Your Name Dot Com and Traveling Productively

Business Brain, the Entrepreneurs Podcast Episode 417 for Friday, January 20, 2023 Greetings folks and welcome back to Business Brain, the show where we talk about how we use our business brains in all aspects of our lives to make our lives happier, more efficient, more productive. And all in all, here using my Business Brain yet again in Durham, New Hampshire for the moment, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. At least as far as you know.

That'S what you keep telling me, man. I, I've decided to believe it. I'm, I've never once, I don't think either one of us has ever checked our IDs. We've seen them though, because when we set up bank accounts, I think we probably had to. Yeah, that's true, that's true. So we're put a lot of, a.

Lot of effort in branding. So you wouldn't want to swap that out?

No, I don't want to change it. In fact, if my name wasn't Dave Hamilton, I would out of my way to like, why not get IDs to make it.

I, I, I'm gonna, we should, I want to tell the story about your name real quick because I've told, I tell it all the time and it's one day we, you and I were like doing a pre show setup and I can remember you saying, hey, you know, if, if you could buy your, your name.com Dave Hamilton.com and you know, spend, I don't know was a few hundred bucks or whatever it was, would, would you do that? And I was like, oh absolutely. And I think I put some ceiling like, you know, I'd spend up to 500 bucks or a thousand bucks. I think it's worth it. And I had been trying to get my own, you know, domain shannon gene.com for years and there was nothing there. But somebody owned it. And I could never get them to. As is happens a lot when you're trying to get a domain, people don't respond.

Yeah, right.

And so while you and I talked, you went up and bought it and I was like, that's great. And then I, immediately after the show I was like, you know what, I'm just going to go check again. And I went and checked. Shannon Jean. Boom, available 10 bucks. Oh, I was like, I was so happy that you prompted me and that.

I didn't pay, I paid a thousand bucks for davehamilton.com and what was funny is of course I was bidding against, you guessed Dave Hamilton. Right. Another Dave Hamilton. He reached out to me on Facebook like a week later and we've been Facebook friends ever since. For years. Yeah. Because he was like, I wanted to meet the person that I was going against. I'm like, man, I wish you had had that discussion ahead of time because we probably could have saved one of us a little bit of money.

Yes.

You know, because only one of us has the domain and only one of us paid a thousand dollars for it. So, you know.

Yeah, well, I go, I mean, I have my kids, you know, domains I got. And I get, you know, I keep, keep them up to date. I think it's very important for them. They get. My daughter has her portfolio up on her domain name and all that kind of stuff. And my son, once, he kind of is not a knucklehead anymore. He'll, he'll, he'll realize the value of it too and build something up there and when he gets a little older. So. Yes. Anyway, that, that's, that's just. And I tell that a lot. I don't know why, nobody probably cares, but I think it's a good story.

No, it's, I think it's good to own your own domain because, like, I feel like if I had told the other Dave Hamilton, look, I'm willing to spend a thousand bucks on this. When we were at 300, he would have been like, oh, okay, I'm out. You know, like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not willing to spend a thousand on it. Like, okay, great. Yeah, from. Yeah. So. But then I would have gotten it for like 300 instead of a thousand.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well.

And it's a great hub for all your stuff. If you're an entrepreneur. If. Use your business brain for all this kind of stuff. It's, it's like if you go to shannon jean.com you can just see all the projects that I'm, Yeah. I have been involved in or currently.

I need to flesh mine out more. That was one of my 2022 sort of, you know, back burner projects and, and we all know how that went, so.

And I just put up, I just put up the logos and links and that's it. And then I, and then, and then I have a blog and I kind of post stuff from time to time and update it and it works out well. And you know the nice thing about, if you're an author and you sell on Amazon, like a self published, even regular author, you get an author page up on Amazon and you can link your blog right to it. So every time you post something on your personal blog, it goes up on Amazon and it really helps your search engine optimization and it drives a ton of traffic to. I, I, I track it all the time, though. I get a lot of traffic from Amazon that comes into to my website for particular blog posts.

Interesting. It's great.

And it's free and it's part of the thing. And you can go post a five page, you know, paper, and I'm sure you may have that content already and give it away for free and still get access to the author page. And Dave, I know you have one because you and I have co authored a book up on Amazon. Yeah, that's just a nice, a nice way to do it. And sometimes I'll use that link if people are asking about stuff and I'll send them to there. It gives you maybe a little more credibility sometimes. So tip of the day.

That is, that's it. These are great tips, man. I'm ready to wrap the show. I was gonna, I, I do have one little thing that I think will remain little. I am. We are recording this before I leave for Italy. We're going away for 10 days. My daughter lives there now, and, and so, yeah, we're going over to see her and her boyfriend and yeah, hopefully it'll be nice.

That's awesome.

I just came back from Cesar in Las Vegas, and as soon as I came back, I wound up with the flu. I, I presume it wasn't Covid, but I've had Covid twice in the last year. Whatever it was that I had last week, the not Covid that I had was much worse. Like, it knocked me on my butt, man. I, I, one morning I had a fever of about 100 and my heart rate was about 100. Like, resting heart rate, My resting heart rate is in the 60s, man, like, normally. And it might, like, I couldn't sleep because my heart rate was at 100. You know, clearly my body was fighting something. And, and at this point, I can happily say that, you know, it's, it's done. I've got a little lingering congestion, but the fever hasn't been there for days. The cough is pretty much gone. And, you know, like, I haven't taken any meds for anything in, in the last few days. So, like, this is good news. But it really derailed me. And I had planned this where I came back from CES and then had about 10 days in the office, you know, at home, you know, including weekends before we left for Italy, because it was Made clear to me that we were going to be going to Italy in January. I was like, wow, that's a terrible time for me to go anywhere, but okay, that's what we're doing. I got it. Yep. So I. So I wound up this weekend. Freaked out a little bit because it did derail my productivity last week. Like, I needed. There was. I. I literally took a sick day. And. And this weekend, I was supposed to have a bunch of band rehearsals, canceled. All of those. Like, it was just out for the count. And I was like. Even as recently as yesterday morning, I was like, all right, maybe I need to send the family off and maybe I'll follow them in four or five days or something. I'm just too far behind. And I was kind of bummed about that, but I was coming to that realization that that was probably going to be the best thing, because I just can't take another 10 days and be totally derailed. And I thought yesterday morning. And then I. I was like, well, I have a bunch of stuff to do, so if I'm gonna be in the office doing stuff, I'm gonna go be productive. And I did. I turned on some music. Music really helps me focus when I need to, like, power through.

Like, what kind of music?

I can listen to almost anything. I. I like the band Phish, and they. They. They tour a bunch, and they release every single one of their live shows. So I wind up listening to a lot of live fish stuff, which is more instrumental than vocal stuff. But the vocal stuff doesn't distract me most of the time. You know, I can. I can listen to anything I listen to sometimes classical music, but sometimes it'll be like Green Day or REM or Rush or whatever. Like, you know, it's. Yeah, whatever. But it's mostly fish just because they produce a lot of content. Right. So more content, sure. You're gonna get more of my ears. And. And it's new content. Like, I haven't heard these songs before, so sometimes I'll stop and be like, oh, that's interesting what they did with this year. O. Cool. And then it's like, all right, back into work. And music helps me focus. It doesn't distract me. It's. It's. Which is weird. I. I know it's normal for people who were like. Like, you know, I don't know if I'm ADHD or what, but I know that music helps a lot of people that. That have those diagnoses.

Helps me. Helps me, too, big time.

But I'm a musician, and So I know a lot of musicians who can't listen to music when they're trying to do something else because they get distracted by, you know, going deep into that. Like that becomes the thing that's not often. That is not the case for me. And it wasn't yesterday. Super, at a super productive morning, plowed through everything. I went through my email, like I talked about in the last episode and really caught up on all the things that I sort of let fall by the wayside while I was traveling at CES and while I was sick and, and the end of the day, not even the end of the day. By about 3 in the afternoon, I was like, okay, wait a minute, I can go to Italy. I'm going, I'm going to go with the family. I just need to carve out two hours every other day where I'm going to put my AirPods in. I'm going to listen to some music. I'm going to bring an extra screen with me. I have ViewSonic's new VP16 OLED which is a almost 16 inch. They call it a 16 inch. It's like 15 point something OLED screen. You plug it into your laptop, it becomes a second monitor. I am a second monitor person. I've always had two monitors at my workspace. For whatever reason, I am a lot more productive, especially sort of doing that grunt work, that heads down stuff. I'm so much more productive when I can have two screens up for a lot of the things that I do. So I've got that. I'm gonna travel with that. It's a gorgeous screen. This OLED thing, man, it's great. I'm stoked about it. It's cool.

Yep. It's packable. No problem.

It just packs flat and it's cool. It's got a stand. It can be just like an easel type stand where the bottom of the monitor essentially rests on the des. It, it just, you know, has a kickstand sort of thing out the back.

Or would you put a link to that in the show notes?

I will. Or the kickstand can fold out and actually lift the thing up several inches. If you want that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. And it's, it's powered by your computer, so you just need to bring one cable. You plug in, you're going to.

What about a keyboard? What about a keyboard?

You bring a. I'm fine with the. I have a MacBook 2 year old M1 Air, Apple MacBook Air and I like that keyboard. So I don't need to bring a keyboard with me. I'm fortunate in that regard. Yep. But I, you know, I feel like, and, and where we're staying, I, I actually went and looked at the Airbnb listing again. I'm like, okay, where can I carve out, like, a place that's to work? And I know my family would, like, help me and if I needed to carve out the kitchen, because that's the only place they'd be like, all right, well, we'll vacate the kitchen for two hours. We want to make sure you're here. You know, like, they, they would, they would adapt around that if necessary. I don't think that to be the case because we have an extra bedroom in this Airbnb we're renting, so I think that's going to work out. But I really, I, you know, yesterday, going heads down and putting on some music made me realize, okay, I need to do this because I've got a couple of, like, back to back to back trips coming up. I've got, you know, this one, and then I'm home for about three weeks. And then in February, I've got it again end of February into March. I've got to be in, like, Mexico, Vegas, Austin, and I think Houston in a, in a.

So what you're telling me is we're recording or we're shifting their recording dates.

Or we'll record while I'm on the road, which is also fine. Yeah, I, I'm fine recording on the road. I mean, it's not bringing my, my comfy podcast studio I can't do, but I can, I can bring a microphone and I'm technically savvy enough to make a recording work. I've done it. We've done it. You know, it's, it's fine. Yeah, it's no big deal. Cool. But that's great. But it made me realize, like, you know, I need to be intentional about this while I'm traveling so that when I come back, I'm not feeling, like, overwhelmed and everything. Like, like I was, you know, being traveling and then being sick. So I'm like, I learned this about, and I know this about me, but I sort of relearned this about me. I'm curious. You, you travel a bunch and you have a, you know, your house over at Tahoe as well, where you go often. Are you. How do you make sure you're productive when you travel, or are you in a spot where you can afford to not be productive for the times that you're away? From your primary residence.

Yeah, it depends on what's going on, just like you're describing. But oftentimes when I go to our different vacation rentals that we have. Well, those, we run those as businesses, so I'm very productive, but I'm focused on that.

That.

So when I go to Tahoe, my wife and I, we. We both have lists and, oh, this has to get done. This, Got to do this, got to check into this. We want to update this. Maintenance that. Yeah. So we get stuff done, but it's related to those things. I put my other things, typically, like my online stores and things, I'll put them in vacation mode and say, hey, I'm going to go focus on this. And it works out really well.

Okay, so. So you, you kind of punt on. You're able to, at some level, punt on. On the other businesses. I.

Yes, I am.

I am not in that mode entirely. I've got a couple of businesses that I can't just press pause on.

And we've recorded, like, I lock myself into one of the bedrooms and we, We've recorded the podcast up there and I've done different things and certainly take calls and all that kind of stuff. So. But all in all, I try to separate and then focus while I'm up there on, on what's going on around because, yeah, part of the, part of the problem is, and I think it's great that you are going to go because, you know, it's equally as important that you focus on the. How to make the trip productive for your family.

Right.

And yourself.

Yes.

And reset as it is, keeping everything else on track to make work. So, you know, you need to. Sometimes I go up and I wind up not having the best time because I have so much stuff to get done. Of course we've, we've tried to. We're going to go up early, go stay later then, especially if you're having other guests come up, because it. There's nothing worse than having to work on a place when everybody else is partying.

Oh, yeah, you can't do that. Not productively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I agree with you that, you know, the, the having some downtime is a good thing. And I think my, my issue here is I was enforced downtime for about four days and I didn't have enough time because I was sick. You know, it was like, yeah, I traveled to ces, which is sort of like I did not carve out. I carved out work time while I was there, but it was to do work there. It's kind of like your vacation home type work. Like, it was like, here are things that are going to be about ces, but I really didn't carve out time. I don't even know that I would have been able to, to really do anything other than just like casually triaging email. And I need it to, in order to keep myself from feeling like getting to that point where I'm just overwhelmed. I need to, I need to be more than casual about it on a more regular basis, you know, and especially right now. So it was like, all right, how can I do this? I can make this work. Because then it was like, well, even if I, if I shorten my trip by four or five days, well, now I'm traveling internationally and I'm only going to be gone for five days. Like that's going to burn. Yeah, exactly. Like, what's the point of this? Yeah, yeah.

And you won't be as productive.

No.

You know, no, it's just not, it's not worth it.

It's not worth it. Yeah, exactly. So I was happy that I had that sort of realization yesterday that was like, wait, if I just focus, it doesn't matter where I am. I mean, parts of it do and parts of it I'm certainly more efficient in my environment, but enough of it I can be productive with, especially in today's world. You know, we talked about email being synced to your server. Everything synced to my server now, like all my documents, all that stuff. It doesn't matter what computer I have, as long as I have, you know, a computer that's logged into my stuff, which all of my computers are, I'm generally good to go. So I'll report back when we get back. But that's great. Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good about it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, if you have productivity tips you want to share, please send them in feedbackusinessbrain Show. And you know, go, go register all your kids domain names. That's really important. You can thank me sometime later in the future. And you know, we're doing these either.

Use namecheap or what I've been using is Cloudflare. I know they're more of a like DNS management company, but you get the management for free and their domain registrations are at their cost, so. Oh, that's cool.

That's good to know.

Yep.

Yeah. And you know, we've been doing these bite sized shows 15, 20 minutes, getting some great feedback. Remember, if you comment to feedback at Business Show. No, that's not that's no name Businessbrain show. And we mentioned your email on on the on an episode like our good friend Jeff B. That sent in some comments and gave us some tips about show length. We're gonna put him down as the entrance for the MacBook Air that we're giving away in 2023.

Amazing.

Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah, make sure you send in your email feedback businessbrain Show. Make sure you keep living that charmed life, and we'll see you next week.