Focus Finder: Take Control of Your Time And Improve Productivity Featuring Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #431

These seven things that I'm going to share with you are going to really make an impact in your business, bigger than anything that I've ever discovered. And the battle that we're facing as we're moving into trying to get things done is we're fighting the proactive, reactive battle.

Hello, this is Joe Polish. Now real quick, before you listen to the podcast, which I hope you're going to love, just wanted to let you know I spent the entire last year on a sabbatical and I've got so many insights, so many things that would be super valuable and my first official coming back event and my first public appearance is going to be February 11th through the 13th in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. So if you are a high level entrepreneur and you would like to attend in person, go to joe polishreturns.com joepolishreturns.com check it out. Hope to see you there. Now enjoy the podcast.

How many people think that their business would be better off if you had more time to get stuff done? I was talking to people about productivity and about getting things done and the common thing I kept hearing is I just don't have time for everything. And I'm going to show you how to really make big, big improvements in the way that you manage your time and your ability to get things done. Because you guys know that there's no shortage of cool ideas and things that you can install in your business right now. And you know, even learning dialogues to really take them deep and really master them. Guess what? That takes time to get the 30 day lead blitz installed. Guess what? That takes time. It all takes time. These seven things that I'm going to share with you are going to really make an impact in your business bigger than anything that I've ever discovered. And the battle that we're facing as we're moving into trying to get things done is we're fighting the proactive, reactive battle where we know that in order to get things done, we need to proactively schedule time to do them, figure out what it is that we want to do, and actually keep our commitment to get those things done. Now the struggle that we have is that what's happening is that there's constantly this tax on our time that we're focusing on the reactive things that happen in our day and we have very little time to do the proactive things. So what we really want to do is flip that around and focus our time on doing the proactive things. So in order to do that, we need to get rid of all of the reactive things that cause all these demands on our time. So here are the seven powerful peak productivity practices. Number one, eliminate the big four reactive activators. Now, when we talk about going into reactive mode and you're going to notice that this is absolutely true, that there are four big things that set us off into reactive mode. Number one is email. Now, immediately, you never know what's going to happen on your email, do you? But you never know. You could have a couple of leads that have come in. You could have a problem that's come in. You could have a link to a video that one of your friends has sent you on YouTube and you watch that and that was funny. And then the next video comes up and you watch that one. The Internet is attached to your email. Have you guys noticed that you can waste a little time on the Internet when you go into that mode and it's very, very easy to let hours slip by at every. But nobody is immune to this. And a lot of times we kind of use the Internet and we use email as that filler time, you know, where you, okay, I don't have to leave for this appointment. I'll just check my email and I'll do all this. So you default to going online, checking the message board, doing all those things that you're just kind of checking again and again. And it's very distracting. You're never going to get anything proactive done while you're caught in that reactive loop of email, Internet and all that time wasting and sometimes awareness of it just builds its own momentum. If you were to go online and go to Google and do a search on online timer. So every time I would get online that day, I would press the timer and it would count up how long. And then when I got offline, I'd stop it but not close the window. So I could keep the, the cumulative total. And I think you'll find there's a lot of time there. So I'm trying to help you find some time to be proactive. And Internet and email is one of those places that you can find it. The second big reactive activator is the telephone. Has anybody ever gotten a phone call and that sent them into a reactive zone? You know, when you think about it, we're sitting there, we've all got our cell phones right here. We're all, at any moment we could be reacting to something. Phone calls can cause you to go into great elation. It could be somebody referring somebody to you or somebody who was referred to you. You could get a New listing. You could get a phone call that a contract has fallen apart or that something's not going to close, or any number of things that can cause a negative 10 tailspin. And so being reactive to that phone is another thing that drives us out of the proactive zone. The third big reactive activator is people. If you're in your office and you're surrounded and people might just pop in, hey, you got a minute? Are you doing anything? And you get into all kinds of conversations. You could talk about productive things. You can also sometimes talk about not so productive things. Now, the biggest reactive activator, the hardest one to get rid of, is your thoughts. You start thinking something and that reminds, oh, I should call Bob. And then you call Bob and that leads you into, oh, I got to do this and I got to do this. And you get all these pop up thoughts that happen all the time. One of the easiest ways to eliminate those distractions is, is start scheduling time to play golf. Now, golf, of course, is an acronym. And I started looking at my own life and so I started thinking about how come it's so easy for me to play golf? Because I never had a problem with that. I could schedule four, I blocked four hours off and I could go play golf anytime. And it's very easy for me. So I started looking at it and I came up with this acronym where G O L F goal is the first one when I'm going to play golf. I've made up my mind that that's what I'm going to do. I made a decision that I'm going to play golf. So if I make the decision that I'm going to play golf, that means that while I'm playing golf, I can't go to the movies, or I can't go online and work on the Internet, or I can't write an ad. I can't do any of the things other than what I've decided I'm going to do, which is to play golf. O is an optimal environment. Now, an optimal environment for me for the things that I do is an environment with limited distractions where I have nothing in my way of getting things done. See, the first three reactive activators are sort of easy to eliminate. You can eliminate email, you can eliminate the telephone, and you can eliminate people by removing yourself from their path. If you put yourself in a room where there is no telephone and there is no Internet and there are no people, you're not going to be engaged by those three reactive activators. A golf course is the optimal environment for playing golf. It's set up perfectly for the task. You've got 18 holes, you start on number one, you go all the way through it kind of propels you into it, keeps you on track, right? You start at the first hole, you go all the way to the 18th hole and there's nothing many other things that are competing for your attention while you're on the golf course. Unless You've got your BlackBerry or your iPhone and all that stuff with you and that's you're defeating the whole purpose, then f is a fixed time frame. I know that when I make the decision to go play golf, that's a four and a half hour decision. I know that from the time I make the decision, I'm going to leave my house to get to the golf course, get my golf clubs, get on the course, play around, get done, get in the car and come back home. That's at least four and a half hours. Even when you eliminate all those physical reactive activators, the thing that you carry with you are what I call your free range thoughts. All the thoughts that are rolling around in your head that can send you off into a reactive tailspin. Have you ever sat down, you had the best of intentions, set up your optimal environment, you decided you wanted to do something. You've eliminated the telephone calls in your email, but you sat down. And as soon as you sit down to focus, something pops into your head and you think, oh, I got to call this before I get started or I've got to do this, or I've got to call about this contract, I got to get this waiver and you get sucked back into your day. The thing that you can do to corral those free range thoughts is to use the 50 minute focus finder. Now this is something that I use a lot and I'll share with you how and why this actually works. Because when you are going to focus on something, when you're going to focus all of your attention on something and you want to give it your full attention attention. The only way for you to really focus on that one thing is to be completely confident in your mind that that is the thing that you should be focused on right now, that you're not going to get in trouble for not doing something else. Now there's not many things in your life that can't wait for two hours. Would you agree that most of the time it's very. Sometimes things happen quickly, but you don't. You're not so worried about it when you're on a listing appointment, even if you have a pop up thought during a listing appointment, what do you do? You dismiss it, don't you? Both Joe and I use actual timers for doing this. One of the most freeing things that I ever discovered was the use of a digital timer that will go off at a certain interval of time. If I can set it to 50 minutes and know that that buzzer is going to ding in 50 minutes, I can focus all of my attention and not have to worry about how long have I been in here or what's the time or anything like that. I know that it's going to go off in 50 minutes. Now here's what I would recommend for you as your very first 50 minute focus finder. To get a yellow pad or four sheets of paper and set your timer for 50 minutes. And here's what I want you to do in that 50 minutes. I want you to write down every thought that's on your mind, everything you can possibly think of. Now it seems like you're thinking, wow, there's a lot of stuff going on there. And here's what's going to happen. For the first 10 minutes you're going to have thoughts as fast as you can write them. As fast as you can write them down. They're going to come. You might start slowing down at seven minutes or eight minutes, but then a couple of more will come and you'll get, you'll feel like you're completely done at 10 minutes, but you're not. Because at 10 minutes what happens is now you can focus into instead of the things that are immediately on your mind, all the surface things. Now you start moving into the proactive things, the things that you'd like to do, the things that you've been meaning to do, the things that you would love to do at some point. And if you spend 50 minutes writing down all of these thoughts, I would challenge you to get to 100 things that are on your mind that are all right there. And the first thing that you're going to notice when you get all 50 of those done is that you will have an immediate sense of relief. You'll immediately feel like, wow, it seems much more manageable when you look at it on four sheets of paper than when it's rolling around in your head and no thought is too significant or, or insignificant to write on your sheet of paper there. You know, it could be as easy as get milk or it could be as big as how am I going to pay for retirement? Or how am I going to pay for college. It could be any of those things. When you get them all out on that piece of paper, what you're going to find is that you've got enough ammunition on that piece of paper to fuel all of your proactive endeavors for the next 60 to 90 days and beyond. Now, what you'll also notice is that as soon as you do that 50 minute focus finder, you're going to see that a lot of the tasks kind of group together, especially the ones on the first page. From the first 10 minutes, you're going to look through them and you're going to see there's a lot of phone calls that you might need to make. So you might want to go through and kind of put a little check mark beside all the phone calls that you, you have to make. There might be a whole list of things that you can pick up when you're out and about. So you go out and you block them all at one time to go out and pick up your dry cleaning and drop off that waiver and get yourself a timer and get some office supplies and get all the things that are there for you. You might find that there is a whole list of things that you want to do online, proactive things that you want to do online. Number five is the 50, 20, 50 solution. This is how I get everything that I get done done. What I look at doing is blocking off a period of two hours, a two hour chunk of time. So all my days I'm looking and I know that the first thing that I'm going to do, the first proactive thing, is to block off that two hours where I'm going to do a 50, 20, 50 block. And what that means is a 50 minute session of on where I'm completely focused on that one thing. The buzzer goes off, the timer goes off, I press stop, I set it for 20 minutes and then I completely disconnect for 20 minutes. And as soon as that buzzer goes off, I get right back and do another 50 minutes. That is a two hour block of time right there. And you've spent two 50 minute focus sessions on something, one task that's very productive. It's all about really flexing your focus muscle. You know, how long can you right now focus on one thing? You know, can you go five minutes focused on one thing? Can you go 10, 20, whatever it is, I guarantee you're going to find that, that, that 50 minutes is a lot of times, but you can't do it unless you've corralled all of those free range thoughts that are rolling around in your head so that you know that While you're doing this 50, 20, 50 block that you're okay, that there's nothing that you really have to focus on other than what you want to focus on for these two hours. And when you practice this, when you start doing it, it'll become the most productive thing that you've ever done. What you're going to find is with that list, with your list of your free range thoughts. Those are going to be the seeds of all of the time that you're going to spend in your optimal environment playing golf. And if you know ahead of time what you want to do, what the highest priority thing is, it's easy then for you to break it up into chunks that are going to take 50 minutes or that are going to be two at a time to do a two hour chunk. Number six is to stop multitasking and focus on one thing at a time. You cannot do two things at one time and what you're really doing is you're switching between things really quickly. Number seven is to focus on free time and remodel time. Results always fit in. The thing that you have to really proactively focus on are doing the things like free time and remodel time. Because nobody's hounding you to do those things. What would you do just to practice. And if you had two hours to do something that you would really enjoy doing that has nothing to do with work, it could be going to a movie, it could be going to get a massage, it could be going to a yoga class, it could be having lunch with a friend. If you've got the very first thing, you've already got Your first few 50 minute focus finders blocked out. You've got your first task is to do that list of 100 free range thoughts. Get them all gathered down. What that will lead to is that's going to give you all kinds of ammunition to fill the next seven 50 minute focus blocks where you can take 50 minutes, make a lot of those phone calls that you have to make, or take a two hour block, go out, run all over town and get all the things that you have to go and get or drop off. Or do I talk about this concept of being in time debt? It's hard to focus on proactive things when you know you've got all this stuff that you really have to do or you should do, or you need to clean up things like your inbox in your email, things like your physical environment in your desk or or your office or your home or anything that's like that. Your car, all these things. Those will be good things for you to proactively take care of in your focus sessions initially, and it will fuel everything else. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show, notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing. Com 431.