Crushing the Clock

032: Project Management for Parents

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Being a parent has always been a challenging role. There’s always a never-ending question of whys and how-to. Moreover, parents often feel stuck and unproductive managing everything all at once – from work to house and vice versa. However, it's not an issue of why you're feeling less productive but looking into how you are doing things. With the right approach, you can get things done efficiently! All you need are the right tools to help you get started.

Hilary Kinney is a project manager at a Fortune 500 company and a proud mother. Her 17 years of experience are placed in a book to help parents improve their family relationships. Today, she joins the podcast to talk more about the advantages of these frameworks through her book, Project Management for Parents. Specifically to engage the family, build teamwork, and succeed together.

Sprints

When people hear project management, they worry that it's all processes and frameworks and spreadsheets. However, in both professional and personal life, you'd want to use the minimum amount of process needed to get more organized and the work done. And as a family, we're so busy. We don't want to do spreadsheets for the sake of spreadsheets. You need to just put processes in place that support your family so that you can get the stuff done that you need to get done and have more fun and quality time together. Because that's what it's all about - that time together as a family is important.

Communication

Another beauty of agile is that the people are involved. And that's so important with families and kids. You involve the kids in the process, talk with them, and get their ideas. You talk about the planning and start building those planning skills for them. By involving them in these conversations and principles, you're helping them develop these skills that will also serve them later in life.

Constraints

In project management, we always manage projects to constraints, whereas in our personal lives, we tend to manage and max everything out. It would help if you thought about your limits (i.e., time, money, resources, efforts, etc.) and thought of them as a stop sign. There are certain things that every family has some capability of what they can get done. So, think through what those capabilities are - what you can and cannot do, and then sit down and talk about it in these different areas, be incredibly realistic about what you can't do, and then commit to it and put it on a piece of paper. Avoid getting overwhelmed like a water balloon bursting because it would strain your relationship with your family or result in health issues. And there are also resources you can add to help you with things. Like grocery delivery, to decrease that workload, so add those support systems. There are different ways to manage it, but be aware of your limits, and manage to those instead of unlimited time and resources.

Organization

You can use a Kanban board at home if you want. It's a board that has "to do", "doing", and "done". And you can move sticky notes down the board. Like if your kids have different assignments, chores or homework. So you can visually see if they need help. You could do it on a whiteboard, on a bulletin board, on a chalkboard, or there are apps you can use that do this for you. You can go from simple to complex. And again, keep it as easy as possible. It is also important to keep in mind the age of your kids. Think about what works well for them and what's their learning style. Are they real tactile learners? Would they prefer to have a little mason jar of what their chores are for the day, and then when they're done, they move it to the completed mason jar? There are lots of fun ways to engage with the kids so they can see and understand it. And then there's a clear understanding of what needs to happen.

Change

There's something called Change Management, which is the people side of the change. It's going from something existing to something new, and you're not only changing systems and processes –people need to adopt that change and be ready for it. Specifically, the emotional side of change. It's important to recognize that change triggers some emotions and that we can be aware of that and help support them. And people have a limited capacity for change because, as human beings, we can only take on so much. So, in your family, it's important to think about what you can do if you have to make this big change. Note that kids can only take so much.

Keep those communication lines open and talk to your kids about what's happening and how they feel. And then think of how you can support them through the process with their emotions, and actually what's happening and bringing them into the process, like helping them have input. So, they feel like they have some control over it. It's also important to remember that change may require reinforcement and more support later. You may have moved, and your child may seem okay, but what if they're still struggling? So, keep your eyes and ears open to ensure they can successfully navigate the entire process.

Awareness

Building that the first step in the process is building that awareness. Bring your kids in as early as possible to the process. Bring them in as early as possible and start that conversation. It's not a surprise because that gives them time to process that range of emotions they're going through, and work through that grieving process, because it's much harder to do on a shorter timeline. And the longer timeline is easier for them to work through that. So, building that awareness, and then also building that buy-in and that desire for them to participate in the change but also talking through and being honest with them, but being sure to reinforce the benefits of what's happening so that they can keep those in mind and start seeing what's happening in a real way and start thinking through what's coming.

Get Started

Start with communication over dinner. What can you weave into those conversations to start about what's going on? What can we do better? What are people having on their plate and open up those lines of communication, and start practising those skills of planning together as a family, because that sort of that foundation, and it builds that foundation of teamwork that's so important? And then that's how you build teamwork as a family. And that's all based on communication. So, practicing those communication lines, bringing your kids into those conversations, and getting their input is really helpful.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

031: Taking Notes Effectively (and Retrieving them) in a Digital World

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Note-taking has been extremely important in the past. Even today, people still find themselves taking notes to keep track of almost everything. But with the world always evolving, jotting down everything could be time-consuming or worse – keep you more confused as you get buried in a pile of papers! But the onset of the information age has made this a lot easier as various digital tools are openly accessible to be utilized and keep track of your day-to-day activities.

Frank Buck is a certified Evernote consultant and productivity expert. He started his career in the early 80s when digital fashion was not a trend. He realized it's important to create a single place to handle everything for now – a system that works! Now, he joins the podcast to share more about accomplishing significant goals and understanding your ability to organize your time and surroundings through digital tools.

Digital Notes

An old quote goes, "If you read the New York Times for a week, you're going to come across as much information as someone in Shakespeare's time came across in their entire life." Information is all around us, but your information is only as good as your ability to put your hands on it when needed. So, to date, with so much that digitally comes to us, it makes sense to keep things digital. The ability to trap that information in notes has always been important. And it will be much easier if you do it digitally because it's so easy to search for later. For example, the computer started as the center of information, but today Google/Microsoft servers took its place. This is because it provides everyone with the accessibility to their information using phones just as easily as they're getting it from the computer. The only caveat is to utilize software that works well from anywhere is important.

People would like to have the ability to get things in quickly, where you don't have to go from folder to folder to retrieve them. In other words, the search is very good, and you can easily share it with other people. The nice thing with digital notes is when you're thinking of something you're trying to find - not only do you find that easily. But you also find some other notes you had taken on the same subject that you forgot you even had. All those come up in the search quickly.

Evernote

Evernote offers a free plan, so you can get it anytime in a few easy steps (1) Go to Evernote.com (2) Look and Download Evernote Web Clipper (3) Download the App to your phone.

The whole idea of Evernote is that you would be able to get your note wherever you are. All those little bits of information in small index cards and sticky notes scattered everywhere. With Evernote, you can create a little notebook to store your personal information, from insurance policy number, AARP number, driver's license, etc., in alphabetical order. You can also have a default inbox notebook with a.in front of it, so all incoming mail is sorted from the top of the list dot. So, when you check it later in the day, you can easily sort, review everything, clean, or add as necessary, which will be more helpful to you later.

Taking Notes

David Allen was right on the money when he said, "where people mess up is when they start to try to do too much at the same time." For example, if you are in a meeting taking notes and it includes a few deadlines, you flip back to your to-do list and note them there. Essentially you are going back and forth between your to-do list and your calendar. But the principles taught there were, as you're taking notes when you have those two dues in those calendar appointments that come out of that meeting, go ahead and make it part of your notes, write it all right there. And then, later in the day, you review your notes. And that's where you start to take those two dues, refine them, put them on these specific days, and put those calendar events on the correct pages.

Review

The review is essential, whether it is paper or digital. Because of things during the day, like if you're in a meeting and things are going fast, just being able to get the stuff down and refine it later. As you read your notes later, some of the questions that would probably go through your mind are if you have spelled the name correctly and tried to write it down as best as possible during the meeting. Afterwards, you can go back and google him and ensure that the spelling is correct. Anything incomplete about your notes in that meeting, you can do a little research and get those notes where it's just pristine so that you would not be putting pressure on yourself to have them perfect in the meeting. So, this is why the review is critically important.

Web Clipper

As much of our information comes from the web, you don't want to grab that URL. You want to grab that entire article and annotate it. Now you can (1) Click the Web Clipper, (2) Two little box comes up, and you click save! Now you can go over there, read, edit, highlight, type things, delete parts, correct a typo (even on the phone) and make it your own. You can also click the share button and put your email address there. And even if you didn't have Evernote, you'd still be able to see the document or, with another click or two, get a URL that would let you share that with the entire world just as if it were a web page.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

030: Rewire Your Brain to Get Unstuck

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Do you ever feel stuck? As if you can't seem to move forward despite doing what you have to do? Like there's an invisible wall you can't seem to cross? If so, you're not alone. Most people find themselves stuck in different aspects of their lives. It's nothing new! You can also get out of it, become more efficient, and see the progress you've always wanted.

ST Rappaport, a productivity coach. She coaches people, especially growing entrepreneurs, to rewire their brains and achieve results. Now, she joins the podcast to share more about the Feuerstein methods. Specifically, to take control of your lives, find focus and increase productivity professionally and personally.

Cognitive Deficiencies

If you have a cup inside and there are holes in your cup, whatever you pour inside the cup will come out of those holes. But as soon as you close those holes, pour any drink - it stays in the cup. Now, your brain is the same way. It has what's called cognitive deficiencies. And when you're trying all these hacks, tips, courses, reading books, or whatever you're doing to become more productive, improve a specific area of your life, or learn this new technique. And despite you putting in all the work and effort, it's just going right out of those holes. But when you close those holes and improve those cognitive functions, all those tips and hacks will now work for your brain.

Cognitive Functions

The act of thinking is made up of what's called 28 cognitive functions. It means that there are 28 parts to this act of thinking. Now, we all have weaker and stronger ones. And different people have different areas. So when one of them is weak, it's like those holes. When one of them is weak, we have a hole in that aspect of our life, and things fall out. For example, if you're good at planning, you will eventually plan your day and organize everything to get things done. However, if you want everything to happen right now, let's say you need to go to the laundry today but know you'd also go there again tomorrow. You would still go to the laundry today because you want it to happen now even though there's no reason - but because it has to happen. Now your brain couldn't say, this has to go on the back burner for a while. It's fine if it goes to the cleaners tomorrow, so don't waste time going to the cleaners today and then going into the cleaners again tomorrow when there is no need for it now. But it won't because it's stupid. This cognitive function is called categorization, which is how your brain can categorize things. And that cognitive function in your brain is weak, and that's the hole in your brain.

System

You want to work with your brain, not against your brain. Create a system to work together with your brain. For example, if you have a hole in your memory, you can think of a great idea but forget it after a while. You can have a piece of paper on your desk or notes on your phone. So as soon as you have an idea, something you know you have to do, it goes right down on that paper. And you could be in the middle of a session with a client, podcast recording, or anything. You have that paper, and you can write it down. Because that way, you don't forget it. However, every person's brain works differently. And you have to find the method that works for your brain.

Better Habits

It doesn't happen overnight, it takes months, and you must create those new neural connections. But once they're there, they're forever because you created those new neural connections. Now, it's a bit difficult to say, to go and do this, instead of doing that, because that is almost like just giving you another hack, right? Specifically, it's harder because of those holes. So what you should do is a little bit less tangible, like go into this box - what's going to make the difference? You'll want to do it for the next couple of days, and it's going to take time, but you have to be conscious about it and mark it down. Notice what is going on throughout your day that you are struggling with. For example, you get overwhelmed if your boss gives you a massive task. What you're going to mark down specifically is at what point did your brain get overwhelmed, shut down, and unable to do this task because there are three phases of thinking: input (how we take in their information), elaboration (how we process the information), and output (how we tell the world what we know). Now, each of the 20 cognitive functions is in one of those three phases. And what depending where they're weak is, depending on where it's going to affect your life? So what you're going to do is, as you mark down multiple points, you're going to be able to see which phase input elaboration or output are you struggling with, and then you'll know what you could go on, fix on.

Metacognition

Metacognition is thinking about thinking. For example, how to be punctual. It's right, and it's not because you're lazy. And it's not because your brain likes it or doesn't understand time; it's not because you're not trying. And it's not because you haven't tried all these tips. It's because your brain struggles with cognitive efficiency. So we take an example of being unable to be on time, then understand why your brain is thinking that way because of the cognitive deficiency of time, and then give you practical tips on how you could go and improve your brain's sense of time. So right now, your brain doesn't understand time; probably, it doesn't understand how long tasks take because time is so abstract to it. And it just your brain can't begin to like comprehend it. So you may want to start by tracking how long tasks take you, right? You might think, Oh, I take such quick showers only takes me five minutes. But it takes you 12 minutes, okay? Now, let's still quick shower. But when you're rushing to a meeting, 12 minutes will make you late. Instead of that seven minutes. So by training your brain to think that way. Or maybe you need to add some whitespace in your day, add extra time in your day for your brain to either catch up on time on activities or to just reground yourself and get back into it and get back into the flow of time.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

029: Decluttering Your Schedule (and everything else)

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 01:00:00 -0600

When it comes to decluttering, it’s usually a question of how to do it rather than why. People also find it almost impossible to accomplish, considering the other things they have to do. But it doesn't mean they don't want a clean home – and a smooth schedule, right? However, it's not impossible if you know the right steps to start. Using all those planners and attending online courses can help, but those are only tools - you need to learn how, when, and why to use those tools to be the most effective.

Gael Wood is a mother of two, and a former massage therapist turned entrepreneur and a certified Feng Shui consultant. She writes and coaches people on mindset and journaling strategies. Today, she joins the podcast to share how to re-evaluate your time and spend your energy on what matters to make positive changes.

Staying Focus

It's a matter of figuring out how you can ignore other things that might feel pressing. And I think a lot of that depends on your personality. Like some people tend to like not to want to settle down to work if their house is messy. If they could straighten up their house and get everything clean, they'll be able to think better. If you have that stuff done, it won't distract you. So, it's a matter of having to learn to train yourself to set all of that aside and focus. The morning routine also really helps. Like getting up early, doing some basic things for your mindset, reading something motivational, and thinking about your goals and what you're working toward in a big picture way, which helps motivate you on the smaller things throughout the day.

Task List

One of the biggest habits is to do a daily routine of prioritizing your tasks. So, that mindset of "if I only had two hours to work today, what would I need to get done?" What are the most important things? Because we all know, as entrepreneurs or as parents, that things can pop up throughout the day that can derail you. So, if you spent your whole morning answering emails and not writing your book or preparing for your class, it's really easy to get behind. So, make a daily most important tasks list and then, from there, prioritize it. It helps to get all that clutter out of your mind and onto paper.

Decluttering

Step one would be to figure out your 10 hours that could be made up of different 30-minute chunks here and there. So, start thinking about where your time is going. Because we always time. And you know, there are different things to think about with all of this, for example, is watching TV at night wasting time, or is that just relaxing? Is that just something that we should do or need to do? And of course, we all need to relax. And then take a look at all of these things you are spending time on to see if you could do less of that and maybe get some time there or do things in a new and different way. So, think about anything you're doing because there may be stuff that's just a holdover from another time in life. Start looking for more and more ways you could optimize your schedule.

30-day Challenge

One way is to do a challenge. Maybe if you want to get up earlier, put yourself on a 30-day get up the early challenge because that helps take some of the hardness out of it. You'll think that getting up earlier is a really hard thing to do. But getting up early for 30 days seems a lot easier. Because it's like, you'll do it for 30 days, and it's a challenge, it kind of puts fun energy to it. Because then, you can see the benefits by the time you're done with the 30 days. And it's not hard.

10-minute Thing

Sometimes every day would go by, and you'd be like, you didn't find the time or the space to do it, or all these excuses come up. So, try the 10-minute thing. Like, find a way to make it not hard for yourself and start small. And you could do that with anything like writing a book. So, there are just so all kinds of fun ways to hack yourself. But to hack yourself, know your tendencies and why you don't do stuff. So, you can kind of play around with it.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

Declutter Your Schedule Free Ebook!

028: Embracing Imperfection (and Other Takeaways from Free Time)

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Free Time Framework:

Align
Design
Assign

Specific takeaways:

Energy
Embrace imperfection
Nonlinear breakthroughs
Time block and bake in batches
Automate what you repeat

Get the book: Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business by Jenny Blake

027: How to Free Time to Work on Your Business

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 01:00:00 -0600

You can try to have this perfect picture of how you want to spend your day, but have it blown up in seconds – and you’ll running all over the place. But you don’t have to operate this way. The path can be a bit tricky, especially for entrepreneurs and start-up CEOs, but not totally impossible!

Jenny Blake is a podcaster, host, speaker and author. She helps organizations and business owners – young or old- organize their plans through smarter systems. She joins the podcast to talk about managing time, Specifically establishing systems that would skyrocket your way to success while maintaining a work-life balance.

Founder Time

Founder time is time that's just for you, and it's protected. And whether you work for yourself currently or you work for someone else. It is the time to be strategic and creative about your life and your business about the projects you're working on. As Michael Gerber would say, work on the business, not in the business. Like really asking, what is the one thing you can work on in this block of time that will free up your time or move the business forward?

Start with creative ways of asking, how can I afford this? And not with, can I afford this? With that, you're asking how and not with something that ends with a yes or no kind of answer. And in doing that, you're generating creative ideas. For example, hiring a team that would free you most of your time so you can build more products and services in your business. It could be expensive, but the free time dashboard has earned you back the cost of hiring this team. It just came from a slightly different channel.

Flow and Friction

The first thing you can do is create a delegation task tracker and observe over the next few weeks but have this open in front of you. You can use a pen and paper at your desk, and it could be the notes app on your phone. It doesn't have to be fancy. But the point is that as you work on a given day or week, it will give you the most information about what you could delegate, even if you don't know to whom yet or if you can afford it.

Start by noticing what area of your life and work is creating the most friction right now? What area drains you the most or you don't like doing? Then delegate that first! Because it's going to relieve the most pressure. And you know, there are different ways to do that, and you can even run experiments, but picking an area that has a lot of friction, will make you more motivated to solve it and more motivated to pay for it. And you're going to benefit the most from freeing that zone to do more of your best work. For example, with admin stuff, there's a lot that you can automate more than you probably think there's a lot that you can eliminate. But even if you don't know who yet, or how you're going to delegate, write the process down.

Tiny Teams

If you google connection nodes, you'll see that the complexity of communication increases dramatically once you get over about seven people. Research also shows that about seven is a sweet spot. Work with at least a triangle formation or a square. Because if you only have you and a VA, your business is still fragile. There's a saying that one is the most dangerous number in business. If you have one of anything, you have a single point of failure, including you, the business owner, and that's quite stressful. Everything grinds to a halt if you get sick, including your income. And that's scary! If you have a VA and they leave, or they get sick, or something happens, you're still left in the lurch and going to be stressed. So, a triangle would be delightful for a square that works, too, as long as you can see that the communication nodes among you are still relatively simple.

Documentation

Every question lives three lives. So, if someone is going to ask a question, that's okay. But that means we had a gap in our systems and documentation. However, when you find yourself answering the same questions repeatedly, even if it's two different people who don't know any better. It's never the other person's fault. It's your fault. What you can do is train the system. So that every time there is a turnover of who is helping you with the task, you won't have to explain the same things again.

For example, if someone on your team asks you a question because they can't find the answer, that's the system's flag B. They should document what you say. So, if you answer them on the phone and email in Slack, it shouldn't just live there. That question has to live a second life in your internal documentation so that the next person can find it more easily. And if it can live a third customer-facing life, it's on your website. It clarifies that nobody has to ask you the same thing twice.

Good Systems

A good system will not create more work and more friction, but the one that you can't resist because it makes your life so much easier. If you have ever stayed at an Airbnb, you know that the owner doesn't call each guest on the phone and walk them through. There's a guide to how to stay at that apartment. So that's a metaphor, but it's also a very useful, practical thing that we've all experienced.

The books 80% Approach by Dan Sullivan and Flywheel Monograph by Jim Collins will get you to focus on where it is important and let the rest go. But you can't always be perfectionistic and detail-oriented because that will hobble progress. But then, now and then, of course, it's a good thing to do a systems audit and dive back in and find things that aren't up to your standards – so go and fix them.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

026: The Law of Compounding Your Productivity

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 01:00:00 -0600

New and veteran entrepreneurs alike may have a continual struggle with closing deals. Part of this reason is because we’re good at doing the work or making the widget more than we are at working the sales process. It can also be nearly impossible to build the right habits and routines with all other obligations. It's even harder when you're jumping from one time zone to another ~ which most business owners agree. But with the right mindset and proper training ~ it's not all that impossible! All it takes is sheer motivation and proper rhythm.

Desmond Dixon is a sales recruiter, trainer, and host of the Campfire Capitalism podcast. He helps business owners and entrepreneurs make more money in terms of revenue while traveling the world! He joins the podcast to talk about creating small micro habits that would help you get real results! Specifically, the ways to implement these habits and routines into revenue.

Laws of Compounding

The name of the game is staying in the game. And becoming intentional with every interaction you're having. And not from a place of taking, but from giving. If you compound giving, you're also going to receive because you're allowing, and you're a person of value. Compounding can be something as small as reaching out to 10 people every day, and if you do that for 30 days, you're more likely to book calls. And then we layer on top of that. And then follow back with the people you connect with because those people are more likely to buy from you statistically and refer you because word of mouth is the most powerful thing in marketing. So, ten new people a day, 10 follows from people that you couldn't connect with and one touchback from someone that you've already enrolled or has already said no to you. Let people go who said yes or no, but always follow up and just check on them, not from a place of I want to sell you something, but be interested in what's going on in their life or their business. Those are some little things that compound over time.

One Interaction

The biggest paradigm is that the more people you talk to gives you more likelihood of closing a deal. But the real deal is going deeper, not wider. Understanding networking on a very high level will get you those big deals or the velocity behind the deals. The number one mistake salespeople make is falling apart. Having the resilience and the discipline to keep following up with people every day can help you gain billions of dollars as a salesman. It may take you 34567 touches over months to get that person on the phone. But that one deal can change your life, though. That's the crazy part about it. That one interaction could change your life because that person can introduce you to many people.

Making Value

Networking with other people doesn't mean that you're selling something to them. But maybe they know the right people that have a problem that you can solve. They can make introductions for you, right? It's not about getting into three-dimensional chess here. But networking is something you can do and still create a win-win. Like supposed you introduce someone like a prospect. Don't be so consumed with selling your widget. Talk to them, and figure out what's going on in their life. And if you see a gap in solving their problem, maybe it's not your solution; maybe you need to introduce them to your friend or a guy you met a week ago, or the guy you talked to this morning, and create connections by making value to people.

Finding Traffic

Let's reframe it from just talking to 10 people, right? Okay. It doesn't even need to be like, Hey, I have Joe Schmo, and I want to sell you something, or would you be interested in my widget? It can be finding your ideal customer and telling a quick story to the audience. It's a perfect example of sales, and it's just business like you're just putting your cooler at the top of the fortress when people are hiking up this mountain. And giving them what they're more than willing to pay. And sometimes you only need to find the right room, group, and forum, where all your ideal customers are! Are they at trade shows? Are they at conventions? Are they in masterminds? Are they in Facebook groups? Are they listening to podcasts? Are they following a shirt hashtag? Are they on Tik Tok? It's simply looking where the traffic will experience a certain need and meeting them where they are by getting to that space. And if you don't know that space or don't know where all my customers are concentrating, then the best thing to do is go out and talk to people!

Long Game

Find people who serve your clients. It's simply asking, who else is serving my clients? The bookkeeper, mortgage brokers, or the payroll guys selling software could be serving your clients. And start with like Dell has several people and simply connect with them in a very gentle like, Hey, I see that we serve some of the same people, I would love to be a value in some way connect with you. And 50% to 70% of those people will accept your request. And probably 30% of those people will engage in dialogue with you. Second, talk to other verticals. You build this network of people who solve these different problems because now when you approach your client or prospective customers, you can be a problem solver, right and not attached. They have to buy my stuff right now. Because if you play the long game, the networking game, it will compound because word of mouth is the most powerful thing.

Build Connections

Put yourself in the consumer's shoes. For example, if they come to your store and ask you for something but you don't have it ~ try telling them the place where they could get what they want, instead of saying, you can take this and that. Why? Because it becomes counterintuitive like a customer, you'd want to go back to this place the next time because they help people and not just take your money. And this is service. Focus on what the customer wants, and turn such into a referral or a connection. It's like a reframe. It's like coming from a place of abundance. They say no to solving their problem, find the right people to provide them with the service, and use this relationship or connection to create value.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

025: Small Habits to Reclaim Your Schedule

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Many people find it difficult to stay on track with their goals. A lot find it more challenging as task after task arises. However, it is not to say that you could overcome those. Several argue that it would always start with small steps. One lifesaver could be working on a to-do list. Though routines like this would demand consistency, which is another obstacle itself.

Nicki Conradt Eberlin, a certified life coach, whether happiness, money, relationships, health could be mental or physical health or career-wise. She joins the podcast to talk about how people can build better habits to reach their goals. Specifically, creating small habits to reach one's personal or professional goals.

Key Benefits

The biggest benefit to starting small is you make it so easy that you can't say no. It's just a simple small habit, and that's easy. There's no pressure or strain for you to complete this, like a massive goal. But depending on the purpose of why you're building that small habit, which is produced in this aspect. It could improve your quality of life, lower your stress levels, help you focus more, have a greater sense of joy with what you do, and have more self-confidence. It is because when you're productive, you're focused, and you can take on different things.

Instant Gratification

People want instant gratification. And this is for some reason that smaller habits can be too simple. You don't have enough motivation or willpower to do just a small aspect. But that's where it starts. A perfect example of that is when people start a small habit or think of one, they think it's not that big of a deal, or it's not a big habit, so they start there. But then they don't take it seriously, so you push it off to the wayside. But if you started working with those small habits seriously, you could have started building better or bigger habits already.

Small Habits with Big Impact

The small habits that make the biggest impact are showing up in planning your weeks out for whatever goal that might be. You can start with small habits and figure out the trigger points, what's going on in your head, and take small parts of the day. And that could be like not spending five minutes in the morning to plan out your day to be more productive or saying no to that afternoon cocktail and doing something else. And there are so many variables and moving aspects depending on like what the goals that the individual has. But condensing it down from doing it once to twice a week, and if you're feeling really good, bump up to five as it takes time to get those things rolling.

Reclaiming your schedule

If you don't have time to do blank, what do you have time to do? Because essentially, all people have the same time of the day. And in reclaiming your schedule, you first have to find 30 minutes in your schedule, at least to show up for yourself once a week. And the biggest part is making that time to figure out how you can become more productive. And then you start gaining more time. So, if you want to show up for 30 minutes for yourself once a week, work out your schedule, read a book about time management, whatever it might be. Still, you have that 30-minute to better yourself to reclaim your schedule, and then you start finding other actionable items during that timeframe.

But if you are not good with your schedule, break it down into three days, 10 minutes a day where you can at least practice working on some productivity, some like efficiency in your schedule or learning something new during that timeframe. And those 10 minutes, three days a week, are going to be difficult for you, but know that it will get easier. You have to dedicate that time first. That's the biggest step.

Protecting Time Blocks

There are a couple of different ideas, but one of them is to find a time that works for you. For example, if you are a morning person, get up early, and that would be a good time to spend 10 minutes that day and figure out what's going on. If you're an evening person, do that in the evenings. If you want to do it on your lunch break, find time to do whatever works for you. When it comes to setting that boundary around yourself and making sure that you stick to that quote, unquote, or appointment, you have to have non-negotiables and understand what's important to you.

And when you create new habits, you have to be strict with yourself and have black and white. Because once you start to build that habit, you can have that grey area where you can ask yourself those questions like what's more important at that time? And if you want to switch times or move your schedule around, you commit to that and follow through on that.

Overcoming obstacles

One of them is understanding, like your triggers. What will throw you off balance from accomplishing whatever you need to accomplish? Whether it's a certain time, location, your state of mind, people, etc. So really understanding what's going on and what can prevent you from following through on that thing helps you. The second aspect is rewarding yourself, like giving yourself credit for showing up and doing the work. It doesn't matter how big or small, but naturally, our brains want to discredit everything. Because we're like, oh, it's not that big of a deal, but you're showing up and doing the work. And you're going to see how much it benefits you over a consistent period. So, rewarding yourself can be telling yourself you did a good job. It could be getting a nice lunch, etc. It's hard to do, but it is important to keep yourself motivated and feel good. So, you can keep on moving forward.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

024: Stop Being Busy and Start Actually Getting Things Done

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 27 May 2022 01:00:00 -0600

People spend a lot of time on a million different things every day. But the real question is, do all those things matter? Are we time-blocking stuff on the calendar because they are important? Are doing all of these to stay on track towards our goals? And the answer to all of these is probably a big YES. However, we can't deny that many times we are going around juggling the same thing repeatedly, but not really getting there.

Michelle Pince is a writer and motivational speaker who owns a publishing company. She also works with business owners, leaders, entrepreneurs, founders that helps get people's stories into paper and make a difference. She joins the podcast to talk about how to start getting things done. Specifically, delineating yourself from the concept of busyness and focusing on productivity, and maybe some tips to make some reset.

Juggling

Juggling is not a good thing. But the question is, what do you do when you're juggling? It's like having all the balls are in the air, and you're touching a ball for just a second. Like in your family, career, physical health, and spiritual life, you're all of the different components of your lives, they're all up in the air, and you spend just a tiny bit of time on them. But you don't give it the attention it needs. And will you ever have perfect balance? No, probably not. But you definitely will be able to focus on the most important things right now and take the time rather than just throwing them up in the air and hoping they all get done.

The Wheel of Life

The wheel of life is just a visual representation of who you are, and you're in the center of it. And it's like spokes of the wheel coming out. And each spoke is a part of who you are. So, you have a career life, a personal life, a family life, spiritual life, a physical life, and so on. And what you do is you take a look at that and see a snapshot of where are you right now. And you go around the whole wheel and mark where you are from 1 to 10, honestly, and then connect the dots because what it shows you is a picture of your wheel. And often, people experience ups and downs and a pretty bumpy ride, but that's where you should start.

Priorities & Boundaries

The reality is we all have the same amount of time. But some people are so incredibly productive, and others are wasting it, which boils back down to the priorities. Some are even great believers of time blocking, but unless you know that you should be working on the important things and getting those in your calendar first, it's going to be hard to be fulfilled and happy and productive. Boundaries are also a key. And it could protect you from distractions, but it's also communicating what is important. But often, people are so busy because they don't say no, or they allow people to interrupt their time. It is why it's essential to set your boundaries. And it could be as simple as somebody comes into your office, asking you a quick question or a minute. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, I'm happy to help; however, I'm working on something for the next 30 minutes. Can this wait? But many want to jump to help. And in doing so, yes, you may be helping others, but getting back in the groove of what you're working on will probably take ten times longer than if you focus for the next 30 minutes. And unless someone's bleeding or, you know, it's a huge emergency, most of the time, it can wait. Remember, people will respect you to the exact degree you respect yourself. And that goes with time too! So, if you're responding to emails at one o'clock in the morning, people are going to expect you to do that in the future. If you drop everything for them to answer a question, when you're in the middle of something, well, you're setting the boundary that it's okay to do that. And you have to be the one in control of that.

Refocusing

The key is the amount of time you block off many times because inevitably, you will get distracted. And some things need your attention. So, it's more important to set them in small increments, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. There's a reason why in school, classes are only 15 minutes. In most cases, it's because you can only keep your attention for so long. So, you can do a 30-minute, 45-minute block for no more than an hour. And then also scheduling some reactive time. So, if you are going to be focused on a project for 45 minutes, you have to know when you're done. Because you're going to have emails waiting for you, people waiting for you, and a bunch of text messages and giving yourself a 15-minute buffer before you schedule anything else is equally as important as scheduling the task reactive time.

3 Principles

It starts with passion. All of us are here for a purpose and a reason. And your passion is one of the first things to look at. It's a clue to your purpose, which could be a purpose in your career, family, or personal life. But when you don't know what you want, it makes no difference which road to take, right? So, the purpose part is letting you know what your priorities are. It shows you what you need to be doing on every given day or any time. And passion leads to purpose because passion will show you the clues to your purpose.

In contrast, the purpose will clarify your priorities because you really can't get anything accomplished if you don't know your priorities. But when you know your priorities and you're doing what you're supposed to do, that's when your performance picks up, leading to a platform. And when you can share what you know with other people to speak life into other people, that's when you have a prosperous life. So, prosperity is the next p and then leads to a life of peace. And so, the peace of prosperity comes as a result of making a difference. And those are the principles of success.

Procrastination

Most people procrastinate, but the chances are that people tend to procrastinate on the things that matter. And one obvious reason why people procrastinate is fear. For example, you want to write a book, and you make it a goal to do it, but then you just never do it. It just keeps going and going, and chances are it's tied to fear. It's probably well, "What if I do this? And if it's a flop?" And this is why fear is one of the biggest drivers. But it could also be other things, but at the end of the day, you can't overcome anything unless you know what it is. So, getting real with yourself, why are you procrastinating? Because when you have passion tied to it, it will push you, and you don't have to pull it. And maybe for the first time in a long-time dream! People often set goals on what is possible, and chances are it's just a stretch of where you are now. So, allow yourself to dream. Because honestly, you're not going to overcome procrastination unless you have something really important to you to accomplish. And then you know, there are other pieces to it. But at the end of the day, start looking at life.

As you know, we all have an expiration date. So, what is something that you will be very disappointed that you know, you're on your deathbed, you didn't accomplish? And yes, life's too short to go by, but it starts with figuring out what you want personally and professionally?

Links/Resources/Tools section:

023: How to Increase Productivity and Manage Stress

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 18 May 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Feeling stressed? Know you’re not alone. We all inevitably have stress in our lives, and we need to manage stress in healthy ways while also staying productive. On today’s podcast, Daria Tsvenger joins us. Daria is a mindset coach and has also studied cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. Daria has a unique program called The Dream Sprint, a personal growth challenge that people gain clarity and pursue their dreams.

The Problem With Stress

Stress is a state in our bodies. It's a primal response that occurs in our brain whenever we face some kind of change. If the changes are sudden, our stress levels rise higher. Our brain wants things to stay the same; stress is the brain’s response to change. Thankfully there is a healthy way to handle stress.

How To Handle Stress

Resilience is the best way to handle stress. And resilience is like a muscle in your body. When you train a muscle, you do the same activity over and over. So the next time you do the same activity, it is easier for you to do because your muscles are trained. The same concept applies to your mind. The more we process change, the more we develop resilience.

Moving Past Mental Blocks

We all face mental blocks, things that stop us from doing the things we want to accomplish.

And it might not even be the same challenge that stops us. Daria recommends the “big perspective exercise” where you take into account how long your life actually is.

On average, a human being’s life expectancy is around 80 years, which comes to about 4,000 weeks. Once you are able to realize how many weeks you’ve already been alive, and approximately how many more weeks you have to live, you’ll likely start to see that your time is limited. You know you don’t want to waste your time. This creates urgency and allows you to move past any challenges so you can take action.

Becoming More Confident

Many people struggle with confidence. But what is confidence really? It is when you're able to keep the promises that you gave to yourself. Every time you break a promise to yourself, you become less confident. So the best thing we can do to move forward is to set micro goals. Micro goals add up and enable us to keep our promises to ourselves.

Next Steps

Wherever you are today, I want to challenge you to take the next small step that will lead you to where you want to go. Daria’s Dream Sprint program could be a great way to get some support and accountability as you move forward. We all need support and encouragement. Once you have those, you also have hope. And hope is a very powerful thing. That’s why I make this podcast. So I want to encourage you to keep taking intentional small steps as you are on your journey.

022: Building Momentum: Setting up the Right Framework for Your Business

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Many business owners are caught in a difficult cycle of overworking and getting frustrated when setting up their businesses. It's often one of the most challenging aspects of entrepreneurs. However, there are many ways to cut through this chaos and take back that freedom.

Peter Mohr, a business coach and host of the Simplifying Entrepreneurship podcast – talks about how to go through the process of taking back that freedom. Specifically, he joins the podcast to talk about how entrepreneurs reduce frustrations and set up the right framework for your business. Essentially, making one feel that you are the owner of your business and not the other way around!

Wheel of momentum

The six C's to momentum starts off with clarity, you need to be clear about what you want to do. Because clarity brings you confidence, we don't move ahead without confidence. So if you're not feeling confident, you got to rewind a little bit and build more clarity. And once we have the confidence, we're looking to build competence. And competence often happens when you look into the strengths of your team and the things that you have at your disposal. Sometimes it's an outsource partner, or whatever the case is. As the old concept goes, you don't always need to know how to get something done; you need to know who can help you get it done. However, entrepreneurs seem to get tied up often because they're spending all their time trying to figure out how to do something instead of spending half that time finding out who can do it for them.

And once you found the cooperation within, you've built your competence, confidence, and clarity, and then we're building capacity. And once we start building capacity, well, that's when things get exciting. Now I'm feeling the momentum. You can feel it sort of building up within your team within your organization within your mind as a leader. And once you start feeling comfortable and others see that's not in the model. And once you start feeling comfortable around this, you can be creative again. Because we lose our creativity when we're in a situation of frustration, or we lose our creativity because we don't have the confidence actually to think we can get through. That's why it's a wheel. That's why it starts to run because as you get the system, it just kind of rolls through, and you gain that momentum. And it's really exciting when you can have these little frameworks and systems that pull you through, for it just works a lot better that way.

Accountability Chart

A big piece of business is setting up that alignment process whereby you can delegate things to someone else. So when you have that, and you're outsourcing essentially, either to somebody on your team or outside of your team, those accountabilities, all you need to do from a leader's leadership side of things is to have it systematize and the processes in place. You don't need to make all those decisions. And as leaders of your organization, the biggest piece of the puzzle often is just making the decisions. But you don't have to make the decisions at the low level of your organization. Let other people tackle that, for that is their unique ability, that's their centre of strength, and it's freeing you up as the leader to make the decisions on the things that aren't already systematized that aren't already processed, that aren't already set up in that way. Because everybody in your organization wants to have a certain amount of authority, they want to own certain things. It would be best if you learned to trust the people you're with and give them that trust so that they can run with the jobs they need to do. And you're not micromanaging in there.

Five Ps

One of the biggest things business leaders deal with is the five Ps. The five P's of creating freedom, specifically, having the right promise, having the right product, having the right process, the right people, so that you can have the right profit. The first P is the promise, and understanding the promises is the big thing. And if you haven't developed your promise and you have to want it in very clear, simple language. And if you can communicate that, in everything you do, you're going to deliver your promise, and every decision will be so much easier. Also, many business owners sell a product or service that doesn't even align with their promise. Because while they've always sold it in the past when their business has changed, they're still selling old stuff that doesn't align with what they do anymore. Sometimes, they just said it's an opportunity to make a few bucks. But it doesn't align with what they do, so complete misalignment. Remember, if you're confused, you lose, right?

The next step after aligning the product is aligning all your processes. And if all your processes are all up in your head, then that's a problem because you'll never be able to release any of that to anyone else if all of the processes are in your head. And nobody knows how to make those decisions in a clear, consistent format, right? We want to allow them to understand how things are done with the alignment of the promise. The next step after the process is people. And people portion are often the one that gives entrepreneurs the most frustration. Whether those people are not essentially your team members, it's your clients, your wholesalers. You outsource partners and all the people in your sphere of influence. So, you want to make it as simple as you can for your team to make decisions every time without asking your opinion or coming to you for any. They should be able to make decisions on their level of accountability every time.

A Clear Promise

When you have a very clear idea - everything aligns with that. And it's very simple to make decisions when there's absolute clarity. And it's part of the leader's job to communicate that clarity and promise. And to continuously communicate that to the public, you have to market that promise to everybody to know what it is. You have to live it with your team, hire or fire to that promise, set up our processes, and have the right services and products that align with that promise. And if they don't, that's where that wheel momentum gets like a stick through one of the cogs of that wheel. Because everything has to be in a structure that's fully aligned with that promise so that the momentum can continue to build, it's like the snowball, and it's rolling down the hill. It starts small when nobody knows your promise. But then when everybody starts to understand it, your team starts to understand it, they're perpetuating it out there, they're getting it out there, and then everybody else the marketing's working some of this other stuff and. Everybody starts to begin to understand what that promise is, then that's when you get some real momentum behind you. And it's okay to either attract or repel based on your promise, and it should attract or repel you want to attract all those who love the best promise, and you want to repel the ones who don't because they're going to be a better fit somewhere else.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

021: How Your Productivity is Affected by Your Fitness and Nutrition

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 01:00:00 -0600

The importance of health is nothing new. However, as individuals keep chasing time and try to get things done in a fast-paced world - health becomes a much lower priority. It's mostly something to set aside until our body says otherwise. Although this is mostly true for most people, many still want to balance nutrition and productivity.

Nate Palmer, coach and the best selling author of the book Million Dollar Body Method – talks about these areas. Specifically, he joins the podcast to talk about how you can embrace efficiency with the right focus, training, and nutrition. And essentially taking your fitness to the next level.

Nutrition, Fitness, and Productivity

Often, people think of nutrition in one of two different ways. It's either, "What do I want to eat right now? Or how do I lose weight?" However, these things are disparate entities, and it would be better to have them combined like, "What should I eat, feel the way I want and execute on the things that need to get done?" Because changing that question can change how you view nutrition and just kind of the world around you. For example, macronutrients proteins, fats, and carbs are all different levers. They're all different ways of communicating with your body. And once you know, what each of them does, it will help you with the mental acuity of sitting down and doing that deep work that needs to be done.

Scarcity and Maintenance

When we focus on energy, health and weight loss come, but if we focus on weight loss, we lose the energy and put ourselves in this stagnant place. We deprive ourselves, and then we inevitably backslide. There's a reason that there's a 95% recidivism rate in weight loss, which means that 95% of people who lose weight gain it back, and then someone has gained more for good measure. It is because when you're in scarcity, when you're always deprived, it becomes a mental roadblock, and you're never going to escape that. Like maintenance is sustaining stuff, and it's the most important because if you can't sustain it, then why even do it in the first place? If everything you're putting on yourself is like "can't", "won't", "don't", and "off-limits", then you're going to get stuck in this negative cycle. Because if you have a scarcity mindset, then it's hard to live a life of abundance. But if you have an abundant mindset, where you can eat whatever you want to, then it's also a different mentality. It's just shifting your vision to make those decisions based on what you want and not necessarily what you're hungry for in the moment.

Good Alternatives

The number one thing is to understand your proclivity. It's like deciding to choose something or do something. And once you take it away and make it a little bit harder to access, then sometimes, something like that can be a big change rather than having something like out on the counter. And if you can set yourself up for success by separating yourself from that, you can create that self-confidence. Like you are mentally tough enough to keep yourself from doing what you want at the moment. And this snowballs into a positive mental state about food without having to deprive yourself. But one thing when it comes to those moments is being able to delay that by planning. Having a plan to get in that moment can make you enjoy those things guilt-free.

Training and Nutrition

People need to start considering that training and nutrition are as important to our success as personal development, reading, meditation, and other things. Because health is at the baseline, it's like the building blocks. So, make sure that your fitness and nutrition are solid and in place, even if they're both a little bit rote and monotonous. That is the point that you start to master these things. As Bruce Lee says, "I don't feel the man who's practised 10,000 kicks one time, but the man who's practised one kick 10,000 times." It's just making sure that everything that you're doing is pointing back to the result that you're looking for.

The Other Four

The first one is a morning routine, so basically, you have to get your morning routine done in under 90 seconds. It's like waking up first thing, having 32 ounces of water first thing in the morning, and then doing 60 seconds of explosive exercise, not necessarily in that order. It could be like jumping jacks, shadowboxing jump squats, burpees if you're a sadist, whatever you wanted to do, but basically, what's going to happen will shift your body from that sleepy state to sympathetic nervous system dominance. So, you get up, get hydrated, and get active, your turn your body and your brain on. The second one is liquid assets. It's drinking a gallon of water today. The third one is training, making sure that you're doing a minimum of 20 minutes of some activity movement every single day. And then the fourth one is the final deposit, which is one thing that you can have people do either before bed or right after work, and it avoids that entrepreneurial trap of working every single hour of every single day.

Get Hydrated

Getting people to drink more water is one of the key things. Because if you're dehydrated, you feel like a piece of shit all day long. A 3% decrease in hydration levels can cause a 30% reduction in strength. So, if you can bench 200 pounds, you're going to drop that to 140 pounds with a 3% decrease in hydration, which is a lot, and it's crazy how much that can factor into your energy and your abilities. Plus, your body literally cannot burn fat if you're dehydrated. The way we burn fat is Not at the gym. It's not in the sauna. It's when we're at rest at night, and we're breathing out moist air. Because to burn one pound of fat takes about 30 gallons of water and like 28 pounds of oxygen to burn one pound of fat. So, it's all done at night through our respiratory system. You're always dehydrated that that process is significantly slowed. So, if you're dying, you're working out, and you're doing all the right things, you're taking the supplements, you're not drinking enough water, it's not going to happen. And it's so frustrating. But it's also free. You can drink water; you can walk, and you can fast. And those are the three best things you can do for your body. And none of those costs any money.

Natural Chemistry

Many people don't have the scientific knowledge of actually how the body works and what levers and knobs you have to turn or twist to get the result you're looking for. Your body is complicated, like a chemical laboratory. It's not a simple math equation where you put in one extra treadmills session and equal out one pound of fat loss. You got to adjust these little things to learn how to manipulate your body's natural chemistry and how you work with your body, rather than go blunt force trauma, which all of us do. Like just diet and exercise, diet and exercise, diet and exercise and exercise, that's like white-knuckling yourself and hoping that you're going to get there eventually. But also killing yourself in the process, and it just doesn't have to be that way, if you have a little bit more understanding of what it takes and how your body works.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

020: Moving from Success to Significance

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Our guest this week is Aaron Walker. He has started several businesses throughout the years, but his current endeavor is "View from the Top."

Aaron shares some fantastic things, including:

How he started is first business
How he retired several times, the first time at age 27
How he recovered from a tragedy
How he helps men grow themselves and their business through his mastermind groups

Aaron has generously shared several things for you to download:

Personal Assessment
What Do I Want?
Steps to a Productive Day

Just go to http://viewfromthetop.com/success

019: Results Not Typical: Mastering the Pareto Principle

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 01:00:00 -0600

People continue rushing to the finish line as there are so many things to get done with so little time. But the question is, is there really no time at all, or are we only focusing more of our energy on less important things?

Mark Sieverkropp, a blogger, coach and co-founder and former director of Happen-ings at Happen To Your Career. He is also a personal friend and was my first co-host of the 24 Faithful podcast. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about the Pareto Principle and how to apply this principle to almost every aspect of our lives to achieve the highest efficiency.

Pareto principle

It's a foundational idea that not everything you do is equal. And not everything you do is of equal value because people think that everything they do is equal and need to get more done. It's basically the idea that if you only have a certain amount of time, what would you do that's most valuable? However, unless you find that 20% and look for them, you'll miss out on the idea and the process. The 80/20 principle, essentially, points out, in theory, that you can work one day in a week and get this like 80% of the results that you typically do in one day or a week because that's 20% of your week and 80% of your results are going to come from that 20%.

Finding your 20

How do you find the 20%? When it comes to either products or services or the things/tasks you're doing, it's the things that directly and proportionately contribute to bottom-line revenue. So, what are the things that will make the biggest difference? Because honestly, people do many things that have no value, and the key is looking at those things. Because everything else is kind of is important, and it contributes, but it's not nearly as important. So, it's that idea of not only knowing it but then finding what those 20% things are. When you focus on that 20% and emphasize that, you're still going to find time to get those other important things done because these things will find their way in to get done anyway.

Bottom Line

If you don't do the important things, at first, you run out of time, and you don't get to them. And many people find themselves doing that because they are not intentional with their time. We spend too much time surfing Facebook or rearranging our office space. And those things can be valuable, but if we don't leave time for connecting with people, those won't happen. Most of the time, the 20% are things that you enjoy doing, but there are times where those 20% things are the things that maybe are a little bit scarier or a little tougher. And as humans are good at saying well, doing things later and then later never comes, and doing those types of things that are easy, and make them feel like they're accomplishing something, but don't contribute to the bottom line.

The four things

The four most important things, as far as getting those things done, are focus, accountability, encouragement, and recalibration. First is the focus, and it's a huge one, and it is this idea of focusing on the most important things. The second is accountability like you need people to keep you accountable. You need somebody that knows that you're going to do something and ask you about it and make sure we do it. The third is encouragement. Having somebody who can encourage you, support you, and keep you motivated, can remind you why you're doing those things is massively important. And the final one is being willing to recalibrate, like being willing to adjust, because if we don't have that ability to adjust, it makes it hard. And that's where you start to feel bad and get down on yourself when you mess up. Or you don't do as well as you want because you feel like all is lost.

The Next Step

If a person is not willing to take the first step, they will never take the second step. There's a reason that number one is number one. And many people get caught up in all these things to get done, and that's the issue you're having is your focus is so scattered that you never get that one thing done. And that's really what this process is, is to help you do is first to identify what they are. Most people know what the most important thing is because not everything people do is equal. Every product you create is equal on every service you create is equal. Some generate more revenue, and some generate more revenue and take less time. Some generate a lot of revenue but take a lot of time. And so, it's identifying what those things are. So that you can go into that process and make an informed decision on what that next step is.

Accountability

One of the main reasons people go for coaching is to have somebody bounce ideas off and then have somebody that will say, Okay, what's your next step? And that's the power of accountability. You can hire a coach, you can find a mastermind, you know, whether that's paid or it's free. Another great way is to have one person like a friend who is willing to talk to you, and it's not even like an official accountability thing, but they just care. And some other ways you can do it is to post your goals on social media – however, that kind of accountability can help some people, sometimes it doesn't. The amount of accountability you need depends on your amount of self-control. And most people have probably less self-control than they care to admit. And we all think we can do it ourselves, but most of us fail at doing it ourselves, for it's just finding somebody that cares.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

018: How to Maximize Every Minute

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 01:00:00 -0600

People are constantly battling trying to finish things more quickly, but at the same time, swamped with more work. So getting more things done in less time is almost like an impossible feat. Adding to this stress, we also have to try to balance both personal and work life. But as people constantly fight to find this balance, experts argue that implementing the right strategies is the best solution to all this pressure. But what is the right strategy for you?

Paul Casey, founder and CEO of growing forward, a leadership and life coaching business – talks about this in his book maximizing every minute. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about 101 tips and tools on time management for your work and personal life.

12 Commitments

Filtering your time commitments through the lens of your core values and your vision, whether a one-year or long-range vision.
Choosing your top three priorities for tomorrow before you're done with today.
Accomplish your priorities early in the day to avoid procrastination.
Block out appointments with yourself.
Finish one task before starting another.
Follow your biorhythm so that you're most productive in your energy sweet spot of the day.
Delegate or outsource anything that only you must do. Try to stay on the most important things of your day.
Utilize strategies and boundaries to limit the negative side effects of side trackers.
Building margins and breaks into your day.
Lead your meetings.
Share your priorities with other people.
Do reviews regularly, whether that's a daily review, weekly, quarterly, or annual review.

Filtering Time Commitments

People want to dive into the tips and tricks right away, and they skip over this very fundamental point, which is managing your life around your values and your vision. And instead of just giving the people you love and the most important things to you the leftovers. You have to get those values in your calendar and literally block those out first, and then let the rest of your daily schedule around those. The second piece of that is your vision. And this is your long-range vision of where you want to be someday, like where do you want to be one year from today in all the categories of your life, your wellness, your relationships, your marketing, all those different kinds of things, give yourself a target to shoot for. And backtrack from that into setting goals that will get you there. Those things have to go into your calendar first.

Frontloading Priorities

Josh said that afternoons are runaway trains. If we don't frontload our priorities into the morning and take that thing that we set as a priority and drag it into later, then the afternoon comes, and you don't have enough time to get your priorities done because there's no margin-left. But if you get it done early in the day, it starts off this snowball of productivity. Whereas if you drag it to the afternoon, you get the three things done out of ten but usually not. And then you procrastinate yet again. And it goes into the next day. And you've double-stacked tomorrow and made that day undoable.

Multitasking

People think multitasking is going to be great because you are spinning all these plates simultaneously. But research shows it's a bad deal, and it's like messing up two things at once. The old proverb that says he who chases two rabbits catches neither. And you won't feel like you've gotten anything done. And the interruption of task switching, some research says that it takes between 11 and 20 minutes to return to your frame of thought. Can you imagine if you keep switching all day long? And how much time you're wasting and deep work? So, finish something and let the load off.

Biorhythm

Time management tips don't fit everybody, but there are ones that fit most people. And since people have different biorhythms. And when you figure that out, that's where you put your creative tasks and your critical thinking tasks. Chronotypes is another word where you're freshest in your day. If you are an afternoon person or an evening person, then do your best deep work at those times. And maybe you're going to move your day around a little bit different, but you're still going to have to protect with time blocking those sweet spots in your day, like closing your door or putting Do Not Disturb on, or you're still going to fall victim to the procrastination.

Priority Management

Put your tasks on one column, put a column in the middle, that's urgency, then put a third column that is important. And then the last column, which is the total. And you take your tasks every day on a scale of one to ten. Then you do it for urgency. How soon must you get this done to be successful? Give that a scale of one to ten and multiply those two together. You get a total. And when you work through your top 10 tasks this way, you'll see that not every task is equal. There are priorities that you must decide to move to the top of your day. And re-rank those priorities and those become your big three for the day. And maybe add another column that ranks the energy that it takes to do that as well. Not necessarily going into ranking the priority, but maybe looking at where you need to place this in your day, as far as the energy it takes?

Daily Review Preview

The last 30 minutes of your day before you shut your light off at home or before you drive home from work, you stop what you're doing and think about your top priorities for tomorrow, your big three. What allows you to have a hard stop in today, which helps your work-life balance, gives you a plan in tomorrow, when to hit the ground running of what truly is most important? You're not going for the easy, convenient, and fun, but to go for the things that matter most. Another benefit is that your brain works on problems when your subconscious mind is asleep. And when you get good at that, you do a weekly preview where you sum up this week and celebrate your wins.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

017: 3 Simple Tools to Boost Your Productivity in 2022

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Ready to boost your productivity to new heights? Today’s episode features USA Today Bestselling writer, Russell Nohelty. He is not only an author, he also runs three companies. Clearly, Russell has to be very productive. And in this episode, he’s going to share with you how he does it. Best of all, his approach is actually very simple.

The One Thing

Russell uses The One Thing approach which was made popular by author Gary Keller. The One Thing focuses on moving one domino or boulder at a time. If you focus your attention and energy on one specific area, you can move past the one challenge that is in your way. And then once you push that domino over, you create momentum. Then you move on to another domino. Most people don’t have one clear intention. They are just very busy. But being busy does not mean you’re being productive.

For example, Russell wanted to be a USA Today bestselling author. Not so much for the acclaim, he wanted to have this behind his name so get more clients and reach more readers. It took about two years of pushing all sorts of different boulders and working with people to push that boulder over. But he pushed that boulder down in 2018, and says that it felt great.

Another Important Approach

Russell uses time blocking during the week to take care of the tasks that are most important. Every block of time is labeled as green time, yellow time, or red time. Green time is when you are working on things that are moving you towards your goal or working with customers. Green time is when you're making money.

Yellow colored time is focused on activities that are indirectly related to Russell’s income. For example, customer service, shipping something, or doing payroll. Lastly, there’s red time. These activities have no bearing on making money. Some of these things include eating lunch, going to pick up your kids from school, or going to a doctor's appointment. While all of these things have no bearing on making money, these tasks are still essential.

Working During The Right Time

It is very important to work when you are most productive and have high amounts of energy. Russell says that while he doesn't have any kids, he has two dogs that are very, very needy. They want his attention most between about 6 am and 8 am, and 5pm to 7pm. Because of that, he knows that he is most likely to have a problem with distraction during those times. With this knowledge in mind, he does not schedule his green time during those hours.

For even more info about Russell’s approach, I recommend listening to the podcast. It’s a great interview. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

A Final Word

To further connect with Russell check out The Complete Creators blog and podcast. This content helps creators build better businesses and then make the best work of their life. And don’t forget to check out his author website which features his fiction work which focuses on fantasy, sci-fi and supernatural stories.

016: How Confidence Affects Your Productivity

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 01:00:00 -0600

What is confidence? What doesn’t it look like?

You can find millions of photos shared on all types of social media. But is this really what confidence looks like? Or is it a way of sugarcoating the hard truth that confidence is more than just a photo snap? Yes, people have described confidence in many ways, but to truly understand it might be more than what people already believe it to be.

Dr Nate Zinsser, a former high school MVP turned author, speaker and consultant- talks about the confident mind. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about how you think affects you and that you have the free will to decide how it should be.

Confident Mind

As described in the book, the confident mind follows your confidence in the sense of certainty you have about yourself or a particular ability. It allows you to express that ability and demonstrate that confidence more or less unconsciously without having to talk yourself through it or analyze what you're doing step by step. It proceeds more or less naturally; you think about how you are when you do something as simple and as common as tying your shoelaces.

Devaluing Oneself

There's a lot of times where people get to the point where they're good at something, and to become second nature, they don't realize the skill level that they have. And so they end up devaluing it. We have a habit of devaluing, emotionally discounting, and taking so many things that we do well for granted. It's remarkable how many athletes and other performers talk about their experiences. And when it comes to light that they've worked very hard, they've developed certain capabilities and demonstrated these capabilities on many levels, yet, they don't allow those memories to create a sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm for their future. They've just emotionally swept them under the rug.

The Bank Account

Your sense of certainty about yourself is, in fact, the expression of all the thoughts that you have about yourself, all the thoughts you have about that particular ability, and all the thoughts you have about the situations in which you exercise that ability. Like a bank account, depending on what you put into it and what thoughts suck it down. There's your balance for the day, for the moment. That's your level of confidence at any given time. And there are certain thought processes that we go through which attack that mental bank account and draw it down our habits of self-criticism, worry about the future, envisioning various catastrophes as opposed to the kinds of deposits that we can make when we look back at our both long term and short-term memories and kind of filter out moments that have created in our lives, a powerful sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm for ourselves. And we identify the beliefs about ourselves in the present that are indeed energizing. And we create through the proper use of our imagination, scenes, movie clips, beautiful photos, beautiful stills of accomplishments and actions, and we need to take those thoughts to build up the bank account.

The Misconception

Once an individual reaches a certain level of confidence, they're going to stay that way forever. That's not how it works. Confidence is rather fragile, depending on which thoughts you choose to maintain and which ones you care to discard. And if we, as we've been talking, emotionally, discount, disregard take for granted - our progress and success will not even bring our mental bank accounts to balance down. And again, opponents, competitors, just the imperfect nature of the world we all inhabit, things will go wrong. And so, you have to be very good at responding to life's inevitable ups and downs and your inevitable human imperfections. Those are thieves. Those are criminals, you have to have some safeguards intact, or those guys might sneak in just like a cybercriminal and shut down your bank account without you knowing.

Confidence Matters

Confidence is really what makes good performances possible. It's not a guarantee, but with that sense of certainty, all your natural talent, all your acquired skill built up through your training, your study, and your personal experience. All of that has the potential to be expressed when you want it to be expressed, provided you have that sense of certainty about it provided you are confident if you go into a situation doubting yourself fearing the worst. If you do this in very, very subtle ways, you will always compromise your effectiveness. So, confidence is a necessary condition. It's not a guarantee, but it always tilts the odds a little bit more in your favor.

Taking the first step

First and foremost, you must understand that every thought you think is entering that mental bank account. And you want to be somewhat careful about how you allow yourself to think about yourself. The second key point is that you have free will to think about yourself more productively. You have that ability as a human being, assuming that you're old enough to be listening to this podcast, you have that ability, it does not matter where you are, it does not matter what conditions you are under, you have that free will. And as Dr Viktor Frankl said, the last human freedom is the last human freedom to choose one's thoughts, regardless of circumstance. Everybody has that ability, and unfortunately, people often forego that and give it that ability. And they allow the circumstances they are in to dictate how they think about themselves.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

015: How to Make Goal-Setting Work For You

Joshua Rivers — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 01:00:00 -0600

Are you falling short in meeting your goals? Or maybe you feel like something is just missing.

On today’s episode, I chat with Roman Marinov about goal setting. Roman is a relationship coach who has been trained in Tony Robbins’ coaching program. He also is offering a free 30% discount on coaching for anyone who mentions Success Road Podcast listeners. Just mention the show to him.

Why Is Goal Setting Important?

A great example is to think of a plane. A plane needs to know where it's going. It needs to know his destination. Otherwise the plane will waste time, and fuel. It might get lost or even be going in the wrong direction. And that's what goals are for us. Goals are our destinations. That’s why goals are so important.

How To Approach Goal Setting

Roman uses a straightforward framework that consists of a quick meditation. Then he asks individuals to share their goals in four specific categories which include personal, financial, adventure and contribution. This entire process comes from the book Awaken The Giant Within.

And so they give Roman those goals, he writes them down. And then the next step is he asks why these goals are important to them. And the next step is getting very, very specific, creating specific action items for each goal and the deadlines. That's the process.

Best Advice For Someone Not Working With A Coach

Roman recommends reading Awaken The Giant Within and following the framework described in the book. The very first step is taking five minutes to write a goal in each category without filtering yourself. For example, if you're working in the financial category of goal, so someone may write “I want to make this specific amount of income.” Following the framework is key, and sticking to it by showing up everyday.

When Goal Setting Isn’t Working

If you’re struggling with achieving goals, Roman recommends focusing is on the future. Believing something will happen and what it will feel like when it happens. This provides a form of motivation. Roman uses visualization in the morning and evening to stay on track.

Accomplishing Goals With Loved Ones

Roman recommends reading the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, because Covey goes into depth about this topic in the book.

In some cases, putting some of your money at stake can help too. You could tell a friend, “If I don't complete complete this goal by the specific deadline, use this money however you want.” And if you accomplish the goal, you get the money back. That's a pretty easy way to hold yourself accountable.

Your Next Steps

We will all fail at meeting our goals sometimes. We all have to readjust our goals too. This is all just part of the process. You set new goals, and then you create a plan. Whether you are starting a new goal or just need some help with a current goal, Roman offers a free complimentary coaching session for all new clients. In addition, mention Success Road Podcast for a special 30% off discount.

Best of luck as you pursue and achieve your goals. Feel free to contact me, Joshua Rivers, and tell me some of your wins. I’d love to hear them!

014: Learn to Master Your Time (not just manage time)

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 01:00:00 -0600

People don't often see the bigger perspective in their minds like they should be seen. And they end up doing things they shouldn't be working on in the first place. But seeing past the barriers of clearly seeing might not be a walk in the park. But, it's not all that difficult if one learns to focus their mindset and manage their time, like identifying your top priorities. When people break past these barriers, they can be more productive.

Emily Sander, currently a C suite executive in corporate America, founder and primary coach at next level coaching. She works with business leaders and entrepreneurs working on their prioritization and time management to make them more productive. She wrote a book earlier this year called Hacking executive leadership. Now, she joins the podcast to talk more about the practical things of managing time and developing a mental mindset to build a foundation that will enable one to go forward.

Strengths

The first big concept is to play to your strengths, identify your strengths, play to them and get other people or processes or automation, or help for the things you're not good at. You can identify what you're good at by asking yourself what comes naturally to you? What do you like doing? What do you lose time doing? What are you known for? And then delegate higher or build a process to the rest. Playing to your strengths is important for two main reasons. You get further faster in what you're doing because you're good at it. And secondly, if you spend time doing things that are not in your area of strength, you waste time there because you're not as good, but you also wear yourself out and tire yourself out when you get to the things that you're good at. So, it's almost like a double compounded negative, and you're stacking it against yourself.

Zones

The green zone is positive, and the red zone is negative. If you're in the green zone, you are energetic, enthusiastic, forward-thinking, feel like you're on your game, have good ideas, and contribute well. Conversely, if you're in the red zone, you're downtrodden, you're anxious, and you're working out of a place of fear. And you're spending your time ruminating about the past and what went wrong there or worrying about the future and what might go wrong there. If you think about where you're spending your time and your mental time and energy, in the purest sense, it doesn't make any sense to have red light thoughts in the red zone. You're wasting your time. You are wasting your time and mental energy spending it there. So, if you go into your day and your week and into whatever process you have with this lens on, you'll be able to make decisions that support that. So, if you have that visual in mind, clear the decks, mechanism, and highway. So, you can go fast, stay focused, and have greenlighted thoughts, and you don't have to start and stop. And that's going to help you keep you in that good mental space.

Twelve Arrows

In his book essentialism, Greg McAllen talks about how many things you are putting your energy to? It’s about a great graph and a circle. And in one version of the circle, 12 arrows is going out of it. You can think of 12 arrows pointing out of the circle, and they go a short distance because the arrows represent energy, and the circle is you. And if you're giving your energy to 12 different things. And you can only get so far. But if you have that same circle and only have one arrow, it goes further. And you're able to make more progress when you - the circle, are giving your energy to one thing. For instance, when people are asked what is important, they come up with seven a dozen things. But when asked why these things are important? It gets much fewer. And it would feel better for you to have one or punch to go after every single day or week. And though some people would say they need to do everything, in the end, they will realize that this feels so much better.

Managing vs Mastering Time

Managing time is what most people are doing. They're trying to manage their calendar. They're trying to manage blocks of time, their hours, their schedule, which does have its place. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn't do that, but there is another level, which is mastering your time. It is where you practice the mental mindset pieces. It comes with taking control of your day, week and where to spend your time. And there are sacrifices in that. It's difficult, but if you allow yourself to control, unexpected things will pop up in your life, and you react to them. You will still know where your priorities lie. They might have to shift but will be calm about it, and you are the master of your time. It's not you being controlled or waiting for something to happen and having to react to it, you are calm, and you're in control, even if something unexpected comes up. This is what we meant by going from managing your time. And this frantic, chaotic kind of pace to mastering your time where you know what you need to do, and you build your day and structure your priorities around that.

Setting priorities

Set your top priority for the day. If you don't know what your highest priorities are, then you're going to get pulled in a million different directions because you've got no Northstar. So you should be able to have that and write it down or say it to yourself. There are time boxing activities, set a timer and take a break because your brain can focus on something very well for about 15 minutes, and then it usually needs a break. And work with your body clock on things like that. However, the most difficult part is starting. So, if you're having trouble just starting on something, employ mini habits. For example, if you want to read more or consume more information by reading more, you can't sit down and just read a book you have no time. Commit yourself to read one page a day. That is your mini habit. More often than not, you will read more than one page a day. It's just getting started. But even if you only read one page a day, you can check that off and say I have accomplished my mini-goal, and I have accomplished my target for that day. And then the last one is pretty basic, but it does work. Schedule time on your calendar. And if what is next is a time block for a certain project or making a certain call to a family member, then that's what you have next. You build it into your schedule and then protect and honor that time.

Spotlight Effect

If you aren't taking care of yourself and aren't accomplishing your goals, what type of person and space will you be in when you're interacting with others. And so, just keep that in mind. A lot of people feel guilty because they feel selfish. But you're serving the people around you better by taking care of yourself and making sure that you're in a good spot physically, and mentally and emotionally going into your days and weeks. However, when somebody else honors their time blocks, we don't think anything of it. We don't judge them for being selfish or anything like that. But when it's on us, we assume that everybody else is thinking that about us, even though it's most likely not true. And that causes us to change to try to make people happy, even though there wasn't a problem there in the first place. So, it's very important to get that mindset shift in our brain, which doesn't happen overnight. It’s a process.

Compounding your habits

Invest in yourself and think about the power of compounding. Build these habits up now. Where will you be in six months in a year from now and 18 months in five years from now? If you keep doing what you're doing today, and you're still struggling and still in the same spot with it five years from now, you know, you can invest that time, or you can waste that time. So yes, it's not going to happen overnight. But it's well worth it, and you've got to come to that conclusion and decision yourself. But ask yourself, “Where do I want to be? Who do I want to be, and what do I want to be about in one your time two years, three years out?” Most people are familiar with that in terms of financing, your 401k and which is, you know, somewhat boring to people. But look at a compounding calendar, and someone in their 20s, who invest a couple 100 or even 100 a month when they retire, will be a millionaire. So, think about that. That's the power of compounding your habits today will take you far in even a few years from now. So, invest in yourself, and tell yourself that small wins add up faster than you think. So find your small wins today.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

013: Less But Better…and Easier

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Many people take this time of year to reflect over the past year, evaluate how they did, and make new goals for the new year. While there are certainly many things that I could look at in regards to this annual routine, the thought that comes to mind right now is the sheer amount of things that clamor for our attention.

If you’re like me, you have way too many things pulling for your time and attention. From family, to work, to church, to hobbies, to friendships and social engagements - there is no way we can do everything for everyone. Also, if you’re like me, you have a difficult time saying “no” to any of these requests - and, let’s be honest, not all requests are actually direct; some of them are requests that we assume because of some status quo.

Today, I want to bring a short episode to reflect on this and recommend two books and a podcast to help you with this very dilemma.

The Trivial Many

So many things scream for our attention. Our boss demands more tasks to be done. Our family demands our attention. Our calendar is crammed with activities. Our phones and computers ping us with notifications of things we either need to do or need to know. But, no matter how urgent they appear, most things in life don’t matter as much as they seem.

Many of these things may be good. Many of these things may even need to be done. But you need to ask yourself a couple questions:

Do “I” need to be the one to do it?
Does it need to be done now?
What’s the worst thing that could happen if it doesn’t get done?

The Vital Few

So when we realize that most of the things trying to grab our attention are more trivial and unimportant, then we start to realize that there are only a few things that are truly vital. The thing that makes this even more difficult is that these vital things are usually quiet.

They’re not the things yelling for our attention.

They’re the still, small voice in the background getting ignored by the things that are louder.

These vital things can be ignored for a while with no seemingly negative impact.

That is, until it suddenly becomes urgent.

That’s what happens when someone ignores their health until they find themselves in the emergency room.

That’s what happens when someone finds that they are getting served divorce papers from someone they don’t really know or care about anymore.

The vital few things in our life need to be identified and then prioritized intentionally.

Elimination Round

This means that we need to start eliminating things from our lives. No, I’m not suggesting that you start cutting everything immediately or completely. You didn’t get overwhelmed overnight, but you have trained your brain over the years that overwhelm and crazy are normal - so you might not be able to handle such a drastic change.

But you should start by cutting a couple easier things from your life and schedule.

Also, you need to prioritize the things you identified as vital for you. This means that you need to make sure that these things are scheduled and that nothing takes their place. If a conflict comes up, take the time to really assess if the new task or activity is vital and more important than what you already had scheduled. It may surprise you that what you already scheduled is the most important thing and you need to say “no” to the new request.

Of course, this is easy to say, but difficult to actually do.

At least, when you are starting out.

As you consistently prioritize your most important things - your most important relationships, responsibilities, activities, etc. - it’ll be easier to keep those at the top.

What if it could be easy?

Now, you may get to the point where you eliminate virtually everything that is trivial and only do the things that are important - but you still struggle with balancing everything.

First of all - realize that there is no such thing as a true balance in life. Life is constantly counterbalancing from one thing to the next.

Secondly, this is where you can ask yourself the question:

“What if it could be easy?”

This may seem like a silly question. You may be thinking: “If I knew how it could be easy, I would be doing it.”

I think the same thing. But the problem is that while our brains look for the easiest path, sometimes (many times) the “easiest” path is simply the path that we have taken most often.

There have been many times, especially before the development of GPS, that I would drive a certain way because it was familiar. But then the GPS would show me that another route would actually save me 5-10 minutes. I personally still struggle and have the tendency to follow the route in my brain rather than the GPS. Why? Because the GPS’s way is new. It’s untested. It’s unfamiliar. Therefore, it seems to be the more difficult way.

But I know that if I follow the GPS a few times, my brain will get used to the new way and then I get to start saving 5-10 minutes every time. If it’s something I do every day, that’s an hour or two each week.

012: How to Better Manage Your Activities

Joshua Rivers — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Not everyone works with a vision. A lot of people do things just because it is customary. However, working with a vision in mind would help one know where they are exactly headed. It would also drive people to take action. And knowing how to make your time productive will eventually lead to better results.

Patricia Stepler works with business owners and entrepreneurs to increase their revenue and save more time by taking inspired action instead of doing things without a goal. She joins the podcast to talk about how one could achieve results, specifically in learning to delegate important things to accomplish your goal.

Activity Management

We can't manage time, but we can figure out how to manage our activities. If you can group activities, set a certain amount of time, and then keep that in a block schedule. Because if you can set up a routine, it becomes a habit that you do them. You can start by doing the thing you don't want to do first. Because once you get out of the way, then you feel like a weight has been lifted. And it's also good to have times of the day where you don't take any interruptions because one of the worst things we have are these things that disrupt our thinking. Once you have a disruption like that, it can take 15 to 25 minutes to get back to where you were. And you end up wasting time during your day. So gripping activities is a great way to avoid that.

Block Schedule

There are a lot of techniques on block schedules. One could be blocking an hour of your time for a call with a client, a two for an email response, etc. However, as an entrepreneur, this might be difficult, and you'll end up wasting time instead of going back and forth. Others start by blocking out their morning to do the things that they need to do. Then set the afternoon to meet with other people. But you have to understand that this is also a mindset switch. Because everything you set yourself becomes your habits, it also means you have to do it regularly. You can create a list of activities you have to do and check them off through the day. Try also to check how is it working for you. If not, try to look for other ways to make it work. Like, organizing yourself or developing a system and avoiding things that will make you unproductive.

Whiteboard Technique

Writing things on a piece of paper can be good if you don't lose them! So, another technique is jotting your task on a whiteboard. If you have a few minutes to spare in your day, you can look at your whiteboard. Or even find a task that maybe you can do in 15 or 20 minutes and get that wiped out. It's a good resource to remind you of things that need to be done at a time, which isn't a block time. Because what happens in trying to remember the things you have to do – will make you forget about it even more. So, it's another good technique to become more efficient with your time.

Unexpected Things

Some days, something's going to happen, and it will interrupt your perfect schedule. One morning, you might find you have an errand to run. It was not a choice, so it interrupted your schedule. But as soon as you got back into your schedule, you kind of played little catch-up. And you have to allow yourself that! We don't live on this perfect day. So get back on task as quickly as you can.

And if you run out of time, generally look at the most important thing you need to do. Ask yourself, "What's the most important thing for me to do today that's going to make the biggest impact on my business?". And then start with that. And then if you can get some other things in great. Maybe you can work a little faster, or keep your phone calls shorter or something to make up for that time. But we also need to forgive ourselves for the things that happen along the day – the unexpected things.

Keep it short

When you're evaluating your day, and if you go an entire week and never get a day, you feel like you deserve the 10. Again, you need to evaluate and not beat yourself up about it. And if you start to evaluate your activities, you're going to end up in a week/s, or month/s, seeing that you've accomplished so much more than you would have. Also, you can ask yourself, "What goal can I set that's more short term, but still, it's going to push me and stretch me?" Because the shorter you can make those goals, like stepping stones on your path to some great big goal, the better off you are. It will help you to stay focused on something for 90 days rather than for an entire year.

Habits

We are programmed, and our minds are habitual. 95% of your day is habitual. So, if you take those goals, and then you break that down to like weeks. You can find one thing this week that you can start working on. And then the next week, take one more thing. And build it like that. It also becomes a lot less frustrating rather than trying to go in and change something huge right away. And if you break it down, instead of trying to, take great big bites. You can improve week by week. And then see at the end of 90 days or 12-week period where you've gone. And reward yourself for the advancements you have made. Start to look at it that way instead of beating yourselves up, for that doesn't do you any good.

Vision

Is there a way you can eliminate those interruptions? If you're worried about the phone ringing, turn your phone off or put your phone in another room so you don't get that disruption. And if it's something you need to concentrate on, try to eliminate that. Sometimes it's really hard but try to focus on what you're doing. If you can learn to be focused, you can work for eight hours a day just being completely focused. Sometimes people think they can multitask, but not really. You're not concentrating on anything. So, get the distraction away from you, so you don't have that distraction.

And always go back to your vision. Because when you have a big vision, and you're excited about where you're headed and what you're going to do, then that will start to drive you. And a lot of people don't have that vision. And that goal of where they want to go. And so, they don't have the goal or idea where they're headed. And so, having that big goal helps you to get more focused and organized.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

011: How Anxiety and Joy Affect Your Productivity

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 01:00:00 -0600

People have varying definitions of joy. Some tend to look for material things to guarantee such joy and associate it with happiness. While only a few go beyond these external things to find the true meaning of joy. However, with the society that people live in – people succumb more to superficial things in defining joy and bridge such ideas to happiness. But the real question is, how do we seek joy in this world fully dictated with material things in defining life's beauty?

Erin Mac joins the podcast to talk about joy. Specifically, how you could recognize your experience and learn to strategize it to a positive experience regardless of outside influences. As someone who's built her company 20 years ago, Erin shares more how money can't provide the real meaning of joy, and it won’t help if you only rely on external things. In this episode, she shares how one can start finding oneself and get on that journey.

Impenetrable Joy

Impenetrable joy is the experience that you no longer have to be at the mercy of or beholden to people or circumstances to dictate as to whether you're having a good day or a bad day, or for that matter, a good life or a bad life. You're no longer on the roller coaster ride of emotions, like when someone says something or something happens, and all of a sudden, our mood switches, and we start going south. When you recognize that you are responsible for your experiences and learn how to change them into the experiences you want, then create a penetrable joy, which is internal. It's not based on something that's going on externally.

It's recognizing that some things are going on behind the scenes that we are often unaware of, and when we can get awareness of them, we can begin to unpack what's going on. Not so much on why it happened, what were the circumstances or the things that led to the experience, but more just in the proactive state of how can I change that experience?

Joy vs Happiness

The difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is based on external things. It's a brand-new car, but it's short-lived and is based on an external thing. Joy is an internal experience that you can create throughout each day. However, the idea of happiness that we've been taught in our society and many other societies is based on external things. But the real joy is the kind of joy available now, regardless of what's going on out here. The internal experiences, the one that's meaningful and has a purpose. And that's what we're after. But people don't know it because we don't make these distinctions.

Sufficiency and Excess

We have this idea of sufficiency and excess. It's like, what is going to be enough for me? Is it enough to have a nice home, to have shelter, to have access to food and water? Is it enough to have those things to have deep, meaningful relationships with people and purpose and meaning in your life? Or do I need to subscribe to what society would have you believe?

If that's the case, why are multimillionaires or billionaire clients also miserable despite having all the money? It's because of that happiness thing they were pursuing. Because it's the journey inside that has meaning and purpose. It's not the exterior nor the external things.

Journey of Growth

People are essentially here for growth. As humans like to evolve as human beings. And when we can align with that idea, then we find purpose and meaning in our life. Hence, the way to begin the growth journey is to recognize that you do not have purpose and meaning. And sometimes, that comes in the form of a crisis. Like recognizing that if you keep doing the same things repeatedly, you will have the same result.

Now, it's that idea that you want to do something different. But if you don't insert or apply new information, you will continue to do the same things repeatedly. It's not reconciliation – but a recognition of that story and how it's playing out in your life. When you start to recognize the pieces that are showing up in your life and heal some of those emotional scars, you can begin to retrain your brain and rewire it in ways that make more sense for the future that you're trying to create.

Patterns of Behavior

You start to see these trigger things that are happening in your life. It's not anxiety, or stress, or overwhelm or worry. They don't happen in a container. It's because of something that is triggering something that you are either unaware of or latent in you. And when you have recognition around it, take it as an opportunity to switch that to shift right there. Try to recognize it right before it happens. Take a deep breath, take at the moment, where's it living in your body? What could you possibly do differently? And it's just those little things, but you have to become that scientist or detective to see what's going on. Otherwise, the patterns of behaviour will keep going.

Five Pieces

It is not easy to assess oneself, especially when you're someone not used to doing that. But there are some things one can do. First is initial awareness, like, ''I don't talk about the crisis", or, "I just, I don't want to be like this". Second is emotional awareness, like, "how do I start to recognize when I'm in reaction to people and circumstances". The third piece is getting intentional about what you would like to create to avoid getting stuck. The fourth piece is strategy, like rewiring the brain to habitual things that you love to do and thinking about the action you can take. And the last piece is practice. Because practising these things for years, these habits, thoughts, and actions can help you go consistently and get the good kind of results.

Baby Steps

There are incremental steps that you can do that are easy. It's when you begin to put things in large categories, and they become overwhelming. So, take it slow! If you recognize that you are in a state very often that doesn't feel good, like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, worry, depression, sadness, etc. Begin to seek alternative solutions to that experience.

However, it would help if you were intentional about what you want to achieve, as the cessation of anxiety or stress. Essentially, there's somebody there for you out in the world that's talking about these things that can help you. You can also start to read books, watch videos, and go to seminars. All of those things are growing in the right direction. And there's so much free content out there. Seek until you find one and make it a part of your life, not just today.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

010: Pushing Past Barriers to Reach Your Potential

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Eddie Maalouf is an entrepreneur and marketer at brilliantmarketers.com

Eddie’s Personal Story

In college, Eddie would skip classes and go out start his own businesses on the side. He always had the idea of starting his own business. Once he graduated college, he worked for a fitness company and became the number one salesman. But once he realized he had reached the top spot, he decided to quit his job and work for his father for a flat rate plus 20% of any revenue increases in his father’s business. During that time, Eddie realized like the wonders that marketing actually does for a business. Since then he expanded by starting a team and building an agency.

How To Push Past Barriers and Limits

Eddie sees three challenges that are common to most businesses. The first challenge is when people are making money, and they're often self employed, and they don't want to hire. They want to see how much they can make without having to hire someone. But then there comes a point where you need to hire someone.

In some cases, there are people that are ineffective in their company, that aren't doing the job. When you fire them, you notice that your efficiency as a company still stays the same.

Eddie says, “I'd rather own half of a watermelon than an entire grape.” This is why mindset is so important when looking at a business. In order to get to that kind of watermelon point, you have to build the team around you to take care of other things.

The second challenge is marketing. Eddie says the biggest growth in every business that he has seen comes from a really good marketing campaign. So that is usually the bottleneck. And when that campaign works well, it often leads back to the first challenge with hiring.

The third challenge is that owners need to invest in themselves and their own mindset and personal development. For example, if all someone’s friends make $10,000 a month and they make 20,000 a month they think they're a success. But you know, if you actually said that at the wrong table at a restaurant, you realize all those people are making a million dollars a month. All of a sudden, that whole mindset that you had your whole life just kind of comes crashing down.

How To Start Hiring People

The first step is recognizing where you need employees. When a business owner hires someone to do one or two jobs that take the most time out of your day, you'd be surprised within a month, they probably are doing that job better than the owner, because that is that they do that from nine to five every single day.

Once Eddie realized this, he became more comfortable hiring and like losing money for a month, knowing that next month, this person on my team is going to be able to generate that revenue back and make even more revenue in the future.

Eddie says that it is also important to know that not everyone is going to have the same vision as the owner. And they're not going to understand what metrics are important and what standards the business owner has. That’s why it is important to use KPI’s, or key performance indicators, on paper for each position.

I learned a lot from this interview and I wanted to mention that Eddie’s course is available at brilliantmarketers.com. This program primarily teaches business owners how to learn online advertising. I recommend checking it out.

009: How to Automate Your Life and Work

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 01:00:00 -0600

With the constant demand of time in a fast-paced world, automation took the stage of varied industries. From marketing, management, support, and more, human intervention was less needed, and technology became essential. Hence, businesses delve more into implementing automation, especially when industries shift to virtual set-ups.

Samantha Pointer Foxx of Samantha Pointer Enterprises helps businesses automate their marketing and sales systems. Her whirlwind journey began as a professional organizer in 1997. After ten years, she started to help clients organize their digital files and go paperless. From there, she went to marketing and started a web business design after college. Years later, she joined Chris Davis’ automation program. Now, she joins the podcast to talk about automation. Specifically, mistakes people make when they start getting into the automation process and how they should overcome them.

Beginner’s Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes is that people immediately jump into the technology tool itself without any strategy. In the end, they feel disgruntled. It would have been a great tool if you had started with a strategy on how you need to use it and knowing your end goal. It is like how easier it is to see problems beforehand when you’re doing it on paper first or mapping it out first. However, since many business owners aren’t tech-savvy, they get easily overwhelmed with the options. It’s like spending money without using it for your advantage and end up becoming a collector of all this software.

Document the Process

Keeping everything in your head on how to do things will keep it trapped in there. It’s easy to blow things up if it becomes complicated. But if you write it down, you can streamline a lot of things. Remember, you can’t scale your business if you’re the only one who knows what’s going on in your business. Document your process! It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can write or record and let someone else transcribe it into a document. It will help you pivot things up when need be.

Getting Started

Start at the place closest to the money. For example, if it is a process that you generate money and you are doing it manually, like a coach manually booking people. It can be a start to document the steps like what do you send out to the people? What information do you need? And find a tool that will automate that. Another place that’s easy to automate is social media. There are a plethora of social media dashboards you can use to start to automate that process. Like Facebook, you can start automating your posting with native Facebook and schedule stuff ahead of time. If you want to automate your content to drive awareness to you quickly, that would be a quick thing you could do to get started.

Things People Automate

People want to save time, but some apps don't allow the usage of third-party tools, for you can be penalized for that. However, you can take advantage of a lot of stuff right from your phone and schedule or create content in advance. Also, most booking software has integrations with email management software like MailChimp or Active Campaign. You can have it set where it sends information once something is booked and send out these sets of emails. These are the types of things people can automate.

Identify your Needs

One major thing is to sit down and think about your goal for your business. What area is the most important for you to automate right now to put you on the path to reaching that goal? Once you do that and have the vision and the goal, that's where the strategy starts. Don't look at every other business out there. Because what works for one business may not necessarily work for yours, or you may not even need that. And don't get overwhelmed with all the technology out there. Because, again, something has been invented every second. So, you're never going to be on top of that. Just think about what your business needs and what you need to get accomplished right now. Ask yourself, how can I save myself time? How can I save my employees? How can we be more efficient in this area? And what are the tools we need to get that done?

No More Spinning Wheels

It uses conditional logic, and you can do that through some of the email platforms. And a lot that could be helpful for that has an FAQ on your website or canned responses. Suppose you're getting the same type of question all the time, having those canned responses set up and using a text expander. So, you don’t have to do things over and over again. That's why it's so important to document your processes and the questions you get, and your answer to them. Then, link it to any assets you might have out there, like videos or podcasts that go into depth and answers you can send to people. That's where automation can help and save you time.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

008: Learning to Manage Your Stress From an Army Veteran

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Welcome to Success Road Podcast. Today’s episode features Brent Magnussen. Brent is an avid practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, an accomplished cook, a speaker, and the author of the book Roger Up: The Mission Ready Blueprint to Crush the Morning, Own the Day, and Be the Best Version of You.

Brent is also one of the board members of the Resilient Warrior Foundation which serves United States veterans, and first responders who suffer from post-traumatic stress. This organization provides scholarships to study the art of Brazilian jiu jitsu in the Academy of their choice, anywhere in the United States. Brent is a veteran and also an avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Benefits of Brazillian Jiu-jitsu

When someone is a member of the military, you are constantly in high stress situations. From the first day an individual arrives at basic training, people are screaming at you at four in the morning to get up and do a bunch of pushups. And they're spraying you with hoses and whatever else. Not to mention the verbal assault you take for a couple of months. As a result, individuals learn very quickly how to deal with stress. Once you’ve been in the military for an extended period of time, you get used to it. Then, when you leave the military, you're no longer in a constant state of stress. Many people have trouble coping with the difference in lifestyles.

What Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu does is it provides you the opportunity to use stress in a safe environment. This allows the veteran to relearn how to manage stress. When you go through hard situations, you learn how to manage them. This approach transfers over into your work life, into your relationships, and into everything you do. You learn how to become a better person, and you get your confidence back.

A Real Life Example

Brent mentioned his daughter is nine years old. And when she gets older, she's very likely going to be a smaller person as her Mom is five foot tall. I don't think Emma's going to be much over five foot, four or five foot five, 105 pounds. And God forbid, someone, some guy tries to attack her or hurt her.

Since she has been trained in jiu-jitsu, she's going to know exactly what to do. When she's on her back and having to deal with an aggressive person, she's going to know what to do. When a bully confronts her, she's going to know how to use her words first, because she's going to have that extreme confidence that if it does get physical, it doesn't matter if.

Establishing A Morning Routine

Brent came up with the Zero Five Thirty Blueprint. First, he gets up at 5:30. He says the key is getting up at the same time every morning. He says to never use the snooze button. The first thing he does is smile. Then he does a hundred pushups. He smiles because it tricks his body and gives him the right mindset. Then he gets up and makes the bed. Then he drinks sixteen ounces of room temperature water. Next he does some quick diaphragm breathing and goes for a walk. And after his walk, he takes a cold shower.

In the rest of the podcast, Brent shares more information about Brazillian jiu-jitsu, morning routines, the benefits of water, and more. I encourage you to listen to the entire podcast. Special thanks to Brent for being on Success Road.

007: How to Effectively Manage Your Energy

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 01:00:00 -0600

People find it very difficult to manage their energy. Especially if the energy comes from considering one’s food intake, hydration, exercise, sleep, and etc. It almost feels as if the difficulty comes not with the lack of focus or time. But the lack of habit to condition ourselves into doing so. Looking into these areas would actually lead to a good energy flow, as well as making us more productive in the process.

Chelsea Stegman has an undergrad degree at Miami University of Ohio. Got her dietetic internship in Louisiana, and worked with the worst diabetes, and kidney dialysis. Afterward, she became a dietitian, moved to Cincinnati, and worked in a health club for three years. Now, she’s in downtown Chicago, worked in another health club, finished her master's, and started her own virtual business. She now joins the podcast to talk about energy management. Specifically, about managing nutrition, how to decrease burnout, increase energy, productivity, and performance.

Managing your nutrition

Managing nutrition often depends on the person but the most realistic way for you to start, with priorities in general, is finding that needle mover that moves all these other habits. Health-wise, it's focusing on exercise, and a lot of nutrition habits, water intake, and eating frequency. But a big priority with most people that leads to all these other things is managing blood sugar throughout the day and looking at macronutrients’ meal timing. And that can also help with productivity and reducing brain fog throughout the day.

The Blood Sugar and Diet

You don't have to look at blood sugar, or blood values consistently. It's really what makes up your meals. Starting off the day with adequate protein, non-starchy vegetables, a complex carbohydrate, healthy fat, or overall a well-balanced meal. Also, looking into the components of each meal throughout your day, and ensuring that you are eating or snacking to just keep that blood sugar stable. So, you don’t ride the blood sugar roller coaster. And symptomatically we can feel it, we feel the cravings, we feel the brain fog, the energy dips, and rises and everything that comes with it. Hence, what people should look at is what they are eating and noticing that link between a lot of those symptoms. Also, we kind of life in a world of extremes, there are some components that do help with brain health, people with actual disorders, such as epilepsy. It can be beneficial for the general population. Not advised for that, just making more of a well-rounded approach. Because carbs can support brain health, muscle development, and so many other things. So just making sure we have all those components to keep it stable, and not just go into the extreme forms of dieting. All is right.

Cortisol and Energy

It is your stress hormone, it takes a diurnal rhythm, that spikes in the morning then slowly taper off throughout the day. And has an inverse relationship to melatonin. For instance, at night, when cortisol is supposed to be low, melatonin is supposed to be high. But some people could have that imbalance if their cortisol is high. A lot of people with productivity energy levels throughout the day performance, like at work or at the gym, are looking more into those cortisol levels and how they're managed. Also, it has a very close relationship with blood sugar too. Managing blood sugar can help manage that cortisol throughout the day. If blood sugar is super low, your cortisol spikes and vice versa. Also, you can tell symptomatically if you're tired and wired throughout the day. Your brains keep on going but you're physically tired. If you're relying on coffee throughout the day, there's a lot of factors with that. But cortisol or stress hormone is what you should look at. When you're stressed and have no sleep, it’s a stressor on the body too. You power through things until you can't anymore until you feel the intense brain fog until super low energy throughout the day, and you kind of try and look into what's wrong with you. And it all makes sense, just looking into your history, or it was just looking more into the science that your cortisol is low.

Hydration

Hydration delivers all the nutrients to all your cells, all your organs. It helps with that in a natural way. But yes, it's not as quick. It's not as noticeable at first, but after a while, once we get that hydration up, you can feel it definitely. People talk about how they struggle to drink enough water. And some experienced a couple of heat exhaustion. If we start forcing ourselves to drink more water and really do that. We eventually got into a habit. Others drink eight glasses of water a day. But still, a lot of people struggle to be able to drink the water that they need. And they drink very little. So, how can they be able to? Well, first of all, how much water and how can they be able to implement drinking water more into their day? The general recommendation would be half your body weight in ounces, which sounds like a lot for people just starting out. But again, baby steps. Keep a water bottle with you that has the ounces. Start off with maybe one bottle and then go to two, and just gradually increase. After a while, most people crave more, they get thirsty, or they want it more. It just takes a certain amount of time to get to that point.

Balancing with Supplements

When it comes to supplements, it's quality over quantity. A good quality multivitamin, covering those bases. B vitamins can help with energy and other things as well. Omega threes and fish oil help with brain health. And Vitamin D is super low with a lot of people so a baseline dose through a multivitamin or heightened dose if it is pretty low. Magnesium is also deficient in most people, especially in their diet. Usually, you can get it through dark green leafy vegetables, and then greens, but usually depleted if you have a lot of caffeine and alcohol intake. And if you're very active or very stressed, you do need more. At night, just taking a good quality dose, and that can kind of help you relax at night, it's called the relaxation mineral. And these are the general ones and certain protein powders, though not necessary, but good for convenience if you feel like you can't prepare the adequate protein that you need. Your multivitamin should have B vitamins and that would not be beneficial at night. It'll keep you up for those help with energy and fish oil too. Vitamin D can be taken at different times. At night, generally a probiotic, magnesium and anything else that you would need for sleep.

Recover, Rest, or Heal

If you're active, stressed, doing a lot in general, or in higher output in life, then you need to recover to bounce back stronger. With nutrition, magnesium definitely helps with that recovery. Muscle recovery or relaxation of your whole body in general can help with that. You can build back up stronger. Another thing, vitamin C can help with immunity and so many other things that most of us probably know. But also, with adrenal health, cortisol production, and recovery. Zinc can also help with muscle recovery. And habits, lifestyle factors to the main thing we want with the word recovery is activating that parasympathetic nervous system. But winding down a little bit more, a simple deep breathing can also help with that. It could be a five-minute meditation, a 20-minute yoga class, and anti-inflammatory eating in general. Eating to reduce inflammation and antioxidants can help too. Mediterranean bass eating can help with inflammation. A lot of fish in general can really help. And yes, there's a lot to recover but super important.

The Needle Mover

In an ancient Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now”. It means that the best time to start with nutrition is when you're young and be able to get this in balance. But for some, that's not necessarily possible at this point. So, the next best time is to start now before we start to make things worse, or we get older and it becomes harder to overcome. People should look at the symptoms first like blood sugar swings, cortisol levels off, and notice what's going on with one’s baseline habits. “Am I drinking adequate water throughout the day? Am I consistent with my meals throughout the day? Do I have the basic multivitamin? Am I taking that consistently? What do my workout routines look like if you're training for something, or if you want more of a well-rounded, like walking strength, recovery-based kind of routine? Simply looking at all those habits related to the symptoms, and seeing honestly, what is a needle mover, the easiest way to start?

Links/Resources/Tools section:

006: Figuring Out What Productivity Hacks Work for YOU

Joshua Rivers — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 01:00:00 -0600

As everything comes online, sometimes we could not eradicate the overwhelming pressure. We constantly work and speed things up. And we often forget to take a short pause or break. Then we either forget things altogether or leave things in a mess. Hence, burning out ourselves too in the process.

Jimmy Claire is a motivational speaker and an autism advocate. He joins the podcast to talk about different time management tools and tips. Specifically, the tools he used to help improve his work-life balance.

Block Scheduling

One of the biggest things that helps a lot is block scheduling. And not like block scheduling and Google Calendar. It’s a different tool called Time Tune for Android. It helps you to block your time. It's useful because it helps you stay on track of each task on a day without overwhelming your calendar. It helps you to stay away from burnout, and information overload. Because sometimes too much information could shut you down. But with Time Tune, it can tell you that there's two hours’ time remaining, and you can find two hours of time that you didn't even know that you had.

Stack Browser

What process are the most unfriendly tools to use and keep your most important websites at hand possible? Yes, you can have bookmarks, but then you can also have search functionality. Eventually, a bookmark bar is also going to fill up or you start scrolling down and say, “Now where do I put this website?” It's like a shell kind of game where that person puts the ball underneath it and mixes it all around and everything. So, there is this tool called things browser stack or stack browser. It lets you bookmark all the important web pages that you use on a daily basis. It keeps them all in one spot, and it syncs across your devices, from Windows and Linux and an Apple.

An All-in-One Tool

The notion is basically an all-in-one app that can do pretty much everything. You can store files, has databases like spreadsheets, and it condenses everything in just one box. So even if the text is long, it just makes the box bigger. And it doesn't overlap with another box or another row or column. It’s literally the best tool.

Browser Extension

One of the other tools that you will find helpful is called station. It is a web browser extension and helps you find all the files that you need in different places that you put them in. And if you might say, “Okay, well, why can’t I just use my browsing history?” Yes, you can but if you want to have everything just a click away - you can use Station. It used to be an all-in-one app, but their goal was not to become a web browser, it was to help people find stuff. So, they kind of rebranded their tool and made it into a web extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It's helpful because sometimes there are so many places where we store stuff, and we can't find it all nor do we really want to go to that service area, a lot of times.

Blocking out Distractions

One of the things you can use is called a Dragon. It's a Pomodoro timer app, it's free, and it syncs with your to-do list. If you are a person who likes everything digitally and has it on all your devices wherever you go and need them. Like if you forgot to upload up the night before on your computer, then you should be able to go on your phone, get it from the web browser, like the cloud storage. And instead of logging into every system.

Another tool that you can use for blocking out distractions is this tool called freedom. There are some nights where you still want to continue working because sometimes you have so many great ideas in your head. And you’re always just trying to fire off every single idea. When you are using freedom and when it kicks in at five o'clock, it blocks you from all your work. Their logo is a big butterfly and has a green background. And when it pops up, it’s like everything is about to be fried! But it is useful because it stops you from overworking.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

005: Everything You Know About Time Management is Wrong

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 01:00:00 -0600

There can be two types of people, the seed planter or the fireman. The firemen are those that wait until there's a problem and go to put out the fire. The seed planters are those that plant the seed in preparation before there's a problem. The huge difference between the two lies on how they view and manage their time. With emphasis on the significance factor more than urgency and importance.

Rory Vaden is a graduate from the University of Denver. He is the co-founder of southwestern consulting. He is a top performing conspiracy speaker from Toastmasters World Championship several years ago. He's the best-selling author of two different books. And he also shares a birthday with Kevin Spacey and Sandra Bullock. Above all, a fantastic husband. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book called Procrastinate on Purpose. Specifically, about five permissions to multiply your time.

Great Service

John de Julius, who is an author and speaker, has a book called What's the Secret. In this book, he talks about great service. It is about providing something that is so hyper specific to one person. It's not giving out a rose to everybody who walks in your store, but it's doing something hyper specific to that person. And this was one of the best examples of it, where you're listening to the podcast, and then it occurs to you, and then you actually do it.

Getting out of Debt

Being out of debt is a huge multiplier, and people don't realize how impactful it is. When you are debt free, it allows you to do what you want to do, and not as much what you have to do when you're in debt. For once you're out of debt, have a three-to-six-month emergency fund, and pay your house off, your whole life changes. Getting debt free is much more than freeing yourself from financial worry. It frees you to do whatever it is that brings you passion in life. And that's a huge moment. People massively underestimate the impact of doing that. Being debt free is one of the most important and significant transformations that anybody can make.

Types of Procrastination

The book, Take the Stairs, was all about overcoming procrastination, improving self-discipline, and helping people do the things they know they should be doing, even when they don't feel like doing them. In the book, we talked about three different types of procrastination. First is classic procrastination, which is consciously delaying what you know you should be doing. And that's what we all think of when we hear the word. Second, creative avoidance, which is basically creating stuff for yourself to do. So, you can avoid doing the thing you really need to do, but you don't feel like doing. And third, priority dilution is different from the first two because it has nothing to do with being lazy, apathetic or disengaged, it actually affects the chronic overachievers, what happens though is that as you become more successful, you have more and more things coming to you for attention, more people to take care of more responsibilities, more moving pieces of your business. And your priorities naturally start to dilute.

Time Management is Emotional

Everything that you read in time management isn't just logical, it's emotional. And how we choose to spend our time has much to do with feelings of guilt, and anxiety and worry and stress and the desire to feel important and the desire to feel successful. And the desire to feel included as it does with anything. And yet nobody ever talks about the emotional side of productivity and time management. And so, we realized that that is a big element. And that's different in the world today. And that's where the subtitle “Five Permissions to Multiply Your Time” really comes from.

Time Management Thinking

In the late 80s, a new era entered called time management thinking. It is two-dimensional thinking about prioritizing your time. In the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen Covey. He introduced a time management matrix and gave a two-dimensional way to evaluate tasks. The y and x axes. The y axis was important, and the x axis was urgent. Basically, he gave us a system for scoring and weighting various tasks. And for the last 25 years, that has been the pervasive mode of thinking as it relates to productivity. And efficiency and priority are all good and relevant skills. But there's a limitation to both of these areas of thinking. The limitation to efficient thinking is that you can only move so fast, and there's always going to be more to do than you can ever get to. That's perfectly evidenced by the fact that we all carry around small computers in our pockets. And yet we never seem to be caught up. We always fall behind. And then the limitation with prioritizing, there's nothing about prioritizing that creates more time. All prioritizing does is take item number seven on your to do list and bump it up to number one. And it's valuable to learn how to focus first on what matters most. But that doesn't create more time. Prioritizing is more like borrowing time from one area of your life to focus on another and that's a game changer.

Z-axis

Significance becomes the z axis. It creates three-dimensional thinking and the significance cube. Its importance is how much something matters, how soon something matters, and how long something matters. And it changes everything, because it forces us to get outside of the paradigm of only thinking about today. Most of us are inappropriately overweighting the urgency calculation. We are frantically checking email all day long and we are always falling victim to the latest and loudest. And we're poured, we're pulled away from long term strategic things, because we're putting out short term fires. While multipliers don't do that, as much they make, they make a heavier weight on the significance calculation. And so that brings you to multiplying your time. If era one was about managing your time, by doing things efficiently, and era two was prioritizing your time by focusing first on what matters most, then era three is about multiplying your time. And the way that you multiply your time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. That is what the significance calculation is and it changes everything.

The Focus Funnel

The rest of the book does an overview of what we call the focus funnel. It is meant to be a visual depiction that captures the thought process that multipliers go through consciously. Error and error evaluating their decisions about how to choose time and sack the second. Eliminate, automate, delegate, concentrate, on a surface which title. The second sort of focus is automated. Automated is anything when you create a process today, they save you time tomorrow. Example, giving yourself permission to invest time, energy, and money into a product and setting up a process today gives you more time tomorrow. Well, you will never make that choice because it's always faster to just do it than to set up a system to do it for you. And that's why the significance calculation matters. It is a radically different way of thinking by the world's ultra-performers.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

004: Figuring Out Your One Thing

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Jim Rohn said, "You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

The amount of information we can get from people is astounding, and most of it is pretty useless. If you want to accelerate your learning, you need to surround yourself with the right people. The people who will help you accelerate the ladder of success and not failure. It might seem pretty intense but not impossible. And all you have to do is to get started!

Geoff Woods was a former medical sales representative. In 2015, he started The Mentee Podcast because he wants to start a business that will deliver a massive impact on society. Later, he joined Gary and Jay in building the company around The One Thing. Now, he joins the podcast to talk about The One Thing. Specifically, how The One Thing can be the simple truth behind extraordinary results.

Take the First Step

It's mind-blowing to see someone be able to pull off something amazing and seemingly effortless. But it can be hard to imagine it for yourself because we're so used to "Well, he is a movie star" or "He is a famous actor." But just because you don't see the clear path on how to go from where you are to where you want to be, doesn't mean that you can't take the first step.

Enjoy the Climb

You need to learn to focus less on the destination and more on the journey. You hate it when you're in the middle of it but miss it when it's gone. So, enjoy the climb because that is where the value is. Stop focusing on the destination that you want and start celebrating the journey.

Time Over Money

Which is more valuable, time or money? Time for sure! We're in the business of time and it's our most valuable resource. But most people spend time and do not invest it. We don't hold our time to the same standard we hold our dollars. But anything that we want in our life happens over time. You look at somebody who's built wealth, they built it over time. You look at somebody who's in shape they got there over time, you look at great marriages and relationships, they were developed over time. The key is over time.

The Domino Effect

The path to getting everything you want in life personally and professionally starts by getting one thing at a time. Back in 2009, there was a group out of the Netherlands Wieder Domino productions, they broke the world record for Domino falls, they lined up 4.5 million dominoes. But the most amazing part was that when the leader of that group knocked the first one down, how much effort did that take? It's almost effortless. If you were that leader, you would have just unleashed 94,000 joules of energy. Put that into context, if you were to do 545 consecutive push-ups, that's how much energy you would release. So, think about it, the flick of a finger, that one subtle action could create a massive reaction. Small actions can unleash massive reactions. And if you graph this out, it's that hockey stick growth where it feels like you're moving forward not making much progress and suddenly, boom, it's just exponential. This is the shape of success.

The Seven Circles

The seven circles are the seven most important areas of your life. And you only need one area to focus on. However, this is hard for people because they feel like they want to focus on all of them. But again, the path to getting everything you want starts by getting one thing at a time. Think big, go small, trust the dominoes will fall, start by picking one circle. It could be a circle that you are struggling with or it could be a circle that you are crushing. Then ask the question, what's the one thing I can do for my [circle] such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

A Wall of I DON'T KNOW

Most people who ask that question, “What is my ONE THING?” then hit a wall called "I don't know". If you ever think "I don't know", that's just where your mind currently stopped searching. Give yourself permission to keep searching. Sometimes, you'll come up with an answer.and recognize that that answer is probably not the one thing. Then, it's probably still too big. So, you ask the question again. Keep asking the question until you arrive at something that is so small, that effortlessly it will fall. It will almost feel like it's cheating. When you answer, you'll go, "Oh, I can't do that". And that's when you know it's the Lead Domino.

Links/Resources/Tools section:

003: Embracing the Pause: How Video Games Can Teach Productivity

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 01:00:00 -0600

I grew up in the era when the original NES came out. I could often be found spending my free time playing video games.

As a family, we would often have competitions on games like Tetris or Klax, but I also spent a good deal of time playing role playing games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. These games required a lot of solving puzzles, planning, and strategizing.

We would have some family collaboration with these games, too - mostly with my mom and grandma. We would often pause the game to make notes on clues from talking with different characters, draw rudimentary maps, list where certain items could be found or bought, and so on. I often found myself looking over this array of information before and after playing so I could strategize my next course of action.

Similarly, we sometimes need to hit the pause button in life to figure things out.

Don’t just rush in to do a task - take a little time to step back and evaluate
Getting the 30,000 foot view
Gives time to:
Assess the situation
Evaluate the data
Create a plan
Decide the first best step
“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast”
Sometimes you just need to take a break
Helps to clear your head
Gives you a fresh perspective

002: Managing Your Energy for Higher Levels of Productivity

Joshua Rivers — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 01:00:00 -0600

People often find information about productivity helpful but fail to put it into practice. It is why we hope to filter through mere information processing and help you dive into the actual process!

Jim Woods comes on the podcast to talk about productivity and what comes with it. Specifically, we’ll look at why rest is a big part of productivity. One of the things that people need to address when it comes to productivity is not about time or task management but about their energy and how energy plays a big part of rest!

The Role of Hustle

Rest is important to keep you going, but it is not often discussed since people focus more on the hustle, grind, and being more productive. But obviously, rest is important since it keeps people going and keeps things sustainable, but it's completely different for the young ones. It is why context also matters when we talk about rest. On the other hand, sleep becomes the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about rest, but other people might also have other ideas.

Managing Your Energy

Managing your energy is different for each individual. Still, people can manage their energy by avoiding putting everything on a calendar, knowing their patterns, and understanding their tendencies. There are also many tools people can choose from when they want to know more about their personality like the enneagram or the Myers Briggs. But the best way could be having a huge mindset.

Know Yourself

Being honest with yourself and learning to say NO to things is a good start to set some boundaries to keep your focus on things that matter. People always think they have too much responsibility and end up getting burned out. Hence, it would be good to start being honest with yourself on these things, or finding an outlet to talk to is also a good start. You have to know when you have enough and set some boundaries for yourself. Try to learn new things, and paying attention to your patterns will keep you on track.

Healthy Diet and Exercise

Don't take your frustrations on a coffee pot. Don't keep on drinking coffee and avoid junk foods, especially at certain parts of the day. How you eat affects how you feel, and your energy levels for food can affect your body in different ways. Also, doing some physical activity like playing basketball or standing using a standing desk will help bring rest, even though it requires physical exertion. It may seem counterintuitive, but doing something physical may rest your mind a little bit instead of being in a more awkward position, which will add extra stress and tension and then make you feel more tired.

Make Rest Like A Habit

Resting your energy should be a daily thing like water. It should become a good habit, but people often tend to forget things that work well. When one doesn't do it constantly, it kind of derails. And you are back to square one! A good foundation is to start with things that excite you, like how Jim started using an Alpha Neo Smart typing device. Doing things that excite you is huge and ends up making things work well. Hence, resting as a habit will help prepare you for something bigger. It can be like a day-to-day project like drinking enough water to help prepare yourself for something bigger.

Restart Yourself

Figure out what works well for you to get something out of rest. Moderate screen time activities to give yourself more free room. Restart yourself, have some accountability and some form of boundary. And even if rest is difficult, it could mean a different thing from one person to another, making some movement like doing some exercise to relieve stress and get out some energy. Make more movement to rest later truly.

Keep it Balanced

Balance is needed physically, mentally, emotionally to rejuvenate spiritually. Eat properly and the right food, exercise, sleep or get some time to relax or socialize. Take a proper nap of around 10 – 20 minutes and not longer than that, or you'll end up counterproductive. Switch physical locations, wander around a library, pick a book, walk in a park, etc. Take a break from time to time and drink enough water. Energy is like a time of the day, and you have to find what works best for you like a pattern, give yourself some grace, keep learning, keep growing, and be honest with yourself.

Links/Resources/Tools section

001: What is Productivity?

Joshua Rivers — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Productivity could be defined as accomplishing more with less.

But this is an over-simplification of what productivity is and what goes into making it work.

Here are the 4 Pillars of Productivity:

Time Management
Task Management
Energy Management
Self Management

Ready to Explore the Nature of Productivity?

Joshua Rivers — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 01:00:00 -0600

Have you struggled to get everything done?

Have you looked for every trick to be more productive?

How much do you really understand about how productivity really works?

This is Crushing the Clock, a podcast where we explore the nature of productivity so you can actually gain back your time and energy, making a difference in both your personal and professional lives.

Crushing the Clock

032: Project Management for Parents

Sprints

Communication

Constraints

Organization

Change

Awareness

Get Started

031: Taking Notes Effectively (and Retrieving them) in a Digital World

Digital Notes

Evernote

Taking Notes

Review

Tags

Web Clipper

030: Rewire Your Brain to Get Unstuck

Cognitive Deficiencies

Cognitive Functions

System

Better Habits

Metacognition

029: Decluttering Your Schedule (and everything else)

Staying Focus

Task List

Decluttering

30-day Challenge

10-minute Thing

028: Embracing Imperfection (and Other Takeaways from Free Time)

027: How to Free Time to Work on Your Business

Founder Time

Flow and Friction

Tiny Teams

Documentation

Good Systems

026: The Law of Compounding Your Productivity

Laws of Compounding

One Interaction

Making Value

Finding Traffic

Long Game

Build Connections

025: Small Habits to Reclaim Your Schedule

Key Benefits

Instant Gratification

Small Habits with Big Impact

Reclaiming your schedule

Protecting Time Blocks

Overcoming obstacles

024: Stop Being Busy and Start Actually Getting Things Done

Juggling

The Wheel of Life

Priorities & Boundaries

Refocusing

3 Principles

Procrastination

023: How to Increase Productivity and Manage Stress

022: Building Momentum: Setting up the Right Framework for Your Business

Wheel of momentum

Accountability Chart

Five Ps

A Clear Promise

021: How Your Productivity is Affected by Your Fitness and Nutrition

Nutrition, Fitness, and Productivity

Scarcity and Maintenance

Good Alternatives

Training and Nutrition

The Other Four

Get Hydrated

Natural Chemistry

020: Moving from Success to Significance

019: Results Not Typical: Mastering the Pareto Principle

Pareto principle

Finding your 20

Bottom Line

The four things

The Next Step

Accountability

018: How to Maximize Every Minute

12 Commitments