Episode Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. I’m Adam OLeary. Today, I want to talk about one of our most precious, and most finite, resources. It’s not money. It’s time.
I was watching a video recently by Alex Hormozi. For those who don’t know him, he’s an entrepreneur who runs [Acquisition.com](http://acquisition.com/), a portfolio of companies that, as he puts it, did over $250 million in aggregate revenue last year. The core premise of what he shared was one of the most practical and mindset-shifting lessons I’ve encountered in a long time.
The title of his video was bold: "This video might save you 20 years of your life or maybe just move your life 20 years forward." And the entire thesis was built on a single, powerful trade: trading dollars for time, but in a very specific, calculated way. He wasn't talking about buying a yacht; he was talking about outsourcing the mundane, repetitive tasks that silently eat up our lives.
So, after watching this, I felt like I had a new lens through which to view my work, my productivity, and my life. And today, I want to walk you through exactly what I learned from Alex Hormozi about how to buy back an entire week every single month.
The foundational principle Hormozi laid out is this: **if you make more per hour than it costs to outsource a task, you should outsource it.** It’s a simple arbitrage of your time. But he takes it several steps further, providing a specific list of seven investments, in the exact order he recommends implementing them. The goal? To reclaim time you didn't even know you were losing and redirect it towards high-value activities, like increasing your skills or growing your business.
He made a striking point right at the beginning: "You don't need to own a company for this to work. You just have to have more dollars than you have time and want to make a trade." This immediately made the advice feel accessible. It’s not about being a CEO; it’s about valuing your own potential.
So, let's start with investment number one, which he believes is the highest-impact starting point: **getting your meals taken care of.**
Hormozi breaks down the true cost of feeding yourself. It’s not just the grocery bill. It’s the "groceries, meal planning, cooking, cleaning, and prepping." He cited a statistic that stopped me in my tracks: "The average American spends 13.5 hours per week... That's two full work days." Let that sink in. Two full workdays every week on thinking about, acquiring, and dealing with food.
His solution is either pre-made meal delivery services or a structured approach like his own. He recommends getting two meals a day delivered—lunch and dinner—and having a shake for breakfast. He estimated the cost at about $750 a month. Now, that sounds like a lot, but as he points out, "you're not buying groceries anymore." The net cost is actually lower. The real value is the 13.5 hours per week—that’s **54 hours a month**—you get back.
He even offered a more flexible alternative for those who balk at the idea of pre-made meals. He said, "for a period of multiple years, I eat Chipotle twice a day." His accountant noticed over 500 transactions and was shocked. Hormozi’s response was pure clarity: "but think of how much time I'm saving." For him, the consistency and elimination of decision-making were worth far more than the dollar cost. The lesson I took away is that the goal isn't gourmet; it's efficiency. The first step to buying back your week is to stop being your own short-order cook.
**(Sound of a pen ticking a checkbox)**
Alright, so we’ve saved 54 hours a month. Next on Hormozi’s list is **laundry.**
This one seems small, but the numbers are again, surprising. He said the average person spends about four hours a week on "clothes cleaning related activities." That’s sorting, folding, putting away, and waiting around for washing and drying cycles. That adds up to **16 hours a month.**
The cost to outsource this with a drop-off service? About $60 to $80 a month. He asked a rhetorical question that really hit home for me: "I have never met many founders who are like, you know what I really look forward to? Laundry, right?" The point is, very few people get genuine joy or value from this task. It’s pure maintenance.
He also shared a tiny but brilliant tip for reducing the mental load even further: "If you do choose to wear the same thing every day, it makes it so easy to get up and go every morning... I zero thinking and I'm out the door in like 5 seconds." It’s not about fashion; it’s about cognitive freedom. So, for a relatively small fee, you can buy back another half a workweek each month. That’s a no-brainer.
Now, we’re at 70 hours reclaimed. The third investment is **house cleaning.**
Hormozi breaks this down into a weekly deep clean (3-4 hours) and daily tidying (about 30 minutes a day, or 3.5 hours a week). That’s a total of 6 to 7 hours a week, or about **26 hours per month.** He joked, "I also, weirdly, have yet to meet an entrepreneur who's like, you know what, I really love just deep cleaning... the shower grate."
The cost for a regular cleaning service? He estimated $200 to $300 a month. His personal confession here was hilarious and relatable: "The real answer is I just didn't clean. And the way that I didn't clean is that I just wouldn't touch anything in my apartment because I didn't want anything to get dirty so I wouldn't have to clean." The lesson? If your strategy for dealing with a time-consuming task is to avoid living your life, it’s probably a sign you should pay someone else to handle it.
At this point in his breakdown, he tallied it up. We’ve got meals ($750), laundry ($60), and cleaning ($250). That’s about $1,060 a month. And the time saved? 13.5 hours + 4 hours + 6 hours = 23.5 hours per week. That’s multiple full workdays *every week*. The ROI is already staggering.
But Hormozi doesn’t stop there. He then introduces what he calls the "zero" investment, which he is, in his words, "so hardcore" about. This one is different because it doesn’t directly give you back hours; it makes every hour you have more productive. It’s **optimizing your sleep.**
He was almost evangelical about this. "You spend a third of your life sleeping," he said, "and the idea that so few people have optimized what they spend a third of their life in... it is the cheapest environment to optimize." His recommendations are simple but powerful: blackout curtains (so dark you can't tell if your eyes are open), earplugs (he admits they hurt for a week, but then you adjust), and even electrical tape to cover tiny LED lights.
Then, for a bigger one-time investment (around $2,000), he strongly recommends a cooling mattress. His reasoning is brilliant: "It also will dramatically reduce your heating and cooling bill because... we have to cool our entire house just so that when we're underneath of the blanket, it's a certain temperature, but you can just cool that tiny area and it'll save you a ton of money." So it’s an investment that pays for itself in comfort, better sleep, and lower bills.
The benefit? It’s about quality, not just quantity. He explained that deep sleep is when your brain clears out metabolic waste. "The no juice thing is not because you have no juice left. It's actually because you accumulated waste in your brain." Better sleep means better decisions, more energy, and a longer life. For Hormozi, this is non-negotiable. He said, "I will buy it for a founder who doesn't have it... It makes no sense to not get better rest." The lesson I learned: optimizing your sleep isn't a luxury; it's a fundamental productivity upgrade.
The next investment moves outside the home: **landscaping and yard work.**
This saves you 1-2 hours per week on mowing, plus another 2 hours per month on weeding and trimming, and occasional gutter cleaning. All in, he estimates about **8 hours per month** for a cost of around $300. He acknowledges that the "dollars per hour" you're saving here starts to go down compared to the earlier investments, but he frames it as a natural progression of success: "welcome to becoming more successful. Like you have to spend more."
Now we get to the bigger leaps. Investment number six is **transportation,** specifically, **not driving yourself.**
He says if you make over $50 an hour, you should seriously consider using Uber, Lyft, or a driver. The average commute, including parking and walking, is about 1.5 hours per day. That’s a conservative **30 hours per month.** The cost? Somewhere between $600 and $1,000 a month.
But the key question is: what do you do with that time? Hormozi uses it productively. "A lot of the tweets that you see for my account and whatnot, I actually tweet while I'm being driven... I'm checking Slack... I can move the ball forward." The car becomes a mobile office. This reframed the entire concept of a "commute" for me. It’s not dead time; it’s potential work time, if you’re not the one behind the wheel.
Finally, the seventh investment is for those who travel for work: **semi-private flying.**
He talks about services like JSX, where you bypass traditional airport chaos. It might cost triple a commercial airline ticket, but it can turn a full-day travel ordeal into a simple, few-hour trip. He said, "if you include all the other cost associated with it in terms of time, sometimes this can be 10 hours per week if you travel a lot." The cost is variable but could be around an extra $1,000 a month on top of your normal travel budget.
**(Pause for effect)**
So, let’s do the final math, as Hormozi did. If you add up all the time saved from these investments:
- Meals: 13.5 hrs/week
- Laundry: 4 hrs/week
- Cleaning: 6 hrs/week
- Landscaping: 2 hrs/week
- Commute: 7.5 hrs/week (1.5 hrs/day)
- Travel: Variable, but let's say 2 hrs/week
That’s roughly **35 hours per week.** You have literally bought yourself an entire workweek.
And the cost? $750 (meals) + $70 (laundry) + $250 (cleaning) + $300 (landscaping) + $800 (transport) + $1,000 (travel) = about **$3,170 per month.**
The grand conclusion, and my biggest takeaway from Hormozi’s video, is this concept of "focus as the hypothetical extreme." He said, "if we think about focus as the hypothetical extreme which is doing nothing except for the task that we set out to do then anything that is not that task distracts us from the ultimate goal that we have."
Outsourcing isn't about being lazy or extravagant. It’s about creating the conditions for extreme focus. It’s about systematically removing every distraction that stands between you and your most important work. When someone asks, "How does he get so much done?" the answer might be, "Well, I literally have two weeks for every week."
You don’t have to do it all at once. The power is in the order. Start with the highest-impact, lowest-cost arbitrage—like meals—and work your way up as your income grows. The ultimate goal is to use that bought-back time to increase your active income. As Hormozi bluntly put it: "Go spend this money so you can increase your active income rather than obsessing over passive and you will think yourself forward in a few years."
After watching this, I’m looking at my own weekly chores and errands not as necessities, but as potential investments. Every hour I spend on them is an hour I’m not spending on building something meaningful. It’s a complete shift from thinking "I can't afford to outsource this" to "Can I afford *not* to outsource this?"
It’s not about having a massive income to start; it’s about making a conscious trade, even on a small scale, to value your time for what it’s truly worth. And that, I learned from Alex Hormozi, might be the investment that pays the highest dividend of all.
Thank you for listening. I’m Adam OLeary, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
