Work Efficiently to Be Fully Present in Your Life with Ian Koniak

You have to set boundaries for the time you work. That's the number one thing I do. Now. There's a Parkinson's law. It says that work will expand to the time allotted. So if you don't have boundaries, you'll work 70, 80 hours a week. And that's just stupid. I don't want someone working that many hours. That means they have no life and they're not going to be a cool person because they're not doing other stuff outside of work. That's going to make them well rounded. For many salespeople. That can be very hard to manage. Managing the white space. I like to say white space is dead space. So when I think time management, I have a golden rule of time management, which I love. What you said, work smarter and harder. But my definition of effective time management, this golden rule is simple. The quality of the time you work determines both the quality and quantity of time you have outside of work.

Say it one more time.

Say it one more time. The quality of time you work determines both the quality and quantity of time you have outside of work. Okay, and I'll break that down very simply and what it means. If you're working hard in the hours that you're supposed to be working on the right things, you can leave work and be fully present with the people you love because you got the shit done that you needed to get done, and you're not carrying it with you to your family, to your friends, to your weekends, to your nights. And you're going to have a heck of a lot more time available because you're working efficiently and you're making a lot more money, which is going to let you do a lot more things and not have to work as much. So it really is work smarter, not harder. And make sure you're working when you're supposed to on the right thing so that you can free up your headspace for full presence in all other areas of what you're doing in life.

One of the things I talked about with my team all the time, right, we had this little quote that we'd go through is like, you'd be shocked how much work you could get done at work if all you did at work was work.

I love it.

And like, we joke about it, it's like, y', all like, I don't want you working at home. I don't want you working on the weekends. But it's like, we don't get the work done at work, which then forces us to do work outside of work, which then makes us Take our foot off the gas at work and it becomes this game, right? So let's talk about. Cause that's why I didn't like the, you know, smarter, not harder. It's like when you're working, work hard. Yeah, but then apply the smart. So let's go another layer deeper here of like, okay, so what are some tactics or what are some things that have helped you or the teams you've worked with get more done at work, right. To get into that deep work stage.

So, so I'm going to give you so many because I teach this and I. If there's one thing that, that makes a big, biggest difference in someone's sales career, I want to take a step back before I get into tactics. So as part of my sales coaching business, I'm half therapist, half coach, okay? So people open up to me and one of the things that I asked them in the very beginning, Katie, is how much are you really working during a workday on revenue generating activities? And when I say RGAs, revenue generating activities, what I define that as is two things, very simple. Either advancement of pipeline or creation of pipeline. Everything else is noise. Okay? So when I ask that question consistently, what do you think I get from in an eight hour day, what do you think? Most people tell me in confidence, knowing that I'm not their manager, knowing that they would never admit this to anyone else.

So in confidence I'm going to say.

An hour I get consistently two to four hours. All right?

There's no way it's four, but I'll give them the two. There's no way.

I said, well, what would happen if you actually work the full eight hours on revenue generating activities? Okay. And administrative stuff could be revenue generating. Let's, let's not get doing a proposal. Absolutely. Is revenue generating activity, okay, Sending an order to a client to get signed? Of course that's a revenue. I'm talking true RGAs and we define it that way. I say what would happen if you were doing that? And they say, I would double, triple my results. I would feel way better. It's because I have distractions and noise and I'm not prioritizing. So this is something everybody faces and you're not alone. If you give that one hour, two hour, three hour, maybe they're being generous and saying four. But frankly, when you work a full day on the right things and you actually execute what you plan and accomplish, everything you set out to do, there is no better feeling in the world. And you can sleep well at night because you know you're doing all you can. And I think you and I both live by this principle and that's why we take so much on. And frankly, I do it so I feel good. I know if I mess around in the day, at the end of the day I feel guilty and I'm not present and I just beat myself up and I'm just tired of that. I did that long enough. So I said, okay, this is something I need to work on. I stopped taking Adderall and I started intensely studying time management and applying it and really have spent the better part of the last couple of years since I got off Adderall, learning to master these principles. And you never stop learning, learning and going. So a couple principles I'm going to teach. Number one is you have to set boundaries for the time you work. That's the number one thing I do. Now there's a Parkinson's law. It says that work will expand to the time allotted. So if you don't have boundaries, you'll work 70, 80 hours a week. And that's just stupid. I don't want someone working that many hours. That means they have no life and they're not going to be a cool person because they're not doing other stuff outside of work that's going to make them well rounded. So, so fundamentally, if you only give yourself two hours to get something done, you will work way more efficiently, you will work way more focused. And that's why people work well under deadlines or when there's a meeting coming up, because, you know, they're finally like forced to do it. So if you can set that boundary every single day for yourself, I think that's a foundation. So for me, my boundaries are eight to six. Okay? So I'm not working after six, no matter what I have left to do, because there's always going to be stuff I didn't get to. I'm stopping at 6 so I can be present with my family. I also have another boundary from 12 to 1. Every day I go in and have lunch with my wife. I work in the back office. I go in and she texts me at 12:02, she's like, you coming? So, you know, even, even she, she's on it because she knows that's our sacred time. So by having that lunch hour, it forces me to work super efficiently in the 8 to 12 and the 1 to 6. Okay? So that's one technique is really set those boundaries. Now there are going to be times you have some big project or, you know, occasionally you might have to work at night or you know, a morning. I try and do that when I'm. When it's not interfering with my family. So I'll wake up early on the weekends if I got something big. And by the time I'm done it's 9am My family's getting up and there's no impact to that. So you know, for the most part it's 8 to 8 to 12 and 1 to 6, Monday to Friday. Occasionally if I got stuff on the weekends, I'll do it. But for the most part that's made me work. Really efficiency, that's the first thing. So know your boundaries, set your boundaries and stick to your boundaries. When I say I start at 8, what I'm really doing is at 7:45, which is my tactic. Number two is I'm planning my day. Okay? So I will go through. I use a system, it's called the 12 week year and it's really simple. I have it here, it looks very busy, but it works for me. I print out basically a weekly scorecard at the beginning of the week and I do this on a Sunday night or a Monday morning. And I write down here my top revenue generating critical activities for the week. Okay, so for me I'll have 15 things written out and then I prioritize those from 1 to 15. So rather than every day trying to figure out what I'm going to do, how I'm going to do it and making a ton of decision, I've already done that once in the beginning of the week. So at 7:45 or whenever I start my day, I will look and I will actually look at where I am on my ranking. Maybe I'm number three and number one and two and then I just pick up on number three, pick up on number five. Now there's going to be things that come in throughout the day. I'll talk to you about how you deal with those. But fundamentally you have to plan your week and you got to plan your day. So for me, the act of writing down the critical things I want to do each week, ranking them, makes it really easy to plan my day into task block and put those critical things I need to get done in my white space. So literally every minute of the day is accounted for and a lot of times the week, in some cases where it's a busy week and I only have a little bit of white space. So that makes the decision fatigue, you know, having to figure out what I'm going to do when, when there's a two or three hour block in the calendar. Completely obsolete. I already know what I'm going to do because I took the time to plan it out.