The Business Brain Productivity Power Up!

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, episode 496 for Casual Friday, October 27, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where every episode we take a topic or three, we crunch it down, we analyze it so that we can each tune our business brains and keep living those charmed lives here. Living my version of a charmed life. In Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in still sunny California, although we had a little rain this week, which was amazing.

I'm Shannon Jean. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. I think we're supposed to have, like, weather in the 80s this weekend or something.

Amazing.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Something. I'll take it. Sure, why not? Suck sober, man. That doesn't happen here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After the rainy summer that we had, though, which is not. I mean, we get rain in the summer, but, you know, this summer was like a washout for us. So I'll tell you, that's amazing.

Hey, you took a trip recently and you were telling me how it fell into our productivity tip scope of, if you will, and I'd love to hear more about it.

Yeah, I finished discussing it. I trained myself. That's. That's the note that I wrote down in our. In our notes. But I didn't. I. I didn't actually, it's not in the version that it sounds like. I had to go to a media event in New York City, which is about a five, maybe five and a half hour drive from me here. And the way the schedule worked last week, I knew that I didn't want to be gone overnight. I just. I had a thing the next day, and I probably could have made it back in time if I had stayed overnight, but the press event was just running from 5 to 8pm and so I was like, all right, can I do this in one day? And I know that I can. I have driven down and back in. In one day before. It's obviously a lot of driving, but whatever, it's fine. It's fairly easy drive, so, you know, no big deal. Then I looked at the train schedules, the Amtrak schedules. Boston's about an hour south of me. And so I drove down to Boston. I took the train into New York, and then I went and did this event, and then I took the train back from the event and then drove home from Boston. And, man, I had such a productive day. The wifi on the train worked fairly well. Well enough, like, I don't know that I could have streamed a Netflix movie But I didn't. I did put some movies on my iPad in case I wanted to get to that point. I never did. But, you know, I had email that had piled up like all of those things that you kind of need just a desk day to do. And sometimes long stretches of time go by where you don't really get that desk day. Too much interruption. There's too many things going on. And it was almost, it was unintentional. I did not think about it this way. I did not approach it this way. But. But in retrospect, I took a productivity retreat on the train for a day.

I like it.

Yeah, I was so. I felt such relief when I was about maybe an hour, maybe 45 minutes outside of New York. It's like, man, I have gotten so much done just sitting on the train here.

And was that relief based on the. Prompted by how you could just focus?

Yeah.

You didn't have other distractions?

There was no, there were no distractions. Like, I, I was, I, I couldn't, I mean, I could get up and like go to the cafe car if I wanted to buy a sandwich or whatever. But yeah, otherwise I was just like, I wasn't taking phone calls. You can on the train, it's allowed. But I wasn't, you know, and I was just like in my laptop email mode. I, I had things that had piled up in my inbox that weren't like, pressing but kind of become pressing things to finalize some projects that had been lingering. All of that. It was a cleanup day, if you will. Sure. And then on the ride, I was able to get all the cleanup done on the trip down. So the ride back I was able to start some new things. Like I had a fresh head and was able to start some new things and get some other things done. But, man, I realized I certainly wouldn't want to do that once a week. Get that out of the way. It's brutal, right? But once every four to six weeks, something like that would be really helpful. I hear the folks on the Focused podcast, which is a great podcast, I'll put a link in the show. Notes Mike Schmitz and David Sparks. And we've had David on the show here. They talk about how they take, and I wish I could remember the term. I don't think they call it a retreat, but it might be. But it's a one person retreat, right. Where you just go and they talk about how they go to like a hotel room or an Airbnb overnight and just like hunker down and Get a bunch of stuff done without any of the normal distractions in your normal environment that you would have. And I think they do it, I, I don't know, once a quarter or something like that. And I, like, there's, I had never, I'd never done anything like that before. Certainly I've spent the day on a train before, but never with the intention of just really plowing through work. And it was catalyzed by, you know, a moderate amount of stress. It was like, I know that I have all this stuff I need to do. Okay, great, I'm going to use the train to do that. And boy, did it work out like it was.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it was so much better. I, you know, I just, I expected it to be half distracted. You know, you're on a train and it's bouncing around like, you know, all the things. And it was, it was, it was great. The one thing I did going in, I did not know how the WI fi on the train was going to be. So I planned and made sure I have enough, had enough data left in my Mint Mobile plan to just be able to tether to my laptop if I needed to the whole time, you know, tether my laptop to my phone and just burn data that way. And, you know, I was, I was totally okay with it. I had more. I, I don't use, I think I buy 15 gigs a month from Mint Mobile and I probably use five, so. And you know, the month was about to turn over anyway, so I was like, yeah, it's fine if, you know, if I wind up using another five gigs today. Down and back. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's great. And even if it did matter, I would just buy, you know, for like 10, 15 bucks, you can buy another five gigs not from Mint, but, you know, on an ESIM or whatever. And I just put that on my phone and good to go. So I wasn't really worried about the data. I really, I went into it with the intention of like, let's get stuff done. And the seats on a train, on the Amtrak trains. And I, I didn't take the Acelo, which is the super high speed train because it was like triple the price and didn't really make a difference for my timing. I took the regional train and the seats on those trains, they're big, you know, you, you really have room to get stuff done. Unlike a plane where you're, you know, it's jammed in there. You're kind of jammed in. Yeah, I had plenty of room on the train. And I think that helped quite a bit. So I don't know. That's great.

It's a good tip.

Yeah.

Productivity retreat. I think it's a great idea.

All right. Hey, look, while we're here, I want to take a minute and talk about a fantastic podcast recommendation that we have. Leo Laporte hosts a show called this Week in Tech, one of the longest running tech news shows in the world that launched in 2005 on Twitt TV. In the 18 plus years since, they've covered every major tech story with some of the biggest names and smartest people by doing a deep dive into the biggest tech stories, a different panel of experts join Leo Laporte every Sunday, bringing expert analysis, helpful advice and entertaining discussions. You'll listen to every episode knowing more about what's happening in the tech world around you. And they deal with some of the biggest issues in the world today. Not just computing, Windows, Mac and Linux, but also AI, Twitter, cybersecurity, privacy, search, and so much more. Visit TWiT TV TWiT to subscribe to this Week in Tech. And thanks to Leo and the team for doing the swap with us. So we've shared productivity tips in the intro of the two shows this week. The first segment, if you would. And as we mentioned last, last episode on Wednesday. We have worked really hard internally here putting together and polishing up a productivity course for all of you. And we are ready for you to take a look at it. I'm really excited. Oh, yeah, man.

Yes. Yeah, so am I. You know, I've, we've talked about this over the years. We've got eight years of amazing content and it's not, I mean, yeah, you can go to our website, you can dig it up, but when you take some of those episodes where we really dived into some productivity issues, either on our own or with a guest, and then you couple it with some added content to build this course. I was really happy with the way it turned out when I ran through it the first time. And then we've had a few other people go through it and I love the structure. There's a seven day course, there's a nine day course, and we even have a masterclass course where you can connect with Dave or I to help out with productivity things. And we talk about productivity so much on this show that it just seemed that was the right topic to roll out for our first course.

Yeah, absolutely. Sadie was able to take a lot of the sort of buried gems in our older episodes and things we had created and talked about and really surface them in a way that makes it super digestible and super informative. Arrives in your inbox once a day, making it super easy for you to just dig in and go. And I, I'm really eager to hear what all of you think about it.

So, yeah, same with, with me. So what we want to do for our listeners here that have helped us along so much over the years is give you an exclusive look at the, at the first couple of lessons. And if you go to businessbraincourses.com.

You.

Can go ahead and sign up and get the first two lessons at no charge and then you can give us some feedback and we'd love to hear what you think. And then you can decide if you want to continue with the 7, 9 or masterclass and go along with the productivity. Ride with us. I think you'll find it really useful. As I took it and I was listening, it reminded me, you know, we've done episodes on continuing education and trade shows and conferences and just even, you know, courses like this. It's super useful if you, you know, if you boil it down, if you take away just even a few things that can make a positive impact on your life. I could tell you the first time I ever did continuing education. I really date myself here is I bought a course called learn HTML not, not anything. Learn HTML in 14 days. And I was like, wow, you know, it's kind of expensive, it's a lot of money. But I did it and I, I did it every night after my kids would go to bed when they were younger. And I walked through it and it allowed me to understand the fundamentals of, you know, HTML is everything. At the time, there was no CSS and all this other stuff, no data driven websites. And so it, I mean, it was an amazing foundation for me over for a long time, even after I turned that stuff over to someone else to build a much more robust, you know, system on line and everything, I still kind of had these kernels of information. And since then I've taken tons of courses and hired coaches. We hired a coach when we wrote our first book. You know, the mistakes are tuition and it's. Continuing education is just really a great thing for you and your employees. So I'm excited to get on the other side of the classroom, so to speak, and have you take a look at the courses.

Oh really? I mean, I think it's fair to say we've been on the other side of the classroom for eight years doing this show. Yeah. Now we're just really distilling some of those things and sifting through and really kind of pulling out some of the valuable. I don't want to say that every second of every episode is invaluable, but there's, you know, the topics are varied and so now we're collating them and pulling them together so that you can really just dive in. I'm, I'm really stoked. So, yeah, business braincourses.com free please go. Let us know what you think. That's the most important thing in from, from my standpoint is just please, like, we want to hear your feedback. So yeah, exactly.

Help us make it better or give us a positive testimonial if you like it. And so you'll start, you get an email each day and on the third day you'll get a FL follow up like, hey, you know what? Did you like what? You know, give us some critique on it. I would. It would be fantastic. And then we'll have the rest of the courses. It'll be up@businessbrain courses.com for everybody else to take a look at it. But you get a sneak preview here and a couple of free lessons.

A couple of free lessons, absolutely. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for sending in all your feedback. We actually have some questions and some comments about recent episodes that we queued up, especially that screen time episode from last week. Lots of. There's a lot of opinions about this and that's a good thing. So we will share some of your thoughts next week to keep that conversation going. And thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to check out businessbraincourses.com free and do me another favor, would you keep living that charmed life? I'll see you next week.