No theory. No fluff. Just what works.
The best founders don’t just build great companies. They engineer their lives to run on autopilot. Here are 22 hacks they actually use.
Travel
1. Never check a bag. Michael Gilmour hasn’t checked luggage in 25 years. Carry-on only. One of his team members ignored this advice on a trip from Melbourne to Las Vegas. Michael was already at the hotel working by the time the guy’s bags showed up.
2. Same spot, every hotel room. Charger here. Laptop there. Shoes by the door. Every room, every trip. You’ll pack in 30 seconds and never leave anything behind.
Decisions cost energy. Energy is your most valuable resource.
Wardrobe
3. Kill sock-sorting forever. Throw them all out. Buy 24 identical white and 24 identical black. No sorting. No mismatches. No mental energy wasted.
4. Find something you like? Buy a dozen. Stop re-deciding things you’ve already decided. That energy belongs on your business.
5. Wear your company merch daily. Colin wears a Startup.club shirt. Michael wears a Park Logic polo. Every elevator, every photo, every random conversation becomes a branded impression. You already paid for the shirt, so make it work.
AI
6. Use AI to conquer your files. One founder spent 15 minutes letting Claude sort through six gigabytes of chaos. It categorized everything and flagged confidence levels before lunch. Start here.
7. Automate your repetitive communications. Michael built a workflow that reads support requests, routes summaries to the right people, and auto-replies to anything routine. It runs every day. He does nothing. That’s the goal.
8. Build a personal AI medical file. Upload your entire medical history to a dedicated chat. When a health issue comes up, the AI already has full context. First stop before any doctor’s visit.
9. Use AI as a nutrition coach. Photograph your meal before and after eating. Feed it to a dedicated chat. Over weeks it spots patterns and tells you exactly what you’re missing. No app. No subscription.
10. Drop legal documents into AI before calling your lawyer. Surface pros, cons, and red flags first. Still read every clause yourself, but the review will be dramatically faster.
11. Watch great films like a screenwriter. After a movie moves you, ask AI for the top ten reasons it worked as a story. It strips out the emotion and reveals the craft. Do this for ten years and you’ll become an exceptional storyteller.
Time and Focus
12. Your schedule is your to-do list. When something lands in Michael’s inbox, he asks one question: is this worth a calendar slot? Yes, it gets scheduled. No, it’s gone. No separate task list. No thrashing.
13. Batch your errands. Stop scattering low-value tasks across your week. Group them, knock them out, protect the rest of your time.
14. Commit to five minutes. Tell yourself you’ll work on something for just five minutes. An hour later, you’re still going. Tell yourself it’ll take an hour and you’ll never start.
15. Stop small decisions from reaching you. Michael told his accountant: never call about anything under $5,000. His team can spend up to $10,000 without him. His travel policy is one sentence: “I trust my team to make sensible decisions.” He says it’s saved more money than any rulebook ever could.
Health and Routine
16. Lay your workout clothes out the night before. Wake up, see the clothes, decision already made. One founder puts them just outside the bedroom door so he trips over them. Friction removed. Workout done.
17. Habit stack. You already make coffee every morning. Those two minutes are free. Do squats. Stack a new habit onto one you already have and it costs you nothing.
18. Make your bed, every day. Michael does it without fail. A small act of order that sets the tone for everything that follows.
Spending
19. Shop by price per gram, not sticker price. Ignore the headline number. Look at the unit cost. A two-pound tin can be a better deal than a one-pound one. Stop letting packaging fool you.
Delegation
20. Delegate responsibilities, not tasks. Colin hasn’t paid a personal bill in 25 years. He’s involved in 20 companies. He didn’t delegate to-dos. He handed off entire domains of his life.
Start small. If you make $50 an hour and pay someone $30 to do something you hate, the math is obvious. But the real win isn’t financial. It’s the 3am wake-ups you never have again.
21. Clean your desktop in 60 seconds. Create a folder. Call it “Desktop.” Drag everything into it. Done. Pull files out one at a time as you need them. Anything that never comes out? You never needed it.
The Bottom Line
Every hack on this list does the same thing: it eliminates a decision.
Decisions cost energy. Energy is your most valuable resource. Whether it’s socks, travel, or who pays your bills, stop burning mental cycles on things that don’t matter so you can go all in on the things that do.
Colin C. Campbell is the author of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. The Complete Entrepreneur airs every Thursday at 5PM ET on Startup.club. The content for this post was generated by the community during a live episode of the podcast.
