How To Stop Juggling So Many Tasks And Become Laser-Focused

In today's podcast I want to share with you the approach I take to managing my time, specifically how I plan my day and my week. Now I thought I'd record this because I see many of my clients making the same mistakes when it comes to planning their days and that can lead them to working long hours, to never having that sense of accomplishment, and therefore feeling like they're taking one step forward and one step backwards. So today I want to focus on how to stop doing juggling so many balls and become laser focused. So let's dig in and let's get on with the show. I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Now before we jump into today's show, I want to ask you a big favor, especially if you are a regular listener to the podcast and that is to make sure you have left a review on Apple Podcasts and also of course, make sure you've hit subscribe and share this episode with your colleagues. Now it can be quite complicated on how to actually leave a review, so I've shot a quick sort of 30 seconds video which I'll put in the show notes to show you exactly how to do that. Okay, thank you so much for doing that. And let's jump into today's content, all about how to stop juggling so many balls and therefore become laser focused. Now I hope that you have a plan for the year for your agency and I'm not going to jump into that today, but if you do have a plan, you'll be breaking that year down into quarters and then breaking the quarters down into months and then the next stage after that is to take those monthly plans and break them down into weeks and then today into days and then putting them your diary. That is a really good practice to making sure that the steps you take every single day, a micro level, are driving towards that bigger picture, macro level of delivering your vision for the year. And that is the only way you're going to do it if you have a vision for the year and then you just kind of hope that it happens. Well, I'm sorry to say that it probably won't happen and maybe you'll have achieved a few of the goals, but undoubtedly there will be many goals that you haven't achieved. So we need to take this stepped approach from bigger picture thinking and chunking it right the way down till we get into the, into the weeds and the detail of what we're going to do on a day to day basis. So that's the first thing that you need to make sure you have done, which is have a year's vision, break it down into quarters, break the quarters down into months, break the months down into weeks, and then take the weeks and break them down into what you're going to do on a day to day basis and put them into your diary. So let me share with you a few tips that work really well for me so I know they're going to work for you. As ever, I practice what I teach, so so I know this stuff works. So the first thing is that when you're planning your day, you want to put times by the activities. I often see people opening up their pad and they list all the tasks that they're going to do and then they just work in a linear fashion from top to bottom. And that is a sure fire way of making sure that you end your day with half the tasks that haven't been done and then you just have to transfer them over to the next day, which is not the greatest thing to do. It never really ensures that you're focusing on the right things that move the needle. And it also leaves you with a sense of lack of accomplishment because you've got this big list to do before you've even started planning the following day. So if that's the way you do plan your day, typically I would say make your list first of all. But then you need to prioritize it. And the way to prioritize it is to make sure you are doing the most important things first and make sure you're doing the hardest things first. I see a lot of people who create to do lists and then there's maybe five things on that list that they can check off really quickly, so they think they'll start with that. Meanwhile, there's this difficult report or this proposal looming in the background that's kind of getting harder and harder and harder in their minds because they're sort of putting it off. So rather than doing that, you should do that report or that proposal first because not only will have you got it out the way, but you will also feel really good about yourself. And invariably those things don't take as long or are not as difficult as you anticipated in the first place. So you're going to have your list for the day, and you want to prioritize it into the most important things first, and then you want to start assigning time to those tasks. Now, my advice is that you plan your day to the nearest 30 minutes so that you might say from 9 to 9:30, you're doing this. From 9:30 to 10:30, you're doing that from 10:30 to 11 and so on. And you also want to schedule in there when you're going to take a break, when you're going to have lunch, when you're going to, you know, like for me, when I'm working at home, when I'm going to go to the gym, when I'm going to walk the dog, I put all of those things in my day plan. Now, the most important thing to say at this point is that we tend to underestimate how long tasks will take. So even if we planned our day down to the next half an hour, something takes more than half an hour. And then suddenly everything else, like a house of dominoes, has fallen over, and then our plan goes out the window, so we ignore it and we just get on with our day. And then, of course, that isn't going to ensure that you're focused on the right things. It's not going to leave you with a sense of accomplishment. So when you are planning your tasks, you absolutely need to overestimate how long tasks will take. I'm going to say that again because it's that important. You need to overestimate long tasks will take. Now, this does two things. First of all, it ensures that you've got some flex when a task takes longer than you thought. But second of all, if there are things that are going to interrupt your day, which of course, invariably there are phone calls from clients or a situation that you couldn't have possibly anticipated at the start of the day, then this gives you some flex to do that. So if I've got a task that I think is going to take me 40 minutes, I'm going to plan an hour for that task, and then that's going to allow for all of those unknowns that will invariably happen in your day. Now, of course, if you do get that task done in 40 minutes and you've scheduled an hour, well, guess what? You've now won back 20 minutes of your day and you're going to feel really good and you can move on to the next task or even slot something else in. So that is a really important point to make, which is overestimate how long tasks will take to plan for all those unknowns that you couldn't possibly plan for at the beginning of your day. Now, talking of those hard tasks, those really important tasks, we need to make sure that we are blocking out time that is uninterruptible. So this is time when you don't want to answer the phone, when you don't want someone coming up to your desk and asking you a question, when you don't want a chat box pinging up, when you don't want to check your emails. So we need to have that time in our day every single day. Obviously, it can't be the whole seven or eight hours, but it might be an hour here and an hour there. And one of the ways to do that is to make an appointment with yourself and to think, right, this is time I'm not available for anybody else. In effect, you want to shut your office door so that other people know that you can't be interrupted. If you want to be really efficient, you have to do that. Because when you are writing that proposal or writing that report, and you really need to have your head in the game, you want to get that task done much more quickly. If you can just focus solely on that with your head so totally focused on that. If, of course, you are doing that and then you get interrupted and you see an email pinging in and you go and answer it, now your head's come out of the game and you've got to kind of get back into it. So that task is going to end up taking 50% longer if you're interrupted two or three or four times while you're trying to do it. So make an appointment with yourself. That is a really good way of doing this. I remember years ago, I worked with someone who was very, very busy, and she would schedule time in her diary to write a report. So she put in her diary working on this particular report. But then people would have access to her diary and they would see it and they would think, oh, well, I can interrupt that, because that doesn't look that important. So I'm going to actually invite her to come to this meeting. And she found constantly that time she was scheduling in a diary to do these difficult tasks was being overwritten by other people. So I told her to put an appointment in her diary that other people wouldn't know what it was for. So if you do have that same problem, then just put an appointment in there that other people won't interrupt. Now, if you use a physical notepad or even an app to plan your day to do your to do list, I use an app called Marvin, which I really like, and I'll put a link in the show notes to it. You want to be able to physically cross off the task from your list. So obviously it's a notepad, you can just literally cross it off, but you want to use an app like I do, the way you can literally do that as well. So it gets grayed out when you tick the box to say the task has been completed. And I've got to say, there is nothing better than at the end of the day seeing an empty to do list with all of the tasks cross out. There is a really big psychological benefit of crossing tasks out as they get done. So that's something else I would advise you to do, whether you use a physical notepad or a an app for that. Now, the goal obviously should be that at the end of every day you've crossed off every single task on your list rather than carrying tasks over. And if you find yourself constantly carrying tasks over again and again, then you have to ask yourself, a, was that task really a priority and should I just not have it on my list? And B, am I completely overestimating how much I can get done in a day? And therefore I need to be more conservative, which will help me really think about what the priorities are. Because my goal has to be to cross everything off. So the next day I start with a clean slate. Bill Gates said it very well where we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term, but underestimate what we can do in the long term. And in this context, the short term will be your day or your week plan. Now, let's just talk a little bit about when you should create your to do lists. And I'm going to refer you Back to episode 101, where I talk about my favorite productivity tools, techniques and hacks. And in there I talk about morning and evening rituals. So I'm not going to jump too much into that. But suffice it to say that you should start and end your day in exactly the same way every single day. So you might want to start your day by making your coffee and checking your emails and doing all that stuff. But you're then going to make your plan for the day and indeed, at the end of the day, you might start making that plan for the following day. So I always think you should start the day by making your plan because that's going to give you a sense of control, it's going to give you the time to See the bigger picture for the day before you get consumed by the minutiae and stuck in the weeds of tasks to do. But rather you'll take a step back and you will plan your day. And then at the end of the day, you want to review your day and start creating an outline for the following day. If you do that consistently, then creating this to do list and using it, as I've outlined in this podcast, will become second nature and very, very easy for you to do. Now, you might want to take that a step further and say once a week I'm actually going to set my big goals, my big rocks for the week. What are the things that I want to achie achieve? Then on a day to day basis, you're going to look at that list to identify the priorities that need to go in your daily to do list. So you might want to create a week plan as well, which identifies the big goals for the week. And of course you're going to identify what those are by looking at your month plan as part of the vision that we talked about at the start of this episode. So there's a very methodical approach to this and there's a routine that you need to get into in order to make the to do list concept work for you. But I guarantee that if you can implement this, and remember, it takes 20, 40 days, whatever to change a habit. So you need to be really diligent at committing to this to start with before it does become second nature. But I guarantee that if you do it, you're going to feel really in control and you're also going to feel confident that things that you do on a day to day or on an hour to hour basis are the things that are going to drive your agency forwards. So this is super important and the concepts I've talked about in this episode are exactly what I do. So for example, this podcast episode was scheduled for an hour and a half in my diary in order for me to write an outline and then actually record it and create the show notes. Hopefully it won't take me that long, but that's how long I've scheduled. And as I said, I practice what I teach. So everything I've outlined in this podcast is exactly what I've learned in terms of best practice, but also what I implement in my own business and my own day as well. So I hope you found that useful. Another practical episode. And if you did find it useful, as I said earlier, please do consider leaving a review and make sure you've subscribed and shared this episode with your colleagues. Other than that, I will see you next Thursday for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.