How to overcome Overwhelm and to turn off the Noise

Mark Simpson. And this is a video that I have wanted to do for so long. On a daily basis I get at least a handful of messages saying to me that they can't do all of the training because they feel overwhelmed. I want to show you the five things that I have done through the last two years that has helped me grow not only my business boostly, but help manage well over 20 Facebook pages at once, as well as growing two Facebook groups and getting well over 100 emails, over 50 messages a day on the Facebook, on the, on the social media and never actually having to go on social media more than once or twice a day. Okay, first of all, we'll go into Facebook and as you will see what's different to yours right now it's is that right here you've got a newsfeed? I haven't, I've just got a quote. And this is a Google Chrome extension and it's called News Feed Eradicator. So all you do go into Google, type in News Feed eradicator, Chrome extension, you install it to your Google Chrome and when you come on, it takes away the temptation to go down that rabbit hole. So instead of me coming onto Facebook and seeing lots of potential things that's going to take my attention away from what I need to do, it is replaced with a nice little quote or a saying or a positive message. And I love this. I've had this now for well over a year and it's been one of the most important things that I've done. Secondly, the notifications on the top right hand corner here. Like I said, I've grown two Facebook groups. I'm a big part of a couple of other very important Facebook groups. Coffee with Dan, espresso with Dan. And I used to be that type of person that would just join every single Facebook group. When you join a Facebook group, your notifications are automatically by default set to highlights or all posts or friends posts. Okay. What I do on 80% of the groups that I am now a part of, I turn them to off. Because what happens is if you join lots and lots of groups like those for sale groups and all the other Facebook groups that are out there and you've got notifications turn to highlights, then your notification bar up here is going to get overwhelmed with people wanting to grab your attention and you got to work out your 80 20. The 20% of the groups that you spend 80% of your time, the ones that you want to go in, the ones you want to engage in. Next we're going to Go into notifications and what we're going to do is we're going to go and turn on do not disturb mode. Do not disturb mode is great. When you flick it on, it means that you don't get any notifications in these top right hand corner. Secondly, I go a little bit step further, I come into system preferences and what I do is I come into the actual notifications and I take it a step further by turning off all of the badges. Now what this does, it means that now I'm in control. There's nothing out there that is going to go and grab my attention and I'm going to come back into Facebook. So again, you get notifications all of the time here. All right, when you interact with a post and you go away, say that somebody else engages with it. So just like this one here, I will keep getting notifications, just go in, tap those little dots, turn off notifications about that photo. So what that means is that I'm not going to get notified any more times when someone interacts with that post, which is key because you could have a really popular Facebook post that keeps getting commented and commented and commented and commented on. But by turning it off, what it means is that I'm not going to get notified. All right, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come off my computer and I'm going to go to the all important mobile device. So what I want to do is I want to show you what I've done to massively cut down on distractions on my iPhone over the past year. One of the first things that I do is go into settings and I turn do not disturb on. So again, I won't be getting any notifications that I don't want to see. You can even go a step further, double up, go into the notifications tab. And again I turn off badge icons, I turn off banner icons, I turn off drop down icons just so that WhatsApp, just so that text messages, just so that Instagram, all of that will not get through. I found that especially with the messenger app because it's on a small screen, the messages that I were getting, the quality of the message I was sending back was nowhere near as good as when I got a time to be on a desktop and I could type it out. I normally find that I was checking messenger on the move when I was walking or you know, I was doing something else. And I just found that the, the messages that I was sending back to people, part of my paid community or just people reaching out for help. It was shocking compared to the type of advice I can give when I can stop and I'm doing it in my own time on a desktop when I block off time to do it. And I found that my response and the advice that I was giving was 10 times better. So again this is something that I've just done recently by getting rid of the Facebook app and the messenger app and it has massively helped not only productivity but also the types of advice that I was giving back. And finally my final one, when it comes to checking emails, when it comes to checking notifications, just set a block period. So for me personally with email I have a half an hour block in the morning and I have a half an hour block in the afternoon just before I finish work and those are the only two times that I check email. Same with social media. I give myself three blocks throughout the day, one in the morning, one at lunch, one in the afternoon.