Outsmarting Chaos

Business Brain, episode 505 for Casual Friday, December 1, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas and we crunch on them because we want to tune our business brains together. We all want to make our business brains as and functional as they can be, and we get to do that together so that we can each keep on living those charmed lives here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton, and I'm still out here in California.

Shannon Jean. How you doing?

I'm good, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it's always crazy week. I feed on the craziness to a degree. Like, there's a tipping point of the craziness where I actually get to a. Like, little paralyzed. If. If it gets too crazy. And I, you know, let's. I. My. You know what? I'm. I'm not. Of the two of us, I am not unique in this regard. Right. You. You occasionally get this way, too, where you. You feel a little like there's too much on your plate. Okay. Of course, my. Well, I don't know. I mean, we're all different.

Chaos, I think often I remind myself that, you know, chaos often is a start of something great. Right?

That's fair. But chaos in and of itself is not necessarily a good state to remain in. Right.

You gotta move beyond it.

You gotta move beyond it. So one of my tricks for getting myself out of the chaos is to do lists, like, just starting to break it down. Like, okay, I've got this thing coming up. You know, it's a major change. It's, you know, chaos. Right. I don't know what to do. I've never done this thing before. That's usually what chaos means, is, like, it's not that it's not orderly necessarily. It's that I don't know how to see the order in it. Right. You know, because with some things, like sitting down to do a podcast, it could look chaotic. It's like, well, there's so many different, like, variables and things in the air. It's like, well, yeah, but what I do is I do this one first and this one second and this one third and this one fourth, and. And then, boom, the podcast is out, it's done. And, yeah, it's cool, right? But it is. It is a jumble of chaotic things or a jumble of things that appears chaotic. And so what I do is I start trying to make order of it. I might not make the most efficient order the first time I do something in fact, I'm sure that I won't. But that doesn't stop me, or it usually doesn't stop me from applying some sort of order to it. Even if it's a bad order, it just allows me to start breaking it down. I like to say that I use calculus every day, and that's what I learned in calculus, is to take a seemingly insurmountable problem and just break it down into the smallest parts that I can. Until I can solve those little things. It's like, okay, well, I got to do this huge thing. In fact, I have a huge thing going on. But I can't talk. I can't talk about it publicly until next week because it's not. There's news happening that's not my news to share. But once the news is shared, I have this thing that's super chaotic and somewhat stressful for me, but I will. I'm learning to break it down. So how do you address, how do you process and work through it? When you get to chaos?

The first thing that really helps me is that phrase I said before realizing that I have vast experience of being on getting to the other side of it. So I think back, I'm like, oh, I've done this over and over in my life where everything's nuts. But then I know it's going to get under control.

Yes.

And I know good things are going to come out of it. I may not know what those good things are right yet, but I know that by, okay, just got to embrace it. And I'm not a to do list person, but I am a to did list person.

Interesting.

We've talked about a lot because I've kind of power through my day and I find I'm more productive when I let myself off the leash a bit and bounce around into tasks and then. Or at least that's what I've convinced myself.

You have enough evidence to support this fallacy?

When I have enough going on that I can go, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. But then at the end of the day, always take a few minutes to create the list of things I did get done. And that will point me to, I think, becomes my North Star. Am I really moving towards getting the chaos under control or am I fooling myself? And did I just burn, you know, eight hours because I thought I was getting something done? So that, that's my rubric. It tells me if I'm, if I'm headed in that direction, but I do it at the end I'm kind of a backwards guy.

So we really. I mean, I enjoy a good to did list, don't get me wrong. But my life, and we've talked about this a lot. I never quite realized that we are fundamentally different in this. Where I like to have my order is. Is set up in front. I will create the to do list and then I will. It will. I'll call audibles the whole way through. I'll improvise my way through my to do list. Like it's, it's not hard and fast once I've created it, but the process of creating it is what helps me find an entry point into the chaos. If, if that makes sense. Whereas, whereas you just dive in and, and, and then look back and say, okay, well, I let, I let myself. I let myself sort of freeform. This was that valuable. And if the answer was no, then my guess is even without it being overly intentional, your path for the next day is a little clearer. Absolutely right. Okay.

And I use you, you know, crutches. I use my reminders. My reminders app on my phone all day long as I'm walking around and I'm bouncing from thing to thing and I think, oh, you know what? I need to make sure, you know, this has got to be done. This has got to be done. So I'm just constantly remind me at 3pm about this, remind me at 5pm about that.

So you are using a to do list in that sense of like, when something comes to mind, you capture it. There's.

Yes, I do have a way to capture what's going on, but I don't like the formal list thing, but I do like it after the fact. I don't know why the system that I've developed over time and I think it's kind of like last week you mentioned this concept that I've really been thinking a lot about systems with milestones. Because systems by themselves, if you don't measure, they may not be very effective. And you think you're being productive, you think you're achieving things, but maybe you're not. And so putting those milestones, or, you know, you could call them KPIs key performance indicators. It's a corporate word. But.

No, but that's, That's a fine term. Sure.

Yes. Yes. So you could have those. So the, The. The to did list for me of. Is my. Where my milestones. Am I getting these things done during the day or. And maybe I'll make it at lunchtime. What was. Give me my to did list for the morning I, you know, had four hours of work or whatever it is I liked.

I didn't realize that you were so committed to your to did list. I mean, I knew that we both liked them, but you use yours actively as a. Oh, yeah. Keep yourself honest. Essentially.

I'm pretty religious about it because I don't know if often because I'm not. I have a tremendous bandwidth, but I just suck at focus.

Yeah.

It's just the way my brain works.

I'm going to try this for a little bit. I'm going to try the Shannon Jean method for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.

Yeah, I like it because then I know it also, if I did it right, it reinforces it. I feel good. Like, wow, I did knock all those things out. But you have to put on your to did list and if you go to Businessbrain show and search for to.

Did, I'll put a link in the show notes for it. Yep. Great.

We did a whole episode on this concept. I know, maybe a year or two ago. But you have to track everything because, you know, little things really add up and little things help build the foundation for success with bigger things. So if you're, you know, forgetting that you spent 20 minutes building out your, you know, I don't know, Twitter bio or your, you know, your marketing thing or a landing page for this or a product description, you're short changing your to did list. You got to recognize those things. And over time, you, you get better at it because you're just like, okay, let's go. And sometimes it's only 10 minutes, 5 minutes and. But yeah, it works for me.

Interesting.

Oftentimes I'm wrong. Oftentimes I'm of course, really, you know.

Sorry. Yeah. Interrupting you. Yeah, you're wrong. But you keep yourself honest about it. Like you, you know that you, you don't just, you know, free form the day and then say, cool off to dinner. You know, like you, you, you have this sort of analysis part of it, the. The tuning of your business brain, if you will.

That's right. And I used to be able to do this in a much. Well, the rubric that I used to use for, you know, when I was really grinding every single day was at the end of the day was always money. What revenue did we generate today? How many orders did we ship today?

Right.

How many repairs got. But that. My business is very different now. Much more long term. Much more. Maybe. Yeah. Not as instant, you know, gratification. So I have to pull out these little things and. And make it. You know. But I'd be really interested to hear what everybody else uses. Some people love to do lists. You know, different people use different apps. Although I mean I use the Notes app to do my to did list and I love it and I can.

There is that app for the Mac called Timing. Yeah. Well, because it. TimingApp.com I think time stamp or something. I want to make sure this is the one I think about. They sponsored it. They sponsored us a number of years ago. I'm almost certain it was called Timing. I will find the link and put it in the show Notes. But it tracks what you are doing on your Mac so you don't have to stop and say, oh, I just spent 15 minutes in Word or in whatever pages doing this and 20 minutes in numbers doing that and 14 minutes in my email. It tracks all that. Now you have to go back and con. Conceptualize it right. Like, you know, like add some contextualize it rather and add some context to what were you doing in Pages or what were you doing in numbers. But it does allow you if you're.

Behind your computer all day. I think this is great. I love it.

Yeah.

I'm in and out and like, you know, I use that Rewind app and it will track everything on your Mac too. It even tracks like if you jumped on a phone call, it's like, well, you took a call from you. You know, Dave Hamilton that lasted, you know, 18 minutes.

Yeah.

So you could. You could do it that way too. I do agree with you. More and more of this will be automated so you won't have to sit down and think about the things you accomplished and whether it was productive for you or not.

Yeah, I found it is timingapp.com I'll put a link in the Show Notes because I think it's. And I'll put a link to Rewind too. So. Yep.

Oh that they. They do phone calls too. Times track timing. Does timing on phone calls, meetings, calendar events and soon reminders. So that might be really well if it. Because sometimes I have to punt my reminder to the next day or later that afternoon.

Maybe apps like that.

That's. That that's fascinating. Looks like a great app. I think I'm going to try it out.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. They sponsor your back like in 2018. Timing did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Great.

We got to get him back on the. Back on the program.

I agree.

But I would love to know what works for everybody else, you know. Feedbackusbrain show this is part of tuning your business brain is sharing with the, you know, thousands of listeners that pick up the show each week.

Absolutely.

What I love about this show is oftentimes with both episodes this week we had totally different topic that we were going to discuss, but once we started talking we kept going with a different topic which, which is terrific and I think is, is indicative of trying to keep the show relevant to everybody and not. Yeah, what's going on.

So would you folks like to know more about the behind the scenes of this show? Let us know. Feedbackusinessbrain show we're, we're talking about sort of maybe pulling, allowing you to pull the curtain a little bit, see into our prep process and because I think there's there may like, our prep process is often just as valuable for me as the show is. And I wonder if that wouldn't also be true for you. Don't get me wrong, there are some conversations that Shannon and I have that are not public and they must remain that way. Yes. I mean we vent to each other like, you know, like, like friends do and we help each other with that kind of stuff. But, but yeah, there's, there's parts of this that I think might be valuable. There's one thing I did want to share that I kind of had on the agenda and I'm only 14 minutes late into this episode sharing it. Listener Chuck was talking to us about some projects he's working on and he shared a piece of advice. He says, I go read your bio everywhere. The bio that you probably. And if you don't have one, create one so that it's there. The bio that you create and have in your notes database or your Evernote database or whatever so that when somebody says, hey, thank you for coming to our meeting and speaking here, I need your bio. Have one, have two of them. Two different lengths, one that's like three sentences and one that's like a, you know, a couple of paragraphs and that way you can send those. But if you already have one of those, go look at it right now because my guess is it is out of date. And the same for your, you know, your LinkedIn bio, your Twitter X bio, all your social media bios, Facebook, all that stuff, go check those too. If you've got a description on your website about you, check that. If you've got a description on your website about what your business is, check that. You know, Chuck's comment was, it's funny how we never go and look at our own write ups and when we do we realize that things are outdated? It's true. And I will tell you, use. I know Chat GPT is not built to tell you about yourself. Right. It's, it's, it has proven to be awful. If you want to do like vanity searches or whatever. Chat GPT is bad at that. But what Chat GPT can be great at is taking all the things that you want to put in your bio and writing it for you in the third person. It's weird. Writing about ourselves in the third person.

Yeah.

You know, and, but, but it should be written that way. And tell Chat GPT this is a bio. Make me look good. Right. And so it's going to puff up some things that you would never puff up about yourself, but in a bio, absolutely need to be puffed up about yourself. So I like it. Yep.

The other thing I'll say is that you're talking about bios and information about yourself is if you can get your domain name, your name.com, you should get it any chance you get. I know davehamilton.com and shannon jean.com we have them. Took me three or four years before mine became available. I was tracking it all the time. I know you bought yours.

I remember talking about. I met Dave Hamilton after he cost me. Either one of us probably would have spent about three or four hundred bucks on the name. But we were, we were going back and forth with each other unknowingly, of course, in the, in the auction to bid for it when it came up and I spent. It was just shy of a thousand bucks, but totally worth it. But I like having it. And then, you know, a few months later he found me because, you know, I was@davehamilton.com and he's like, I just had to reach out because you're the guy. And I'm like, thanks. You cost me about 500 bucks, man. Like, you know.

Yeah, but it's a great way to have your own. It's like your LinkedIn bio where you have all your stuff. You should have that same thing on your own website. It's just great. You never know where you're. It's going to come in handy. I send people to mine all the time. So I think it's a great place, it's handy, and I like to go look at it. It's another part of my TO DID concept when I can go look at all the logos on the front page of the companies that I've started.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Good stuff, man.

Go put that on your TO did list folks and send us. You know, I know that when we're doing this, it triggers ideas in your head, right. Because you're like us. You. You know, you hear things and you want to react. React. Feedbackusbrain show. And if there is a method via which you would like to react that we don't offer or you don't think we offer, let us know that too, because we'd love to hear from you. And I'll put our. We. We do have a phone number that you can call and leave us voicemails. And I'm. I'm gonna try and find it here, but I don't know that I'm gonna find it off the top of my head. I am gonna find it off the top of my head. Shannon. It is. Yeah. If 567-274-6977. I'm sure that means something because we created it.

We should put that on the front page of the website.

Absolutely. Maybe. Maybe it is there. But you can call us, you can leave us a message there and it'll be in the show notes at BusinessBrain Show. So call us, text us, whatever you want to do. We will get it and we'd love to hear from you and have a great weekend and keep living that charmed life. Will you? See you next week?