Mindset Monday - Effective vs Efficient - Where to focus?

This is episode 101 of the Empowered Athlete podcast. This is the Empowered Athlete podcast Mindset Monday 10 minutes with Kari Schneider to learn new mindset tactics and tricks to optimize your performance in sport, business and life.

I am actually doing two things at once, which is contradicting the message that I'm sending today. So it's effective versus efficient. And the reason that this comes up is because I started to really pay attention to this. I was reading a book by John Berardi and it was about it's change makers in the fitness, the health and fitness realm. And he started talking about how they shifted their entire business in order to have greater effectiveness. And this just kind of popped for me because I've spent over 20 years really emphasizing to my athletes and my clients that we're trying to get the most effectiveness and efficiency all at once. And in doing that, we want to really optimize our time. Often with a high performance athlete, we're always trying to get things done as fast because there's such a tight timeline and not really this length that we would often have. There's always a push after injuries to get back on the court. There's always this, this time crunch in order to make a particular team or certain time of year, certain season. So there's always this time crunch. And from a personal standpoint, I've always felt that too. Between having a business and having kids, I was always trying to do about three things at once and be as efficient as possible in order to have the biggest bang, have the most have done in the least amount of time. That was always about the efficiency. And only recently, over the last couple of of months, have I shifted to focus on effectiveness first. It doesn't mean that we weren't focusing on effectiveness in the past. Not only from a coaching standpoint, but a family standpoint. But there was always this try to be efficient, multitasking how many things can get done in a given day. And what I've started to notice is that you end up circling back to redo something. You end up finding that your attention was split and divided in about five different ways. And so I've come up with a few things for you to really take a look at the difference between effectiveness and efficiency and where you might want to really focus on effectiveness over efficiency. Make sure you've got that effectiveness of focus and how you can do it. So number one, I used to list on my planner, on my scheduler, I would list and list and list all the things and I freaking love Crossing or checking off that list. If I could cross or check off that list, it felt so good. Get that little dopamine pump and yay, I did something, I'm accomplished and instead what I've started to do is something completely different. You ever find though that with those lists that you want to write something down that you did just so you could cross it off? Yep, that's me. So instead of that scheduling, completely focusing on scheduling and blocking that time, now here is the catch on this. What you may find is that you've scheduled something, but your time spending doing that task goes way over what you actually scheduled. You didn't schedule enough time. So if you were being graded on that task, maybe you failed that task. And what do we equate failing to? We equate it to learning. So what do we learn from that is that that task needs more time. Does it need twice as much time? Does it mean need 30% more time? What does that task need for time? So number one, instead of listing what you need to do, actually scheduling it in and this includes family time. This includes attention to a spouse. This includes practice time. This includes extra skill skill development, scheduling it in making sure that that's part of the bigger picture. The second one in that scheduling is time block related tasks. So instead of in order to be the most effective and impactful, do not divert your brain from more than one topic. So for instance, if you've decided that you are going to, you need to do, you need to go out and get some running shoes for your training, but you also need to get your bike repaired and you also need to buy some new shorts. Well, time block all of those at the same time. So your brain is focused on the same thing and it's not going in five different directions. Same thing for work. If you have very similar tasks to do, instead of scheduling them out on three different days time block them. So those things happen on a given given time block, then your brain works more effect to get those done and you'll find it will happen faster. So you didn't mean to be efficient in that you're focusing on effectiveness, but because of the way you did it, you end up becoming more efficient in the long run and have a greater effective impact. So that would be the second thing. The third thing to create more effectiveness is triangulate. We often think we know our homes, our lives, our families the best and we typically do. However, we're only coming from our perspective. If we're trying to create the most effective result, then triangulating means getting the opinion or the advice or the expertise from three different experts in whatever that field is. So, for instance, if I want to know more about cycling, then I not only do I want to find out from one coach, I want to find out from two other experts in that field before I make my decision on how I'm going to approach it for myself. Now, this seems like a time sink. It seems time consuming instead of trial and error on my own or asking one person. But triangulating allows you to come up with a better result because it's perfect. If two of those experts don't see eye to eye, if they don't have the same opinion, then what it allows you to do is, doesn't mean that one is right and one is wrong. What it means is they probably have areas of expertise in subtly different fields. And then what you can do with that is decide which one serves you best. And that's how you end up finding what you really need the most and becoming far more exponentially more effective at what you want to learn. So it doesn't matter whether it's parenting, your finances, your training, your strength and conditioning, your race prep, your schooling, whatever it is you triangulate, you find three different experts in the area that you really care about. And that's going to allow you to be far more effective than had you just tried to decide by yourself. Your perspective is not enough when it comes to a major decision or something you really want to know more about. So triangulating, and that is something that I learned from Ray Dalio. If you aren't familiar with who that is, he is an expert in financial, investment and business. So look up Ray Dalio. So those are the three things to be most effective. Now I'm going to contrast this to not only what I have done and what I used to do, which was more about efficiency or what I thought was efficiency. And that is I used to have a running list all of the time, a running list going that this had to happen. And I'd have this constant pressure of this running list going from week after week and it would just keep carrying on. And I never had the relief from completing that running list. Because our brain runs in loops. Our brain really wants to complete a loop or complete a task, and it helps us with memory. So when we have running lists all of the time, our brain is never feeling like it gets to shut down or relax or finish and complete that loop. So I used to do that all the time, thinking it was efficient. The second thing is I'VE always thought I was this hero at multitasking and multitasking as women we tend to do a lot of it, but we know research wise and we also know from experience that trying to juggle too many balls at once is simply not effective. So that would be the other thing that I've really tried to clamp down on in order to be more effective at anything that I'm doing. It doesn't matter whether it's around the home, in the business, in the gym, with clients, but really clamping down on that multitasking because it tends not to serve the bigger picture in the most effective way. And the third thing is deciding quickly. I've known for a very long time that leaders make decisions quickly. However they make decisions quickly once the information has been accumulated. And that's what goes with the triangulation. So accumulating the information first, taking the time to do it and then making the decision quickly because there's nothing worse than making fast decisions and making fast actions and going in the wrong freaking direction. So take your time to accumulate and assimilate that information so that you can make a very effective decision in the direction that you want to go. So those are the three things that I used to do so much for efficiency that I have since learned really don't serve me as well. So just a recap on the effective things. Number one Scheduling versus list making. Don't list, make, schedule it in. And then once you've learned how much time most things take, you adjust your time. Don't go insane by trying to schedule the same amount of time for something that needs more time or can use less time. Number two Time. Block related things together. So if you are going to do a block of work on a specific topics that are related, block them on the same day and same time instead of trying to break them out through three days. Your brain works so much better when it's in the same realm of focus or interest. Number three. Triangulate. Get three experts in the field or the area that you need to go, the direction you need to go, or the area you need to learn about so that you can accumulate and assimilate the information that you need to make an appropriate decision. These three things will make you far more effective at what you want to get done. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a new personal best in the gym. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for better finance or running your home better. Those ways will make you more effective and focusing on the effectiveness versus the efficiency will serve you so much better. So this is what our power up call this morning was about on the Empowered Reset. So we have an intention every single day of this 30 day empowered reset. And this morning's was effective versus efficiency and that is what we focused on. So the intention of the day, starting from first thing in the morning for all the people in Team Reset was to be how? Here's the question. How? What do I have to do to be the most effective in what I want to accomplish today or in the things that will move the needle the most in what is most fulfilling for me in my life? So most effective is the focus and that's what I wanted to bring you today. So that is your mindset Monday. That's what we're focusing on today. I hope this intention serves you well and you can have more effectiveness in your life and not worry as much about efficiency so you can have your best results and you can have the greatest fulfillment for you. Have a great Monday today. It's a great day. It's a Monday. It's a fresh start of a week. You got this guys. Crush your weekend.