Sean Coyne: Getting Many Things Done At Once

Hey, fastlaners, Ryan here. And if you've been listening to the show for a while, you might not know that we have a second show called Freedom Fastlane tv. It's our video show where we go through recent news items and I give my opinion on a variety of different things as well as go through case studies and answer your questions. You can get that on your podcasting app. So you just search for FFL TV or you can find it on YouTube. Just search for Freedom Fast Lane. Hey everybody. Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran and here we talk about building businesses and investing the profits. Today I'm going to be joined by my dear friend, business partner, confidant, Sean Coyne. You might remember Sean from. He was my business partner on Zen ActiveSport, which is a yoga products business that we built and sold together. And Sean has one of the most popular podcasts here on Freedom Fast Lane because we walk through really the step by step process to all the little intricate details to building a six figure, seven figure physical products business. Sean is kind of my go to guy for going into the nitty gritty. He's, he's the details side of my crazy creative side. He also happens to be the person who just gets an insane amount of quality work done. He manages multiple projects. He has his own projects. He, the guy, the guy just gets so much done. And I have asked him regularly, how is it that you were able to manage so many projects and not drive yourself crazy? So he comes on the podcast today. He's doing a solo podcast where he's explaining exactly how he determines what he's getting done, what he delegates, and how he determines what is important. So having him do a solo podcast allows me to spearhead some initiatives here at Freedom Fast Lane, specifically Freedom Fast Lane TV, which is now on, on iTunes and on YouTube. And it also allows you to hear from somebody that isn't named Ryan Daniel Moran. And what Sean is going to be going through, first of all is the Eisenhower matrix, which is a tool used for determining what is important. And it's something that Sean uses extensively. And I thought this was especially relevant for entrepreneurs because we are notoriously starters. But then we create this swamp of things to do because we love to start new things and not complete any of them. So, so what happens for most of us is we get overwhelmed and we react to things and then we say, what the heck am I doing with my life? And we start having this feeling of we're doing a lot of things, but nothing is really getting done. And Sean is a very specific way that he trudges through that mud and he's gonna be sharing that with us today on the podcast. And this would be a really helpful thing for you to give to your critical team members and have them listen to and have them report back to you on how they're accomplishing the things that are on their to do list. If you can get your team rallying behind this type of a concept, you as a team will get so much more done. So I hope you enjoy this chat from Sean Coyne.

Hey guys, I want to talk to you all about some tips, tricks and tactics that you can use to be more productive and better manage your time. So I want to start off with one of my favorite tools, which is the Eisenhower Matrix. So today we're going to talk about why it even matters, what it actually is and how you can use it. So why does the Eisenhower Matrix matter? And I guess a better question is why does. Why do you even need such a tool? So one of my favorite quotes is an old Chinese proverb. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. And while it's super inspirational, it doesn't really tell you how to determine when to plant a tree today. What if you have other things to do? What if you should have planted the tree five days ago and now you're going to miss your tree growing plan? So I think a lot of times it's easy to see quotes like this and say, oh, that's great, I'm going to do everything right now. And that's really not the case. About a year ago, things were going pretty well. My projects at work were going well. I was launching a men's skincare line. I had coaching. Clients.

Kind of were fizzling down from the sale of the yoga company. All of those things were going well. However, they were taking up every minute of every single day. And I was completely exhausted. And I didn't really know how to sort that out because in the past, kind of brute force had always worked for me. If I wanted to get an A in a course in college, I would just study hard and I would get an A. If I wanted to get a new job, I would just apply and work really hard to improve my resume and I would get a job. And that works great until there's too many options and you have to determine which one to do. You can't just brute force everything or you find yourself working till midnight, getting up at 5am, not exercising all those Things that we know are not good for us. So I found this tool really helpful in addition to a number of other changes in determining what things I should be working on, what things I should be working on up until midnight, Is it important enough for me to do that? And what things should I be pushing off?

So the Eisenhower matrix has four different categories as urgent and not urgent, and important and not important. And each of those will determine which bucket a task would fall into. So the urgent and important buckets are the things that you need to do now. Your house is on fire, you need to resolve that now. There's a crisis. There is, you know, a quality with a core, you know, value of your product or business or your job.

Those are the things you want to do now, not urgent and important. So those are things that while are important to you and your goals, they don't have to be done today. So things like exercising and planning and research, they don't be done today, but they do need to be done. So deciding which for me means scheduling is really kind of the bucket that those items would fall into. So things that are urgent but not important, and again, not important to you, or that the level of quality would be more acceptable if it were done 80% correct, would that be acceptable? Those are items that you'll want to delegate. Things like scheduling your meetings, administrative work, tasks that are easily repeatable, and we'll talk more about that. The delegation requires coaching and training, but those are items that they don't have to be. Those are not your core competencies as an individual. They don't have to be 100% perfect. Those are the tasks you want to delegate. And finally, things that are not urgent and not important, go to the don't do bucket. And that's a lot easier said than done. A really easy example is junk mail. Instead of just archiving it every single time, just unsubscribe. So now you don't have to deal with that junk mail in the future. Tasks that are causing your projects to kind of grow out of control, adding on exciting new features and benefits for either your customers or your project.

Really should be handled in the decide portion. Shouldn't ever make it to the urgent and important person urgent and important.

Portion and really are just taking you away from your focus. Busy work's another easy one. We all like to feel busy, but if you don't have any urgent items, if you've done all your scheduling, if you are successfully delegating, that time is much better spent on something that could fall back into the decide bucket, Maybe reading a book, going for a run. Not just doing work for the sake of doing work. Thinking, does this really, you know, lead to the goals that I want to get to?

So let's talk about what those different portions of the Eisenhower matrix actually mean. So urgent and important. And we kind of touched on all these, but I want to dig into them a little bit deeper. These are tasks that are urgent to you and important to you. So this could be something like you are delivering a project at the end of the week or you're about to launch a new product at the end of the week and you have to work on it now. It's not something that's months away that you can schedule for. I'll give you some tips on how to handle these things. But ideally there would be as few of these as possible. Hopefully you are successfully delegating and planning for the important and not important portions so that things that are important don't become urgent.

So the ones that are not urgent but important, these will kind of always remain. And it's really going to be different for every person. It could be spending time with your family, it could be volunteering, it could be exercising, it could be reading a book, it could be planning your week out, it could be researching a new competitor. Any number of things that don't have to be done today, but if you don't do them, you're really not going to be heading in the path that you would like to.

Items that are urgent but not important. So these, again, keep remembering this is to you. They're urgent to you, but they're not important. So this might be, you need to set up a meeting by the end of the week. It's not important as to what day, it's really not important as to which time. Like you probably don't want it at 4am but through coaching you can kind of help your team understand where your expectations are and help them kind of achieve a new level success. So when you think about an item and it comes up and you say, oh, this needs to be done, but it really doesn't help me get to where I want to go. This might be a good option for delegation.

Finally, the don't do category. Not urgent to you, not important to you. This might be something as easy as saying, that's really not in my wheelhouse. I think you should talk to a different team. These are items that someone might have an urgency for and it might be important to someone. But as to you and the scope that you've kind of defined for yourself and your goals. These are items that you shouldn't be doing.

So none of that's helpful to apply. So I want to kind of walk through each task and give you a couple tips on how you can apply each kind of bucket once you've determined where it falls. So for the do now category, those are things that are urgent and important. Couple tips. I would say avoiding distraction has been really helpful and that's going to be different. All of these are going to be different for every person. But for me, that might be working from home and closing the door and putting my headphones in and just eliminating the possibility of anyone even finding me or distracting me, closing my Skype, turning off my phone, shrinking outlook so I can really focus. Because if it's urgent and important, then we shouldn't be distracted by something that's urgent and not important, like maybe someone's Skype question or important but not urgent, like maybe I really want to watch a movie and relax. If you push all those things aside till you are clearly focused on the urgent and important task, you can be done with it quickly and efficiently so that you can go back to kind of a more stable workload. I've also found that bucketing tasks has been helpful. If you have a handful of urgent emails that you have to send out today, and those are important for your progress, set aside, you know, a half hour to, say, send emails. That way later on in the day you're not getting distracted by thinking, oh, I need to send this email now. Because you know in your mind you have set aside time for that item. And finally, much easier said than done is just preventing items from becoming urgent that would leave them in the not urgent and important bucket, which you can schedule for, is much easier to manage because then you know how much you're going to need to do each day. So some ways that you can do that are just recognizing risk early on. If you are launching a new product and you realize that there is a transportation strike, you may need to reset the expectations of your customers or your team as to when that might arrive or early on instead of two days before it's supposed to arrive and realize it's going to be four days late.

So preventing that urgent will be very helpful. So the side category, these are things that are not urgent but are important to you. So I found a lot of success in protecting my calendar. So I will schedule time to go to the gym. I will schedule time to watch videos on pluralsight, I will schedule time to really do anything that I deem important. That way, when I have items that I'm not sure if they're urgent or important, I can look and see what do I have scheduled. Is it more important than that? Is it more important and urgent than that? And if no, it's really easy to figure out what bucket it falls into. And I do that by planning the entire week out. Usually I'll do this on Sunday. I'll sit down watching tv, spend maybe a half hour just sorting through all of my tasks that I finished up on Friday, figuring out what I need to do and accomplish in the next week, and making sure that I place it on my calendar. That way, when I come into the office on Monday, I don't have to think about where do I start. All I have to do is follow the guidelines I've already set up for myself.

And the third point would be, when you're setting those guidelines and those deadlines is to make them achievable. And a lot of times that means not setting the most aggressive timeline you can think of. So if you can create a new website in, I don't know, four days, and that will mean you spend eight hours a day.

Only work on the website, so you're probably going to be up to like 10 at night, that might be great. Except the instant you finish that, you're going to have another one and you're never going to have time to recover. You're never going to have time for the urgent and important items that pop up. You're never going to have time to correctly plan. So setting up an achievable deadline that will leave you kind of the slack you need for other issues to arise. For the important things that might not be related to that project or that task has also been really helpful.

So the delegate category is one that requires kind of a different way of thinking. So these are tasks that are urgent but not important. So we'll talk about this more a little bit on. But one of the best ways to delegate is really invest in your team or your contractors and grant them the authority. And that also means granting them the authority to make mistakes. And if you continually take back projects and say, this is wrong, I'm going to do it and you fix it, and don't explain or don't coach them on how to do it better the next time, you're not really delegating, you're just adding a lot more work for yourself, you're going to frustrate them, they're not going to continue to work with you. Granting them the authority to complete the task comes along with granting them the authority to deal with the consequences. That doesn't mean deal with getting yelled at. It might mean deal with, you know, having a meeting to figure out how to do it better the next time. That goes hand in hand with providing explicit direction. If you're not giving timelines and expectations as to what the deliverable should look like, you're never going to get what you expect. People can't read minds. It would be interesting if we could. It would be much easier to delegate, but that's just not the case. So if you are finding that you're getting tasks returned to you and you're thinking to yourself, this is not at all what I wanted, or this is totally wrong, then that's on you. You need to do a better job of, you know, having that feedback after the project and say, hey, here are the things that I, as the delegator didn't tell you, and for the next time that I delegate something to you, I'll be more clear on what I want from you. And finally, both of those are pretty negative. So you need to make sure that when you're delegating, when things do go well, or even if things don't go great, but there's portions that go well that you're showing appreciation to your team or the contractor or whoever you're working with, it can be very frustrating. Beyond the opposite side of delegation and having a very broad task handed to you saying, build a website. And if that person is fresh out of college or very junior, they might not push back and say, well, what the heck do you mean, I can't just build a website? Do you want a website built today? That's one page. Do you want it built in a year? That's 4,000 pages. That's a very broad statement. So as you see those kind of things, and that would be a good example, make sure you're showing appreciation. It would be really easy to say, oh, that's a great point. Thank you for bringing that up. That'll keep your team engaged and continue to work with you and grow with you.

So the last category, the don't do it category. So one way that you can determine what you don't do is just establish your own personal boundaries. And I don't mean like your own little bubble or like your own little space, but think like, what are the goals that you have as an individual? If your goal is to provide as much content.

To your community as possible through a number of streams, then maybe writing a Blog is in your scope. But if your goal is to solve the problems of the world by improving technology, writing a blog doesn't really fit into that. So when you start to kind of determine your own personal goals, it becomes a lot easier to establish the boundaries. And when you do come across a boundary and someone wants you to do something, like write a blog article, and you say, well, I don't really think. In your head, you say, I don't think I want to do that. Doesn't meet any of my goals. I don't like to write blog articles. It's not important to me. It seems to be urgent to them, but it's certainly not urgent to me. You want to say yes to the person, but no to the task. So you might say, okay, Michael, that's a great idea. I really agree. Someone should be writing the blog. That's really not my wheelhouse. Why don't you hire someone on Fiverr to do that? Or why don't you go connect with this person? I know they're an expert. So you're not saying no? Because a lot of times when you say, no, that would be inferred that, no, this is a bad idea. You're saying, yes, this is a good idea, just not for me. And that kind of leads into the third and final tip. Let the rubber balls drop. So there's an example that I've heard where a pitching machine is pitching rubber balls and glass balls. So every 10 rubber balls, there's one glass ball, and you as the catcher, need to figure out how to handle that. So you can try and catch every single ball, and you'll probably do that for the first 10, 12 or so. There's no way you're going to catch 10 balls every single time. You're going to start to drop balls and you're going to drop some of the rubber balls, and eventually one of the glass balls is going to drop. But if instead you approach the stream of baseballs coming at you and you say, I'm only going to focus on the glass balls, the rubber balls will be fine. They're not going to make a mess. They're not going to hurt me and focus on the glass balls, you'll have a much better chance of catching all the glass balls, knowing that the rubber balls don't really matter that much. But they will be okay. They'll figure their way out. They're not going to shatter like the glass ball would.

So I just want to end with a last bit of advice, is that all of this requires practice you're not going to delegate perfectly all the time. There's going to be times when you pull something back and say, I'm going to do this. What you really need to do is think about things after the fact. Once you have done that, think about how can I not do that next time? Or if you let something get to the urgent and important category, once you've resolved it, think how could I have prevented that from happening? Over time you'll see kind of those outliers reduce, but it's always going to be a continual process.

So today we talked about the Eisenhower Matrix, why it matters to you, what it actually is and how you can use it in your everyday life. So I hope this has been helpful and I look forward to chatting with you all in the next podcast.

There was actually a study done to analyze how the most meaningful work got done according to this format, the Eisenhower Matrix. And what they found was that the the actual work that mattered was that important but not urgent category. So that category where you're not reacting but you're actually building something is where reaction, real meaningful work gets done. That's when you are planning new initiatives. It's when you're creating new products. It's when you are hiring that important person. These are things that you're not reacting to, but it's you're actually building on top of something. You're building the plan forward. That not urgent but important category is where that gets done. Special thanks to Sean Coyne for hanging out with us here on the podcast. You have heard heard me do the case study of our business together which is an active sports. We actually have a couple of new projects together, Sean and I, which I will be detailing further here on the podcast. One is a physical products company and another is an app that we will be talking about as I release all of the details. But we're still in some of the preliminary things but I will be detailing more of those businesses, they become relevant. So look for that and look for more from Sean and I on those projects here on Freedom Fast Lane and over@freedomfastlane.com also if you like those types of case studies, if you like hearing kind of the step by step format and the behind the scenes of what building those businesses actually looks like. Subscribe to Freedom Fastlane tv. It's our other podcast. You can get it in the same podcast app you're using right now, itunes or Stitcher or whatever. Or you can watch it over@capitalism.com or you can watch it on YouTube just search for Freedom Fast Lane, but we go through a case study every week. We also answer your questions and look at relevant things that are happening right now in your business. So if you like more topical, timely and step by step training, you'll definitely want to check out Freedom Fast Lane tv. It's a great compliment to what we're doing here on the podcast. Hope you enjoyed today's episode with Sean. As always, we appreciate you subscribing and leaving reviews for the show. Please share this with your team and with someone that you think would find value in it, and we'll see you guys on the next show.