In this monologue‑style episode of the Above the Business podcast, the host (Bradley Hamner) uses the whack‑a‑mole metaphor to illustrate how small‑business owners get trapped in endless reactive tasks. He argues that the default response—hitting every mole that pops up—may be unnecessary and often the wrong person should be doing it. To break free, he proposes a handful of sustainable, low‑overhead disciplines: (1) define a clear "North Star" vision to give direction; (2) schedule a weekly "thinking time" session away from the office (e.g., at a coffee shop) to step back from day‑to‑day noise; (3) conduct a Sunday‑night weekly planning session that filters incoming work against the North Star; and (4) perform quarterly planning to set broader strategic goals. He emphasizes that these practices help owners decide whether a particular issue deserves their personal attention or can be delegated, reducing the feeling of constantly playing whack‑a‑mole. The episode closes with a call to adopt these small habits for long‑term productivity rather than chasing quick‑fix hacks.
Chapters
The thing about the whack-a-mole that nobody says is whether or not you should actually be the one hitting that to begin with at all. See, it's this idea that it pops up and just because it pops up, you need to go hit it. I'm not so sure that's the case. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast where we help you get above the business, begin to think like an architect. And what architects use? They use blueprints. We want to help you to have a business blueprint for your small business. Have you Have you ever felt like you play whack-a-mole all the time? I know that oftentimes we as business owners will talk about, you know, we're juggling so many different things and that's probably an accurate depiction, but it oftentimes can feel like more of a game that you go to one of the fairs that come into town and your kids want to play for $25. This game of whack-a-mole, they hit the thing and they're racking up points, but it pops up. And then before you know it, things start popping up. The better you get at the game. Maybe you go to Dave Buster's and they have this game. You go to the game, you play it, it continues to pop up, and the better you get at it, the more that they start popping up and the faster they start popping up. You ever felt like business can be that way? I mean, I think that you hit something, you knock it down, you get a weekend break. Maybe as you're listening to this, you're going into the weekend. You feel like you went and knocked down a lot of different whack-a— you played whack-a-mole this past week. And everything's calm and settled until we get through until Monday morning, we check emails and then boom, there it all in, it comes back and heck, maybe it even happened over the weekend and it complete, it can seem like a game of business whack-a-mole. Well, if that's the case, that's the problem. And we're pulled in many different directions. We're juggling a lot of different things. We're switching specifically in business and context. We just got off the phone. With a customer, we respond to some messages from our team about a customer complaint. The very next thing we see, we look down and we look and we got a text message from an upset customer. But then simultaneously, the phone is ringing from a prospect that you have been talking to that you're excited about. And so we put that down for a moment to take that call with the prospect while we know in the back of our head we have one of our upset customers. Well, as we go in between calls, we run to the restroom, we take our phone, we look at the emails, and oh boy, we've got an email from our accountant we need to respond to. We've got an email from the guys' or girls' upcoming trip that you're excited about, and then it just never stops. I could go on for another 5 to 10 minutes about just the examples of being pulled in so many different directions. So the question is, what, what do you do? I mean, this is not going to be this is not for me to begin to try to give any level of productivity hacks. You can go to an Ali Abdaal on YouTube or somebody like that and let them, you know, kind of share this idea of kind of— or maybe watch David Allen, you know, Getting Things Done, or somebody like that, or Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain. I think those kind of people can give some very specific productivity tips for most business owners. They are doing what my dad used to say, they are running around like a chicken with their head cut off, and they just get really good at it. You build a tolerance for being able to do it. So what is the answer? I don't know if there's a great specific answer, but I think that there are some principles that for a business owner is universal. I think number one is you just have to be able to make sure that you have effectively your North Star, which is the clarity of the vision that you are wanting to accomplish. I think it's number one. I think if you have that North Star that you can navigate by, not to, but by it, that matters. Otherwise, we're just floating around. Uh, we're just kind of running around like a chicken with a head cut off without any sort of direction. That's number one. Do you understand where it is you're trying to go? Because then number two, what we can do is we can make sure that we try to integrate a once-a-week discipline of thinking time. It's come up on the podcast a lot, but it's worth a reminder to be able That is one example of getting above the business. My hope is, is these 10 to 15 minute episodes I do on Fridays are also a help for you in trying to push away from all of that for just a little bit of time to be able to get above the business. If you can get above the business, then we can begin to kind of make sense and we can prioritize some of these things about whether or not they're actually worth your time. Are not worth your time at all. And so if we can know that we have a direction, a vision of where we're trying to go, number one, and then we can install the discipline of once a week thinking time, quarterly planning— we just did the quarterly for Q4 not long ago— but weekly thinking time sessions, quarterly planning, and I believe planning for your week, Sunday night planning happens on Sunday. If you can have those 3 disciplines in place, that's not asking a lot. Plan once a quarter for the quarter, number 1. Number 2, once a week, get to a coffee shop and think about the business. Think about the business. And then plan your week at the beginning of every week. I think if you can have those things in place along with the North Star of where you're wanting to go, you can try to begin to make sense of that. This is not going to be the podcast where somebody is going to say, silence your notifications and, you know, do all of these things that sound good in theory but just are hard to execute on. I mean, I hope that those things work for, for you, and sometimes they work for me for a short period of time, but I want sustainable things that I know I can do over a long period of time. I can plan my week, I can have a weekly thinking time session, and I can plan for the quarter. And I can make sure that I have a vision of where I'm trying to go. Because I've had the vision, when I plan my week, I can make sure— does the things I have going on this week specifically help us get to what it is we're trying to go? Does it help us get there faster? Or is this just all the distraction? See, Sunday Night Planning becomes a filter for all of these things. All of these potential distractions. Number 2, weekly thinking time does the exact same thing. It helps me to be able to kind of push away from all the day-to-day stuff— the rings, the pings, the dings, the phone calls coming in, the got-a-minutes, all those other things. And you gotta handle those. You gotta handle those. Yeah, it's great for a Dan Martell that's built— or Alex Hormozi has a $100 million company— to say don't do these kind of things. Whenever the reality is you're playing, you're playing a level of whack-a-mole. Okay. And you're trying to grow that company from $30,000 a month to $60,000 a month and from $60,000 a month to $80,000 a month. I mean, that's what we're— that's reality that we all live in. Or maybe you're already at $100,000, $125,000, $150,000 a month in your, in your small business, whatever that may look like. Indeed, you can do it and you can do it and you can begin to silence some of these things and make the decisions on each one one of those whack-a-moles about whether or not it's worth your time. See, the thing about the whack-a-mole— and this is kind of where I wanted to land the plane— the thing about the whack-a-mole that nobody says is whether or not you should actually be the one hitting that to begin with at all. See, it's this idea that it pops up and just because it pops up, you need to go hit it. I'm not so sure that's the case. That's not so sure that that's the case, that A, it needs to be addressed at all, hence some fires in business need to burn. But also number 2 is whether or not you should be the one that's actually hitting that. Sounds good in theory, Bradley, conceptually get it. What do I do? Evaluate yourself. Do you do weekly Sunday night planning? Do you have at least a 1-hour session once a week where you go somewhere to a coffee shop, get out of the office, and go spend time thinking about the business? And do you plan for the quarter? If you don't, I would encourage you to consider implementing those very small disciplines. I mean, plan for the week, 30, 45 minutes once a week. Do a thinking time session, 45 minutes to an hour once a week. Oftentimes that's all it takes. All right, everyone, hope this helped you. Let's silence having to feel like we have to play whack-a-mole all the time. There's no perfect solution for everybody, but I like to think that there are a few handful of principles that we can use that can help us to decide whether or not we should even be playing this game of whack-a-mole. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well and go be great. Hey, if you're watching this on YouTube, would appreciate if you hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, and share it with one other person. All right, till next time.
