#164: Getting Your Most Important Things Done Every Week without All the Stress and Drama

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a quick reminder that you can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 1, 6 4. Those notes will include a summary of our discussion as well as links to any resources we mentioned during the show. One of the things that I focus on with many of my coaching clients is productivity. Productivity improvement. You could have great clients that pay you high fees, but really, if you can't get control over your week, you're going to burn out quickly. Or maybe a more common scenario is one where nothing seems to be working. Maybe you don't have great clients, but you also don't seem to ever have time to market yourself better and more consistently so you can land better clients and opportunities. If that sounds familiar, if that's something you struggle with, I think you're going to enjoy today's episode. My guest is Jordan Baker and Jordan is a personal productivity expert and the creator of focuster@focuster.com and that's an auto scheduling calendar app for entrepreneurs, freelancers and other professionals. Jordan takes a very holistic approach to productivity that's very well aligned with my own approach. If you've been through any of my productivity training, you're going to hear some familiar advice here, but you're also going to get Jordan's insights and practical ideas, which are excellent. It doesn't matter if you're a paper and pen kind of person or if you're really into apps and tools, none of that matters. You're going to walk away from this conversation with some great ideas to help get you on the right track and help you get the most important things done every week without all the stress and drama. Enjoy. Jordan, welcome. It's great to have you here, Ed.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Well, let's start with some background because I want to dive into this topic and I'm anxious to talk with you about this. It's one of the things that I'm really passionate about and I geek out over this stuff, but I want to make sure folks get an idea of where you're coming from, what your background is, what you do today, and maybe a little bit about what led you to this point.

Love talking about the origins. So just to start with what I do today, today I help busy professionals manage their focus and not just their time. I'm actually so passionate about this topic that I created software to help do just that. The way I, you know, what I believe about this topic is I believe that we can't directly affect the passing of time. Right. Like seconds are ticking by. No matter what I do, what I can control is where I put my attention. So going back to the very beginning, for me, at least in my professional life, I had a very, very short, kind of career working in a. Yeah. In a corporate environment. I think I worked for, let's see, a year in one company and a year in a second company. And after that I decided to go freelance. And that's what I've, you know, I did freelancing for, for at least 10 years. And then I founded my first company as a web development agency. And in that process I realized that my ability to manage my focus was really the key to growing both professionally and personally. But you know, in terms of professionally and in terms of growing my revenue, in terms of developing relationships, you know, really being able to manage my focus and to, to execute was the key. I mean, it's, it's kind of logical, but when you start to break down what focus really is, that's where it gets, gets a little bit more interesting. So in order to get there, I studied many, many productivity systems, including like getting things done. And I studied some of the things that Tony Robbins teaches around productivity. He has a system called rpm. And I also studied what Stephen Covey talks about when it comes to productivity. And one of the key commonalities, at least out of the two of those three that I found really powerful, was to actually commit time in my calendar for my priorities. Now that involved actually identifying what my priorities were. So that's a big piece of the puzzle. But the second part, actually committing time in my calendar created this dramatic shift in how much I actually got done. And it wasn't just getting more done, it was actually getting the right things done. And also when I put things in my calendar, it brought new awareness to places where my attention and my time were leaking. Along with that, I was also studying yoga and meditation. And that has actually profoundly influenced the way that I approach productivity. I found it both very beneficial to develop the ability for self reflection and self regulation. So those are just a couple of the. Hopefully that gives you just kind of a good idea of where I'm kind of coming at when it comes to Productivity.

No, absolutely. Basically, this is. You and I are very well aligned in terms of how we think of this. I've said the same thing. It's look at, you can't really manage time. It continues to flow no matter what you do. You can only manage yourself in how you focus your time, energy and attention. So I love that we're really well aligned there. And I'm curious, you spent a lot of time on your own as a freelancer and then eventually as a business owner. I'm curious what you feel makes productivity such a big challenge for professionals, creative professionals, especially those who work from home. That's maybe different from those who work in a traditional office environment.

Yeah, this is definitely a topic I've thought a lot about. So when you work for someone else, typically the definition of success is well defined. You know, step one, show up on time. Step two, do the work assigned to you. Step three, profit. So it's very easy when you work for someone else because they tell you what they expect. If they're a good boss, they tell you what they expect. And as long as you meet that criteria, you can feel good about yourself. You feel that you're being productive, they feel good about you and you get paid, unfortunately. And fortunately, being self employed means that it's kind of like a choose your own adventure book. You need to define your. You need to create your own definition of success. It's why you might have heard so often when starting a new business. For example, in the book E Myth, which is, you know, a very popular book about becoming an entrepreneur, he talks about defining, you know, what is your personal definition of success? Like, what would your, what do you want your personal life to look like before you even think about launching a business? If you've already launched a business, it doesn't mean you can't go back and think about that because that's really going to influence what your definition of a success is. If your definition of success is to, you know, is to sleep in every morning and, you know, go surfing on the beach and then work your ass off, you know, between noon and 8pm Then I don't see anything wrong with that. But if, if, you know, if you don't define that and you end up having to wake up at 8am to deal with some client that, that, you know, and you're unhappy about that, now, you know, now you've created a situation for yourself where you're not going to meet your own definition of success. So I see so many people, first of all, they miss that part of it. And the second thing is, with all this freedom to define your own reality of what success means, we also are able to indulge ourselves. We don't have somebody who's checking in on us necessarily all the time. Now, some people fill that gap with a coach, right? They get some accountability or they have a peer group. You know, maybe, maybe, you know, I've participated in masterminds where we. We meet once a week or once every two weeks to. To set goals together and to share our progress. And that can be very, very valuable. And that takes the place of, you know, having a manager who's. Who's checking in on you. It's, you know, when you're a freelancer, of course, you have multiple bosses. So some of that is a little bit different than if you're, let's say, creating something completely new as an entrepreneur for yourself. So there's that little distinction. I think that's. That's really important. And then the third piece is. Is around distractions. Again, it's just so easy to say, hey, I'm going to take the afternoon off. I'm going to. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to stay at lunch longer than I can, longer than I should. And part of that is because, again, there's no one checking up on you. And the other thing is, sometimes you're just not as aware of it. You know, when we work for ourselves, we might be working in our own space. We might be working in a space that we have multiple purposes for. You know, maybe if you're in a relationship, your partner comes in and starts talking to you. So a lot of the things that just kind of come built in, just to kind of summarize, a lot of things that kind of come built in. In regular employment, you have to create for yourself, right? And that includes your definition of success. You know, that includes creating systems for accountability, and that includes creating your space and managing distractions.

Yes, so true. I find that it's some. We have to wear so many hats that sometimes we can easily go down one or two different rabbit holes. And next thing we know, it's Friday, and we've gotten half done of what we needed to get done, which is. Really doesn't make you feel great going into a weekend, you know. And in fact, what I'm seeing is so many freelance professionals then working every weekend because it's just a constant cycle. So I want to kind of shift gears a little bit now that we've kind of set the stage and just start Talking about some practical solutions, because I know you develop a process for, as you mentioned earlier, getting instant clarity on your priorities, which I agree is just absolutely key. There's just way too many things to do, and if you don't identify those and address them, then everything else will take precedence. But let's talk a little bit about that. What can you walk us through the process of getting that clarity, even when you have just a pile of things that you have to do every day and that's your everyday reality?

Yeah, I'd like to just kind of step back just for one second. And before I kind of get into prioritization, I think it's really important that people understand why that's important. If you. Can we just go down that little thing just for a second?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yes.

Because it has a lot to do with how I see, first of all, like, what focus is. And so I have this formula which is like, focus equals intention plus attention. Okay? So on one side of that, we have intention, which is what you want to do. What you have identified as important, that actually is the priority piece, what you've identified as a priority. And on the other side of that is attention, which is your ability to execute. It's your ability to bring yourself to actually do what you need to do. And if you don't have either of those pieces correct, then your focus is not going to be effective. You're not going to be properly focused. You can be executing really well, but you can be doing the wrong thing. So like you said, you know, you could get to Friday, and you might have been working as hard as you possibly can all week, but you may have been working on the wrong things. And then because of that, now you got to work on the weekend. On the other hand, you could have spent all this time identifying your priorities. They might be the exact right priorities for you to work on. And for some reason, you can't tear yourself away from looking at, you know, funny cat videos, which are so captivating. I just wanted to bring it back to the definition, right, of what focus for me is. And, you know, and so because of that, prioritization is a really critical piece. So as you say, as you say, so what is prioritizing mean? And this kind of. Actually another thing I wanted to share is, is why most traditional to do lists fail, and priority is actually one of those pieces. So can I go down that little rabbit hole first before I can come back to your question?

Let's do that, because now we're really getting into the nitty gritty. And as you know, we. It's not just a to do list is many of us are working on multiple projects at any given time. So it's really a combination of yeah, projects, but I got to do lists as well. So that's kind of the backdrop, right?

Totally, totally. So what I found, looking at different to do lists, and this is actually supported by, actually read an article a couple years ago from Harvard Business Review entitled two to do lists don't work. And this is very, you know, very in line with how I think about it as well. So the first thing that traditional to do lists suffer from is they don't account for time. The second thing is they aren't typically prioritized. And three, and because of these issues, they actually end up causing you more stress than they should. So the first item to do lists don't account for time. A to do list is really only useful to a large degree if it can show you what you can realistically get done. If it's showing you more than what you can get done, that's going to contribute to factor three, which is stress. What that means practically is the list that you're looking at should really reflect your capability to get it done. Let's assume for a second, like ed, you, you probably have a list of things, there's probably a never ending list. Right. There's always something you can do. And because of that, would you say that's true?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. If you left me here to left to my own devices, it would, it would just keep on going. Like there would never be an end point. There would never be a point. It's like, oh, wow, I'm done. I could take, you know, the rest of the week off now. There's always more stuff and the back burner that I can bring back and yes, right.

And so that's one problem is that people tend to create these lists that are never ending and that's not useful. The second issue with time is most people don't put any times associated with how long things are going to take. They actually end up mixing something that's going to take five minutes with something that's going to take an hour. And this has an impact when you start to try to figure out, you know, what am I going to start with, what am I going to do next? If you need to constantly juggle all these things in your head, then you're going to have difficulties selecting the work that you need to select when you need to select it. So that comes to point number Two, which is prioritization. If you don't prioritize your list in advance, then you might fall into the trap of scanning after every time you finish something. Now why is that bad? It means that you're mixing two modes of thinking. One mode is planning and one mode is executing. And when you context switch, you're inevitably going to do both of those things poorly. You can't do two things at once. And the cost of switching between those two different things mean you're not going to do it as well. And the end result typically is that people pick something that is easy and gives a feeling of productivity, but is really just being busy.

Yeah, I think most of us will look at a to do list and we don't like going back to your earlier point about time. A longer to do list feels like more work than a shorter to do list. First of all, which is not necessarily true because some of the items on a shorter to do list could be really, really long items that maybe should be actually multiple tasks instead of just one. And then, let's face it, we always gravitate toward the easier things because the rush most of us get is in crossing things off as opposed to being effective.

Exactly. So you make a great point about breaking things down. So if you break things down so that you account for the amount of time you have. So if you look at your calendar and you say like, hey, I've got three appointments today, they've got some client meetings, and in between that I've got, whoa, look, I only have four hours to actually do client work. Wow, that's not much. Right. So you know, how am I going to maximize my billings? You know, how am I going to get the administrative work I need to get done or sales follow ups, you know, how am I going to do all those things? So that's really where accounting for time becomes critical. And as you say, if you, if you're not breaking it down, then you really can't. This is how you know, Estimating time and prioritization, in my opinion, are inextricably linked. When you don't account for time, you can't prioritize if you know, because if you have unlimited time, then you will get everything done. So knowledge and feedback on your time limitations is critical for the prioritization process.

Gotcha. Okay, so we got time estimate prioritization. Did you say there was another one?

Well, I mean, the third factor of why traditional to do lists are less effective than they should be is stress. So at the end of the day, when you are faced with an overwhelmingly long list that is going to cause you stress because you're just going to constantly feel like you're failing. You're going to get to the end of your day and you're not going to have cross anything out. You're. You're less likely to have, you know, actually accomplish some of the highest priority things. So you're not going to have that feeling that you can relax. And also in the process of executing through your day, you're going to be scanning, you're going to be devoting, you know, more. It's stressful. Let's just say it's stressful. So there's time prioritization and stress that are problems with traditional to do list.

All right, so with that is kind of the backdrop, let's get into then some ways that you can actually manage this and actually get out of the cycle. And I want to. And I know you, you're very familiar with what we do because you were a freelancer for a long time. But I look at Monday morning, most of us kind of get to our desk and we realize we got a mix of things. We got client work in the way of projects. Most of the time we have marketing, some marketing we got to do to market our business, some prospecting, some other forms of marketing. We have some administrative work. And that could be anything from billing to kind of catching up with your bookkeeping, to just miscellaneous administrative stuff. And then there's personal stuff, you know, family stuff, doctor's appointments, taking the kids to school, that sort of thing. This can very quickly get overwhelming. And I think most people just dive right in. Right. So what do you suggest is a better way of approaching your week?

Yes. So definitely freelancer. I mean, everybody wears many different hats, but especially freelancers, especially entrepreneurs are wearing, usually in their company themselves, are wearing at least half a dozen hats, let alone all their other personal things. So that's very true. As you say. One of the most effective productivity techniques I've actually found, found to solve this challenge is to do something that is called time blocking or time theming. So this is the idea that. And Stephen Covey actually was one of the guys who I got this from originally. But you identify what are the different roles that I play in my life, and you mentioned some of those things. Then you start to look at your weekly calendar and you start to, you start to paint or you start to block out times that you're going to address those different areas of your life. So, you know, if you want to spend 50% of your time doing client work. Let's say you realize, like, look, in order to make the money I need to make, I need to spend 50% of my time doing client work. So then you're actually going to go into your calendar and you're going to block out client work on the times of the day and the days of the week that you want to do that work. Okay, now you've, now you've identified that, Then you're going to go and you're going to look at the next thing on your list. So maybe you need to do administrative stuff. You realize, look, I need to do four hours of administrative work a week. And you block that out on your schedule, and you keep doing that until you have now built yourself a weekly repeatable schedule which accounts for all the different hats that you've had to wear or that you do wear. And you might realize along the way that, that maybe you have too much work or maybe you need some support in certain areas to get all those things done. Maybe you, you know, maybe you need a virtual assistant to kind of just take care of some of those things, or maybe a bookkeeper is in the mix or something, right? Or maybe you need to work longer hours than you thought you did and that's just a reality right now. Or maybe you need to raise your rates so that you don't work as many hours. Right. So this, this is going to give you some information once you start to do this process.

So that's the first step, I think that's brilliant, is look at your capacity and then estimate how you're going to basically budget that. What would be the next thing, were we now getting into prioritizing what you do have to do?

Yeah, I mean, just also, just to follow up on what you just said, Ed, is that it's, you know, once you've established this thing, it's most like most people that I come across will, as you said, we'll just jump right in and work on the thing that seems the most urgent. But this actually gives you clarity about what to work, you know, gives you more clarity about what to work on. Like if somebody calls you up and if, you know, if you're not going to be working on client work unless there's a major deadline, you know, when you're supposed to be taking care of your administrative work and you, you know, it, it's brilliant because it lets make sure that some of those things that are not nearly as appealing, like, let's face it, I don't know, I just speak for myself. But administrative work is not nearly as exciting as talking on podcasts or, you know, writing code or, you know, or working on some marketing campaign or, you know, doing, you know, cool stuff like that, you know, like doing my taxes and all. Like, it's not as exciting. So. But when you block it out, you make sure it gets done, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So. Yeah. So once you have that, then what do you advise in terms of figuring out your priorities and bringing those to the surface?

Right. Okay. So this process to help you identify your priorities. So time is a huge factor of it. The process for identifying your priorities starts with getting clear on some criteria. And these criteria can be very personal. But if you were to imagine a grid, a spreadsheet, if you will. If you will, where you have a couple different, you know, you have the things you want to work on, and you have the different criteria. So one of those criteria could be, does it make money? Right. That could be something that's really important to you. You know, when faced with an overwhelmingly long list of things that you might want to work on, you may want to assign some priority to if it makes you money. Another thing might be, you know, will it make a customer happy? That's another factor. And another thing is, is this a repeatable process? Okay, so this is. These are. These are some example criteria. I actually got these example criteria from Dan Martell, who's another entrepreneur. And these don't have to be your criteria. I mean, you might have criteria that's like. That's more along the lines of, is it aligned with your mission? Does this, you know, does this support me in moving towards, you know, my professional goals? There's all sorts of different things that. That may be important to you, but what's important is that you identify those criteria, and then you. You also want to assign some weighting to them if they're not all equally important. For example, you know, if. If making money is more important to you than making a customer happy, it seems kind of weird to kind of compare the two. But, you know, you might give that a value of three. Making money, making a customer happy. Number two, you know, is a value of two. And maybe a repeatable process is a one. And if something is all of those, then you add up that, and you get six. And then you sort your. You know, you could create a spreadsheet. You sort that, and boom, now you've identified what our urgency might be. One of your criteria, of course. Right? Because if something is super urgent, maybe you've let it go on too Long. And now it's going to come up to the top of your list.

Absolutely. I would actually add, and I know you said everyone's got their own. Should have their own criteria. This is something I would spend some time thinking about. But is this aligned with my genius? So, in other words, is this kind of like my core based on my core gifts? Because. Right. It's many times we spend so much of our week working on things that honestly, that's not. That's not our highest value activity or energy. And, you know, I think it's. You can be a lot happier if you spend a greater percentage of your week working on the things that you're truly gifted at, where you add the most value in your business as opposed to things that other people could do better, faster, cheaper.

Yeah, I love that one. Thanks, Ed.

So, yeah, so this is great. So the whole idea here, though, like you said, Jordan, is, look, this is a personal thing. Figure out what some of these criteria should be, and then you could even get fancy if you wanted to and weigh them. But I think many times with some practice, I can imagine the people will just naturally think through them. They don't have to assign a score. They just. Just thinking through all the different criteria will help them figure out the priority.

Right, Sure. I mean, this is kind of like first aid. Right. If your list has grown out of control and you need to kind of get back on track, that's a process that you can use. It's kind of like a last resort.

Gotcha. Okay. All right, so then once you figure that out, then what do you go next?

All right, So I mean, what I have done is I actually, you know, now that I've identified what I. What are my priorities, how long those things are going to take. Now I can actually start to schedule this in my calendar so I can put it into the, you know, put it into the times of the day that. That are available. And now when I look at my calendar, I see exactly what I'm going to work on and when. Right, Gotcha. So I don't know about you, but that. The feeling of that for me is like, oh, I have relief. I know that all these important things are identified. I know they're the highest priority. I know I have time to do them. It's pretty realistic. I mean, I might not get everything done, but, you know, it's realistic. And, you know, the thing that's so brilliant about prioritization is that even if you only get a couple of the things done, if you do them in the right order. You can do like the first three sometimes in your day, let's say you have three priorities for the day. If you do the first, you know, even if you do the first one sometimes, I mean, if you do the one right thing every day, it's almost like you can go home before lunch. Now, most people don't do that, but if you really did that one thing that could totally transform your business. You could just go home before lunch.

Yeah. I find that moving the top two or three things to the first three things I do during a day that's made all the, all the difference in the world for me because I have good intentions and I say, yeah, I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do that and then I'll get to this other thing and that's really important, but things happen, life happens. And there's a very high probability that I won't get my top two or three things done that way.

Yeah, it's like eating the frog is. Brian Tracy talked about that. One is like putting, you know, putting the most difficult thing at the start of your list in the day, but it's also going to be your highest priority thing sometimes. Usually it's difficult because it requires like emotional mastery. It's like, you know, for some people, sales calls are difficult and you know, they put them off. Right. If you're not a natural salesperson. But getting that sale could be, you know, you get one sale for the day that's worth whatever it's worth, you know, $20,000 or 10,000 or 5,000. But you know, if you made a sale, you'd feel pretty good and you, you know. Absolutely, that's my point. Yeah.

Well, I've also found too what I, what I love about the system, which is extremely simple. I'm thinking, I'm listening to you and going, well, this makes perfect sense. But we don't do it right. Is that I find that the kind of the emotional and cognitive requirements of looking at an unprioritized to do list and one that as the day goes by, doesn't seem to get that much shorter, is so draining. I know that sounds silly because there's people with a lot bigger problems in the world than that, but honestly, that can be debilitating because by the end of the day a lot of your mental and emotional resources have been taken of care up looking at that to do list like every five minutes and trying to make decisions on it. What you just suggested is, look, you make some of the heavier decisions early on. And then you let that guide you during the week, which is great because you can kind of run on autopilot. Not 100%, but mostly. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, that's actually really a great point. And it kind of actually comes back to. I actually wrote an article, blog post on this a while back, which is decision fatigue, right?

Yes.

You know, and the fact that when we wake up in the morning, you know, we have kind of our maximum capacity for making decisions. And just as you said, you know, if we keep coming back to our to do list and scanning all the time, we're actually kind of frittering away our ability to stay focused and to decide. And, you know, there's certain things that actually help kind of replenish that. You know, taking a break and eating lunch. Apparently there's a connection between blood sugar in the brain and our ability to. To be decisive. That's why at the supermarket, after you've, you know, you've had to make all these decisions about what kind of eggs to get and what kind of laundry detergent, then they put the candy right before you check out. Right. Because that's when you're craving, you know, craving. You're first of all vulnerable to making a decision to get some candy. But also candy is something that's actually. You need actually kind of replenish your. Your blood, your brain glucose.

Interesting.

And. Yeah, yeah. So. And they've also another interesting thing is they found that, you know, if you're going to go up for. If you're going up for parole, right, you want to be one of the first cases in the morning with the judge, or you want to be one of the first cases after lunch, if you're one of the last cases before lunch or the last cases before the end of the day, that judge, the studies found is much more likely to keep you in jail because they feel burned out on decision making. Right?

Yeah, that's right. Daniel Pink talks about that in his book when I remember. Fascinating. Interesting. So, you know. Well, first of all, don't land in jail.

Step one.

Yeah. Step one, don't land in jail. Step two, please, you know, try to get the better times. So. All right, let me give you a couple scenarios, since we're kind of in this area, about the challenges. A couple of scenarios that come up often. If maybe we could just talk quickly through them. As far as your suggestions. When, when you start the day low on energy or you're unmotivated, how can you turn things around pretty quickly? Because many of us can't afford to then waste the rest of the day. It's important that we get back track. Any, any ideas or suggestions there?

Yes, yes, I have often, I've often struggled with, with this myself. You know, just, just kind of feeling overwhelmed or, or having a bunch of, you know, maybe having a setback or something the day before and just, just feeling, you know, kind of already behind before I even got started. So there's a couple things I've done, you know, and one of the things is managing emotions. Another thing is, is really just kind of coming back to that priority list. And then the third, you know, the third thing is kind of some practices that can really, really transform how you feel.

Like what, what do you have?

Well. Well, yeah. Okay, let's get into it. So, so one of the practices I found is really helpful for me is meditation. And it doesn't have to be something super esoteric, but my experience is about the kind of, the core of meditation is to really feel what is happening for you and not to fight it and not to try to change it per se, but to just fully experience and accept it. And I know for some people it might sound kind of woo woo or something, but, but my, my personal experience and many other people actually, if you, if you kind of look into this, is that when we fully experience and acknowledge what we're feeling, that it actually starts to dissipate, it starts to release its grip. And I think part of this is because our feelings and emotions are trying to give us information. And when we try to ignore that information and we try to get away from it, we try to not acknowledge it, that it gets stronger and more, it actually starts to dissipate, it starts to release its grip. And I think part of this is because our feelings and emotions are trying to give us information. And when we try to ignore that information and we try to get away from it, we try to not acknowledge it, that it gets stronger and more powerful and it tightens its grip on us and, and when we take a moment to just fully feel it and fully accept and get it, you know, get the extent of its information, then sometimes you can actually start to shift it, right? You can start to, to, you know, start to powerful and it tightens its grip on us and, and when we take a moment to just fully feel it and fully accept and, and get it, you know, get the extent. The other day I had, I had a bit of a personal setback and I felt, I felt that it's information, then sometimes you can actually start out. I Felt like the rug got pulled out from under, shifted. Right. You can start to, to, you know, start to. Me, I was feeling a lot of fear. You know, I could feel like all this adrenaline in my body and I was like, okay, I don't know what to do right now because I don't know how to change this. And I just. I just decided to breathe. I decided to. And I noticed. I'm like, okay, as much as I'm disappointed in the situation, I'm here right now, I'm breathing. There's nothing actually wrong in this particular moment. You know, I'm safe. Nothing's bad. You know, like, it just re. Centered me and, and it didn't make everything better. But I was able to. The other day I had. I had a bit of a personal setback and I felt. I felt. I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me. I was feeling a lot of fear. You know, I could feel like all this adrenaline on my body and I was able to move forward, you know, within about 10 minutes.

Yeah, I'm with you. Like, it could. Things can spiral out of control very quickly. And if you can kind of recenter. I do agree, man. I. A couple of years ago, I started meditating regularly. I'm assuming you do mindfulness meditation. Is that typically what you enjoy doing?

I mean, I do a variety of things, but I would, you know, I've. I've done more. Some of like Buddhist insight meditation over the years and, and which is more where you're. Sometimes you're holding the various intentions for, you know, for goodwill to. To all being, you know, to yourself and to others. And those are powerful practices. But I think in the realm of productivity and especially as a beginning practice for someone who's maybe new to this. Yeah, I think just a simple concentration meditation where you're just following your breath in and out. And you might pick a point in your body where you experience the breath. So you might. Some people, when they breathe in through their nose, they just follow this point maybe at the tip of your nose or the nostrils where you feel the breath going in and going out. And, and by focusing on that, that just helps your mind. People tend to get. Identify with their mind and they think that they are their mind. All right? And this is not, not a good place to be because our mind actually should be our servant. Right. When you start to meditate, you realize like, oh, that chattering mind that gives. That criticizes me all the time. And like, that's not me. It's its own thing. It's you know, we don't want to let the mind become our master or we don't want to forget that it's. That it's something separate from ourselves.

Yeah, well, it's. Yeah, it's. It's kind of a wild animal that can get completely out of control. So I'm going to give you one more situation, then we're going to need to start wrapping up. And I want to be respectful of your time. But one scenario that I hear often, and I'll give you a very specific example is ed. Every week I set this. It's gets kind of a wild animal that can get completely out of control. So I'm going to give you one more situation, then we're going to need to start wrapping up. And I want to be respectful of your time. But one scenario that I hear often, and I'll give you a very specific example is Ed. Every week I set this intention that I'm going to spend so much time or energy prospecting for new clients. And here we go. It's Friday afternoon and I didn't get it done or I got nowhere near my goal. It's been three weeks every. I set out with good intentions, but I end up failing. What's wrong with me? You know, what would you say to somebody like that? And of course, feel free to go back to some of what you've already shared with us. I'm just curious how you would counsel someone like that.

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's dependent on the situation. But a couple of things I would look at would be, you know, are you setting. Are you setting your goals too high? First of all, so if you set a goal like, hey, for the week, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make 30 sales calls. Like, maybe just make your goal for the next day. Make one sales call, and then the next day make two and put that at the top of your list each day, Right?

Yep.

And so, you know, that way you're building it up and very quickly, you know, you're building. I like the incremental approach. So, you know, you do one the first day, you try to do two the next day, but maybe you only get one. So you stay at, you know, you stay at two until you actually do the two. Yeah. You know, if you can't even do the two, if you can't do one consistently, just stay at one until you can get the one done consistently. It's build that habit and build. Build the muscle of breaking through.

Rather than trying to do the big thing, you know, it's either all or nothing, right? That, that all or nothing approach can, can really destroy your. Your morale.

Exactly, exactly. And focus on things you can control. A lot of people create goals that are, you know, I'm going to get X number of sales. But getting sales is actually outside of your control because it involves someone else deciding. And their decision could be based on things totally outside your control, like the economy, like the state of their business, like how they were feeling that day. What you can control is you can deliver X number of, you know, you can make X number of phone calls. That's something you can control. You can send X number of emails. You can, you know, so focusing on the types of work that you can control will also help you to turn that around.

I think it's excellent advice. I want to make sure before we wrap up that you tell us a little bit about your productivity app. You mentioned this at the beginning. I know you have a great app out there that helps entrepreneurs and freelancers improve their productivity and reduce overwhelm. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah, sure. So the app that I've created is called Focuster, and it's a tool that helps you do exactly what I've actually been talking about this whole time, which is it, you know, helps you manage your focus and not just your time. It's, I like to say it's like having a 247 personal assistant that's managing your schedule. So just like we talked about earlier, what this tool does is helps you to visualize how much free time that you have. So it connects to your calendar. It knows, you know, that you've got four hours in between meetings today. And it shows you in a very easy to see a very simple visualization. Almost looks like a progress bar. It shows you how much free time you have. And as you start to drag, it's very intuitive drag and drop interface. And as you drag the work that you need to do into the day, you start to see this bar filling up and you start to see the amount of free time you have shrinking. This alone really, as I mentioned earlier, helps you to prioritize because when you know how much free time you have, you can make those decisions. The other thing that it does is as you add things to your day and in priority order, it automatically schedules those things into your calendar. So it automates, you know, this. It's kind of a tedious process to schedule every single thing that you want to do into your calendar. As valuable as it is I found it very tedious and so I built the software to automate that process. And what's also very tedious is that as much as we all have great intentions and as much as we are superstars at executing on all this stuff, inevitably some things take longer than we expect. Inevitably, sometimes we get distracted. What this app does to support you in that is it moves things forward. If you don't finish some work, it moves it forward to the next available time automatically. And in doing so, and because everything is prioritized, you know, even if something takes longer than expected, you're going to get back on track that much faster. You're going to, you know, if it's billable hours, you're going to be maximizing your billable hours even if you get distracted. Right. And the last thing this app does, I mean, it does a ton of other things, but what's really important is it gives you reminders when you have free time. So it's so easy when we finish one thing and we're kind of thinking about what to do next, instead of you having to go and pull that information, it actually pushes it right to you. It says, hey, here's your next thing on your list. This is your next highest priority. So it works with Google Calendar, Outlook365, Exchange and iCloud, your favorite ed. And it has native Trello integration so you can work with a team, you can put your projects in Trello and you can schedule the cards that you're working on in your calendar. It connects to thousands of other apps that you probably use using Zapier. So you can use this as a digital action hub. You can bring in all of your commitments, whether it's from a CRM or project management tool, whether it's your own personal to do's and you can implement time blocking, you can, you can set up different parts of your schedule where you fill up, let's say your administrative list and that'll schedule it only at the time where you've committed to do administrative work. So there's a ton of features and.

Where can people learn more about it?

Yeah, yeah. If any of your listeners are interested in giving it a shot, we offer a 14 day free trial and they can go to focus.com which is focused on T E R f o c U-S-T e r.com and also when you sign up for the free trial, we also include a free Focus management email course as part of our kind of onboarding email sequence. So if, you know, if some of the things productivity wise, I've been talking about are useful. We have a lot, you know, a lot more information in that email course that we share.

That's awesome. That's awesome. So guys, check it out. We'll make sure to include that link in the show notes so folks can come back and reference that if they're listening to this outside of the office. But Jordan, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on today and for sharing all these wonderful, useful, very practical ideas with us.

You're very welcome, Ed. I really enjoyed our conversation.

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