12 Weeks vs 12 Months | The Productivity Gap Most Miss

If you're anything like me, you probably get to the pointy end of the year like we are now in December, rolling through into the new year 2025, and you're maybe spending a bit of time reflecting on the year that's traveled before you and looking at your work, your relationships, your money, how happy you've been, and various other things, and ruminating on what you got done and maybe what you didn't get done and Perhaps thinking about, well, how can I get more stuff done in 2025? Because I can guarantee as well, and imagine because you're a subscriber to this channel or watching this video, that as a business owner, you probably get a million ideas each and every second that you live. And as much as they're all fantastic ideas, there's just no humanly possible way that you can probably even do a tiny fraction of a percentage of those things. However, it's likely that you do want to be a little bit more productive and perhaps earn more money next year, or just get more stuff done. And so in this short video, I'm gonna be sharing just one really simple way that I manage to set and achieve big, hairy, audacious goals for myself. I don't think there's one that I haven't met yet, but I'm gonna talk you through just this simple framework that I use in order to get stuff done. But what it means is you've gotta be selective. There are gonna be some choices that you've got to make. I know you've got hundreds of fantastic ideas, but you are gonna have to narrow it down. Quite simply, there's Pareto Principle. Which is 80/20. There'll be 20% of the things you do in your business that contribute towards 80% of the outputs. I'm actually a firm believer in the 4% rule, the 20% of the 20%. There are 4% of the things which you do that make the biggest impact overall in your business and to your life, and I would suggest that they might be clues as to what you should be doubling down on in 2025. Most of the time when I have this conversation with business owners, their focus turns to marketing activities. So in order to build your personal brand and get your name out there and generate some interest in business, you've actually got to do this thing called marketing. That tends to take quite a lot of effort. But one of the things that I've discovered, and this is the first part of the framework, is once you've found the things in your marketing mix which you know work time and time again for you and your business, those are likely the things that you want to double down on, um, maximize the amount of time you're spending on those and forgetting about all of the other stuff. So for me, my marketing mix over the past 20 years has predominantly been around guesting on podcasts, getting on stage as a speaker, and also giving away copies of my book. You can get your own copy if you don't have one yet. If you head over to fearless.biz/TYS, you can get a free signed copy. Yes, that's a physical copy of Take Your Shot. I'll pop that in the post to you. But I've discovered that those 3 things— speaking, podcasts, and my books— are the 3 things as my marketing mix which consistently work day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out. And so what I tend to do is I try and create Big Hairy Audacious Goals, BHAGs, around these specific activities so that I can maximise the reach of them. So I'll give you a little example. One of the ones which I came up with in September was this notion of Operation Podblast, and we'll share an enlarged version of this on the screen so you can see it. But you'll see here, all I've done is I've created a little cue card basically, which I've handwritten on. I mean, there's loads of fancy tools out there that you can get, like Todoist is one which I've used in the past. Number of like task-related tools that you can get which tell you, you know, send you reminders and stuff like that, which is great if you're fully, you know, into your technology and don't mind getting notifications popping off every 5 seconds. But what I've noticed is over time I become a little bit desensitized to those apps and the notifications because along with like the good positive notifications like Todoist, there's lots of other not so positive notifications. And no matter how much I try and get rid of them off my phone, off my PC, they always seem to stick around and annoy me. So Eventually I kind of just ignore all of the notifications. I'm just one of those people. However, having this little postcard here, which I've hand-drawn on the different interviews which I wanted to get, and I'll talk you through how Operation Podblast came about in a second. This sits on my desk. It is always there physically. I walk into my desk, I may be at a bit of a loss, don't know what to do. I look at Operation Podblast and see what my progress is, and then that motivates me to want to go and do things in order to get more podcasts booked, or do I need to do any admin on the podcasts which are outstanding? So the BHAG which I set for myself in September was really simple. I wanted to get booked onto 30 podcasts, and then if I could deliver those interviews on those 30 podcasts. I actually got booked onto the 30 podcasts really quickly. It was actually using a tool called Podmatch, which is a fantastic platform built by Alex Sanfilippo. We'll share a link in the description because if you want to guest on more podcasts, it's a really fantastic— it's like a marketplace basically which matches up podcast hosts with podcast guests. And as a guest, you can pay a very small monthly fee and you can actually get access to hundreds of podcasts that you can potentially be a guest on. So I I managed to book the first 30 podcasts within about 8 weeks, so I figured I would set myself a stretch goal and go for 40 podcasts. Now, I've actually recorded since, in that first 3 months since September, in the first 90 days, I recorded 33 podcasts. So Operation Pod Blast was a roaring success, but it was purely down to this postcard which was sat on my desk and every day reminded me what my mission was gonna be for those 90 days that set me on that train of thought that I need to go and book more podcasts and make sure that I'm set up and prepared to be interviewed for each of those podcasts as well. There's an awful There's a lot of work, believe it or not, involved with guesting on 30 and booking 30 podcasts. And this was just a really neat way of visually tracking it through. And you can see the ones where I've booked it but not actually sat the interview yet there, the little, uh, the little square without the X in it. And obviously the ones with the X's through them, those are the ones that I've actually completed the interviews for. And it's also got to a point— bearing in mind I started this in September, we're now on currently at time of recording December the 17th— I've actually started doing it on the back as well. So I've actually now booked up to 47 podcasts. I'm nearly at 50, which is pretty cool, and we haven't quite broken up for Christmas. So I might just make the 50 there and then a majority of those 2— well, 3 or 4/5 of the way through actually recording them. So having a manual way of recording the process of your big hairy audacious goals is a really fantastic and simple way of getting more stuff done. Very focused way of getting stuff done. So first of all, step 1 is come up with what's your big hairy audacious goal gonna be. If it's to write a book, your goal might be to write 500 words a day over the course of 200 days. If I've done my maths right, that should be— well, that's going to be about 100,000 words. It's probably a bit too much for a book, but you get the picture. So decide on what your big hairy audacious goal is. Break it down into smaller chunks. How are you going to know whether you've completed each of those tasks each day or not? And then as you make progress through it, start to tick it off and make sure it's physical and it's somewhere where you're going to see it every day because that will definitely motivate you to get stuff done. That, that's it. That's a really simple framework and probably once I finish completing this I'll find something other, another crazy big hairy audacious goal to, to do and to consume my life. I've got a book which I'm in the process of finishing up as well using the same methodology. I'm about 30,000 out of 40,000 words written. So I just chip away at it, 200 or 300 words a day. Just break it down into small manageable chunks. You'll get to the end of the year and I know now having recorded, you know, 33 podcasts out of 40, I know what impact that is going to have on my personal brand. I'm gonna have a ton of backlinks coming to my website. I'm gonna have a load of people requesting free copies of my book. So it's fantastic from a marketing perspective, and I can rest easy over the Christmas period now knowing that I've done all of that hard work and I will be reaping the rewards heading into 2025. I've just got to decide now on what it is that I'm going to be doing in 2025.