Productivity and the Art of Efficiency

I like to be productive. Shannon, how about you?

I love productivity. I embrace it as much as I can. I always question whether I'm being productive enough, but I do love it and I'm always interested in learning more about it, which is what we're going to talk about today.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing that you said there. You question whether you are productive enough. Not everyone is like us in that way. I certainly ask myself that question all the time. I think a lot of people don't. And, and I'm. I'm not here to necessarily judge, but I know what works for me. So. Yeah, I'm looking forward to. To. To this. You. You have a.

Me too.

You have a show you want to talk about.

I do. So last week we, I, I mentioned, you know, I, I listened to a ton of podcasts. I learn a lot, and so I wanted to share those with you each week. And this week I want to talk about a podcast called Business wars. And we'll put a link in the show notes. It's, it's from the people over at Wondery. They have a pretty good group of po, and it's great. They go back to historical battles between companies, whether it's things like, I'm listening to one now. Nintendo versus Sony in the gaming space, when the PlayStation and the Nintendo stuff is in the 80s 90s and there's all kinds of Ford versus Chevy, Boeing and Airbus. And the great thing I love about finding new podcasts is when there's a ton of content they've already created so I can go back. It's like finding a great book series.

Right.

There's already five books published, so you don't have to wait for a new one to come out all the time. So there's a ton of great content up there, Business wars. And it's enjoyable. It's great to listen to in the background. And there's some really good lessons. Some of it, they kind of narrate and they, they. There's a lot of mind reading that goes on, but, you know, it's not a big deal. It makes it enjoyable. So Business Wars. We'll put a link in the show notes. Check it out. Let me know what you think.

Sounds good. All right, well, awesome. He is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton, and this is episode 26063 of the Small Business Show. All right, folks, let's get into this productivity thing, shall we? Shannon?

Yeah, let's do it. Let's be productive.

Okay. Yeah, this is. Yeah, yeah, I've been Thinking about a lot about productivity this week because.

Good.

I. Well, I traveled last week. I was at the podcast Movement Evolutions conference in LA end of last week, and then flew back home for four days, including the one where we're recording this episode and then heading out again, this time to Mexico with my wife. And this is more of a leisurely trip, you know, so it's the. It is the backbeat media summit meeting. So, you know, so there's a. There's a course, there's. It's tax advantaged, as it should.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's right.

As it should be.

As it should be.

Hold them anywhere you want, right?

You can hold them anywhere you want. My wife works for the company. It's totally fine. The accountant and the IRS are totally on board with it. Yeah, absolutely.

But I. Yeah, that's a great thing to think about.

Yes. The charmed life right there. Yeah, exactly.

Yes, you got it.

The thing is, I've had four days at home and in two of them were weekend days. But let's be realistic, you know, I was getting work done on those days. There is nothing more motivating for my productivity than a deadline. And you know, when I have too much time on my hands, I am not nearly as productive per minute or per hour as I am when I'm. When I'm squeezed for time. And I. I've been thinking. I've been thinking a lot about that lately because I think that's part of why I keep myself so busy is it actually makes me more productive with the. With the things that are. That are. I mean, they're all important to me, but there are some things that make me money and some things that I stay busy with that don't. But knowing that I have to leave or do a thing at a certain time forces me to get the stuff done that makes me money in the time that I have. And I find myself more productive when I have a deadline.

For sure.

Yeah. So little brain hack.

I like that now. Yeah. Let me ask you a question. Do you create kind of. I don't use word arbitrary, but you know, deadlines in either, you know, written on your to do. To did list or a to do list or just arbitrary, I guess, in. In your head that. Does that help you, you know, be more productive during the day or do you use that tech?

No, I do. I. I mean, I have, you know, I will schedule meetings at times when I know. Okay, look, I want. I know for me that my mornings are super productive. I'm energized. I'm excited about the things or stressed about the things. It doesn't really matter. I'm fueled. Excitement and stress are sort of the same thing in that regard, as long as it's not crippling stress or distracting excitement. So I will try not to ever schedule a meeting before 11am my time. Now being on the east coast, that's way easier than it probably would be for you on the west coast. But I do that. And then I almost always have a noon meeting. It's our quick little, I mean it's only a 10 minute meeting. It's a little stand up kind of thing for our Mac observer staff to get everybody in sync. And I, and I usually attend that. I try to attend that every day, except if I've got, you know, an appointment or something that gets in the way of it. But.

Right.

I try to keep that. So at the very least that's my morning. You know, I have a definitive end to my morning and you know, and I have an alarm on my calendar so that at 11:30 I am reminded that in 30 minutes I have that stand up, you know, meeting and I've got it. I want to be there. And it totally forces me to, you know, put the pedal to the metal and be like, all right, I'm going to get this, this and this done before I go to that meeting. Yeah, it's great. It is. I mean, sometimes it's like, I think.

It'S a good way to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And sometimes you have to bump them back. But, but I do believe in setting those deadlines throughout your day can, can really help a lot. And I also think what it does, is it te you, you know, is it, is it realistic?

Right.

Can you get that amount of work done in this given timeframe and hopefully you can adjust your, your system. I'm going to talk a lot about systems today, but you know, you, you can kind of see it's like, wow, I'm not, I don't hit that 11 o' clock deadline or I only hit it 40% of the times. What adjustments do I need to make?

How do I need to do it? Yeah, well, and it also, you know, what I've, what I've noticed about myself in these past four days is that I have been employing ruthless efficiency. And by that I mean completely ignoring the things or saying no to or declining the things that are not absolutely necessary to like march the business forward. And, and that's great. And I, and I've learned a lot in, in sort of, you know, trying to be aware while in the moment, you know, getting these things done. Like, you know, there's no reason that on a random Tuesday, I shouldn't also be doing this, you know? So, yeah, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm just catching myself knowing that I don't have the time to do. I don't have luxury time. So it's like. Because my luxury time starts at the end of the week, you know, which is fine. And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe I should, you know, not mess around with that little project. I'll just get this done. It's like, oh, yeah, I need to be. I need to be more mindful of this kind of stuff. So it's good to, you know, I mean, this is not an artificial deadline, but it is an abnormal deadline for me. And it's. That's sort of been a good thing to have that. So. Yeah.

Yeah, I like it. I think one of the. Thinking about productivity, one of the most important things to me is it's. It's not about being, you know, busier. It's really more important to focus on your outputs.

Right?

What are you getting done? And like, when I titled my notes, you know, productivity and the art of efficiency, and, you know, what are you. How much output are you getting done each day? And I come back to the comment you made a few minutes ago. One of the biggest ways to increase your productivity is to say, no, no more. You know, I can't, or we can't. Can't do this, or we'll table that, or we'll put this on the calendar down the road. But, you know, you have to embrace saying no. You know, we're. We're big yes guys. We like saying yes, too.

We're entrepreneurs. So it's. I know. Yeah, it is.

It is. And. And if you go back, if you listen to episodes with our guests, you. You'll hear it over and over again. Is the shiny object, you know, focus or, you know, squirrel, and. And you go to the side. That's a. It's a productivity killer in. In. In to yourself and maybe even to your entire organization. So I. I would say you should be looking at the decisions that you're making. And, you know, saying no more is. Is a big way to increase that productivity. And along the same lines, I think, you know, don't believe this myth of multitasking.

Right?

We've done shows on this before, but trying to juggle stuff all day long and just being. Dealing with interruptions and kind of managing by interruptions, I don't think it works that well. At least doesn't work that well for me.

I think there's a. You, you said, I think there's two concepts at play here. Managing by interruptions doesn't necessarily. That you are attempting to multitask. Right. That's just distractions. That's right, yes.

Distractions. That's really what I'm talking about.

Yeah. But managing by interruptions, there are days where that turns out to have been what I did all day.

And sometimes as a manager, that could be, that could be your main job.

You can't avoid it. Right. And that's part of the reason why I enjoy my mornings so much. Because most of the people that, that would need me are not yet needing me. So I get to be a little more efficient because I can just work, I can be my own driver of direction as opposed to when, you know, when those people get to work, it's like, well, here we go, what do they need for me? And then off you go. Yeah, but as far as multitasking. Yeah, it doesn't work. What I find is more, I'm more able to embrace is the concept of spotlighting where I can really focus. I can focus on one thing and then the trick is being able to shift into something else and be in it and deep quickly, you know, because that transition time costs you. That is the non productive time. Right. So it's better if you can, if you can stay on something and dive in. But sometimes that's just not how it works. So you need to be able to shift from one to the other without thinking, oh, I should check my email in the middle of this or I should check Facebook or what. Whatever myriad distractions might have you have, you've been ignoring, you know, during whatever deep dive you've had, being able to shift to another deep dive immediately and get in it, there's still going to be some lost time because you've got to get, you know, it takes a little bit of time at least to get deep into something. But, but really be mindful of those transition distractions. Like, oh, I finished with this. Let me check my email. Let me do this and I'll go up and I'll use the bathroom and I'll do, you know, whatever. I mean, some of those things you have to do sometimes, but being mindful of, okay, these cost me when I do them. Yeah, yeah.

Spotlighting is a great way to discuss it. And for me, what I do to manage the flow of requests or things that come in is I call it offloading. So I'll either create a reminder that I need to take care of something later, create a task and keep it on my list. That'll pop up and it will remind me. Because if I'm going to spotlight into the next task, I'll probably hopefully forget all about that other thing so I can dive deep. The other thing that I have been using this manual method that I really like is this little. It's actually glass, but it's like a little whiteboard that goes right above my keyboard in between my keyboard and my monitor. And it allows me to quickly jot down dry erase notes. And as things pop up, if I don't want to create a reminder and I need to do it. And let me tell you, it's just a simple little thing. I don't know, it's probably. It's as wide as your keyboard and maybe 6 inches tall or something like that. And it sits at an angle and I offload stuff to it all day long. So. Okay, I got to take care of this. Oh yeah, this little thing is hanging out there. I don't maybe not create an entire new task or I don't want to create a reminder, but I'll just jot it down maybe where I left off on something if I'm doing, you know, going to go into jump something else. But it helps me a lot. I really found that it's. And it's much better for me than a piece of paper. I can't stand paper. And it works out really well.

What a fascinating. So it's a whiteboard that sits at your desk.

Yep. Right above your keyboard in between your. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. And it is. It's a simple thing. I don't know where I heard about it or I read about it and I try. I'm like, well, I'll try it out. And they're inexpensive and I use it every day. And it's. It's just kind of a crazy little thing. But again, it's a concept of offloading.

Yeah.

It allows me to kind of multitask, but in more towards your method of spotlighting. And it, it increases the speed that I'm able to transition because all I do is look down and here's all these notes and I'm like, oh, this makes sense. If I'm working on a WordPress on one of our websites and there's another WordPress related task. Well, if I'm already into this, I'LL just jump into this and it keeps it front and center in front of my face. And, you know, it's simple, but it, but it works for me.

Whoa, what a great idea. Yeah. Well, I've already put this in my Amazon cart here, so. Well, I mean, this is, what a great thing because I do it with paper, but then, you know, it's just kind of a mess, and I don't want to deal with that. I want to get one of these for the, for the studio here, for when I podcast. Because as you're talking.

You got it.

As you're talking, I'm thinking, oh, I want to, I want to circle back to offloading because as you, you said it with. Before I, Before I needed to. But, you know, offloading helps you with that spotlighting because you're not that. That I. Your memory is not. And I don't say this to you, I say this collectively to all of us and to our listeners. Your memory is not nearly as good as you think it is. And you know it. You know it. And so when you say, oh, I'll remember that now you're spending brain cycles to keep that memory alive because you know you're going to forget.

Correct.

You know you're going to forget it. So if you can offload it, suddenly, boom, you are free. Those cycles are yours to do as you please. And, and the moment that you accept what you already, you know, subconsciously know about your memory being flawed, your life is going to get way, way better. And it has nothing to. Well, I mean, it might have something to do with getting old, but regardless, these are things we cannot change. So embrace it. It is a thing. Just offload your. It's. It doesn't mean you're a lesser person or anything. I mean, I say this because I kind of had to say it to myself, like, oh, no, I'm good at this. No, no, I'm bad at this. And I know I'm bad at this. I might as well admit it.

Yeah. And if you're, you know, like we talked about, being addicted to productivity, that's one of the tricks that has allowed me to succeed and not be overwhelmed. Otherwise, I think I would. I want to talk about downtime in a minute, but downtime or trying to go to sleep at night, which is so important, you know, there's no way I could turn off my head to the, to the dozens and dozens of tasks and requirements. And I love that I, I said, you know, in a previous show that one of my. How I measure success Is that I want people to rely on me. So that comes with all kinds of responsibilities of things I have to get done. Offloading allows me to just, you know, I'm free, I've done it, it's sitting there waiting for me so I don't have to put any of that bandwidth on trying to remember that.

So true. You know, I, I've, I've often thought about this and I was just thinking about it, I don't know, an hour before we recorded a great way. The whole trick is making yourself not having to spend discipline points on being productive.

I like that.

Right. You know, because those discipline, you only have a certain amount of discipline points every day to spend every day. So you don't want to spend those on the things that you need to get done. Right. I mean, as best you can, you want to hack your brain to want to do those things. So it requires zero or very little discipline. And one way to do that is exactly what you said. You pride yourself on being reliable. I use the word dependable, but they're interchangeable in this scenario where it's like I want people to know that I am the productive guy, I am the reliable guy, I am the dependable guy.

Yeah, it's part of your story.

It's part of my story. But it also makes it really easy for me to go and get stuff done because I want to get stuff done so that people, so that I. So that the story is true. Right, right. You know, and it's probably that somewhere in my head I know, oh, I'm not reliable, I'm not dependable. Well, I'll show them, I'll fool them. Right?

Yeah.

So.

Well, that is, you're right. And I would say that and I had this for my notes later in the show, but you have created a system that it's kind of this circular, self fulfilling thing, you know, And I've done the same thing. I want to be known as being dependable, reliable. It gives me a hit of dopamine when I can help someone, you know, and I'm always that guy. If I talk to you at an event and I mention a book, a website or some kind of resource, you're gonna get an email from me after we meet and I'm gonna give you links to what I talked about. It's just what I do. And that little trick has connected me with so many people that were like, oh, I can't, I can't believe you remembered about this. And you know, it's like, well, yeah, I made a Note as soon as.

We were done, as soon as we.

Left, I set a reminder. And the next morning when I got back to my office, I said, oh, send Dave a link to this or, or send him a copy of this book or whatever. And, and that's, that's made a big difference in, in my life and it has created this, you know, fulfillment of. Because then, then this guy or person thinks I'm reliable. I want to be thought of as reliable. And it just goes.

Now it's up to you to prove it wrong, not right. And it's like, well, now I'll just keep doing the same thing and it's all good. Yep.

You know, very afraid of proving it wrong.

Right? Oh, same, yeah. But that's that. So there's the fear based decisions. That's where fear you can leverage. Right. Because it's. Yeah, that's a good fear based decision to make. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Another good decision to make is to get yourself a server for your business because that will help you be reliable. And that's what our sponsor Linode is all about. Right. You don't want to have to be the one managing the hardware for your server and making sure it stays up and all of that stuff. No, you want to offload that to someone that does it all day long and can do it at scale because it's way cheaper for you to have someone else manage your server than it is to have you manage your server. And I say this because, I say this to you because I have to say it to myself. My problem is I know how to manage a server. It would be awful if I had all the servers in my office. I could make it work, but then I wouldn't be doing anything else. That would have to be my priority the moment anything came up. Well, Linode solves that problem for you and they solve it the right way because they know how to get this stuff done. In fact, if you don't know how to manage a server, that's even better. They'll take care of it for you. If you're like me and you like to go to the command line and do those sorts of things, great, you can do that on your Linode server. Server. But you don't have to because you can use their cloud manager to do all of that stuff from the web without even knowing that it's possible to do it from a command line or a terminal or anything like that. They can have you set up like their cloud manager can have you set up their, like a WordPress site without ever needing to know how that works. You can set up a VPN server for yourself. You can basically any kind of server environment that you could think you need. They've probably got something in Cloud Manager for it. And if they don't, you can ask them, because chances are, if you need it, somebody else does too. Might be worth their while to set it up for you and then make it a thing as part of their offering. So you gotta go check this out. And here's where it gets even better. If you visit Linno.com SBS you get a $20 credit just for starting off, just because you're a small business show listener. Linode.com SBS you get a $20 credit, and their most inexpensive server is just five bucks a month. So you can start with linode and get four months for free because you're getting a $20 credit. So go check it out. Linode.comsbs and our thanks, of course, to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, where are we now?

Nice.

What's the.

Well, yeah, since we've been so efficient and productive, let's talk about downtime for a little bit. Because, you know, part of my notes here were all about how to embrace being extremely productive without blowing up the rest of your life.

Right.

Because if you neglect other parts of your life, it is not going to help you be more productive.

No, it'll end pretty quickly. Yeah.

Yes, yes. And I say that, you know, I mean, you need to have time in your schedule. If you're not the type of person that is going to naturally create some time for downtime, for whatever you want to do. You want to read, you want to get outside, you want to walk, as well as time to spend, like, with your family and friends. You need to schedule it. And I think that getting it into part of your system of scheduling your time can help you build the natural pauses that all of us need to be more productive, more creative, and ultimately more successful. And if you're not giving yourself those times to just kind of take a breath, I think it's much more difficult. So I have a hard time doing it. In the minute I start doing it, I start thinking, okay, you know, I should be doing something else.

Right. I should.

I shouldn't be out here on the deck.

Yeah.

You feel.

You feel guilty, So I do.

Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe guilty is the wrong word, but yeah, yeah.

You know, your inner judge. My inner judge is the worst. You know, I hate that guy sometimes. And he's telling me, you know, your office is right up the hill you could go get, you know, 20 minutes of work done instead of sitting out here. So the one trick I have used is I will schedule it. You know, I get it on my okay at 11am I'm gonna, I'm gonna hustle, hustle, hustle. And if I, if I get all these things done and it's part of my carrot system here, I'm gonna give myself 15 minutes to go, go outside or go take the dog, walk down the street, go with my wife, take the dog to the park, relax, do something that is gonna kind of recharge me. Even on these. I like small breaks. It's really efficient. For me, the concept of taking an hour for a lunch, unless it's like a lunch or I'm going somewhere with friends or business thing and I'm going to be talking, but the concept of taking an hour freaks me out. But 20 minutes, half hour, that's all, that's great. And if you can then build that into your schedule, it'll help you, I guess, kind of give yourself permission to have that downtime.

That's a great idea. Yeah. I'm the same way. I don't like the idea of, I mean, it's going to take me 10 minutes to eat lunch, you know, so now I'm going to have another 45 where I just sit around and do nothing because. No, no, no, no, no, no. But that, it does. You, you risk being a workaholic at that point. Yeah. And I don't, you know, I say that word, it can be a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily. There are degrees of this and, and like you said, you have to manage that. You have to, to afford yourself the luxury of, of being able to enjoy your downtime. Right. Like I, I can attach here. Yeah, yeah.

It's another skill that you may need to learn.

Right.

It doesn't come naturally because I'm always worried about being thought of as being lazy.

Right.

But that motivates the hell out of me too. Right. So it's the, it's a double edged, it's a blessing and a curse.

Right.

Okay. You know, it keeps you motivating, keeps you hustling. There's always stuff, well, you know, it's a good time and you know, and I always make the, tell me they don't have enough time and I like you've heard me say on the show over and over and over, I'm like, oh, do you watch tv Now I should just like, oh, do you watch Netflix? You know, do you Watch prime.

Right.

Don't watch it. You know, that is your time. If you really want to, there's a price to pay. If you want to go out and you want to create something from nothing and you want to do it, if, if you're not willing to pay the price, it will. It's just not going to happen. But you know, you also have to kind of create that permission over time to have some downtime and schedule it in.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think it's okay to work a lot like you're talking about, you know, the workaholic thing. I think it's okay. I like to work, I really enjoy it. But I have to structure it and force myself to build in that flexible time for downtime, for family and also a big part of it. As I've gotten older, I've realized I need time for learning each day. And if I don't give myself time for learning and research, I know I'm not going to be as effective and as successful down the road. I've learned that if I get just caught up, caught up on the hamster wheel of every day, then it's tougher for me.

Well, and I find that I need to give myself moments to think. And I've said this many times on the show over the years where. But it happens all the time. It's still very much a thing where I'm on that hamster wheel. Right. I like to keep moving. I like to always be doing something. But I need, I find that when I have that moment of free thought and it could just be walking to put out the trash cans or driving somewhere, or showering or meditating. If I'm being super intentional about it, it. When I'm not actively thinking about a problem, usually it's after I think I've come up with the solution to the problem. That's when the better solution presents itself. And it's like, oh, you know what you could have done is this. And I am always experiencing this. So much so that I have. And this is for a variety of reasons, but this is most definitely one of them. I have my email set not to send. The moment I hit send. I have this program that sits there and it delays my email. I leave most of my email by default. It's on a two minute delay, which is all I need for most emails because they're quick. If I've written a big long email, I might put it on an hour delay or something, something like that. And I catch myself all the time. Rarely is it, oh, you know, there was a typo or something like that. It, it's, and, and, and very rarely is it, oh, I probably shouldn't send that. Like those, those kinds of things I sort of manage differently. But the, the thought of, oh, wait a minute, I, you know, here I am emailing this person. I'm, I'm contacting them, I should remind them casually about this instead of coming in out of the blue reminding them about this. Like, there's opportunities here to do this a little bit better and, you know, incrementally make this email more valuable. I'm going to go ahead and do that, and I totally can do it. It happens all the time. But it's not just email. It's all of the things. It's any problem once I think I'm finished, that's when the good thoughts come out. And that's just learning how to live with myself. Right? I know this. So I have to create those moments where I'm not actively doing something and then the stuff comes out.

Giving your time. We talk about story a lot here. One of the benefits of being an entrepreneur and small business owner is you get to craft your own story, right? Whether it's, you know, I powered through adversity or I'm successful this way, and this is how I do. But, you know, it's great. And most people don't get that opportunity. You know, they become, you know, have their career and that kind of thing, and they create their own story through their family and all that kind of stuff, which is great. But from a business perspective, it's awesome. And I, I would say, I would suggest that, that there's a framework that I think if you embrace when thinking about productivity and about talking to people, that that is very helpful. And what that is, is I don't like to talk about how busy I am. Rather, I, I flip it and I talk about, oh, I'm getting a lot of things done. And you don't have to be specific because most people, let's face it, they don't want to hear, you know, all the exact things. But instead of going, oh, yeah, man, I'm crazy busy. It's like, oh, yeah, it's, it's, you know, I'm really knocking things out. I'm getting things done. I'm completing a lot of tasks. And I'm really happy that that is a great positive story. And it, it, you're training your brain here. A lot of this stuff we talk about, you know, you're really programming yourself. You're creating your Own story. But when you hear that day in and day out again, it goes back into your feedback loop and it helps you get more done. Or at least it helps me get more done.

Well, yeah, because being saying to others, which as you said, is also saying to yourself that I've gotten a lot done or I've been productive, that's a positive thing. In my world, that's a positive thing. Whereas saying I'm super busy like that, that just comes with negative connotations. When, and therefore you think, oh, how can I, man, I gotta. My life. Oh, God, I'm so busy all the time. No, I'm so productive all the time. Oh, wait a minute. Like, same person, same life, different descriptor. This is way more positive. Yeah.

And you'll get a different reaction from people watch. Because they're always used to hearing people, oh, crazy busy. But if you say, yeah, really product. Really productive. I'm really getting a lot. Get a lot of things done, you may get the question, oh, what are you working on? What kind of things are you getting done? And that's great. And maybe that's opens up a conversation, especially with a, you know, a new contact or a business contact. It's, it's, it can be very productive. Right?

I like it. That's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. And I came across a quote as I was looking up some information to do the show, and I really liked it. And it's by a guy the name of Matt Pearman. And he said, when you become more efficient, you tend to do more things, of course. And if you aren't doing the right things in the first place, you have just become an expert at doing more of what doesn't need to be done at all.

Right.

And I really hit me because I was like, wow, you know, it's. Again, it's that busy. I'm busy, busy, busy. And you can trick yourself into thinking you're really being productive. That's why I think that focusing on output is really a critical thing to embrace, you know, but what I asked my. The minute I read that, I'm like, well, how do you know? Some. A lot of times I don't know if I'm focused on the right things, right? Because I think I am. But, you know, and I, and I, I. What I've thought about is taking this concept, which I've done here before, Guy I listen to every day, you know, Scott Adams, he has his concepts like, hey, if you want to see if your worldview is correct, make predictions based on your worldview and See how they turn out. So I, I would suggest we could do the same in the small business world as we could make predictions whether that's, I'm setting a budget, I'm setting a sales, you know, pro. We're going to set progress. I don't want to use goals because we don't like those here. I'm creating a system to meet the, you know, certain sales numbers. Well, those are predictions. So if, if you're writing these predictions down, sharing them with your team and you're hitting them all the time, I would say you're focused on the right things. But if you're writing down predictions of the way you think things are going to turn out in your business, in your life, whatever, and they're not happening, I would say you're focusing on the wrong things. And that is the steering mechanism that you can use to, to look at the decisions that you make each day and see if is, is this what I should be focused on? So thanks, Matt Pearman, for that, that quote, because it really helped fine tune. I like how I would start thinking of it. Yeah. Because I don't know, I don't know. I sit here and talk and maybe it sounds like I know, but I don't, I don't know. And so I'm going to keep this in front of me. It's like, okay, here, what are the predictions I'm making for, you know, this for today, for this week, this month, this quarter, this year, and be able to look at them and then tie it back to decisions that you're making with your time.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. No, that's really good. And I like that prediction thing. Yeah, this is all good. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it could, it could work good. And I, I, I, I like it. I want to be really productive. I want to get into that feedback loop that makes me feel. Thinking about your best days, or at least, you know, in my case, the days that I am just full and knocking things off, you know, getting things done. And at the end of the day when I create my to did list, I can see, look, I got all this stuff done. You know, my whiteboard is clear, all the alerts have been, you know, completed. That's a great day. I feel good about myself. I can go in and, you know, relax, get some downtime, do something else. I really love it.

I like that. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah, you gotta, yeah.

So for me, so today, a few, you know, a couple of key takeaways, create systems that you can use that and adjust and modify that are going to help you make decisions that are going to help you be more productive. Create those systems. But you got to track back to them to see what's working and focus on your output, not how busy you are. If you're super efficient and you can take off and, and you know, it's like the four hour work week guy. It's not about how time you put in, it's about what you're getting out of it. And based on your definition of success.

Right. Yeah. You get to define what success is. I mean, hopefully it has some relationship to what you need out of reality, AKA the rest of the world. But you do get to define what that is. And then when you hit that, you are being productive. That's it. It's that simple.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's great and it's really good. And one of the ways we define success here on the small business show is, is getting your reviews right. I know you hear this all the time from every podcast you listen to, but taking a few minutes to, I mean, not even take a few minutes, you can. 30 seconds to leave us a five star review up on the Apple podcast directory or wherever you listen to podcasts really makes a difference. Gives Dave and I that dopamine hit that we're looking for and we really appreciate it.

Yeah. And it does help the show. It helps the show grow when you review it. It helps rank higher, all of these things. Yeah, it's super helpful. Yeah.

Get better guests. Gets more, you know, we get more connection with, with people that we want to come have on the show. And as well, if you would like to come on the show and talk about your small business experience feedbackus show co. We'd love to hear from you, love to talk with you and hear what you've learned and share it with our small business community.

Yeah, man, it's good stuff. I'm, I'm always, I'm always jazzed after I do the show. It's a little weird for me to do the show and then take off for a couple of days. But you know, that's, that's just how it's.

You'll be charged up. You'll be very productive at your, your board meeting.

Yes, I will. That's true. That I will be very productive at our board meeting. That's correct.

I've told the story about having a board meeting before in, in an indoor swimming pool area and how ner, you know, it's. It was like the humidity was like a thousand percent and I was sweating so bad, but they all wanted to do it. But I was the only one kind of dressed and giving them, giving the talk. And it was. It was most miserable thing in my life.

Yeah.

Just drenched. Don't ever do that.

Don't do it. Yeah, dress. Dress for the environment. For sure. That's right.

Unless you're in the water, which is what I should have. That's what you should have been doing.

Right, Exactly.

Because it was, you know, it was crazy.

That's crazy.

But thanks for listening, everybody. We appreciate your time and your feedback.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's. It's. We love doing this. And we'll, we'll see you next week. Keep living that charmed life and feedback@businessshow.co. just like he said.