Book excerpt: Building a successful company and career doesn't mean sacrificing your family, health, or life. You check email the moment you lift your head off the pillow in the morning. You bring work with you on vacation, sneak glances at your smart phone during family dinners, and take business calls and texts at your kid's sports games. It's as if you've been forced to make a choice between your company or your life, sacrificing time for yourself and family for the sake of career success. But it doesn't have to be that way. The most successful business leaders have learned to bust through the direct one-to-one relationship between hours worked and value created by refocusing their company, department, or team's best talent and attention on their highest value activities—generating hundreds, even thousands, of hours of value in the process. In The Freedom Formula, Wall Street Journal bestselling author and successful entrepreneur David Finkel will help you operationalize working smarter. No fluff, no theory, Finkel shares the detailed blueprint to create maximum value for your company without working nights, weekends, or while on "vacation." You'll learn: • Why working longer and harder doesn't pay off (and what actually does) • Why the 80-20 principle doesn't go far enough (and how to take it to its most productive extreme) • How to escape the Time and Effort Economy • How to structure your day and week so that you reclaim five or more hours each week in usable blocks of your best time • How to leverage the five Freedom Accelerators to get your life back faster And much more! Whether you're a business owner, top executive, key manager—or aspire to be one—The Freedom Formula offers a radical new approach to structuring your time and priorities (and your team's) in order to reclaim hours of your day—and the freedom to live your life, not just your job.