MBA1134 3 Steps to Gain 10 Productive Hours This Week

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the hundred dollar NBA show. Business truths every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn three steps to gaining 10 productive hours this week. Yes, this week you're going to gain 10 hours and I'm going to show you how. These are three things. Three steps I took to do this myself. I'm telling you right now this works. But I'm also going to tell you that this is not a walk in the park. It's going to be a bit of a challenge. Not impossible, but a bit of a challenge. But if you stick to it, you're going to get 10 hours for yourself. Whether you want to invest that back into your business, do a new side project, start a podcast, a blog, or even just use it to catch up on some reading or relaxing. I'm going to show you how to do these three steps. They're simple but they're powerful. I'm also going to show you what to look out for so you don't get derailed, so you don't actually get distracted and not follow through. So important. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Alright? Let's get you 10 productive hours this week. Now this is tried and true. I've done this. I gained 10 hours by cutting out these three bad habits. Now what I want you to do is I want you just to commit to trying this just for one week. You don't have to do this for the rest of your life. I just want you to try it so you can see the results and see and evaluate if you want to continue to do this. So let's start with step number one. And it deals with social media. Believe it or not, social media sucks a lot of your time. Not only with reading all the posts, but replying and crafting your posts. Let's be real. Before you tweet something out, put something on Facebook, you read and reread that post and make sure it sounds brilliant. For most of us, it's gonna take five to ten minutes to craft something reasonable. And if you look at the total time you spend on social media every day, whether it's checking or reading or writing, it's about an hour to two hours a day. Even a light user of social media can easily hit an hour a day. So just for this week, I want you to stop using social media. Just for this week, I just want you to feel how much time it takes. You can reevaluate later on, you can dedicate special time to social media later, but it's best for you to take off completely from social media so you could see the difference. So you're gonna need to do some things to make sure you don't slip back into checking social media. Number one, make sure you remove it from your phone number. Remove all social media apps from your phone. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever you use, even Facebook messenger, get rid of it. That way when you're out about, you're not tempted to check. Number two, if you're using a desktop or a laptop, use a newsfeed eradicator. It's a chrome extension for Facebook, so it just completely removes the newsfeed. So even if you go to Facebook, there's nothing to see. But I highly encourage you not to go to these pages, not to go to your social media profiles. Just for this week, you're gonna see how much time it does take from you and then you can evaluate. If you do this just alone, you're gonna see a tremendous amount of time given back to you and you're gonna feel calmer and more in control. This is my own experience. I've Been off social media for the last 18 months or so. Actually it's about 16 months and I'll be off for the rest of the year. And this is kind of an experiment I've been doing. But, but I started with just being off a week just like this. Now does it mean I'm never going back to social media? No, I'm going to reevaluate at the end of the year and I reevaluate it at the end of the week and realize, hey, this is really beneficial. I'm gaining so much time. That's why I committed for the rest of the year. All right, so that's step one, Step two. Allocating time to check Email Too many of us have our email apps open all the time. Whether we're using a mail client like Mail for Apple or Outlook or whatever that's, you know, on our computer, or we have our Gmail open in tabs on our browser all the time, checking and rechecking email like it's a text message is a big time suck. What you need to do is dedicate certain periods of time during the day. And I recommend two periods of time. I do two hours after I start working and then an hour before I end working or right before I stop working. This allows me to get some work done and then check my email. If I, if there's anything I need to kind of tend to, that's the window. I check it and it's about 30 minutes. Because I don't believe in checking email without being able to reply. I need to give myself enough time. If I'm gonna read an email, I'm gonna reply to it then and there so I don't have to reread it the next time I have to reply. If I just leave and say I'll reply later. When later comes, I'm gonna have to reread that email, making it more time consuming. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna allot 30 minutes two hours after I start working and then 30 minutes at the end of my day or an hour before the end of the. Well, you might be saying, wow, an hour a day on email. Yeah, but you're probably spending a whole lot more going back and forth on email reading and replying throughout the day between tasks, set a specific time and just knock out email during those times. For some people who run their whole business on email and get a lot of emails, they're gonna need to spend a little bit more than 30 minutes. For example, like billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of The Dallas Mavericks. He spends a lot of time in email, but for most of us, you're not Mark Cuban, so you can, you know, do with 30 to 40 minutes at a time. All right, so we got social media handled. We got email handled. And the third one is the toughest one. But I need you to buckle down and promise me you're gonna do it this week. Cause it's gonna save you a ton of time, and it's counterintuitive, but it's going to work, trust me. And that step is, do not multitask. Multitasking has been proven to be the biggest time suck on. Why? Because essentially, the truth is we can't focus on more than one thing. I'm talking about cognitive tasks. I can't do email as well as build my website at the same time, you can do one cognitive task with a physical task, like listening to a book while jogging. Jogging doesn't require too much of your brain power. But when you do two things that require brain power, which is most of your workday, it just doesn't work. You have to switch on and off from each task. Now you might be saying, well, what's the big deal? I'll just switch back and forth. Well, you use a lot of energy and time when you switch. Every time you switch, you have to recalibrate your brain and say, okay, we're not doing this anymore. Now we're doing this. Where are we? Oh, yeah, I was reading this email. The email said this. Oh, who is it from? Okay, let me reply. Let's hit reply. So you have to kind of readjust and reorient yourself to the new task that you switched onto. And then when you switch off and go back to the other task, you're going to have to do the same thing again. Now you might be saying, oh, it's not that time consuming. Well, yeah, it's a few seconds here, a few seconds there, but it adds up. When you constantly multitask, you really don't dedicate the time and attention your tasks need, and you don't really finish it in an efficient manner. I'll give you a perfect example. We're launching a new product called Anytime Webinar. I think this is the first time I've actually mentioned it on the show. And I'm creating all these videos for it because we're about to do a beta launch over@antime webinar.com now, for most people, creating three videos, three tutorial videos that I'm creating, shooting them, editing them, might take a few days. But for me, it only took me about four hours because that's all I did. I locked myself in the room. I didn't have any other tabs open, had nothing open. No slack, no messenger, no basecamp, no social media, of course, no email, nothing. And I just focused on that task. I wrote the actual steps of the task, whether it's scripting, shooting, editing, all that kind of stuff, uploading it to the cloud. I wrote all the steps and I just focused on getting that done. And it was so efficient. Because I didn't multitask. I was able to finish this in four hours. Now how do I know it would take more than that? Well, I've done it in the past. I used to multitask like crazy and a task like that took me in the past more than a day, sometimes two days, sometimes three days because of that cognitive switching and because I have to reacclimate to the task. Do not multitask. It's going to save your life and save you so much time. Trust me, you're going to be tempted to do it. Oh, I can do that. I can do that. I could pick up my phone and send a message while I'm doing this. It's just a small little thing. It's just a small little reply. It's just a small little message. But when you go off task, you're neglecting your focus. And focus is really powerful and it can save you a ton of time.

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All right, let's talk about some pitfalls to look out for when you're implementing these three steps to gain these 10 hours, these productive hours. Number one, old habits die hard. So you have to make sure you're aware of this. Your current habits, the ones that are not like this, are gonna override by default. So you're gonna have to fight against them. Whether it's, you know, kind of creeping back into social media or, you know, breaking that email rule where you're checking email outside of your allotted times, or. Or of course the multitasking, which is kind of the umbrella thing, but multitasking anything, not only just email or social and one of the things that really helped me is putting a post it note on my monitor that a simple quote that I just made up that really just helped me stay on track. And it was just a simple quote that said focus those who focus win. And when I say that to myself, I say focus. I tell myself, focus those who focus win. I'm thinking about all the people that are known for focus that have one. Whether it's Kobe Bryant from the Lakers who has tremendous focus and has been recognized as one of the best basketball players of all time. A great whether it's great podcasters that I look up to, like Jordan Harbinger from the Jordan Harbinger show, which I know personally, he's super focused on creating a great show every single time and he just doesn't wane from that focus. He stays on track. Or think of somebody like Brian Dean, who runs an amazing blog on SEO backlinko.com, super focused on creating great content every single month. He doesn't waver, he doesn't miss a month. He stays focused and he delivers. Those who focus win. You know me, I'm not somebody who typically relies on, you know, rah rah speeches or inspirational quotes, but we need to push from time to time a reminder. So remind yourself, make up your own quote or use mine. It doesn't matter. But the point is that you have to go to something when you feel like you're going off Track. If you go off track, if you check social, if you check email, when you're not in that kind of light, a lot of time, no problem. Just get back on track as soon as possible. Don't stay there. Don't say, oh, what, the hell with it, who cares? No, as soon as you catch yourself, just say, hey, I should stay focused. I should, you know, commit to this week of, you know, doing these three steps. Let me stop. Let me go back on track. Same thing with multitasking. If you stumble, no problem. If you make a mistake, no problem. Just get back on track as soon as possible. I promise you, even if you're not perfect, during these three steps, during this week, you will gain a tremendous amount of time, and you'll thank me for it. It's going to make you reevaluate the way you do everything in business and how you spend your time. It's going to make you think, hey, where else am I wasting time? What else is causing me to, you know, not be as productive as possible? Well, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things that really helped me find out about these three things is I started to question things I really thought were true. Like, you have to be on social media constantly, all day if you're going to be successful online. Is that really true? How much is social media really helping my business? I had a question, and I had to experiment and get the answers for myself rather than just, you know, assume that's the answer. No. Find out. This is your life. This is your business. Get the facts, experiment, and find out what works for you. Thank you so much. And I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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