082: Create a Mess Page — Listener Liron’s Favorite Time-Saving Strategy

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners at as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Today we have a favorite time saving strategy from listener Liran. I will turn it over to her in a minute, but first I want to encourage you to submit yours as well so that we can all continue learning from each other and freeing time together. You can record a voice memo on your phone and send it to hitime.com or or go to itsfreetime.com ask over.

To you Liron.

Hi Jenny, this is Lirone from Israel. I love your podcast and I am about to start reading the book. So I am a long time follower and I wanted to share with you my time saving tip. I have what I call a mess page. This is a notebook that I keep open next to me at my desk and whenever something pops up, something I need to do, someone I need to call, any task, any thought, any idea, anything, I just jot it down on the notebook. This way I don't have to stop what I'm doing on my screen. And in the deep work that I am doing I keep on constantly getting these ideas. So if I were to stop what I was doing in the deep work and writing on notion or on any other web tool or digit tool, I would 100% get out of my focus zone and start browsing or doing something I didn't mean to do. So just by having this mess page on a piece of paper it's really easy for me to just look on the side for a second and then go back to my screen and do what I need to do. Later on at the end of the week or at some other point I process them and this mess page is called Mess page because it really absorbs everything. There is no structure to the page even If I wrote one thing that pops into mind, a task and I think about it, two hours later I will still write it again. The idea is really literally to get the thing out of my head into this safe space that doesn't require me to get out of my screen to a different window or a different app. I hope people will find this useful. This has been life changing for me and this is why I'm sharing it with you. Have a lovely day. Bye bye.

Thank you so much Liron for kicking off this listener tip series. I love it. Way to go first and take charge. I love the idea of a mess page and especially the fact that you don't even have yours in a digital capture tool like Notion or Notes app on your phone that it's sitting right by your desk. I use Moleskine notebooks for keeping my mess pile of to dos, but yours sounds even messier and more delightful and freer. It's almost like the morning pages version of capturing little thoughts and tidbits throughout the day as you said, so that you don't get pulled away from the deeper work that you actually want to be focused on. There are two other ways that I've seen this done. One is to have an inbox for tasks. So if you do use task tracking software, my business we use Notion, some people use Asana or Trello that you can have a category or a column called Inbox and put all the tasks large and small in there as you think of them and then later categorize them, assign them, fill out the details. A second strategy. Oh, now I'm going to give three. Actually, a second strategy is that I like to keep open sometimes what I call a delegation task tracker while I'm working and as I go through the week, I actually like to keep it up for two or three weeks at a time. I will note anything and everything that could possibly be delegated that way. Even if I don't know exactly who's going to take that from my team in the moment. Maybe they don't even exist on my team yet. I'm still keeping track of everything that I could delegate as I share in free time on the chapter to challenge us all to double how much you delegate. There's a template for the Delegation task tracker in the Free Time toolkit so you can get that@itsfreetime.com toolkit and the third strategy I want to share still, this is digital. I love Liron's advice to have a mess pile that's analog paper notebooks sitting at our desk the other thing I do that is the messiest pile I keep is when I'm processing email. I actually have a notion note up. I have a template for this. I say what time I started, how many emails when I started, how many emails when I end, what time I end. But more importantly, there's a section down below for notes and this is my messiest mess pile in my business where I'll have sections like text expander snippets to add or create tasks that I'm pulling from this email processing, keeping links that I want to check out, decisions to make, things that I want to file or store away like quotes, snippets, et cetera. I will have sometimes a section for keeper emails, really nice messages that I've received and just generally keep a big mess as I work as I process email. That way I can move those emails out of my inbox. And yet I still have this big mess pile, as Laram would call it, or this email tracker that allows me to get it all in one place and then later process and put all those little snippets of data in their proper home. Because it's funny when we say oh, responding to email as if it's one thing, it's a thousand things. It's so many different aspects of the business. I hope you found these tips helpful. We would love to hear yours, so don't forget you can always submit a voice memo@hi time.com or leave a note through a browser@itsfreetime.com ask. I look forward to hearing from you on your favorite time saving tips and strategies. Thanks so much for listening everybody and hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

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