Buy Back Your Time: Audit, Transfer, Fill, and Lead With AI Leverage

1. Open the last two weeks of your calendar. Print it or export it so you can mark it up.
2. Write your top three goals for the next 12 months at the top of the page.
3. For every block, note two things: hours spent, and whether it gave you energy or drained it.
4. Circle the draining blocks. Write down who was in each one. Look for the person who appears in most of them.
5. Label every block with one of the 4Ds: Delete (stop doing it), Defer (schedule it later), Delegate (give it to a person or AI), or DO (only you can do this, keep it).
6. Optional: paste the calendar and goals into an AI and ask it to act as a ruthless mentor, ask you four or five clarifying questions one at a time, then find waste and delegation opportunities.
7. Move at least three blocks out of your calendar for the coming two weeks.

Finish with: A marked-up calendar with a 4D decision on every block, the name of your energy-drain pattern, and three blocks removed from next fortnight.

Copy exercise

1. Write down what you pay yourself per year, including salary, draws, and distributions.
2. Add seller discretionary earnings: personal expenses the business pays that a buyer would add back (car, phone, travel, meals).
3. Divide the total by 2,000, the hours most people work in a year. This is your effective hourly rate.
4. Divide that by 4. Martell wants a 4x return on every hour you buy back. This is your buyback rate.
5. Example: $100,000 a year becomes $50 an hour, then $12.50 buyback rate.
6. List ten tasks you did last week, personal and professional. Next to each, write what you could pay someone else (a virtual assistant, a local service, an AI tool) to do it.
7. Mark every task where that price is below your buyback rate. Those are the ones to delegate first.

Finish with: A single dollar number for your time, and a ranked list of tasks you are currently doing below that number.

Copy exercise

1. Choose one recurring task you hate (Martell's examples: bookkeeping, invoicing, bike maintenance).
2. Open a video meeting with only yourself, share your screen, and record while you do the task. Narrate what you are doing and why.
3. Do this for three separate occurrences of the task so edge cases show up.
4. Get transcripts of the three recordings. Remove passwords and private client data.
5. Paste the transcripts into an AI (Martell recommends Claude) and ask for a standard operating procedure, a clear definition of done, and a one-page checklist.
6. If you have never done the task yourself, skip the recording: give the AI a link to a good YouTube tutorial and ask for the SOP instead.
7. Hand the checklist to a team member, contractor, or house manager. Ask them to do it once while you watch, then never touch it again.

Finish with: A one-page checklist and SOP for one task, and a named owner who is not you.

Copy exercise

1. Write your biggest goal for the next 12 months in one sentence.
2. Skills: list the two highest-leverage skills that would make you more valuable toward that goal. Ask 'what is the next-level version of my role?' (bookkeeper to tax strategist; creator who learns to code).
3. Habits: list the two or three daily or weekly habits that align with the goal.
4. Beliefs: write down one belief about money, people, or the world that might be holding you back, and the belief a person who has already reached the goal would hold instead.
5. Optional: give the goal to an AI and ask for a learning plan for the two skills, with daily calendar blocks and links to resources.
6. Book the first learning block in the time you freed up in the calendar audit.

Finish with: A one-page fill plan with two skills, three habits, one belief to change, and a first learning block on the calendar.

Copy exercise

1. Draw five rungs: Admin (inbox and calendar), Delivery (onboarding, support, fulfilment), Marketing (daily traffic and campaigns), Sales (conversations to transactions), Leadership (strategy and outcomes only).
2. For each rung, answer honestly: who owns this today? If the answer is you, or 'me plus someone I supervise closely', the rung is not yet replaced.
3. Find the lowest rung that is still yours. That is your next hire or next AI workflow. Do not skip ahead; Martell says admin first no matter where you start.
4. For that rung, write the outcome you need, the measure of done, and the first candidate (a person, a contractor, or an AI agent).
5. Set a 90-day date to have that rung off your plate.

Finish with: A ladder diagram showing which rungs you still own, and a 90-day plan for the lowest one.

Copy exercise

1. Ask yourself Martell's question: did you delegate your inbox, or do you still read everything and forward what you think your assistant should handle?
2. If you still filter, write the three categories of email you are afraid to let go of and why.
3. For each category, write the rule your assistant or AI should follow (reply, schedule, decline, escalate) and what 'escalate to me' looks like.
4. Give the assistant direct inbox access. Set a daily review meeting of 30 to 90 minutes where they bring only what they could not handle, as Helen does with Richard Branson.
5. If using AI: ask it to study your last 30 days of sent mail, draft replies in your voice, never send, and leave placeholders for facts it does not have.
6. After two weeks, count how many emails you personally opened. Aim for the number to fall each week.

Finish with: Written inbox rules, a daily review slot, and a weekly count of emails you touched.

Copy exercise

1. Ask: if I 10x'd my business tomorrow, what breaks first?
2. Write every answer that comes to mind: people, delivery capacity, cash, your own hours, systems.
3. Pick the one that breaks first. Martell's mentor told him his was building talent, which meant delivery had to stop depending on him.
4. Write what it would take for someone other than you to own that thing within 90 days.
5. Schedule the first step (a recording for an SOP, a job post, an AI workflow) this week.

Finish with: One named constraint and a first step on the calendar.

Copy exercise

1. Write down the single objection that most often stalls your sales conversations or DMs.
2. Gather three to five real transcripts or message threads where it came up (only ones you are allowed to use).
3. Paste them into an AI and ask it to identify every objection raised, group the common ones, and propose the best way to handle each.
4. For your top objection, ask for 17 different response examples. Pick the one that sounds most like you.
5. Turn that response into a script your salesperson or your DM team can use. Test it for two weeks and track the close rate.

Finish with: An objection-handling script for your top objection, and a grouped list of the rest.

Copy exercise

1. Pick one role on your team.
2. Outcome: write one sentence a 13-year-old would understand. Martell's example for a lawn company: 'the best lawn in the neighbourhood'.
3. Measure: list the five to seven parts that make up a great result. For each, describe what a 10 out of 10 looks like and what a 1 looks like.
4. Give the checklist to the person and ask them to self-assess after each job or week.
5. Coach: when a score is low, do not tell them what to do next. Run the three-step coaching conversation: state the principle they violated, tell a personal story about how you learned it, and get an agreement on what they will do differently next time.
6. Repeat for one more role each month.

Finish with: A one-page outcome and measurement sheet for one role, and a coaching script for when results fall short.

Copy exercise

1. Record your next one-on-one or team meeting with the other person's consent, and get the transcript.
2. Paste it into an AI and ask: how did I do as a leader against outcome, measure, and coach? Where was I telling instead of training? How should I show up on the next call?
3. Read the moments it flags in the transcript yourself. Do not treat the AI score as truth.
4. Write one change to make in the next meeting.
5. Monthly: run the same analysis across 30 days of team chat to find where communication is breaking down and end with the one question to ask the team this week.

Finish with: A short written assessment of your leadership in one meeting and one concrete change for the next.

Copy exercise

1. Instead of asking what to add, list everything you did last week that you should not be doing.
2. Include personal tasks. Martell counts anything you could pay someone less than your buyback rate to do.
3. Cross off the three cheapest to remove (a tool, a $10 gig, a family member, an AI workflow) and remove them this week.
4. Keep the list running. Add to it every time you notice yourself doing a $10 task.

Finish with: A living stop-doing list with three items removed this week.

Copy exercise

1. Choose one thing you are about to have built, designed, or produced: a renovation, a landing page, a product, a stage set, a piece of marketing.
2. Open an image model (Gemini or ChatGPT image generation; Claude does not generate images).
3. Describe what you want in detail and iterate until the picture matches your head. Expect ten or more rounds.
4. Print or share the final image with every person who will touch the work, so the bricklayer, the insert supplier, and the finisher all see the same target.
5. Also do this for your own future: generate images of the life and business you are designing and keep them where you will see them.

Finish with: A photorealistic reference image that everyone on the job is building toward.

Copy exercise

1. Gather everyone in your household, including kids and elderly parents.
2. Explain that 12 seconds of audio is enough to clone a voice, and that a scam call can come from an unknown number 'because I borrowed a friend's phone'.
3. Agree on one secret word or phrase that any family member must give when asking another to do something unusual by phone: move money, leave the house, meet somewhere, share information.
4. Agree the rule: no word, no action, hang up and call back on a known number.
5. Practice it once so it feels normal, and never write it in a shared chat.

Finish with: A verified safe word every family member knows and a call-back rule.

Copy exercise

1. List each service you sell and its current price.
2. For each, write the methodology in enough detail that a competent new hire could deliver it to your standard.
3. Re-cost each service as if that person, not you, delivered it: their wage, your margin, and the value of the outcome to the client.
4. Where the new price is higher than today's, you have been pricing your presence instead of your standards. Raise it.
5. Where you cannot write the methodology, that service is not yet a product. Fix that before scaling it.

Finish with: A price list built on the cost of someone else delivering your standard, plus a list of services that still need a written methodology.

Copy exercise

1. If you are tempted to stop growing, answer: Is the world expanding or contracting? Do my customers want more or less from me next year? Who are the one or two people I could not lose, and do they want a smaller or bigger future?
2. If you are tempted to sell, answer: If the problems driving this decision were solved, would I still sell?
3. If the answers point to 'keep going', write down the specific lessons the current complexity is trying to teach you, and pick one to learn this quarter.
4. If you still want to sell, you are at least selling for the right reasons.

Finish with: A clear yes or no on stalling or selling, and the lesson to learn if you stay.

Copy exercise