Real Estate Business Owners Need To Crush Those Digital Addictions

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisor, Charlotte, North Carolina. On the podcast, if you're new, we really just dig into the good and mostly the bad and ugly of building a profitable, sustainable real real estate team business worth owning. And that's what Real Estate B School stands for, really, just to have open conversations about what real estate teams look like today so we can stop the insanity of putting those on a pedestal that have achieved X number of transactions, you know, they grew from here to here. No one's talking profit, no one's talking sustainability, nobody's talking, you know, what the business actually looks like. So I get the fortunate position in our industry is I have these conversations all the time with our members of Real Estate B School and with those that are looking to come into Real Estate B School to fix what they built. And today we're in a, I wouldn't call it a multi part series. I've just been going crazy with the conversation about productivity and I'm going to, I'm going to keep it going here for a few more podcast episodes. Today I want to talk about something that is, it's just as much a challenge for me as it is for really anyone. And it's our digital addictions. And so I'm holding up, if you're watching the video, I'm holding up my phone here. I have the tendencies and I can be just as addicted to my phone as anyone. And so let's just have a conversation about it and what I've learned about when we pick up our phone, what we're looking for and how we use it out of without thinking versus being intentional about using it. So the last podcast episode we talked about linking everything to our goals, you know, everything we do, you know, in every area of our life, all of the things that we do during the day and our waking hours have to be linked to something that you want to be different in a certain area of your life. So if you want a strong marriage, you have to have intention around how you want to show up in that relationship. If you want to be a parent to your children, that sets them up for, you know, a life of contribution and success and meaning and impact. You better make sure that you're being intentional with spending time with your children and teaching them the things that they need to know to be able to show up in the world that way. I have a 9 year old and an 11 year old, so that one to me is really like, man, how many years do I really have left with them? Fourth and sixth grade. How many years do I really have left with my children? And then if you. And the same thing goes for your faith, if you want to, want to have a more intimate relationship with your creator, with God, with Jesus, you better make sure you're doing the things on a regular basis to be able to improve that relationship and to have a better understanding of that relationship. And in business, so to bring it down to business, a lot of times I think we rationalize that the use of technology in business and digital is the handheld, the mobile device is digital, and also your computer and your email specifically. And we'll get into that. You know, go to Google, this is a good test and it's fun. If you have a real estate team, go to Google and I'll make sure it's Darren Hardy Digital Addictions Dictionary. Digital Addiction Assessment. I think that's what it's called, digital addiction. And then you can even put a PDF on it because I think he probably has like a Darren Dale, a Darren Daly on it. Yeah. Productivity Addictions Assessment. Yeah, so. So if you go to it, it's called Productivity Addictions Assessment. He houses it on Amazon S3 and it's Darren Hardy dot com. So it's a fun little two sided. A two sided assessment. He runs a session called High Performance Summit and do the assessment with your team or do it solo. If you don't want to admit to your team how addicted you are, it just sort of sets the stage for a conversation around. On our team, we call our phones Dream stealers. When you have big goals and you spend time doing things that are not in alignment with achieving those goals, you're really just, it's just talk. I mentioned before in the podcast there's a saying in a group I belong to called C12. Priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. So when I look at my calendar and I look where I spend my day and how I can sneak and cheat on my calendar with my mobile device, or spending too much time in email, I'm out of integrity with the fact that I say I want to be a great husband, I say that I want to be a great father, I say that I want to be closer to God, I say that I want to be increasing my net worth systematically, I say that I want less stressed and I'm jumping on social media, right? So we have to look at technology in a way as a business owner because we're not regular people. We are business Owners, we cannot afford to numb out and you know, go into our devices in a way where to be honest, all we're doing is we're looking for that quick, you know, endorphin or dopamine or whatever, you know, you get when you go on your device and you sort of scroll through something in a very non intentional way and it's not linked to something that you're trying to achieve. I go into Facebook. Very rarely do I go into Facebook and I catch myself if I do it or Instagram's the worst. I feel like complete crap when I go into Instagram and I look at everyone's perfect life. It's like, it's ridiculous. My life is amazing. I wouldn't trade my life for any life on the entire planet. Literally. I wouldn't trade my life for any life on the planet. And I go onto Instagram and I feel like I'm a loser. And so how are your digital addictions taking you out of confidence? How are they taking you out of momentum? How are they messing with your psychological well being? Just think about all the ways that technology can be used profitably. So my point was I go into Facebook, I use it strategically. You know, I will go into our private member Facebook group. You know, in real estate B school we have a Facebook group of business builders, like minded business builders. I can stay in there for too long too, just answering questions and sort of chiming in. You know, my thoughts on different, different business issues that our members are having. At least though it's, it's linked to a goal to serve a community that is ultimately going to build businesses that impact their communities. So in a roundabout way it is serving, it is linked to a goal of mine mind mindlessly going into Facebook and just scrolling up and seeing what your friends are up to. Not, not that that's just taking away your dreams. Using your device to catch up on news, really what news do you really need to know? I don't watch any news at all, like at all. I mean I will, I'm trying to think of how I even find out. My mom, occasionally when we have dinner, we have a Sunday night dinner with my mom. She just turned 77 and it's my mom, my sister, my wife, Julie Anderson, Kendall, my kids. And every once in a while or when she gives me a haircut more often when she gives me a haircut, she's 77 and she was a hairdresser when she was younger and she still gives me haircuts. And just on Saturday, this past Saturday she gave me a haircut and I asked her, is there any news in the world that I need to know about? Because I know she watches news all the time and I just poke fun at her. I'm like, why do I need to know that? And I don't even think there was anything in the months since I've gotten my haircut that there was anything I needed to know. What else is a digital addiction? I would say your tv, the morning news, the evening news, putting CNN on the mindless, letting stuff into your brain that is not going to move your life forward. So think about how you use technology. Are you using it to get some kind of validation via likes on Facebook or is it filling you up in some unhealthy way that you really should be getting filled up in your faith or in your relationship with your spouse or your friends or whatnot? So ask yourself, are you using technology profitably, consistently? And then I want to talk a little bit about email. Email is the biggest, can be the biggest time suck imaginable. One tip I will give you for email that will change everything. We use Gmail suite, so G suite for both businesses, high performance real estate advisors and for real estate, B school and the current version of Gmail. So powerful. There's a few things that you could do in there. You could schedule send. So sometimes I'll have a random thought on a weekend instead of blurting it out to my team on a Saturday when I'm going for a run, I'll stop my run. I'll type the email, which is bad. So don't judge because I'm not being present in my run and I'll schedule it to send it on Monday at 10:00am so I'm not messing up their weekend. Like if I'm going to be crazy and work all the time in my mind, I don't need to drive my team crazy. So that's one thing you could do in Gmail. The other thing is it makes it really easy to snooze. So you can go through like two or three time blocks a day, 15 to 20 minutes each time block. Those are your email time blocks. Don't be an email except for those time blocks. And when you're in there, you're just triaging emails. You're deleting, you're snoozing to a day or a time period where you can handle that issue or you're handling it right away if it's a quick one, or you're delegating it to someone else on your Team. The one I really want to get into is the biggest one is, and this has always been, you could do this in Gmail and really any email system, anything. Any email that has the word unsubscribe in it, I have it skip my inbox and go to a folder called unsubscribe and theoretically I can go into that folder and see what's in there. I never do. Literally. That's probably about 90% of my emails are spam and they all have to have the word unsubscribe in it that will change your world forever. And there's really nothing that has the word unsubscribe in it. That's an important email. Unless somebody forwards something to you that they really wanted you. Your best friend wanted you to read this life changing piece of content and it had the word unsubscribe you. Gmail even recognizes those and it puts it into your inbox with a label unsubscribe and also the label inbox because it recognizes that it came from a personal, a personal sender, a personal contact of yours. So, and I have inbox zero every time I shut down. So I have a workday startup, a workday shutdown, two 30 minute time blocks. By the end of my morning time block, I have an inbox 0. By the end of 5:30pm 5 to 5:30 is my workday shutdown. I have a process I go through where I get my inbox to zero and then I have one during the day and sometimes I have it open. Generally though, I always have it to zero. And if I'm in a rock block where I'm working on a project, then I shut the email down and I'm present. I'll go through time blocking here. I'm trying to think of my little syllabus I have here. Yeah, in a couple podcast episodes I'll get into the glorious thing we call time blocking. How sexy sexy time blocking is so crush our digital addictions. You have to do it if you really want to achieve at a high level. You have to be super cynical about this thing. You have to really be intentional with where you put your eyeballs, what you're listening to. I guess one other thing I want to mention is, well, I guess it's digital. I went through a phase where I would listen to like a book a week and it's through my Audible app. So I guess it is digital and I was just consuming information and I wasn't implementing. And so maybe I'll do a separate podcast episode implementation is more powerful than knowledge. I'll save that one because that'll be a good one and that's all I've got for you. So if you're at the point in your business where you, you really don't know how to prioritize your efforts, you really don't have a plan for moving your business forward, you don't have enough intention every day and confidence to know that the thing that I'm doing right now fits in to the longer term plan in this way. And maybe you're just the time, money, stress for you is out of whack, right? Real estate, B school, we are all about paying attention to our time, our money and our stress. And we want more time, we want more money, we want less stress. Maybe that's out of whack for you. Maybe the business is just not set up the right way. Or maybe you're just starting to build your real estate team and you just need help. You need the roadmap to do it. No matter where you are, what your situation is. All I've got for you is a conversation about your business. Go to realestatebschool.com, bright orange banner on top book. In a free business growth strategy session. We'll talk about where you are right now, what's working, what's not working, the good, bad, ugly, the way your business looks today. We'll talk about what you want it to look like, what you think is possible for the future and then we'll talk about what's holding you back. We'll bridge the gap from where you are today to where you will be in the future. If our pilot program is a fit for you, this is a 30 day free program where we actually do a deep dive on your business. We build out a three year picture with you, a one year plan. We break it down to 90 days. We pick rocks which are the projects you're going to work on. We come up with measurables, we break it down even beyond the 90 day into the weekly, into the daily. And that's all in a 30 day process that we go through if you qualify, which we call our pilot program and there's no charge for that program. So go to realestatepschool.com, we'll see you there. And remember, we must crush our digital addictions. See ya.