Michael: Hello, and welcome to the HaBO Village Podcast. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This podcast is to help you, the business owners and leaders, owner-run businesses. We love these things, small business, medium-sized businesses, to grow your company, and create more profit, purpose, and legacy. That's what we're about. We talk about topics that are relevant to that, and we have a good time. Kathryn and I are married. We own our own company, and today we're talking about time management tips. The rest of that stuff, that was for those of you that are first time coming. The rest of you that are coming back for a second or third or fourth time of punishment, welcome back.
Kathryn: Punishment! Wow! I never saw our time together as punishment. Are we hurting people?
Michael: Well, some people might think it's punishment.
Kathryn: Okay, never mind.
Michael: Then they keep coming back-
Kathryn: Okay, but we're going to talk about-
Michael: Which, then, how do we hold them responsible for that?
Kathryn: We're going to talk about time management and how not to get distracted while you're in a task, which is humorous, because it's-
Michael: Because the task here is to talk about time management.
Kathryn: The task here is... mm-hmm (affirmative), and you're distracted.
Michael: I'm already distracted.
Kathryn: You should've seen what the conversation was like before we started the podcast.
Michael: Folks, I want you to know that I didn't hit record before I... Anyway, but we won't go into that. Let's go back to time management. Today, we're going to talk about time management.
Kathryn: We're going to talk about this, because one of the things that leaders really, really struggle with is how to prioritize time, how to make good choices with their time. We've done a couple in a row now that are a series on how do I organize, prioritize, make good choices, so that I'm leading well.
Michael: Well, and the main topic we've been talking about the last couple of podcasts is even more tightly how, when people are saying, how do I know which things to focus on, which tasks to focus on? What are the big projects that need my attention, especially when we're working on the business and not in the business? Because in the business, you started a company. You know what you're doing. You know what kind of things have to get done to get the client projects, probably. If you don't, then you need to focus on really... Maybe some of these tips will help you understand that, and focus your time on that.
Michael: When we're talking about working on the business, we're talking about the idea of how do I know what's going to produce the biggest bang for the buck and stay focused on it. We talked philosophically a little bit, a couple of other things, different angles on this, for the last couple of podcasts, but today just we thought some real tips would be good. Now you might be saying, "I don't need tips. I've heard this a million times. I've been at this a while." I would be inclined to think the same thing if I were in your shoes.
Kathryn: Yes, we tend to say things like, "Ah, there's nothing new here," but here's the thing. Are you actually managing your time well?
Michael: Are you struggling? Would you like to do it better?
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Maybe you're doing a pretty good job. I would say we do a pretty good job, but we're always looking for tips, and then when I'm reading books and-
Kathryn: I feel like I do a pretty good job three out of five days.
Michael: Well-
Kathryn: The other two, I get a little like, oh dear, what have I done?
Michael: Well, yeah, and that's part of it.
Kathryn: Right?
Michael: There was a statistic that I heard recently. You know what they say about statistics. That whole concept is we probably are only efficient two or three hours a day, and the rest of the time is not efficient. Now, I don't know where they get those numbers. I think they know what they're doing.
Kathryn: We're getting stuff done. Is that like we're getting stuff done, but we're not getting it done optimally? Or in a-
Michael: I think it's an optimal thing. I think there's lots of wasted time. Here's what I think. I think there are certain individuals, we have a couple of friends that are like this, that are... Efficiency is their favorite word. Elegance, maybe not, but efficiency is-
Kathryn: How do we get this done faster?
Michael: They'd rather be efficient than thinking about making sure that what they're doing is also the most effective. It's better just to do stuff than it is to not do stuff. It doesn't matter if you're doing the wrong stuff or the right stuff. I think there's a lot of efficiency experts out there, who go, if I took you, and I could take your time, and I focused it, and you stopped wasting time talking to other people, and you stopped fiddling around-
Kathryn: Having relationships, stop that.
Michael: And you stopped... Right, stop having relationships, and you do all this stuff, you'd get so much more done. Then, if you did that, maybe you could just work three hours a day. You could get it all done in three hours a day, and then go home. Nobody's going to do that. Well, almost nobody's going to do that, because none of us, very few of us, believe that there actually is a four-hour work week for a Passion and Provision company.
Kathryn: Or like a four-hour workday.
Michael: That said, there's that idea that we're incredibly inefficient in our lives and in our businesses and in our work, which I have no problem believing there's a lot of things that get wasted. For instance, it's amazing how many interruptions happen that throw things off. One of the tips that we talk about is this idea of blocking.
Michael: Now, none of this is new. It's probably not new to you folks, but it's really important that we say things, that you're reminded of certain things, that like, oh yeah, I remember hearing that, and I never did that, or I used to do that, and I don't do that anymore. I need to get back to that one. I'm hoping there's some of those tips in here today, and then maybe there'll be some nuggets that you go, I've never heard that. I really like that, and that would fit with who I am, my personality, and everything else.
Kathryn: All right, so let's do it.
Michael: Let's go with that first one, the idea of blocking time.
Kathryn: I thought you wanted to start with the beginning of your day, and how you actually begin.
Michael: I just started with blocking time-
Kathryn: Oh, we're going to block your time, okay, fair.
Michael: Because I just, I got distracted, because it seemed like a lead-in. Let's start with... Let's do what you're saying. You're right. You're right. Let's go back.
Kathryn: Let's go back to the beginning.
Michael: That's a very good place to start.
Kathryn: I just woke up. What do I do?
Michael: If you're going to have a good functional day, and you want to increase the ability for you to know what to work on and be able to stay focused and everything else, and get stuff done, important stuff done, start the day off right.
Kathryn: Yep. It's so-
Michael: Why is that important?
Kathryn: Well, because the mindset that you bring into your day is going to be super, super important. If you just wake up and plow into your day without taking some time, blocking some time... There you go, see? Blocking some time to focus and pay attention to how you are and what you're doing and what you're thinking, and just taking some time to gain perspective when you start the morning. Just regroup. Who am I? Why do I exist? What am I doing? Those kinds of things are super, super powerful for just positioning your day correctly.
Michael: Okay, so how much time do I need to spend in the morning?
Kathryn: I think it varies from person to person. I like to always... When I'm trying to do this, and especially when I was trying to learn this habit, I implemented a rule where it was like I always need to take my 10. That was my starting place, right?
Michael: You did do that. You did do that.
Kathryn: I've got to find my 10.
Michael: What 10, 10 hours?
Kathryn: 10 minutes, right?
Michael: 10 minutes, 10 seconds?
Kathryn: For me, what was interesting about that is just being intentional about saying I'm going to find my 10. I'm going to sit. I'm going to be quiet. I'm going to journal maybe. There was something about that for me that, once I started doing it, 10 minutes wasn't enough. For me now, it's more like half an hour, so that settling place of just slowing down first thing in the morning... Well, I shower first, usually, because otherwise I'm not awake enough. I'll just sit there and go back to sleep if I don't shower first. I shower, and then it's what does it look like to just sit and take a half an hour to journal and just gain perspective and think about what really matters in what I need to get done today.
Michael: Yeah, and I look at it, and I go, oh, I don't want to do that. I want to get up. I want to actually... Folks, I'm not a morning person. Some of you may not be morning people, or you've got a lot of stuff going on in your house, so it's not easy for you to just sit around and do stuff. I actually like to set my alarm. I like to hit snooze a couple of times, and then come back... I know that's considered sometimes taboo.
Kathryn: Anathema.
Michael: It's actually a part of my whole... I feel like I'm being a little bit extra lazy, a little bit extra... it's like an extra little... I love that morning sleep between alarms, and to be able to say I get another 15 minutes. It brings me great joy.
Kathryn: Marie Kondo would be so proud.
Michael: Right?
Kathryn: Don't throw away your alarm clock. It brings you joy.
Michael: It brings me joy. For me, that has worked really, really well, more often than not. Then there's those mornings where you've just got to get going, and special appointments, but even those, I try and back it up a little bit. I'm not doing it quite like you're doing it. The shower is a great place for me to have my five or 10, because I get to think through a lot of stuff. It's quiet. I'm relaxed. I'm awake. I do some of my praying in the shower, and that kind of stuff. It's really helpful. A lot of ums in there. Sorry, very helpful to find that time.
Michael: One of the things that has recently reinvigorated my desire to have some solid time in the morning and to recognize more how powerful it is, is when Hal Elrod, Elrod?
Kathryn: Yeah, when he was talking about the Miracle Morning.
Michael: The guy that wrote Miracle Morning, the book, and his acronym is SAVOR, and each one of those stands for something you're doing. There's-
Kathryn: There's silence and affirmation and visualization, and something, and something-something.
Michael: For those of you who aren't into some of that woo woo stuff, or anything like that, or might think it's all hogwash or bad for you or something, it's all really, even from, say, a conservative perspective, it's really healthy, safe. It's described well. I think it's going to... That kind of concept appeals to the way it's defined. A whole lot of hosts of philosophies and perspectives and stuff like that. You're in there. You're going, okay, I'm going to take a couple of moments, and I'm going to just, now that I'm awake, I'm going to be quiet. Silence is a lost art in our world.
Kathryn: Oh, it's a massively lost art. We are so used to having something happening, whether it's music or the television or the radio, something on all the time, right? Just sitting in silence... I mean, sometimes I just drive in silence, because I haven't had any other time, because the morning didn't work out the way I wanted. Instead of putting the radio on or plugging my music in or listening to a podcast, I just drive with silence, and think and process and pray.
Michael: I find myself doing that at times, too. When we're together, it doesn't ever seem to work out.
Kathryn: Well, you're never silent when we're together.
Michael: Boom [inaudible 00:10:32].
Kathryn: Oh, [inaudible 00:10:32].
Michael: If I am, you're bored.
Kathryn: That's so not true.
Michael: Okay, a whole other subject. All right, so silence, finding a moment of silence, finding a time to really just taking a couple of minutes and going, what am I focusing on? What are the big rocks that are really going to be important for me to accomplish in the big plan, the scheme of things? How do we do this?
Michael: When you talk to people who really get a lot of stuff done, it's amazing how often people like... I've got the big plan, and every morning I look at my list, and I remake my list, and I go, okay, these are the things I need to do in the day, and these are the big things that I just have to get accomplished. If I don't get anything else on my list accomplished, I need to get these two or three things done. Sometimes it's just one, because it's big enough, and you've taken a huge step forward.
Michael: This year, for us, that strategy is really important to me, because we've got so many things that have to happen this year for the process to work right, the plan to work right for the company. We tried really hard to look at 2020 and go, did we over-plan for things that we're doing? Yet, when we came down to it, we went, this is going to be a little tough. It's going to be a little tight, but I don't think we're over-planning, because there are three or four things that have to happen this year for us to continue to move towards the goals we have and achieve some things, and some of our things happen in year cycles, so if we don't do it now, we have to wait a year.
Kathryn: Yeah, so the point is, first thing in the morning, is just taking some time to set your day, to gain perspective, to affirm the things that you're committed to, to remind yourself what the big vision is for your life, and then to step into what the day looks like.
Michael: For us, some of that is prayer and Scripture.
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: I mean, we read the Bible, not every day, but most days.
Kathryn: It's a good Book, bestseller.
Michael: For us... Yeah, for a long time. For us, it's just one of those things, right?
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: That's part of our process. What's part of your process, and how do you walk through that? Quite frankly, you can do a lot of this in... You can actually do this in 10 minutes. It's amazing how you can refocus, especially if you spend 15-20 minutes or a half hour once a week reorganizing. Then you've got these things where you know what's coming, and you're just looking. You're just setting yourself up. Breathe a few minutes. Do a little bit of exercise. You can't do exercise in 10 minutes, but do a little exercise, get the blood moving. Do all that kind of stuff. Plan your day. Move on.
Michael: Okay, so you're at your office, or you're in the basement in your home office, or where've you are. One of our friends, his office is in the basement. What are you laughing at?
Kathryn: I'm laughing at you. You just automatically associated the home office in the basement, and all I could see was the 35-year-old gamer, who's in his mother's basement. This is my office. Sorry, it was what happened in my head.
Michael: Steve Reiter is in the basement.
Kathryn: Fair, and he is not just a gamer, not at all.
Michael: He's not. When you look at his room, his office, it doesn't look like it. There's even a window, because basements have windows, too.
Kathryn: In Colorado, they do.
Michael: Well, in a lot of places. All right, so you're thinking about that, right? You're there. What are some of the things we can do that really get in our way?
Kathryn: Things that we can do that don't get in our way.
Michael: Things that we can do to stop the distractions.
Kathryn: Things that get in our way.
Michael: Things that get in our way, Kathryn. Do you want to keep going?
Kathryn: This is that morning, isn't it?
Michael: This is that morning, so sorry.
Kathryn: We're just having that conversation.
Michael: Go ahead, right? See? See?
Kathryn: You're also... What are the things that we can do to make sure that we're planning our time on? Time well, wow, words are hard.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: The first thing is to absolutely shut off all distractions, right?
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: We've talked about this before, but if you have your phone on, you have text messages coming in. You have emails coming in. You're getting alerts. It is going to be real, real hard to stay focused and really move something important forward. Once you've decided what it is you need to accomplish, what the big goal is, you have got to give yourself space to do that. If you are in an office full of people, you need to be able to close your door.
Michael: What if you don't have an office? What if you live in [Cuby Land 00:14:47]? Well, we're just talking to business owners right now.
Kathryn: We're talking to business owners.
Michael: Most of them aren't in Cuby Land.
Kathryn: Close your door.
Michael: Close your door.
Kathryn: Just say, "Hey, staff/team, I need this hour, two hours, whatever it is, this time block, to work on this specific task, so unless something is burning down, or somebody is bleeding, please don't interrupt me." You know what? When we do that with our staff, they're amazing. They don't interrupt. They're not going to push their way through unless there's an urgent matter, which is rare.
Michael: Well, when we started the company, we had a home office. We have an attached garage. We converted that. Before that, it was a spare bedroom. During those days, Jenna was really little. She was in early elementary school, so you have... That was the distraction at that time. You're working. You're putting in hours and stuff like that, and she wants to show up and show you things. I really wanted to be a good dad. I still want to be a good dad.
Kathryn: You still do, good. That's good news.
Michael: It's not past tense. One of the things that I had in my mind was I will be available. There were times when being available ran over, and I couldn't focus, because I kept getting interrupted. Even those things, know that, where's the balance? Find the balance. Find your values and your goals and stuff like that, but realize that when you're balancing the rest of your life, and you want to make sure it's healthy, you have to think about those things. There's times when even for Jenna, I would say, "Okay, I need to be left alone. Go play."
Kathryn: Leave me. Leave me, child.
Michael: That kind of stuff, shut the door. Figure out the time. Block it off.
Kathryn: Turn off your distraction, or yeah, turn off the distractions.
Michael: Turn off all distractions. Some of you are ADD. Some of you think you're ADD, but the doctor never said it.
Kathryn: Or you're ADHD, but you weren't diagnosed either.
Michael: Or ADHD. You may or may not be. If it's a real problem, or a perceived problem, I mean like you're struggling with really focusing. It's like every single... What, rabbit?
Kathryn: Shiny object.
Michael: Do you have shiny object syndrome? It happens all the time. Obviously, I suffer from it, too. You've witnessed it.
Kathryn: Today.
Michael: That said, you want to make sure that these distractions... This is what's going on. I was just talking to a leader recently, within the last couple of weeks, and he was talking about that. He was talking about how effective that is. He actually has to turn everything off, or he can't get projects completed all the way through. They take too long. He distracts himself, in his head, so those kind of things, if you can turn off message. If you have a Mac, you can hit Do Not Disturb, and nothing pops up, in the top right corner. I have to do that. Then I turn off email. I shut my email completely off.
Michael: One of the things that they say in time management that's really helpful is there are certain activities you need to do. Email, checking your text messages, or whatever, in business are all probably part of them. Schedule a time. Find a way where you're going to spend 10 minutes or 15 minutes focusing on them, and then go away. Don't get caught in the I'm available for anybody electronically to reach me anytime, and if they communicate, they need to know something now.
Michael: I think the worst place that is, is in text. I sent you a text. Why didn't you respond?
Kathryn: Right. You don't care about me.
Michael: You sent me a text five minutes ago. Yeah, you don't care about me, because there is an expectation, and more and more people are shunning it. There's an expectation that texts are I have the ability to reach you instantaneously and get instant communication. The reason they think that is because, more often than not, people will respond to them very quickly, because it's in their pocket. They grab it, and they respond to it, and done, as opposed to I communicate, I talk to people and respond at certain times of the day. If you haven't heard back from me for a while, maybe ping me again, but then there's people who don't respond at all to any communication.
Kathryn: Yeah, well, and the texting thing is weird, because we have... I think it's harder for young people, but we've trained ourselves to be like I texted an hour ago. They haven't responded. What's wrong? Then you start thinking terrible things have happened. I'm the worst at this, because texts get lost. I can read a text and be like, oh yeah, and then, because it's not still going to be in front of me, and there's been 15 since, I lose the thread, so having-
Michael: You lose the thread, and you don't get distracted by that, but your phone is... In multiple conversations, you look at your phone way more than I do.
Kathryn: True.
Michael: You're popping it for scores. Anytime that thing buzzes, you're popping it up and looking at it and checking it.
Kathryn: Well, when there's a football game on, I can't help it.
Michael: You keep it in your lap and everything else.
Kathryn: I even do that at church, and that's terrible.
Michael: You did it in the podcast this morning already. I've already seen you do it once. You had it in your lap, and you popped it. You have this behavior. You cover it down, and then you hold it, and then all of a sudden you pop it up, and you peek down, like nobody's noticing you're cheating and looking at your phone and putting it back.
Kathryn: And now you've told on me. Thanks. Thanks for that.
Michael: I have. Well, we're vulnerable here. You've told me that.
Kathryn: Okay, so turn off all your distractions. Okay, let's talk about strategies of how you use that time, once you've blocked it off.
Michael: Oh, I love this.
Kathryn: Let's say we've got a two-hour time block. What's a way to maneuver through that in a way that's helpful.
Michael: My friend, Brian, I give him-
Kathryn: Credit.
Michael: Props.
Kathryn: Props.
Michael: Credit for this. I had never heard of a pomodoro before him.
Kathryn: I've heard the word, but not in association with time management, a pomodoro.
Michael: Well, what have you-
Kathryn: I don't even know. It feels like-
Michael: It's almost close to what they call French fries in some countries, but I can't remember that word. It's a P word or something.
Kathryn: Is it... It doesn't matter.
Michael: Yeah, anyway, pomodoro is time management. It's a concept of time management. I'm sure there's books on this stuff that you could dive in. There's probably somebody on this podcast who's a pomodoro expert and is going to correct everything we said, but this is what I know.
Kathryn: We're open to that. Send us an email.
Michael: This is the way it's worked, and this is the way it's been described. It takes your time. You shut off all distractions. You lock yourself down. You say, I'm going to work on this specific project for a specific amount of time, and you take breaks in the midst of it. Let's say you're actually going to work on something for two hours. Pomodoro would say you would break that into chunks of time with small breaks in between, where you actually get up, move around, exercise, get the blood flowing, because the blood settles. All kinds of things inhibit your ability to concentrate, be creative, to get into flow, is what they call it.
Michael: For instance, the way I do some long morning... If I'm going to do a morning pomodoro that's working on a bigger project, I will usually lock around two to two and a half hours. The first hour, I work 25 minutes solid. I just go boom. I set my timer. At 25 minutes, I force myself, no matter what I'm doing, to finish the sentence that I'm in. I don't finish the paragraph. I don't finish. I go, okay. Put my pencil down. I stand up, and I walk out of my office, if I'm at the office. I walk around the office. I go to the bathroom real quick, or I go get a cup of water, and I, if nothing else, I get up and I walk for four or five minutes.
Michael: I'm getting the blood flowing and everything else, and then I sit back down. I give myself five minutes, and I actually set a timer for that five minutes. Then I sit back down, and I go boom for another 25 minutes. Then I'll take a five-minute break. Then I'll work for 55 minutes. If I work for 55 minutes, I'll take a 10 minute break. What I have realized is I'm more optimally focused, creative, and in the zone when I do that. My instinct is to not do that.
Kathryn: Yeah, my instinct is just to power through, like I'm in flow. I'm not going to stop.
Michael: That's the dumbest thing in the world.
Kathryn: Thanks.
Michael: No, no, no, no, no. That's the "thought."
Kathryn: Oh, the thought is stopping's dumb.
Michael: [crosstalk 00:22:36], so stopping would be dumb.
Kathryn: That went badly for me, what you said.
Michael: No, no, no, not you're the dumbest thing in the world.
Kathryn: That's the dumbest thing ever.
Michael: It happens. It's like, in our minds, we're going stopping is dumb.
Kathryn: Yeah, right, yeah, why stop when I have the flow?
Michael: What happens when we continue to grind it out?
Kathryn: I think that our ability to... We lose the sharpness. We lose the edge, right?
Michael: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kathryn: Our ability to stay as sharp as we need to be, to finish it as well as we started it, just begins to deteriorate.
Michael: Now, I don't know what it looks like when you come into my office, and I've been grinding like that, but when I walk into your office, and you've been grinding like that, you're squinting more. Your posture is cranked over more. Your muscles are sore, and you're like, oh, I just am tired, but I've just got to get this stuff done, and I started working and I don't want to stop, and... right?
Kathryn: Yeah, yeah, and I do that with just little piddly tasks, back to back to back to back to back to back. Even if what you're doing, because I think about the strategy, even if what I'm doing is actually responding to email or working on tasks that are not these huge, important projects, but just stuff, it's still that how do I train myself to take a break, because I don't. It is very difficult. I just power through, and sometimes I'll get to the end of an eight and a half hour, nine hour day, and be like I never left the office. I only stood up twice, to go to the bathroom, and I forgot to eat.
Michael: Basically-
Kathryn: These are bad things for mental acuity.
Michael: As much as we think we're getting stuff done, and we're not achieving our best stuff.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: For some people, it's obvious that they're not achieving their best stuff. For other people, they're like, no, I mean, I'm getting stuff done. Sometimes the trade-off is, at least I stayed on a subject, and I didn't get distracted, but when they graph it out, you start to feel that, especially that first one or two times, you catch a second breath, a second wind is what they call it, and you're going... but really, your acuity, if you don't stop, your blood's settling. Your brain is getting clogged. Your efficiency starts to, if you're graphing it, it just starts to slowly curve downward.
Michael: If you pick it up and take those breaks, it does take three or four minutes to get back from a pomodoro break and refocus, but because you've shut everything down, and you say this is the subject I'm working on, and you know, and you're not trying to choose, what do I work on next? That really, you can get back in and actually come back to a peak. Now, some of the other research on this whole subject says that it's actually better to work on one subject for a longer periods of time, like two, two and a half, three hours, to have larger blocks of a single subject than to go from subject to subject to subject every hour. In the western world, I think we're taught, either intentionally or unintentionally, often to put things into one-hour breaks, and then go from one meeting to the next to the next to the next.
Michael: I know sometimes we schedule our clients that way. I can have a day where I've got four clients, five clients, five major meetings and three clients, but I'm going boom, boom, boom, and you guys will stack my calendar. I can do it pretty well, but here's what happens at the end of the day. Actually, and this sounds counterintuitive, I can actually perform really well at all of those meetings with those clients, right?
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: Even up until 5:00, which is unusual. I can't do that every day, or I would just drop dead, but what happens is at night, once work is over, I'm wasted that night. I don't have the capacity to dive into anything else. More often than not, I'm a little duller the next day. We try and pace our schedules, so we don't put two of those days back to back at all around here, but those things are take a chunk of time, focus on it, stop. Don't jump from subject to subject, because that is as exhausting, they say, by switching subjects and having to wrap around a completely different subject, than staying on one thing for two hours, three hours.
Kathryn: Yeah, the other thing, too... One of the time management tools that I don't, I sometimes fail to do this, but I think is really, really helpful, is to take, if you've got a major strategy meeting, or some sort of a meeting that's important, and you have that meeting, taking a half an hour afterwards to consolidate your thoughts around that meeting and settle them, and then figure out the next steps, as opposed to the meeting's done.
Kathryn: You go into the next thing, and then you're not putting a period on it, and really going, okay, this is what we accomplished. These are the next steps that have to happen, and writing them down. This is what the client needs to do, or the team. This is what I need to do, and just being really crystal clear and taking those few minutes after the meeting to solidify that, so that you don't end up the next time you come back, going okay, what did we decide that we need to do, which I think is really easy to do when you're moving from thing to thing to thing.
Michael: No, that sounds good. I like that.
Kathryn: That's another good time management strategy is building a little bit of time in between the big meetings, when you're having them, because you're going to have meetings. You have to, so in between those meetings, really taking the time to solidify, to have a few minutes just to lock that thing down and go, okay, here's where we landed. Here's what has to happen next, so that it's crystal clear, even if there isn't time to do those things yet.
Michael: All right, I like that, yeah. You know what? You and I are both people who resist time management tips.
Kathryn: I am such a P. You're such a P, in the Myers-Briggs. Sorry, if you're not a Myers-Briggs person.
Michael: Basically, we wait until the last minute to make our decisions. It doesn't make us late, most of the time. We're-
Kathryn: I just operate better under pressure.
Michael: Yeah, we hit our deadlines. It's just a matter of hitting it under pressure, and in the P fashion, you are actually believing that there is more. You want to make sure you have all the good options available for you, before you make the final decision. We do that, and it's harder for the time management skills, but I'll tell you, folks. My experience at this point is, especially as much as many of us have either what we call ADD or we have personalities that are just really highly tuned to moving and switching a lot, none of us multitask well, because research says it. It doesn't matter what we think. There's lots of stuff in that.
Michael: If you want to get the best results out of your work, if you want to build a Passion and Provision company, if you want to have a fulfilling work life and a successful financial achievements at the company, you need to be effective, and so you need to find ways. When we compare somebody who plans out their entire week with a big whiteboard and little tiny stickies, and it's-
Kathryn: Checklists and-
Michael: Every five minutes is scheduled and stuff, and they love it, that's great for them. Our friend, Brian, who turned us onto this, he's like that. He, I mean, even with his little girls and everything else at the house and the family, they schedule everything, and they put it into columns and rankings and stuff, and he loves it. He gets life from it, and that's great. For us, that terrifies us.
Kathryn: Makes me just squeamish thinking about it.
Michael: Yet, there are certain key aspects that, when we implement pieces and parts of that, it actually does improve our peace of mind, our effectiveness, our efficiency. We're actually more efficient, and we're more effective, which I love that. Those two words together create elegance. That's what the two pieces of elegance, and our life and our business become more elegant and smooth, and less resistance to forward movement. We need that.
Kathryn: Well, and if you still are the person who goes, no, you don't understand. I really am a good multitasker, I need you to google the Myth of Multitasking, and just read what the research is saying, because at least you need the perspective to say, okay, maybe what I think and what is true about how the human brain works are not completely aligned. That education and reorientation can also help you rethink your time management.
Michael: Yeah, a lot of the research in this area has come out of really looking at the effects of texting and driving, because what it says is that it shows, at an even more alarming rate, that we don't switch subjects in our brain as fast as possible, because that's what you have to do. That said, I hope... Those were the tips. Those are some basic tips, some things to think about, how to prep your morning, how to prep your mind for the day.
Michael: You can really impact your day by setting aside your 10 or your 15 in the morning, or maybe grow it to an hour in the morning if you can, if you're one of those people that has the ability to do that and a lifestyle that could do that. If nothing else, you need to find some time. Set your mind straight. Focus it, and not just take everything as it comes all day long. The world starts to become the master of your life, instead of you becoming the master of your life. You want to be able to exhibit that a little bit more. Then, what it makes you is it makes you more resilient and gives you more grace under pressure. As leaders, we need that.
Kathryn: We do need that. Just remember that, if this is something where you really have to train yourself in a brand new way, especially the morning thing, create yourself a couple of notes in important places that you see, that say something like, "Find your 10," or, "Find your 15," something that will remind you. Then, when you don't do it, don't beat yourself up. Just try again the next day, because ultimately, it takes time to build a habit, but as you do that, it's going to really radically impact how your day goes.
Michael: I know it's changed us. It's changed the way we pay attention to things, the way we get through stuff, and we've done it, folks. We live a Passion and Provision life. We have a Passion and Provision company. It's not perfect. It's growing. That's part of the whole model and idea, but we enjoy it. We're fulfilled, and we want you to be, too. We want you to see the financial success and the emotional fulfillment of working in something that you believe that you have more profit, more purpose in the work you do, and you're leaving a legacy behind that's impacting everyone around you in a positive way.
Michael: Today, that's it for the tips. We want to ask you that, if you're listening on any of the different systems out there, Apple Podcasts being one of them, hit subscribe please. We really appreciate that. It helps spread the word. If you know anybody who you think would be interested in this podcast, please share it. If there's a podcast that you think is great, share that on your social media feed or anything else. We would love it, and we would love a review. Now that I'm done asking you to do a bunch of things for us, we appreciate you.
Kathryn: Make sure you block time for that.
Michael: Yeah, make sure you block [crosstalk 00:33:38].
Kathryn: Tomorrow morning, preferably.
Michael: That was funny.
Kathryn: Thank you.
Michael: Thank you so much for listening to us. You may not even be hearing us anymore, because you may have turned us off. Have a great week. We want to see you back next week. Thank you so much. I'm Michael Redman...
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This is the HaBO Village Podcast. Take care.
Kathryn: Bye.
