MBA1196 Why Theming My Days Has Been a Game Changer

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Practical business lessons you can actually use every 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 episode you will learn why. Theming my days has been an absolute game changer for me. Theming my days has been the best productivity hack. I don't even want to call it a hack. It's like a a technique I've ever done. I'm going to explain what day theming is, how to implement it in your schedule, and why it's so effective. You don't really understand it on a cognitive level until you actually try it. In essence, day theming allows you to stay focused throughout the full day and not waste energy and time on content switching. I'll explain what that means in today's episode. If you feel at the end of the day you've worked all day, you're super tired but you didn't get anything done and then you feel super overwhelmed the next day because you feel like you have a ton more to do. This will help. It certainly helped me. Can't wait to share it. Let's get into it let's get down to business. Day theming is the practice of theming your days of the week. Let's say, for example, you work Monday through Friday and you give each day a theme. Now this only works if you have five or less themes. If you have more than five themes, that means you have too much on your plate. You are wearing way, way too many hats. Okay, I wear a lot of hats. I need to take some things off my plate. But I only have three themes on my schedule. Here are my themes. 1. Podcasting. So podcasting is a big part of our business. We have a daily show. I have to dedicate a certain amount of time during the week to record podcast episodes. Not only do I have to record, you know, five episodes a week, I gotta record episodes in advance. We have to batch episodes. Because if I don't do that, then I am chained to my microphone. I won't be able to travel or take some time off by batching. And getting ahead allows me to have some lead time so I can have some leave time. So theme number one is podcasting. Theme number two, sales and marketing. That's under my umbrella at this moment. Maybe in the future, maybe in the near future, I'll be making some hires to take care of that. But right now I gotta take care of sales and marketing. That includes webinars, sales calls, replying to customer emails that I have to deal with personally, creating systems and procedures to increase our sales, creating automation sequences to nurture current customers on trial, all that kind of stuff. Anything dealing with sales and marketing, that's another theme. Okay, my third theme is content, and that deals with webinar ninja content. This is like creating blog posts, content, upgrades, videos, anything that I need to create for the website. So this is what my calendar looks like with these three themes. On Monday, I deal with content. And now the reason why I put this on Monday, the theme for Monday is content is because I like to start the week when I'm refreshed, dealing with creative work like writing blog posts. Now the whole theme of that day is doing those types of tasks. There's a huge chunk in my calendar. We're talking about the majority of the day, 9 to 3. Let's say, for example, I, I'm working on that. I don't work on anything else. I'll explain why later. Now you might be thinking, what about emails, what about meetings? What about things like that? The things that run your business, those will be in your calendar. And they're exceptions. They're not the whole day if you have one meeting, that's fine. If it's a sales call, that's different. I have a sales day, and that's when I take my sales calls. But if I'm meeting with my team or I'm answering a chat message, I can dedicate 30 minutes to answer all my messages in the morning or reply to emails in the afternoon. But the bulk of the day is themed around content. What's the theme for Tuesday? Podcasting. I record five podcast episodes at the majority of the time that's allocated for that day. Wednesday's theme, sales and marketing. Reply to all my sales emails, do my sales calls, do any webinars I'm doing, whether it's for members or for non members. Thursday's theme. Back to podcasting. I record another five episodes, and Friday, another sales and marketing day. Now, you might be thinking, what's so great about this? Why is this so powerful? Why is this, you know, kind of up to all your productivity? Well, it allows me to stay focused and get things done. When you have a long laundry list of to dos and they're all mixed with different themes and different ideas and different departments, you waste so much time switching back and forth. When I say switching, I'm talking about in your brain. And this is what's called content switching. If I'm podcasting an episode, let's say, for example, and then immediately after I record one episode, I switch over and do a webinar. And then after that webinar, I plan to switch back and do another episode where I record a podcast, right? Then let's say after that webinar, I decide to hop on the mic again and record a podcast episode. Switching back and forth from that. You may think it's no big deal, but it actually is because my mind is really in a zone when I am recording the podcast, it's so much easier to record the next podcast episode right after one I just did because I have some momentum. My brain is in this mode. I have muscle memory that I can lean on. I'm using all the same skills and abilities I would need to do from the last task because it's the same thing, right? But if I switch over to something else, like, you know, doing a webinar, that's a totally different type of exercise. Or if I get on a sales call or if I work on some email automation by switching my content, switching what I'm doing, I have to re, you know, jig my brain. I have to kind of realign my brain and say, okay, this is now what we're doing, these are the tasks we're doing, this is how we're doing it. This is the medium we're writing instead of talking. And then when I switch back, let's say I go back to podcasting, I have to re get into the groove. Not fun and it wastes a lot of time and it's tiring. That's why a lot of people, they feel like they need so many breaks during the days because their content switching constantly. When, when you don't content switch, when you have a focused energy, you have that theme for the day. You get into this like groove, you get into this type of momentum that makes it so much easier to get things done. It just becomes like this total focus. I've heard other people doing this before. I never tried it until recently and I absolutely love it. I got this concept, this idea from Dan Martell, who's a mentor and coach of ours. And it's so good because it allows you just to stay focused. And then what happens is at the end of the day. So for example, today's Thursday. At the end of the day today I'm going to feel a sense of incredible accomplishment, just like I felt yesterday because I got so much done, I got so much momentum, things that actually matter. And I got done all the nitty gritty stuff like the emails and the meetings and things like that. Now the other thing that I want to point out that theming does is that it prioritizes the important stuff, what Daniel has taught us called the big rocks, the things that actually make your business money, that actually keeps it going. And that's where you build your themes, the big rocks of your business, the things that actually keep your business running and make money. So the podcast is not a podcast without me being on the mic recording episodes. I can't have a software and not sell it. I have to sell it, I have to market it. I can't attract new customers without content, so I have to create content for that. These are the things that, that make the business happen. I build themes around that. It becomes a priority because the theme of the day is that and I have to get those things done. And then everything else will find its own time, whether it's answering emails and if you don't answer all your emails and it gets pushed back till tomorrow to that slot you have in the morning to kind of, you know, bang em out, no problem. Email can wait. You have a meeting scheduled. Go to the meeting, finish the meeting and make sure your meetings are scheduled around the blocks where you're doing your theming. I gotta say, I've been doing this for about two weeks now and it's absolutely game changing. I love it. I didn't expect to see this effect so quickly, but I've been more productive in the last two weeks than I've been in a long time. So glad that I took Dan Martell's advice on this.

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Guys and gals, I beg you, take on this idea of theming your days. Give it a try for a week or two and tell me what you think. You can email me at omar100mba.net Let me know it really works. Choose three to five priorities. Big things, big rocks like they call them, that will move your business. The things that actually make you money. Focus on those things and theme a day after each one. If you have less than five, then obviously one's gonna have more than one day, just like I have. You can even color code your days on a Google calendar so it's clear to you when you open your calendar what today's theme is. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. It's the easiest way to show us love and tell us what you think of the show. Your favorite episode, your favorite takeaway. Everybody who leaves us on itunes rating and review enters our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Every Friday, somebody wins a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating interview and listen in on Friday to see if you won. And before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you're in a rut and you feel like you're not being productive every day, try something different. Try this. See if it works. Experiment. If it doesn't work, you can leave it alone. But give it a good try, right? Or like they say in Australia, a red hot go, Right? Give it a red hot go. Try it for a couple weeks. If it works, fantastic. If it gives you some sort of results, that's better than no results. If you're stuck. Try something different. That's how you get a different result. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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