“If you’re choosing not to do something different, then you’re choosing the status quo. Don’t complain about it.” – Darren Kanthal
Brief Summary/Overview:
In this episode of The Leadership RaDar, we’re breaking down the exact tools we use in our coaching programs to help leaders navigate time management, decision-making, and prioritization. If you’ve ever felt like there’s never enough time in the day, this conversation is for you. We share practical strategies like the Four D’s (Do, Defer, Delete, Delegate), the Five-by-Five framework, and Time & Energy Audits—tools you can implement immediately to bring clarity, reduce overwhelm, and reclaim control over your schedule.
Key Takeaways:
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- The 4D’s: Strip away non-essentials to maximize your time and contribution.
- The 5×5: A leadership tool to remain “in the know” of what your team is accomplishing.
- Time & Energy Audit: Visible & invisible time sucks, and how it’s draining your energy.
- Priority Reset: Focus on what actually matters; it starts with you.
- SHED: Rachel’s proprietary protocol for health & longevity.
Timestamps:
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- 0:00 – Welcome! Rachel and Darren kick things off with a bit of friction.
- 1:30 – Darren’s dad joke: AutoCorrect gone wrong.
- 3:00 – The challenge of feeling overwhelmed: Why leaders struggle with time management.
- 6:00 – The Four D’s: How to make clear, intentional decisions about your workload.
- 12:30 – Why leaders avoid delegating—and how to overcome it.
- 18:00 – The Five-by-Five Framework: How one CTO transformed his leadership approach.
- 26:00 – The reality of burnout: Time & Energy Audits and what they reveal.
- 33:00 – Priority Reset: Why leaders often fail to prioritize themselves (and how to fix it).
- 40:00 – Leadership & health: The direct connection between wellness and performance.
- 48:00 – Final thoughts: Change starts with a decision to do something different.
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Transcript:
Rachel: All right, everybody. Welcome to the Leadership RaDar, our weekly-ish program where we talk candidly about what it takes to lead effectively. I’m Rachel. This is Darren. We’re the owners, the leaders, the executive coaches. We are the people behind The Kanthal Group.
Darren: Tick.
Rachel: And we’re having a little bit of a disagreement here, aren’t we? About how to lead into these LinkedIn Lives. I want a script; Darren does not. So we not only work with and coach our executives, we have to coach ourselves as partners in life and in business. This is a real-life situation, isn’t it?
Darren: Yes. I was thinking about that. I used to love listening to Howard Stern back in the day, and that dude brought everything from his personal life into his show. I was thinking about that for us today as we were leading into this discussion about the formality of the intro and what we do and don’t do.
Rachel: You want it one way, I want it another way. Who’s actually in charge of leading us off?
So we have a little friction going into this one. Okay, today we’re going to get down to business with the exact tools that we use in our coaching program. They’re tangible, you can take them with you, and you can implement them right away.
Darren: Thank you.
Rachel: This comes off the heels of several conversations with our clients about not having enough time.
“I just don’t have enough time to do everything.”
“I don’t have enough time to take a break at work.”
“I’m so busy. I don’t know how to implement everything that’s on my plate.”
So we’re going to break it down and simplify it. But before we do that, we’re going to let Darren take it away with his bad dad joke.
Darren: I like this one.
Rachel: Great.
Darren: Did I tell you I used to be a programmer for AutoCorrect? They fired me for no raisin.
Rachel: That was terrible.
Darren: I like that one.
Rachel: That one is really bad. That’s not even funny.
Darren: Do you understand it? I know you don’t always get them.
Rachel: I don’t always get them, but that one was not very funny.
Darren: I like that one.
Rachel: All right, let’s dive in. You have certain tools that you use with your clients. I have certain tools I use with my clients—our clients. Some of them are unique to our coaching, and some of them are the same thing, just packaged a little differently. So let’s just go down the list here, our Take Five list.
The Four D’s methodology. I use this one all the time with my clients. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Four D’s are: Do, Defer, Delete, or Delegate. How do you use it with your clients?
Darren: So first, I want to name-drop Steven Crawford. I’ve known him for years—he’s the first guy to have taught me this. Then you adopted it, I adopted it, etc.
Now, I know you’re going to talk more about how you coach folks on productivity with email specifically, and I do the same thing. When I hear from my clients, “There’s no time. I don’t have time. My inbox is out of control,” this is a corporate issue.
I was on a call yesterday with four clients. At least two of them said their inboxes just keep growing—they can’t get through it all. As a result, they don’t respond in a timely manner. And I’ve been on the receiving end of their untimely responses. As you know, one of my pet peeves is not getting a timely response. So that’s the backside of when people aren’t on top of emails.
Long-winded way to say, I do coach clients on managing their inbox using the Four D’s. I also coach them as inquiries come in, as priorities shift, and as strategies change. The key is looking at:
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- What do I do?
- What can I defer?
- What don’t I do (delete)?
- What should I delegate?
Delegation, which I count as the fourth thing—my pinky—is what a lot of leaders surprisingly struggle with. And the reason I say surprising is it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about C-suite executives, mid-level leaders, or somewhere in between—delegation is a challenge.
Leaders often say, “My team is too busy, so I’ll just do it.” Or, “I don’t trust they’re going to do it to my satisfaction, so I’ll just do it.” But as leaders improve at delegation, the other three D’s become much simpler.
Rachel: Okay. I use it similarly, but I take a more global perspective—not just for leaders but also for managing home life, kids, and life in general. A lot of my clients feel overwhelmed because there’s so much to do, and they don’t know how to get it all done during the day.
It stacks up so high and so heavy that they either put their head down and do nothing or over-function and burn out. They’re moving so fast they don’t even recognize the Four D’s as an option.
As a leader, what do you need to strip away so you can focus on your priorities?
That leads us into number three and four: Time & Energy Audit and Priority Reset.
I help my clients identify priorities—this week, this month, in work and at home. Then, they do a time audit, recording everything: picking up socks, doing laundry, running meetings, training their team—everything. Then, they compare what they’re doing with what their priorities are. The discrepancy is usually obvious.
That’s when the Four D’s come in.
It shows them why they’re burned out, overwhelmed, and living in anxiety. It shows them why they think they have to work at 3 a.m. to get everything done.
From there, I ask:
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- What do you need to do to protect yourself as an asset?
- How do you stay healthy, fed, and energized?
- How do you protect your leadership role?
Everything else? It needs to be delegated, deferred, or deleted—because it’s slowing them down from making their biggest contributions.
Darren: As you’re talking, something came up for me. I hear this a lot from my clients and through the stories you share from yours. The Four D’s are about decision-making. What I hear most often is, “I either do it, or I don’t.” And in this example, “don’t” means delete.
People get overwhelmed because they feel like they have to do everything. There’s no in-between. They don’t delegate, they don’t defer.
And when they don’t do something, it just piles up. Deadlines get missed, work suffers, health suffers. We start prioritizing everyone else’s priorities over our own.
It’s like two of the D’s get lost in the chaos.
Rachel: Why do you think leaders do that?
Darren: What I hear most often is: “I don’t trust the team to do it.” Sometimes it’s not those exact words, but when we get down to brass tacks, that’s what it is. The other thing I hear is, “They’re too busy, so I have to do it.”
One thing I always tell my clients: If you talk to yourself (not everyone does, but if you do), it’s a one-sided conversation.
“My team is too busy, so I can’t give them anything.”
The problem? They never invite the team into the conversation. They don’t validate whether the team is actually too busy or if they can take something on.
Then comes prioritization.
I had a boss once who told me everything was a priority. I was working 12-hour days, sitting at my little bistro table on Friday nights, drinking wine, and working until midnight. What a loser, right? But the point is—not everything can be the priority.
If I’m overworked and my team is overworked, clearly, we don’t have a reasonable set of priorities. Certain things need to fall down the list. That’s how we re-prioritize.
Rachel: I couldn’t agree more. My clients have hyper-control issues.
For all you hyper-controllers out there, I get it—it feels good. But it’s overwhelming, exhausting, and leads straight to burnout.
A lot of my clients say:
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- “It’s faster if I do it myself.”
- “I know how to do this.”
- “I want a specific outcome, and only I can guarantee that.”
So they control everything.
I genuinely think my clients trust their teams, but they don’t give them a chance to prove they’re trustworthy.
They take that same mentality home.
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- “I can load the dishwasher faster.”
- “I know how to separate the laundry so my whites don’t turn pink.”
- “I just know what summer camps my kids like.”
They over-function at home because they’re so used to over-functioning at work.
And when you implement the Four D’s, it starts to strip away the excess. You create more white space. You’re not at a constant boil; you can simmer down. You can focus on your leadership.
And as we know, what we do in one area of life impacts everything else. Implementing the Four D’s at work allows you to apply them at home, creating more balance and sharing the load.
If you’re overwhelmed, micromanaging, or feeling stretched too thin—you must implement this strategy.
Darren: All right, all right. Number two.
Rachel: And I’m done.
I get passionate about this because it frustrates me when people complain about their lives but don’t take action to fix them.
Here’s a tool—implement the tool.
Number two: The Five by Five. This is yours, Darren. I don’t use this one.
Darren: Okay, so this was developed with a CTO, and quite frankly, he was micromanaging. He has a very specific saying that he used, and I won’t use it here because it would out him. But in essence, he’s in everybody’s business.
As we started to dissect why, a big part of it was that he needed to be informed on what was happening. Now, that’s reasonable. As a leader, you need to know what your team is doing. However, because he was in their business and he was micromanaging, not only was he in the know, but he was consistently over-inserting himself.
Then the team started to defer to him. It was like, all right, the team would be brainstorming, and Mr. CTO would say this, and they would say, okay, Mr. CTO, you know best. Or if they were unsure how to proceed, instead of brainstorming, they would look to the CTO and say, what should we do?
So he wasn’t getting what he needed out of the team, but he was in the know, which was good—but not ultimately what he wanted to do. As we dissected it, really what he needed to know was progress, issues, risks, bottlenecks, etc.
So the five-by-five was what we created. It was a side-by-side on an Excel spreadsheet, very simple. On the left side were the top five strategies or priorities for the department or the company. So it was more of a global view of the top five priorities.
I can’t remember how many direct reports the CTO had—let’s say there were five of them, just for argument’s sake. Each one of them was working on something different: software development, networking, project management, cybersecurity, and whatever the fifth one was.
Each of them was working on something that impacted the company or department, but their individual work was different. The software development team was working on developing new software, while the cybersecurity team was working on patches and security, etc.
So the right-hand side was: What am I personally working on? What are my top five priorities? And these top five priorities should align with the company’s or department’s five priorities.
So it was this constant running list of what am I keeping an eye on globally and what am I doing locally.
Rachel: So it was a real-time tool.
Darren: Yes. He implemented this department-wide. He asked all of his leaders, his direct reports, to bring their five-by-five every time they had a one-on-one, which was biweekly. And then there was a running list of what folks were working on.
Rachel: And everybody could see everybody else’s? Or was this a—
Darren: That’s a good question. I don’t remember the answer to that. I don’t know that all five of the direct reports knew what they were working on, which is a good wrinkle to this whole story, but the CTO knew what each one of those five people was doing.
Rachel: Hmm. Okay. So that created the visibility that he wanted, but it also kept everybody on track with what the actual priority is. So you’re not in the weeds or out there. Look, we all do it. We want to buffer with things that are easy or we enjoy doing, but it’s not exactly what’s moving the needle at the moment. So it keeps everybody on track and creates the visibility for the leader.
Darren: Yes.
Rachel: Well, I like that.
Darren: Here was some downstream effect to it. So Mr. CTO now was in the know. Whenever he got questions from his colleagues or the CEO, he was like, boom, I have the answers for you. The second thing that started to happen is the more he got out of their way, the more these folks started to elevate their game. They were then saying, “Hey, Mr. CTO, from my vantage point of developing the software, I’ve uncovered these things.”
Issues, risks, other buttons and widgets, and things that are going to make this software better. “Hey, I spoke to this other department and realized that what we’re creating doesn’t totally solve their problem. So now I’m suggesting we create this other thing.” Ultimately, what he found was that his direct reports were acting more like senior leaders. They were driving a bigger and better strategy. They were driving bigger and better tactics and projects. The whole engine started working way better once he got out of their way.
Rachel: Yeah, he wasn’t holding them back. He was acting as a leader.
Darren: Yes. He was acting as a leader, and they were not deferring to him to tell them what they should do. Rather, they were telling him, “This is what I’m going to do. Do you object? No? Great. I’m going to go do that.”
Rachel: And let’s be honest, adults do not want to be micromanaged. You hired them for a reason, right? As a leader, you hired your team for a reason.
Let them go do their job. And if they’re not, address that. But come to the table with positive intent—”They’re gonna do what they said they’re gonna do. I’m clear on my expectations and the end results, the KPIs that I want.” Go work on your own issues—maybe it’s trust or over-control—and let them do their job. Then make real-time course corrections.
Okay, so I think I have to bring in this five-by-five. I need that document. All right, let’s go into the time and energy audit, which I love because it’s data, and you really can’t argue with data. I mean, you can, but there’s no benefit to it.
When I hear my clients say, “There’s no time, there’s no time. I need to find the time to do this. I don’t have the time,” but then they say, “I’m so overwhelmed,” I know this is coming from a real place. There’s no judgment—we’re all busy. But it’s coming off a text of, “I’m back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. It’s hard to get to the bathroom, it’s hard to take a drink of water, it’s hard to have lunch.”
When I work with my clients on repairing their adrenals so they have more positive energy, my big thing is: just stop at three o’clock. Give yourself 15 minutes. Get outside or just get away from the computer. And they say, “I can’t do that, I don’t have time.” So if you’re going to use time as an excuse, then I’m going to challenge you to do a time audit. And yes, you’re going to have to find or create time to do the audit, but it’s the only way you’re going to know where you’re spending your time.
In my world, there’s visible time and invisible time.
Rachel: I am doing the laundry, I’m putting together a PowerPoint for the board, I’m training my team, I’m taking my kids to soccer—visible time. But then there’s also invisible time, where you’re managing everybody else’s life and work that is not yours to manage. You’re spending time thinking about it, which distracts you from getting things done quickly and efficiently.
There are invisible time sucks. You have to measure them against your top priorities—or in your words, against your five-by-five. “I said these are my five by fives. Is what I’m doing directly accomplishing that priority that I committed to?” If not, you have to have a hard conversation with yourself.
What do I need to take off my plate? What do I need to stop micromanaging? Let other people manage it. Implement the four Ds: Delete it. Defer it. Delegate it. Or outsource it.
Rachel: It takes a lot of time to cook dinner after a busy day, so delegate it to a meal delivery service, a chef, your kids, or your partner. Does that make sense?
Darren: Maybe talk about how you tactically take someone through a time audit.
Rachel: There are a lot of ways, and you have to know your learning style. Some clients use an app that records their time, and then prints out a report. Others print out their calendar and log everything on it. Some just write it down in a notebook.
You have to commit to doing it for one full week, including a weekend, during a normal schedule. It takes time, and you won’t always want to do it. But it’s the only way to give yourself empirical evidence of what you’re actually doing so you can make adjustments.
Rachel: Whatever method works for you—as long as it’s truthful. No fudging it like people do in food journals.
Darren: All right, here are a few other wrinkles that I work on with my clients. I hear a lot of what you started with, which is the back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings. That’s real in corporate America.
So the first thing we start looking at is: which meetings are you not going to attend? Or are you just going to delete them off your calendar? Really? And most times, as you said earlier, a lot of the work is managing your brain. People like going to meetings. They enjoy the people on the call. They think they’re important, truly. And sometimes, they’re not that important.
Rachel: Very.
Darren: Sometimes, it is necessary—they need to be informed. There’s a whole bunch of reasons, often enough, why it’s not the most productive use of their time. So once we work through their mind-shit, we start removing meetings from the calendar straight up.
Second, we look at bookends. And there are multiple bookends. What time do I get up in the morning? What time do I go to sleep? What time do I go to work? What time do I have to leave? Am I a morning person, an afternoon person, or a night person?
So we start to look at productivity hours. We start using the five-by-five. We didn’t talk about values, and I’m not going to jump into that rabbit hole—even though I love them—but values start to become a barometer too.
Just to get personal for a second—health and wellness are very important to me. And in my time audit, I’ve got to make sure I’m putting in time to work out, especially right now that I’m doing 75 Hard, and I’ve got to work out twice a day.
So the point is, we need to look at the current state of the calendar, see where our time is being spent, and then start making some cuts—straight up. Even though it’s very simple, and a lot of these tools we’re talking about today are very simple, I had a client tell me that just the statement:
“If I say yes to this, then I am saying no to that.”
If I say yes to looking at emails at 10 p.m., I’m saying no to getting to bed on time, or I’m saying no to connecting with my spouse or partner.
Rachel: Hmm?
Darren: Or petting my cat or my dog—whatever it is. I’m oversimplifying, right? But the point is, we need a snapshot of our current state. We have to cut some things, prioritize what’s important to us, and get good—or at least comfortable—at saying no.
Rachel: Yeah, the saying no.
There’s a lot wrapped up in there—like value, worth, and overcompensation. And that’s where we talk about why coaching is so important if you use it properly. Because all these things we’re talking about? We could check the box. You and I both have clients that check the box.
But if you’re not doing the back-end work to change your internal narrative, your programming, or your wiring, the minute there’s a stressor, the minute you’re up against friction, you’re going to go back to your past habits. You must rewire yourself in order to implement anything that’s being handed to you.
It’s so much easier to say, “Just tell me what to do.” And this is kind of what we’re doing here—like, “Okay, we hear you. Just give me a tool.”
Here’s the tool.
But you are the ultimate tool.
I mean, I’m laughing because—you know—you’re the tool. But that’s the ultimate tool that has to be changed. And that’s what coaching does. You fundamentally have to change and rewire in order to do these things, in order to constrain and hold yourself accountable.
So—do the time and energy audit.
Rachel: It is so insightful. One of my clients made a commitment to decrease her meetings by 20%.
So we had to go in and do all of these things. Especially number four, which we’re going to talk about next.
Ok, so for the meetings, we’re protecting that, which means it goes on your calendar, and all of these have to come off. And then you do the coaching on how to maintain that and honor it.
So, priority reset. Can we go into that? I think we’re pretty clear on how to do a time audit.
Darren: Yeah, real quick. I just want to say that with all the pushback that we get about why this thing won’t work and why this other thing doesn’t apply to me. At the end of the day, you have to do something different. And if you’re not willing to do something different by default, you are accepting the status quo. If you’re accepting the status quo, don’t complain about it.
Rachel: Yes. You know that’s a button of mine. Same with yours. If you’re choosing.
Darren: Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel: If you’re choosing not to do something different, then you’re exactly choosing the status quo. Don’t complain. It’s just not useful, and it feels terrible. And then you feel like you don’t have any control over your life when at the end of the day, every result in your life you have created.
So let’s go to the priorities because this one helped me a lot. I don’t even know how many years ago it was. It’s been a while. I was…
Darren: Running.
Rachel: Running.
Darren: Hahaha.
Rachel: I can’t even explain the frenetic energy that I had and how fast I was going. I was doing everything. As a single mom, I had two very young kids. I was running a business. I was mentoring and hiring practitioners. I was doing them. Like, it was just exactly like boil point at its finest—until there was—I can’t even remember what happened, but I was like, something has to change. This is not sustainable.
And I had to sit down and say, what are the actual priorities? If everything else went to shit in my life, what are the three things—maybe four—that I will protect and honor and need in my life no matter what? It was like a little bit of a reality check. And it was me.
I had to make myself a priority. My kids—they had to be a priority. You and I—our relationship. And my business. In that order.
I had to be a priority first. And whenever I do this with my clients and I say, “Okay, tell me your top three priorities,” you know what they do? They do not put themselves on that list. And then I say, “Well, what about you?” And they’re like, “I never really thought about that.”
So, when I do priority resets, and I ask my clients to identify their top three to four priorities, I say, “Number one has to be you. Fill in the rest.”
Rachel: Very challenging for my clients. How do you use the priorities with your clients?
Darren: I do two things, right? So, I alluded to it earlier, so I’ll go into it a little bit today. You know, very big on values. And through the values assessment I created, we’ve identified the top five. We identify more, but the top five are what we focus on. And then, we use the top five as the gauge or the barometer.
So, in essence, if I make this decision—so my number one priority is health and wellness. I don’t remember the exact order, but health and wellness, adventure, freedom, comfort, and flexibility—these are five of my top. Number six is connection. So, these are, like, real important to me.
And I start to then decide—if I do this thing or make this decision, how does it honor or dishonor my values? And that starts to put things into focus for me, and that’s what I do with clients.
Also, very tactical. However, I love it—I grew up in the ’80s, and I love ’80s rap. De La Soul had a song, Three Is the Magic Number. And it is. Three to five is the gauge that I usually use. But there’s the productivity strategy of top three. And on a daily basis, weekly, however you want to use it—these are the top priorities that I have to do today.
And it’s not picking up the kids or eating food. It’s typically medium or bigger rocks that need to get moved forward into whatever forward progress they need. So, you choose the top three, and your day is not over until all three of those things are done.
So that’s one of the things I do too. So, values—number one. And then that top three.
Rachel: It’s just getting honest about what matters.
Rachel: Being truthful with yourself about what is ultimately important in your life and whether or not you’re protecting it.
Rachel: And not feeling bad about it. So, my clients—sometimes when I say, “You have to put yourself on that list,” ooh.
Really?
You have to be a priority in order to run your business, lead your team, grow your career, be the parent that you want to be, be the partner or spouse that you want to be, be the community leader that you want to be, have the health that you want to have. You must be the priority.
And yet, it’s so difficult to make sure that that hits the calendar. And that is the number one thing that goes on my client’s calendar and does not get pushed as soon as there is pushback. It’s fascinating to me.
But yet—that’s the thing that creates everything in your life, and you don’t even make the list. That shit has to change right now.
Rachel: Anything else with priorities?
Darren: Now, let’s segue to The Shed.
Rachel: Okay. So, when I work with my clients, we work multifaceted, meaning I coach them as leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives—we coach them in that mindset. I also coach them on their health and wellness because, again, it’s a reciprocal relationship. Poor health, poor leadership—eventually. Right? Good health, good leadership. They fuel each other.
And one of the tools that I use—there are multi-tools, right? Lab work and supplementation and nutrition protocols. But one of the most effective tools that I use is a program that I have run for years called The Shed: Simple, Healthy, Effective Detox. And for 30 days, we reset everything.
So, we’re gonna—it’s a metabolic detox where we’re gonna reset your blood sugar levels. We’re gonna help your liver detoxify. We’re gonna get you off the sugar and the alcohol—not forever, just so we can kind of clean things out and then start over, if you will. And it’s not the easiest, but it’s not the hardest to do. But it’s very strategic.
Rachel: Like, you just feel it. I know everybody knows what I’m talking about. I just can’t explain it, but you just feel like—you know, you’ve had those moments in life when you’re like, Oh my God, I’ve got it. Like, I have energy. Like, everything is so good. You’re in flow. You’re in ease.
Darren: You’re in flow.
Rachel: Compared to when you’re not—we know that impact. And too many of our executives are living out of the flow, out of the ease, out of that energy, out of that athletic state, and it makes their job harder.
Everything takes longer.
So, I can remove that. Like, I can clear—I like to say, I can clear the runway for you so you can take off fast and hard, and you don’t have to feel so exhausted.
And I think that’s a very unique value proposition that I offer—having that strategic insight and that science behind the human body and nutrition, as well as being able to understand you as a leader and coach you through all aspects of your life. It’s very unique.
I’ll just give myself a little shoutout—I don’t know very many coaches that can do that. So.
If you’re interested in it, give me a call.
Rachel: Watch us on the replay. If you want to stay up to date, ooh, it’s 10 o’clock, make sure you get on our email list, see what we have coming up, new offerings, new programs. But if you’re a leader or you have a team and you need executive coaching and you like what you hear, give us a call. Any final words?
Alright, everybody, see you next Tuesday.
Darren: See you next Tuesday.
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