The "Battle Board" and "Done By One"

Hello, hello, hello. Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live once again. I am getting a little bit better about doing these on schedule. So I enjoy that. I hope that you guys had a great weekend and you're ready for a wonderful week of work, another wonderful opportunity to get your life done. And we're going to talk about a couple of organizational ideas that I use to get a lot done every day. And hopefully you might find these to be useful yourself. Once again, I'm Steve Barnes, and if you enjoy this message, please be sure to share it with your friends. It's the only way we know which messages are appealing to people. So what you see in the back here is a whiteboard. And I'm calling it, for the sake of today's conversation, my battleboard. Brendan Bouchard uses that term. A couple things I'm talking about today come from this guy. I had decided that I was going to be studying him a lot during. Oh, people are sending me hearts. Thank you. I love you too. I promised myself I was going to be studying him a lot this year. And as my family and some friends and business partners have also begun to enjoy him, I thought, you know something, I think I'm going to go even deeper because it isn't just the quality of the teacher. If we take a look at the magic formula, the M and magic formula is modeling. So you have to find people who are better than you at something and find out what are they doing. And then you do that. There are people who are 10 times better than I am at something. But if a person who's only twice as good as I am at something has something to say and that person is also communicating with my team, you know, the people who I need to, to help me, you know, my wife, my business partner, my son, if they can communicate with those people more effectively than someone who's only twice as good as me or even 50% better than me is going to be better than someone who's 10 times better than me. But I'm operating alone. So Bashar is a really interesting guy. And I'm just going to, I think in 2020, I'm going to be going, going, continuing to go a little more deeply into what it is that he's up to, I'll give some additional explanations for that later. I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. I've got a couple these whiteboards. I've got a big one, you know, let me see. You see that over there? See that big board over there? It's a double sided That's a double sided board. And on one side I have today's, the project I'm working on for the dawn project on one side. And I have the next 12 months of my life laid out on the other side. This one is more about what I'm up to on a daily basis. And at the very top, submission 1 million awake, aware adult human beings. That is my mission in life. And your mission should be something that stimulates you, that gets your juices running, a reason to get up in the morning. You know, why are you doing what it is that you're doing? Because people are counting on me or because I feel like the world needs something that I have to give. And if, if the motivation, if the thing that you're doing is big enough, then it will help actually generate the energy that you need to achieve successfully underneath that. Daddy Ronin. I'm just playing around with that. But here, see, it's the only ink I've got. And this is the, this is the Japanese kanji for ronin, R O N I N, which basically means a self employed samurai samurai who works for himself. And it is my way of letting me, reminding me that I'm the bottom line. I don't have a safety net. I've never had a safety net. And I need to be on, on the ball, on my game every day. You know, when I'm relaxing, relax deeply and recharge. When I'm entertaining myself, entertain, have a tremendous amount of fun. Recharge, rest, recreation. But when I'm working, be dead bang on it. Get her done, okay? Because there is nobody else. There is nobody else. That's, you know, that is part of what I have to remind myself of. It's a leadership role in my life. Even though I share that leadership, of course, with my good lady wife and with my business partners in that arena. We make decisions together. But there is a sense in which the buck stops here. And I have to own that. I have to remember that. But I also said Daddy, because being a father is the most important leadership role in my life. It is, it is preparing my children for the adult realities to be able to go out into the world, in essence to make myself obsolete as rapidly as possible. So I have that sense of being on a high wire without a safety net, trying to be of benefit to the world, but remembering bring that down. Who really needs me is my son Jason, my daughter Nikki, you know, who's gone, who's out into the world now, My wife, my sister, the people closest to me. So being a dad is very important. So daddy wrote and I might change that. I'm still experimenting with this question of what are the labels, what are the roles that I play in life? But you know, today and tomorrow that. That works pretty well. So then I put October. What's the most important things in October? I have four major goal areas. Business, career, my physical, and my family. Okay, So I call that the 2 comma club in this working on the dawn project. 2 Kabba Club is business, family is Jason Aimee at straight A's in lettering and sports, martial arts, body and so forth and so on. I call that fire dance. There is a particular blend of yoga and tai chi and mental things and emotional things that I've been working on for a very long time. And I'm working to, to be able to convey these things more effectively and efficiently in the future. And then a movie. I want a movie. It's my last remaining serious goal, really. You know, after writing 30 books, you know, I understand that world and I understand what it is to plan a book, sell a book, write a book, publish a book, promote a book. I understand what those things are. It doesn't excite me in the same way it did when I was, you know, four or five books in, but the idea of doing a movie excites me. Anything that is along that path excites me. And I tend to follow that energetic enthusiasm. So I love writing. I'd like to see myself. I can see myself in a movie theater with. Packed with my friends, maybe even one of those theaters where they serve dinner. That'd be great. And then we watch the movie and we howl and we say rude things at the screen. I can easily see that. So I can get energy from that that I can literally put into the other arenas of my life. Now the other thing is a notion that I got fairly recently only about a week ago, really. It's called Done by one. Done by one. And the idea is this. If you make a list of everything that you need to get done in a day, what you want to do is to scrape. To scrape off the cream of the cream of that list. The things that are most important, the things that will actually 10 to move you forward in your life. The most critical of the most critical, the best of the best. And you make sure that every day you do those things by one o', clock, okay? You simply, you know, you. You focus yourself completely and you get them done by one. Say, like, for instance, this, this conversation with you guys, I have to get this done at about noon, okay? And then after that, take a look. Family things. Jason. Jason had some problems getting to school this morning. We're going to deal with that later on. Fire dance. I did kettlebells, tai chi and yoga. Haven't done martial arts yet, but I probably will during some of my break times today because I'm trying to break at least once every three hours and move. I'm going to try to move that up to breaking every hour and moving because it gives me more energy. And research suggests you can get about a third done more in if you will take 5 to 10 minutes every hour and move your butt if that's, you know, during the day that you're, you're sitting at the, sitting at a desk, your efficiency and effectiveness is drop off the longer you sit. I have to work on a journal that I'm doing for the Dawn Callan Project, the Warrior Woman Journal. And in terms of that movie, I've been hinting about a television project. I can't tell you what it is, but it's happening. And so I have to do, I have to do five pages of, of my project every day. So that's, that's that. I. Since I started doing this, what happens is that I wake up in the morning and I look at those four arenas, the movie, the business, the family things in Fire Dance, the physical things. And I ask myself, what are the most important things that I can do to move that forward? With Bodi, it's going to be yoga and martial arts every day. With family, it's sitting down with Jason and going over his journal and helping him understand how today's actions are important in the context of his life. You know, with my, my business, it's going to be getting a certain chunk of work done, perhaps reaching out to my business partners and consulting with them. With the movie thing, it's going to be getting a certain amount of pages done. So as soon as I'm finished with, with this video, I'm going to do five pages as fast as I can. And one of the things that I've determined is that if I go from a pitch to like a one page outline, you know, pitch being like a single line to three lines and then a one page outline to a three page outline, and then expand that three page outline out to about ten pages, then transfer, and I can do all that in Google Docs, transfer those 10 pages over to my screenwriting software, which is Writer Duet, then I begin to just go over it and over and over. I don't push myself too hard. I Can either just look at the structural things or build out characters. But if there is some dialogue that is suggested, maybe I'll break that dialogue down. I'm just looking to expand it outwards by five pages a day. And if I do that religiously, it can take less than an hour to do those five pages. And if I do everything by one o' clock and I've moved the needle forward in everything by one o', clock, if I wanted to take the rest of the day off, I could. But in that night when I'm doing my journal again, I take a look and it's that verification. Were Those really the four most important things? 5 most important things, 3 most important things, however many I get done by 1 o', clock, if I get better and better and better at determining what the most important things are, and then better and better and better at blocking out distractions, and then better and better and better at keeping my word to myself. So I start early, get focused, do the work, do the work, do the work so that at one o' clock I can say, huzzah. Rest of the day off I go catch a movie if I want to. I do anything I want. Oftentimes I want to get more work done because that's just how I roll. But if I don't, I'm still okay. So those are, those are the two things. The battleboard concept, where you've got a whiteboard or butcher paper or something where you are marking out who you are, what you're committed to, what your long term goals are, how this year fits into your long term plans, and how today's actions will, will keep you there. In today's actions, the primary ones need to be done by one o'. Clock. So just kind of giving you a little peek into how I run my day. Now I've got to actually get into my day and make it work. It's always easier to talk about this stuff than it is to do it. But thank you very much for your time. Again, if you enjoyed this, be sure to, you know, to share it with your friends. It's the only way we know what's working for you. You take care. And this has been brought to you by my Chop Wood Carry Water, my first writing book, which is available at shopwoodwriting. Com. Take care.