The Most Organized Man in America - w/ Andrew Mellen

Foreign.

Welcome everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Young. I don't usually say that though, actually.

I know.

And Justin Gerard. So, Justin, we're gonna have a different kind of show today and I hope people like this. So we normally always talking about consumer packaged goods, but in the world of consumer packaged goods, there's two types of people in that business. There's. There's the big multinational companies, the big firms, and they've got layers and layers of people. And then there's the entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurs. We are. We are a different breed. You've been living around me now for years and you can see that. And we are a different breed of people. And the way that I describe myself to people is when people say, why are you an entrepreneur? And the reason I say this, because I say because I'm unemployable. And being unemployable as entrepreneurs, there's a few things that we all have that we all share in common. One of those things is almost all of us knew by the time we were five years old that we were the thing that didn't match with everyone else. We probably had all been accused of having attention deficit disorder at some point in our childhood or in our later years. And entrepreneurs all believe they have a secret. And it is that I have a secret that you don't have. And the secret I have is that I know how to do something nobody else knows how to do. Or I know how to do something better than anybody else knows how to do. And that's my secret. And along with that comes some other problems. And I'm going to get to our guest here and this will all. I'm just kind of setting the table here. Along with that comes the issue of when you become an entrepreneur. You start off and you have no money and plenty of time. And then you start to trade the time for money and eventually you trade away all the time for money. And then you go back and you figure out, how can I get more time? And this is how your life becomes complicated. Because we start to build. Think about, we start off and we build a three bedroom house and then we bolt on an additional, and then we put on a screen porch and then we put a dormer on the roof. And this is how we start to build our lives. We start to just pile on these things where eventually we need to just tear the house down and build a bigger house. So what happens is a couple of things happen. We try to solve the complexity of our entrepreneurial life with more complexity. But what we really need to do, the only solution to complexity is simplicity. To deal with complexity, you must simplify. To grow, you must simplify. The other thing that we do as entrepreneurs is we go headlong into something and we do something that everybody tells us can't be done. Of course this is a dumb idea. Why would anybody quit their job and go off and start an advertising agency? What makes you qualified to run an advertising agency? Well, the answer is nothing at the moment, but I'll figure it out. So what happens is we go off and we start something. Maybe it's a new product and we launch a new product, and it works. So then we do the next thing, and it works. But guess what? When we do the next thing, everybody tells us again, it can't be done. And then we go and do it. And now we do another thing, and people say, well, okay, I know you got that one and you got this one, but this is a really bad idea, this one. You're never going to get this one. And then we go do it, and it works, and here we are. So what happens is we tend to become our own echo chamber because we tend to think. My advice is the only advice that matters. Because everybody in my life for the past 15, 20 years has been telling me, you're wrong, it can't be done. But I've done it. And now I'm sitting there and I'm saying, okay, well, let's see, I'm pretty rich and you're not. Why should I? So we tend to not take advice from people. But what we need to learn how to do is we need to understand. Yes, we're unemployable. Yes, we have done. We have. We have beat the odds. Yes, we don't fit into polite society on many occasions. And we have a tendency to take our own counsel because if we didn't take our own counsel, we wouldn't be here. At some point, we have to discover that I, as this unique snowflake entrepreneur, which I'm here to tell all of you, you are not unique snowflakes. Because if you put a room together with all of us, which I do on a frequent basis, you take all of us who are unique snowflakes in our old world, and you stick us all in the room together, and we're all the same. We just do different things, but we're. But we're the same type of person. So at some point, we have to make a transition, and that transition is one we have to learn how to simplify. And two, we have to learn to take the advice of other experts. We have to understand there are people in the world who know how to do things that I don't know how to do. Sure, aim as an incredible shock to me, by the way, because I assumed I was the only person who knew how to do anything because everybody told me everything I'm trying to do was a stupid idea. So setting that, that long introduction, I'm going to introduce our guest now. Our guest is Andrew Mellon. Justin, tell us a little bit about Andrew. Let's get us started here.

Well, I would normally, I'd like to introduce our guests, but, but Andrew, you have such a great story after going to your site and hearing your background that I think a lot of entrepreneurs will really connect with.

Very similar to me.

Very similar. Right. It's colorful. It's got a lot of twists and turns. It's, it was, it, it was a journey of discovery. It appears to be that I think a lot of entrepreneurs can connect with. So if you don't mind, could you tell our listeners a little bit about.

Your story, the Andrew Mellon story.

Right.

Sure. Because we haven't seen the movie yet. We're waiting.

Yeah, well, you know, it's still in development. So.

All right.

In that world of, in that world of entrepreneurship. Right. I mean, it's been optioned several times, but it's never actually made it onto the screen. So, you know, the work that I'm doing today is not the work that I ever thought I was going to do. And Mark, you're exactly right. Right. I mean, I have been an entrepreneur since I had a paper route. I sort of answered to somebody, but I didn't. And I had certainly jobs when I was in high school, you know, working at gas stations, working at restaurants and doing that kind of stuff. But the first half of my professional life was spent in the theater as a director, as an actor, producer, playwright. And so I've always been, I've always had to hustle for work and make work where there either was an opportunity or the glimmer of an opportunity or a no. And my job was to turn a no into a yes. And so 27 years ago now, I was laid off from a theater that I was running in Seattle, Washington, and I got a gig co producing an award ceremony at the Kennedy center back in D.C. so I went back to take on this job. One of our awardees was a Nobel Peace Prize winner. I had to go to his office to get some photographs so I could put Together, a slide show. And the process of pulling together the photographs, which were a mess. They were mislabeled, misfiled. They'd been lent out, never returned. He and his wife said, would you like to organize our photographs for us? And I said, that would be a tremendous honor. I would love to do that for you. Because my plan was to move back to New York when the gig was over in D.C. and so we made a day for me to go to work. The day before I was supposed to show up, phone rang. Their assistant said, something unexpected has come up. We need to reschedule for a month later. Fine. This happened three times. The fourth time the phone rang. They said, when we're ready to proceed, we'll get back in touch with you. So I actually never went to work for the. This Nobel Peace Prize winner. But in those four months, I told every living human being, I've got this amazing gig. I'm going to create a comprehensive photographic archive for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Which led my friend to refer me to her accountant who needed a filing system. So I built that for her. Then she started referring her clients to me. So people would show up on my doorstep, literally, with like a duffel bag full of receipts, letters in the duffel bag. They hadn't filed their taxes in five years. Letters from the IRS or the state tax agency. They're freaking out. They would say to me, I don't want to go to jail, and I don't know what to do. I'm so overwhelmed, I'm frozen. Can you make sense out of this paperwork before something really bad happens? So I'd organize their receipts, put it in QuickBooks, give it to the accountant. The accountant will file their taxes. And they're like, oh, my God, you're amazing. You saved my life. They would tell all their friends, you'll never believe I gave this guy a pile of garbage. He turned it into my tax returns. He's a genius. And that is how this practice that I've been doing now for almost three decades, it's mind blowing. Started was all word of mouth, and it was just about solving problems and making order out of chaos. Right? I mean, just. It's so often, I think each of us, right, we. We have our own blind spots where we can't see the forest for the trees. And with some objectivity, somebody, as you pointed out, right? I mean, another entrepreneur, probably more than somebody who tends to think in the box. Only another entrepreneur might be able to look at that and go, oh, if you just shifted this 17 degrees. Everything would open up, you'd have a clear path forward. But we can't see it because we're like, I'm trying to make this fit. Why doesn't this fit? This should fit. It's fit before, you know, and we just keep hammering at it. And so that became my practice as a solopreneur at the very beginning was solving problems for people who had run into a roadblock. Whether that was on the B2B side or the B2C side. I was in people's homes. I was also in people's offices.

Now, by the way, Andrew, we call that it's difficult to read the label when you're stuck inside the jar.

There you go.

Yep.

And that's. That so happens to entrepreneurs because you're in the jar, right?

Yes, you are.

So and you came from Detroit.

Yes, I did.

Now where are you now? You're not in Detroit now, I take it?

No, I'm in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Ah, okay. And I'm also in Clearwater, Florida. Clearwater Beach.

Amazing.

So yeah.

So why haven't we met before?

Kind of get my point. I'm kind of curious to how we haven't crossed each other. Yeah. You were an actor at one point and a director. And let me tell people, anybody who's in entertainment and I've done entertainment, I have a lot of friends in entertainment. You're an entrepreneur.

Oh, yeah.

Whether you're a musician or an actor or a director, you're any of it looking for your next meal. Yeah. And whatever it is you're doing, no matter how good that show is or how good that gig can be, it can be over tonight. Yes. So it's very entrepreneurial.

Yeah, absolutely.

So. So tell us what you're doing now. What, what does your practice do for people?

So I help. I mean I still am all about solving problems. Slightly different focus. I still on the B2C side, we run our own programs. We have a flagship program called the unstuff your life system, which is a 10 week program where we take people from chaos to some form of control where they, they shift their mindset and their entire approach to physical clutter to begin with. I always say it's always the stuff behind the stuff that is keeping people stuck. So even though we meet on the surface, with the physical obstacles and the clutter, it's typically we get deep pretty quickly and so we change how you think about, feel about and interact with stuff. And that's what I do on the B2C side. On the B2B side. I'm often speaking at conferences, I'm doing corporate training, where we're looking at how you think about, feel about, and interact with time. So most businesses live in that narrative. Not that individuals don't as well, but most businesses live in that narrative of too much to do, not enough time. And I help turn that around for them, and I help them figure out what doesn't need to be done at all, what doesn't need to be done by them, and what does need to be done by them and how we elevate that and prioritize that.

So talk to us. Let's back up for just a minute and talk to us about people that are getting stuck on stuff. Sure, let's. Let's open that conversation up for a minute. What does that mean?

Well, you know, I mean. So let's start with the organizational triangle. One home for everything. Like with, like, something in, something out. First two legs are how you get organized. Everything has one home. All, like, objects live together. And I'll break those down for you just a second. Something in, something out is how you stay organized. So it's really three rules will get you and keep you organized. One home for everything means everything has one home, only one home. So where you keep your keys can be different from where I keep my keys. But your keys have a home, my keys have a home. They can only ever be one of two places in our hand unlocking something or in their home. You apply that rule, you'll find anything in 30 seconds or less, guaranteed.

So let me ask you a question real quick. I can literally, I could hand Justin my wallet right now, and I could tell him in what order my credit cards and identification are in in the wallet. Not just where my wallet is, but the driver's license here. Amex card is here. Behind the Amex card is this card. Is that obsessive? Is that ridiculous, or is that the kind of stuff you're talking about?

Well, let's not. We don't need to label it or judge it. Right? It works for you. It feels as you've described it. It feels very comfortable. It doesn't feel like an imposition. And so knowing where everything is is the baseline. You have taken it a few levels beyond that, which is awesome. I, like you, can tell you exactly what's in my wallet, exactly where, in which pouch and which little sleeve it's in. Everybody doesn't need to live that way. They do need to know where their wallet is. And everything that should be in the wallet should be in the wallet. Their driver's license shouldn't be in the bottom of their bag or in a pocket or, you know, in a sport coat hanging up in the closet.

So.

That'S the baseline of everything. Having one home, everything. And all of your, all of the siblings being together. Right. So I often say we don't want to keep most of the tools in the toolbox in the garage, but we keep the Phillips head screwdriver in the junk drawer in the kitchen because we got a story about the knobs in the kitchen always being a little loose. Don't want to go all the way out to the garage. This is good time management. It's actually right at my fingertips when I need it. The problem is you don't remember your hack. So you go to the garage looking for the Phillips head, you don't find it. You might even go to the hardware store and pick up a new screwdriver. And then three weeks later, you're rifling through that drawer. You move the pizza delivery menus out of the way, the leftover Ikea hardware, maybe a few bread twist ties, some dead batteries, a couple of dried out pens. There's the Phillips head screwdriver. And chances are your first thought is not.

Aha.

Your first thought is probably, who's the idiot that left it here? Why did they put it back where it goes? Your second thought is, oh, great, wait, that was my great idea. The third one is one of your 200 lies. And that is now that I've remembered this, I'll never forget it.

And this, this, this makes a ton of sense to me. So my wife actually thinks I'm bizarre, but she understands it because I've ritualized everything. My morning is a ritual. My, my keys, my wallet, everything about me is sitting in the exact same spot. Spot?

Yep.

Every night when I come home. And by the way, if my wife goes and grabs one item and moves it, then she throws my whole morning off the following morning because it's like, this is gone, what happened?

Right.

But that's the kind of stuff you're talking about. And for me, I did it one, because I do have a million things going on in my head. Sure. And the, the second reason is I try to set up systems. Systems and tell me if this makes sense. I try to set up systems so that I do not use up decision making power and do not use up my, my executive function on unimportant things. Is that so? If you, Is that similar to your program?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You never want to solve the same problem more than once. Right. And everything needs to be systematized. That's, that's the path to efficiency. And of course, nobody wants to become a robot necessarily. And what you're describing is a system that works for you. And somewhere between you and your wife, there's a hybrid version that works for both of you so that she doesn't feel penned in by your precision and you don't feel compromised by her sometimes lack of precision or not the same degree or the same kind of precision maybe that you employ. Right. So that's, that's the synthesis about keeping a happy relationship. And the precision is what we're always aiming for, again, to a level of personal comfort. Because if it's onerous to maintain, nobody's going to do it. Even if it's the most efficient way of doing something, if it feels burdensome, if you've got some resistance to it that's worth recognizing and interacting with to find. Where is, where is the line where you have zero resistance to adopting this behavior and turning it into a habit? And that is your sweet spot. It's anyone's sweet spot. Right. Like, where is that place? That's where I'm. That's where I'm trying to coach people and guide them towards so that they can find that for themselves.

So, Justin, you might notice, probably notice this, my wife refers to how I dress for work as my work uniform.

Yes.

Because I dress for work in two ways. I either wear the same, almost the same thing every day, or I wear a suit, which to me is an easy uniform.

Right.

So it's either these type of pants with one of these shirts or grab a suit off the rack. Because suits are like, to me, suits are granimals. You just take them off and they work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I do that because I don't want to spend energy in the morning picking out what I'm going to wear.

And we talk about this all the time. Right. And, and it should be for every individual. But even bringing it back around the beginning of entrepreneurs, everything that an entrepreneur is trying to do is great freedom that would drives their being is creating freedom. And so what you're talking about now is now leveraging simplification now to create more freedom. These systems are simplifying life so that there is more freedom for other things. But that's the goal. And that's when you talk about, Andrew, that concept of creating that system, of to get rid of the resistance, because that now it's free. Now you're free to do Other things.

Exactly.

Refer to it as, we refer to it as the Four Freedoms. The Dan Sullivan four freedoms, which is Dan. I don't know if you know Dan.

Sullivan, but I know of him. I don't know him.

Good. Very close friend of mine. And Dan's four freedoms are freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationships and freedom of purpose. And that real entrepreneurs are in search of those four freedoms all the time.

Yes.

Yep.

So now let's go to the other side. We talked about the stuff. Now the other side was what now?

Time.

About time.

Yeah.

Okay.

Time and productivity, efficiency, friction. And so I mean it's my, my latest book, Calling Bullshit Unbusy is all about the eight deadly time thieves. Interruptions over committing, poor planning, multitasking, meetings, email, social media and procrastination. And addressing all of those to again eliminate any friction points, any bottlenecks from your day, from your life, from your business. That's. So we address all of those. Sorry.

Run through those for us. Give us a little, little, little snippet on each one.

Sure. Well, I mean, interruptions are probably the biggest time thief. And it's all about not having good, clear boundaries and a culture that reinforces or rewards interruptions. And the only way you can eliminate interruptions is to change the culture. So whether that's the culture at home or the culture at work, if you're working from home, the idea that, that it's okay for people to just say, hey, I'm so sorry to bother you, when in fact if you were really sorry to bother me, you wouldn't be bothering me. Right. But it's the way that we, it's the way we manipulate language. Right. To like to minimize the consequences for us as the interrupter and to get a pass that it's like, well, I said I'm sorry, so it's okay. I have to say that I'm not a big fan of that idea of like it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. I think it's probably better to ask for permission. Right. I think if you want your boundaries to be respected, it's. I think it's useful to respect other people's boundaries in anticipation of them respecting yours.

Right.

So if you're going, if you're going to be the get out guy, don't be that guy who interrupts everybody else.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Okay, what's our next one?

Over committing. And that is just, that's another form of people pleasing and raising your hand and volunteering for things that you get that little dopamine rush of putting your hand up. And then when it's time to actually deliver, you're dealing with that time compression of I've overextended myself, there's too many things to do now. I don't know how to prioritize. And you get into that cycle of taking care of everybody else's agenda first. And then when everything else is done, another one of our 200 lies. Right. Oh, I'm going to do my real work. Now that everybody's happy and satisfied, everybody will leave me alone. And I can really focus in and do my real work now at 9 o' clock at night or on a Saturday morning. Not a sustainable model for success.

So we refer to that as one of the things we refer to as every yes is a no and every no is a yes.

Yep.

Because every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else.

Yep.

Yeah. And I say every time you say no, you're saying yes to something that you value more. Right. Or so that's the glass half empty, glass half full. The glass half full. The glass half empty mindset is looking at what you're missing out on the glass half full is I've already committed to these things. These things are already aligned with my values. They're important to me. Why did they suddenly become diminished in importance? Because something new and shiny and flashy appeared on the horizon.

So another really close friend of mine, wonderful guy I know if you know him or not, his name is Joe Polish.

I don't.

Joe Polish is a really big name in the personal development world. Cool. He runs Genius Network. And Joe has a really. I love Joe's approach to this because Joe's approach to this is a yes isn't good enough that you only respond to the hell yes.

Yep.

And that's Joe's approach. If I can't say hell yes, I want to do that, then he says I don't do it.

Right.

Let's go to your next one.

Sure. We've got multitasking, which the brain science tells us is actually a lie. You cannot do open heart surgery and bake a cake at the exact same time. You can do them sequentially, but you cannot do them simultaneously. They did a study at the University of London with 1100 workers attempting to multitask with electronic media. And they discovered that it created a greater decrease in IQ than people who were high on marijuana or hadn't slept for 24 hours. Both of those groups of people functioned at a higher level than somebody who was attempting to multitask with electronic media.

So I can add to that that as my background is neuroscience and psychology, as about 3% of the population can do multitasking, statistically, the problem is, and one of my colleagues here, we're just talking about his wife texting and driving because she thinks that she can do that. And the problem with only 3% can do it is 80% believe they're in the 3%. And this is, by the way, Andrew, this is the same problem we have with IQ. Almost 80% of America rates themselves as above average IQ, which would mean then there's a new average. So sometimes we overestimate our ability to do things. I agree with you. I think multitasking for the vast majority of people, multitasking is a. Is a lot.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, then we've got meetings, you know, which 95% of those do not need to happen. No meeting happens without an agenda. Agendas are distributed at least 24 hours prior to a meeting. No more than 72 hours. Sweet spot is 48 hours before the meeting. I don't want you spitballing. I don't care how talented you are. I don't want your best guests in the meeting. I want your best work. So I want you to show up knowing what we're there to discuss and work on and ready to do the work. And if we don't have an agenda, we don't actually have a meeting.

So we do something. I'm going to add to this. We do something in the meetings that we call an impact filter. And this is a Dan Sullivan thing. And the impact filter is basically a little mini agenda that you can just write out with a pen. Let's type out a whole agenda. But it basically is what are we going to talk about? What are the things we want to accomplish? And then at the bottom of it, it says, what is the best outcome that we hope for in this meeting? And then under that, it says, what is the worst outcome if we do not have the meeting? Now what we find out is that people can't come up with the worst outcome. So it's. So you're telling me if we don't have this meeting, nothing bad's going to happen.

Right.

So why are we having a meeting?

Exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think the other benefit of this tool school and that we've seen here is not only does it lay that out so in the name, the filter, it allows the individual to understand, is this worth it? But it also makes them list what the success criteria will be. So what is going to make this exactly a good meeting. What does it look like and why we're here? So they have to think through every aspect of the outcome before they get into the room for everyone's time. Right. So it's not even just an agenda. It takes it to that next level of understanding the why and what the trend.

Yeah.

Because instead of saying what we will talk about, it says, what is the outcome that we're anticipating?

Exactly. Yes.

All right, let's go to your next one.

Sure. Then we've got emails, you know.

Sorry, how many email do you get today?

A few. I mean, at least 300.

About 300. How about you, Andrew? How many emails do you get a day?

I'd say probably 150 to 200.

Yeah, I'm around 400. 400 plus.

Yep.

So what are we going to do with email?

Well, the number one tip that I tell people is always don't, don't read your email if you don't have time to read it and reply to it. So at best you're wasting the time reading it because you're going to have to reread it. At worst, you're upset by what you've read and now you can't concentrate on what you need to be concentrating on because you're caught in that little loop of upset. So that's, that's one thing that you can do and the other, I mean, there's several things you can do. You can certainly automate your emails so that they, you apply rules or filters to get emails out of your inbox using AI. I mean, it's a low level, it's a, you know, it's an if then construct. I mean, it's a form of AI, but it sort of predates the AI that we're talking about these days.

Right? Yeah.

And then I, I also, I check email three times a day, which is sufficient for me because I mean, email is not my preferred mode of communication. If something were truly urgent, sending me an email is the worst way to get my attention. So if you needed to get me, you would text me or you would call me and otherwise I'll get to you when I get to you. I mean, I'm not. There's nothing that I'm doing that is so time sensitive that, that an email is going to be the way for us to be put on alert that there's an urgent activity that's coming in. We also, I moved my team off of email for internal communications and moved us onto Slack about three years ago. And that was a total game changer to get out of the inbox. So the only emails that I get today are from people who don't work with me.

Okay.

You like Slack a lot?

I do, I do, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's great to be able to keep the threads of communication by, by channel. And we, you know, our, our hack is to give everything a headline. So as we're reading through the threads, it's also very clear about what we're going to find there. And we only tag people. It eliminates all that CCBCC stuff. So the only people who are tagged with something are the people who actually have something to do do with the task at hand. Anybody can go through the channel if they want to get caught up on what the channel's activities are, but you're not getting constantly pinged by things that you don't, you don't need to know about unless you need to know about.

Evan Kelly create Slack Somehow, for some reason I'm thinking that he created that. All right, what's your next item then?

We've got social media.

That's a time sucker.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you use social media for work, that's one thing. If you're using it, you know, to kill time, and I don't think anybody has enough time to murder it. Right. If you, if you are spending your time just scrolling through social media, that could be redirected. I mean, if we go to the Eisenhower quadrants, right? I mean, that is the lower right hand quadrant. It is not important and not urgent and it's just a waste of time. It's, it's the 21st century version of channel surfing. So if you, if there's a reason to be on social media for work or, or for pleasure and you have budgeted time for it, that's one thing. But getting lost down the rabbit holes of the various social media platforms is just, it's just a waste of time.

Now you know what's happened to us? My, my. Because neither one of us use Facebook hardly at all. And we'll miss family functions now because that's people's method of sending out an invitation.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

That we're going to have a family picnic next Friday at Such and Such park and they tag everybody in it. And then if you're not on social media, then it's like, well, I'm not going to family picketing. I didn't know there was a family picnic.

Yeah, well, and that's interesting too. So what Andrew's talked at least. So for me, again, the only reason why I'm on social media is for work. So I'm. I'm on social media. I'm analyzing ads, I'm looking at different brands. I'm seeing different executions. So, yes, I'm in the newsfeed, but I set aside time every day. I set aside 45 minutes or so a day. That's why I'm in there. I'm not engaging.

Do you get the same thing? Do you have friends or relatives who think it. Think that's a formal invitation?

All of them.

And it's like, dude, if you want me to show up, you need to call me.

And I told them, you guys have to tell. Text me or call me, because I'm not paying attention to that at all. I'm going to miss it. And it's not intentional.

Yeah.

Now, you guys could set up autoresponders, right? You could. So that if they ping you, they get a message back saying, you know, this is a bot, and your message was received by the bot, but Mark or Justin hasn't seen it yet. If you want to reach me, give me a call or text me.

Yeah.

The problem I've got is they're not pinging me.

They're posting a. Oh, and they're just tagging you. Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you're not paying attention to it, you're not going to the picnic.

I guess they didn't really want you there.

Yeah, I know how I look at it. All right, let's go to the next one. I guess nobody wants me at their picnic.

Sure. So we've got. We've. We've done interruptions, multitasking, over committing. We didn't. We. We still have poor planning and procrastination. So poor planning is exactly that. Right? There's no plan. You're flying by the seat of your pants. You're relying on your talent, your ingenuity, which can only get you so far. I was taught early on by an English professor that for the bulk of us, the best work happens in revision. That that is where we take ideas, we refine them, we hone them. And that's where the magic is transformed into something that is both sustainable and refined. And so I think often people, because they are beleaguered, overwhelmed, they feel like I don't have enough time to plan, so I just have to wing it and hope for the best. And that, you know, they do that thing, which is very common. They're set up to thinking that they need a big block of unstructured time to do the big thinking. Instead of working in smaller increments, 5, 10, 15 minutes, and actually drilling down into something, setting a timer and working focused on something to move the needle forward incrementally because we're never going to get that big block of unstructured time. So you keep pushing off the planning, thinking, oh, I don't have the time yet, I don't have the time yet. Instead of focusing on, well, what could I actually do in five minutes? If I was precise and focused in, in five minutes, what could actually get done?

Okay, I like that.

All right. And then when it comes to procrastination, I mean, the number one thing to do there is just to eat the frog, as Mark Twain famously said. And then Brian Tracy has run with that idea. Right. I mean, you do the thing that is the most unpleasant. Mark Twain said, eat a live frog first thing in the morning. The rest of the day gets better. And so the thing that we want to spend the least amount of time with, we often end up spending the most amount of time with because we keep dragging it around behind us. We tell ourselves one of those 200 lies, right, that the frog's going to be tastier in the afternoon. You're going to batter fry it and put some tartar sauce on it. It'll be much tastier than eating it first thing in the morning. But the reality is it's never going to be a, it's never going to be tastier. You might as well just get it out of the way and set yourself up for success for the rest of the day.

All right, all right.

So there's, We've got that now. Now what do entrepreneurs what need to do what? So, and again, this, we're really talking to the entrepreneurs.

Sure.

What else do they need to do? Because they're always feeling overwhelmed. They're always like, they have too much to do. So what are the other techniques that you would give them to, to take control of their day?

Yeah, the two things that I would, the three tools that I would encourage people to, to use, first of all, a timer and a calendar. So everything is quantified. You're. You're no longer working in narrative based goals. Like, I'm going to work on this till I'm finished. I'm going to work on this until it's more finished. You're going to work on it for 15 minutes, you're going to work on it for 30 minutes, you're going to work ON it for 12 minutes. Then the timer, just like you were talking about earlier, Mark, right? The idea of you don't need any bandwidth dedicated to like what should I put on in the morning? You don't have to keep score, the timer will keep the score for you. You get to work uninterrupted until the timer interrupts you and says it's time for you to shift focus, go do something else so you don't have to spend any time scorekeeping. You can just drill into whatever it is that you're working on. Let the timer do the work for you. Also driving your day from your calendar, rather than a series of post its or the back of an envelope, a bunch of to do items that you've listed for yourself. Because again, often to do items don't come with quantification. You've just, you've got a series of things you want to get done in the day, but you haven't necessarily quantified how much time it will take you to complete any of them. So often it's, we overestimate what we can get done and we underestimate how long it will take us to do those things. So then we, we, we perpetuate that cycle of oh, I got to the end of the day, there's still so much that I didn't get done. Maybe tomorrow will be different. With no recipe for tomorrow being any different. So I say that we drive our days from our calendars, we make those discrete appointments with ourselves, and then we honor them, we keep them and we budget the time and we use our core values to determine what merits our attention and our time. Because there's plenty of things that we could do that may be fun. And in no way am I denigrating fun, right? But if you're trying to get things done at work, the primary objective is getting the things done that only I can do for my business and I need to do. So I also point people back towards that Pareto principle idea, right? Like what's your 20%? Where do you get the biggest bang for your buck there? No amount of social media posting or blog writing is going to create more revenue for me than speaking on stages and attending networking events. That's where all of my, that's where all of my business comes from, right? I could sit and write blogs all day and I'm sure people appreciate them. Nobody's ever called me up to book me based on a blog that they read.

So we always try to tell people this is the thing that I do and that is we're all A lot of people are told you should only do the things you're good at and you got it right. Which is you need to go beyond that and do the things that only you are good at.

Yeah.

And be willing to accept that there's other people in your organization who can do things. They may not do it as well as you do.

Right.

But that's okay.

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Right. And also keep in mind that there are for everything you hate doing, there is somebody out there who likes doing that.

Yes.

Or as Dan Sullivan says, if you spend all your time focused on, on improving your weaknesses, you just end up as a person with lots of strong weaknesses.

Right? Yes. Right. Well, and, and so what that the question that popped in my head when you're going through this, Andrew, I think it comes back around to that concept of, of, of boundaries as it relates to this who, not how concept. Right. Because so I know, me personally and Mark, I've seen it with you as well. So I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs will understand this. Where I feel at times that my calendar has gotten out of control, that all of a sudden other people are controlling my calendar now. And so how, and what your advice would be to entrepreneurs, and especially in smaller organizations, right. Where you're starting out, you've got five people. How do they set those boundaries and take control of their calendar? How do they take that back?

See what Zuckerberg does. I just saw what Zuckerberg does. He meetings are only allowed to be an hour and then he requires an hour off after the one hour for him to contemplate and think about what happened in the meeting.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, I, I, I tell people all the time, no back to back meetings ever. Right. You always. The end of the meeting isn't the end of the meeting. The end of the meeting is when you've debriefed yourself from the meeting, synthesized everything you needed to, created whatever tasks you needed to do, made appointments, figured out your deliverables, things that have been delegated to other people, then the meeting's over. So if you walk into a meeting from a meeting, you're physically there, but you're still mentally processing what happened in the other room. So you're not even, you might as well sit in the hallway and debrief yourself because you're, you're not getting anything out of being there. And it's like a false positive. People think you're there and listening, but you're actually looking at your agenda from the previous meeting, trying to Figure out, like, what did I mean by this note and who do I have to contact when I get out of this room? So it's all a waste of time. You would be much better off building those buffers in between every meeting.

It's really a good point because I've jumped from meeting to meeting to meeting and I think the deeper they're stacked up, the further behind I am mentally with where I'm at. I'm still at the 10 o' clock meeting and I'm in the 1pm meeting, right?

Absolutely.

Well, and, and because you've, you've stacked all that information on it, it becomes harder to filter through of like what I know that there was something that I had to do when I, like when all of these meetings are finished, there was one deliverable that had to get done this afternoon and it's now completely obscured by everything that's been stacked on top of it. And you would have been much better off at, after that 10 o' clock meeting to either do it or to at least make the appointment with yourself at 2pm when these meetings are finished, do this thing next.

So when you meet with, Are most of your clients entrepreneurs or executives? What makes up the bulk of your.

I mean, I tend to do a lot of work with associations, so clumps of entrepreneurs and small business owners, occasionally companies like the New York Mets bring me in. Or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Express, Goldman Sachs. Then it's obviously I'm working with a team or a series of teams to improve their productivity. But when I'm at these conferences, so everybody's their own shop and they're all under the umbrella of like the Iiaba or, you know, their associations. Shrm. Those kinds of, those kinds of associations where everybody's got their own company, but they're all doing the same kind of an activity.

So do you find the, do you see a big difference between the entrepreneurs and the corporate executives?

Yeah, I would say that the culture and the approach to culture from an entrepreneurial point of view, entrepreneurs tend to view the culture as much more malleable and adaptive, adaptable and less moribund, less, you know, locked into something where often in corporations, even when I'm working with CEOs and people who can shift the culture, there's a sense of it's harder to move the. It's harder to move this machine that far as quickly as we need to. So I find that entrepreneurs are much more adaptable, a good idea. They're willing to, you know, they're willing to play with a good idea much faster.

And it's one of the big advantages an entrepreneur has.

Yeah.

Because a company making an independent line of shampoo with an entrepreneur could go look at his formula and say, you know what, we're, we're going to add whatever we're going to add Joe Oil or whatever the case is to it to do that at P and G is probably a three, three year process.

Totally. Yeah.

Gonna have to go through the chemist and it's going to have to go through marketing and it's going to have to go through finance and it's going to have to go through purchasing. It's going to have to do all this stuff. Then it's going to go to a committee, then it's going to go to the CEO if it's that important.

And then there'll be, you know, there'll be 18 months of focus groups.

Right, exactly.

So that's one of your great strengths folks as entrepreneurs. That as you can pivot on a dime.

Yes.

You know you're a watercraft and PNG is, is a cruise line.

Right. Yeah.

So which one of those can change directions the fast.

Yeah.

And that's one of your great experience, one of your great skills. What would you say when you meet with a new client? What are the single most common items that you and think of the best word to put that. Where's the low hanging fruit when you walk in the door? Where can you go in and say do that, that and that? And we're going to fix 50% of your mess right now. What are the big glaring easy wins for you?

The email shift out of internal communications, using email and moving whether if they're a Microsoft house and they have Microsoft products, they can easily pivot to Microsoft Teams or slack any of those. That's a huge time saver really looking at why we're meeting and when we're meeting and eliminating as many of those as quickly as possible so that a meeting really has to earn its right to be called and.

How.

And then I would say, you know, just that idea of where are the SOPs? Do we have SOPs if we've solved this problem more than once, let's not solve it again without documenting how we've solved it so that everybody has the recipe. You don't need to keep reinventing the recipe to make, you know, an omelette. We know, right. It's three eggs, it's a quarter of a cup of milk and it's some butter. Let's make an omelet. We don't need to like, well, should we use vegetable oil? Should we use Crisco? What, what's. What are we doing here? You know.

Right. And. And SOP means Standard Operating Procedures.

Sorry, yes, Standard Operating Procedures.

I mean they probably did, but.

Yeah.

So Andrew, you've got, I see a couple of books in the background. I'm assuming those are your books. Tell us about the book.

So I've got Unstuff your Life, which is my first book, which is a Wall Street Journal bestseller and that, you know, that was published by penguin, got 14 years ago now. And it's a how to book on how to get and stay organized. So what I discovered when I was wanting to write the book, many of the books on organization that were in the marketplace described what organization looked like but didn't tell anybody how to actually make it happen. So it would say this is what you want to achieve and then you were left to connect the dots yourself. And so I wrote a book that literally tells people, set the book down, go do this, come back, pick up the book, and let's take the next step together. So it's literally a step by step how to book on getting and staying organized.

And you've got another book there.

Yeah.

Then there's calling B.S. i'm busy. Which is. Which is my newest book, which just, just last week was a number one bestseller on Amazon in the time management category. I was so pleased, I took a screenshot of. I was in number one position, Tim Ferriss was in number two position and David Allen was in number five position and Brian Tracy was in number seven. So I was like, oh, this is, it's a good day for me. Right. My book as a Kindle, as an ebook was in position one and the audiobook was in position number four. So that was a good day. I was very pleased. And that again, it addresses the eight deadly time thieves. And so it takes you step by step on how to shift the culture around interruptions, how to stop over committing, how to say no and have no be a complete sentence, how to stop multitasking and really be able to focus, how to do proper planning, how to call meetings that are useful, address social media address email and. And how to eat the frog and beat procrastination.

So just so you know everybody, we'll have links to Andrew's website and to the books in the show notes. If you go to absolutely CPG insiders to the show with Andrew Mellon, we'll have all those links. So if you're driving around, you don't have to figure out how.

Yeah.

You don't have to, don't try to multitask and write it down because we've.

Already established that multitasking doesn't work.

No. So this is, I mean this has been great. I love this conversation. And again, I know that. And we work with entrepreneurs all the time. Right.

And we are entrepreneurs.

And we are entrepreneurs. And so one of the greatest challenges that we're constantly trying to coach our clients on is this concept of simplification is get organized, slow down, slow down is the way to speed up. Right. And I really think that you've got a lot of great just like is it tangible actions people can take? And I think I've taken from this conversation is that you have, you're giving people the game plan. You're not just talking about theory. It's here's how to do it, here's a simple way to execute it. And again, a big takeaway for me that I know I'm going to take away is that concept of, of instead of trying to schedule an hour to think about a big thing is no, take 15 minutes, just put in your calendar. 15 minutes of just focus and using a timer. I'm going to take that away personally because, you know, I, I find myself. And you talked about it too, where that shower moment happens. Right. And because you were actually just nothing else was going on, you got exactly this and oh, the big idea. It was just actual focus time. So no, this has been fantastic, Andrew.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

You offer courses for people also so they can learn that at your website.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. As I said, we've got the unstuff your life system which is a 10 week program to take people from where they're at to really employing the organizational triangle and creating some systems for themselves at home. Typically, I mean you can do it at the office, but it's primarily a residential based program. We got your next big thing which is I teach people the five phases of project management and how to actually get something done in 90 days. And then we've got a de stress your mess challenge which is a five day introductory to me and my methodology. The mindset which is so essential. Right. I mean underpinning all of this along with your core values is glass half empty, glass half full, right? I mean do you see the opportunity or do you see the limitation? And the gift of being the entrepreneur is really can you find the opportunity in this? When you run into that brick wall, what's the opportunity for you? Instead of just. Instead of just accepting it as this brick wall must always be here. No, it's just. It's an opportunity to pivot in a different direction.

So it.

Earl Nightingale, call that the acres of diamonds, I believe comment. Years ago, Earl was actually probably the first person. I don't know if you remember him. Earl Nightingale was probably the first person in this or one of the first in the self development area.

Like a Zig Ziglar.

Like, I mean, Big Ziggler worked for Earl.

Got it. There you go.

Zig was published by Nightingale Conant.

Oh, there you go.

And Earl to this day actually still holds the record of the most sold records of a speaking record.

Wow.

And it was a record. And his Earl had the voice of God. And the record was. What was it? The strangest secret record. Earl was originally the. The radio host of the Paul Harvey moments. Oh. And then when Earl. Earl left radio to run Nightingale Conant as he was publishing Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins and all these people, as he left, he actually discovered. I just said his name. No, no, not Tony Robbins. Who's the guy I'm thinking of? I just said his name. The guy who did the radio moments.

Paul Harvey.

He actually discovered Paul Harvey. Oh, wow. Yeah. Interesting thing with Paul. I'll share with people. Paul Harvey had a very interesting way of speaking. So you might remember him, Andrew and Paul Harvey. A woman from Dubuque, Iowa, and it'd be his long pause. Sent me a letter. In her letter, it said, the reason is Paul Harvey was a stutterer.

Ah.

And I had the chance to know Paul Harvey. He stuttered. That's how he overcame the stuttering was he would say these quick little bursts of words. And like your program where we're saying, okay, you have to come up with these hacks and these ways to do it. Paul's way of doing it was a woman from Dubuque. Okay, take a break. Sent me a letter today. And then he'd take a break. And. And you notice they were very staccato. Something. It was super quick.

Yeah.

I received a letter and. And that's how he controlled the stuttering. And so literally, a guy who had severe stuttering became one of the most famous radio hosts in America for years.

That's a great story.

By finding a way to overcome that. But yeah, that was Earl Nightingale that discovered him. So, folks, check out, check out the books. You get the books on Amazon, I'm assuming.

Oh, yeah.

And go to Andrew's website if you want to take the program Andrews, are the, are the programs video or do you have a coach that you work with on Zoom? How, how do the programs work so.

They'Re all taught live? I mean, what we've discovered is that for, for people to be held accountable, hold themselves accountable, this is not, none of it can be drip delivered.

So Weight Watchers model, we're going to make you come in and get on a scale every week.

Exactly. And, and we get great results for folks because of that. Because it's not. Look, if you were disorganized, how likely is it that you're going to sit down at 8 o' clock at night and watch a video for an hour on how to get, you know, how to get organized? It's not going to happen. So we discovered. I've been teaching online for 14 years and when we first started, we tried to do a drip delivered model and we would get lots of people signing up, but we were not, not getting the kinds of, the kinds of transformation that we were looking for. And while I, you know, I certainly appreciate earning money, I want the transformation for the customer. I want them to get what they came for because then they'll become raving fans and they'll tell all their friends, right. I've tried everything else and finally this guy unlocked the secret. I got what I needed and I got what I came for. So we made that transition literally just before COVID happened to. We're just going to teach everything live. And so I do have a couple of coaches that work with me to deliver some parts of the program. All of the pedagogy is coming from me because it's, it's my technology, if you will, so it's, they can support people around accountability, motivation, all of those kinds of things. When it comes to the, to answering the questions, because I've been doing this work for 27 years. It's just better for me to be the person who's going to instruct you, this is what you want to do with those kinds of things. This is what you want to do with these kinds of things.

What made Weight Watchers work, by the way, isn't the point system and the frozen meals is getting on the scale. Getting on a scale with 20 other people standing there and. All right, Barbara, did you go up or down? Let's watch.

Yeah.

Not wanting to be the person who went up.

No, no, you definitely do not want to be the person who steps on the sound like, oh, how did this happen? How did I put on three pounds? I was so good except for that.

Cake.

Pizza and cake. That have been fine.

Yeah.

But yes, it is, it was, it's the accountability. So I absolutely get that. So you can go to Andrew's website. There'll be a link in the show notes. Any last thoughts for you, Justin?

No, I just appreciate your time here, Andrew. I think that again, I can't emphasize enough how, how the, the skills and the topics that we talked about that, that Andrew's talked about on the show today.

You've got lots of notes.

I, I've taken so many notes today and, and how, but how seriously, how we don't think about the loss of productivity because we're so busy. Busy. Right. And if you just take the time to simplify how much more productive your life and how much. And the freedom again.

Yeah. It's all about the freedom.

Freedom you're going to get from, from it. So this has been fantastic and I.

Hope cut off your opportunity losses.

Yes. Yeah.

Thank you, Andrew. Folks, if you like today's show, make sure you go to wherever you get your podcast. Leave us five star review. You can always get in touch with Justin or myself@cppg insiders.com and you can always ask us questions and you can always give us topics of subjects you'd like to hear us coverage.

Absolutely.

And other than that, that's it for this week. We'll see you on the next episode of CPG Insiders. If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-542 10.