How To Eliminate Distractions So You Can Complete The Important Tasks

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and before we introduce today's guest, which Scott and I have been really, really excited about, this is the kind of guest that, you know, really can move the needle in your life. And for me, distraction is a major obstacle. And so he's gonna help us with this for sure. Before we talk to Rory Vadin, I want to properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com postingdomination.com landgeek Scott Todd. How are you?

Mark?

I am fantastic. How are you?

I'm great. Are we ready to get into it?

Forget everything and let's get onto this topic because this isn't one that we do not want to procrast.

All right, I'm gonna put on my anchorman voice because Rory Vaden, he is self disciplined strategist and basically if you haven't read Take the Stairs yet, you will because it's a number one Wall Street Journal, a number one USA Today and number two New York Times bestseller. He's an award winning entrepreneur, business leader. Rory co founded Southwestern Consulting, a multi million dollar global consulting practice that helps clients in more than 14 countries drive educated decisions with relevant data. He's also the founder of the center for the Study of Self Discipline, which we all need. Rory is the world's leader on defining the psychology around modern day procrastination called priority dilution. In fact, he coined the term. He speaks and consults on how to say no to the things that don't matter and yes to the things that do. His client list includes companies and groups such as Cargill, the Million Dollar Roundtable, P and G, True Value, ypl, well, Fargo, Land O' Lakes, it goes on and on. And finally, he's on a prestigious podcast. Rory Art of Passive Income Podcast. How are you?

I am so excited. I have now reached the pinnacle of success by making it to the Art of Passive Income podcast. I feel like I have arrived.

Yeah, I mean, you know, so what if you're a regular contributor to American Express and Huffington Post and all these other.

Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.

Yeah, yeah.

So Rory, let's just skip the pleasantries and let's just get into it. All right, sounds good. Why are we so distracted and how can we stop being so distracted? And that's number one. The second one is tell me about procrastination.

Yeah, I think the thing is to really look at Understand procrastination. And we talk about three different types of procrastination. So the first one is the one that we all think of when we hear the word, which is classic procrastination. So that's consciously delaying something I know I should be doing. And that's what, you know when you hear the word. Most of us think of that. But that is not the most dangerous type of procrastination. So what we started to notice is two other kind of emerging forms. The second one is called creative avoidance. And creative avoidance is different because it's unconscious. It's unconsciously sort of filling the day with menial work or trivial work. It is creating stuff for myself to do so that I can do those things as a way of avoiding the things I really need to be doing that that I don't want to do, or I'm scared to do, or I don't feel like doing. And then the third type of procrastination is really fascinating. And our second book, which is the most recent, is all about this topic which we call priority dilution. And priority dilution is different from the first two because it affects the chronic overachiever. It affects the movers and shakers, the do gooders, the taskmasters, the checklisters, the people who you would never think to be procrastinators. And it has nothing to do with being lazy or apathetic or disengaged. But what it is is allowing our attention to shift to less important but perhaps more urgent tasks. So whereas somebody struggling with creative avoidance is their life would be characterized as a state of distraction. Somebody struggling with priority dilution, their life would be characterized as living in a state of, of constant interruption, sort of always falling victim to whatever is the most pressing fire. And all three of them are a little bit different. I think everybody struggles with all three of them in different ways. So, you know, that's kind of how we set the stage or define the conversation.

I mean, today's day and age, this is a huge, huge problem.

Huge.

Scott. I mean, do you have this issue, like, if you had to choose which where you lean most of the three in the procrastination arena, which would you say you choose? You lean in?

You know, I think sometimes it's the creative piece, right? Like you really just, you really put off doing what you really, really have to do and you make these, you know, little, little tasks that you perceive, not even perceived, but, you know, you put these little tasks in front of the powerful work that you want to do because it's uncomfortable. So, you know, you see that all the time where, you know something stepping outside your comfort zone is hard, and you're afraid to make a mistake on something. So you're, you know, you go and you go, okay, well, let me just go do this, because I feel safe over here. And it's.

That's.

That's just kind of that admin work, right? Let me just go to the admin work as opposed to let me go and really move the needle in my life because I'm afraid I'll mess up.

Yeah, and I think you bring up a good point, Scott. I think there's kind of two parts to how do you solve this, right? So one part is identifying what we refer to as the significant priorities, the things that will multiply your time or multiply your results. And so there's. That's the first step, right, is how to identify what are the significant things. And then. And that is what actually the second book is all about. And we can talk through the focus funnel, if you guys want to, is just sort of this. This mental checklist that multipliers go through in terms of how they evaluate what is the most important thing to do. Interestingly enough, even though we wrote that book second, that's more of like, the first part is identifying what to do. Then the second part is how to get yourself to do the things you know you should be doing, even when you don't feel like doing them, which is really what the. Take the stairs, which was the first book. That's what the first book was all about. So we kind of went all Quentin Tarantino on everybody. We went in reverse order for how it works, but those are the two things. How do you identify it? And then once it's identified, how do you get yourself to do it? To take the stairs, if you will, when you don't feel like doing it?

I think the focus funnel is huge. When I listened to the audiobook and when I was going through it, there was pieces in there. Sorry, look, it's bringing my audible. My. My Alexa is bringing up the book right now. Look at that Alexa. I had to unplug her.

The.

The.

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The fact is, is that, like, when I was looking at the focus funnel, you know, there's a lot of pieces in there that you kind of know and you kind of like, I was already. But the reality is, is that if you take everything in that comes across your desk to do every. To do, and you do take it through this system, this focus funnel system, it will change the way that you approach the work that you do because you realize, like, there's a time to do something and there's a time not to do something.

Scott, other ways. Can you give us an example of how you personally use the focus funnel? Because I feel like in our niche, like, we have two major things to do every day, which is the mailing and marketing.

Yeah, so part. Part of the focus funnel and, you know, not trying to be the expert here, but, you know, like the, the eliminate. There's, I think, five steps, right, Rory?

Yeah. Five stages.

Eliminate, automate, delegate, procrastinate, and concentrate.

Am I right?

Yeah, you got it.

Okay, Rory, you've got procrastinating.

You actually read the book?

I did read the book. I didn't just read the book. I went back and I executed on the book because, you know, I look at things and I'm looking at it Mark, like, okay, what am I doing right this second? And can I eliminate the work? And, you know, a great example was over the weekend, I was looking at some, like, admin work that I was doing and I stopped and I'm like, okay, let's go back to the focus funnel. Can I use this? How can I use a focus funnel? Okay, well, can I. Do I have. Can I eliminate this work? And I'm like, okay, I cannot eliminate this work. Okay, can I automate it? Well, I've gotten it as automated as I can, so now I have to delegate the work. And so I immediately sent a note to a VA and said, hey, please schedule a time to talk with me around about this project. And I just started shoveling all that work over to that VA. And then this morning at 11:30am I met with my VA and I explained it to them. So you know that that's me using the focus funnel. Can I eliminate it? Can I? If I can't, can I automate it? If not, can I delegate it? If I couldn't delegate it, then I would really go back and look to see if I could procrastinate it. And if I couldn't, can I. Do I need to concentrate on it to do it right now?

Yeah.

And what. So what Scott just described is basically a high level overview of the focus funnel. So at the. If you have all the tasks coming in the top of the funnel, the first question is, can it be eliminated? Is it even worth doing? If it can't be eliminated, it drops down to the middle of the funnel, which is, can it be automated? If it can't be automated, then it drops down to the bottom of the funnel, which is can it be delegated? And then if it can't be eliminated, automated, or delegated, meaning you know it must be done, and you know now that it must be done by you, then that task falls out of the bottom of the focus funnel, and. And now there's only one remaining question to answer, which is, must this task be done now? And if the answer is yes, we call that concentrate, which is the permission to protect. And so each of these stages has an emotional per mission that goes with it. Or if the answer is no, this doesn't need to be done now, then that is where you don't eliminate automate, delegate, or concentrate, but you procrastinate on purpose, which is where the title of the second book actually comes from. Procrastinate on purpose. We call it POP for short. And you don't procrastinate on it forever. What you do is you pop that activity back to the top of the focus funnel, at which point it enters into a holding pattern which. Where it cycles through the focus funnel until at one point, one of the other four strategies, eliminate, automate, Delegate, or procrastinate, will ultimately get executed upon it. And so very often, if the answer to must this be done right now is no, and every time it comes up, it crops to the top of your pile of things to look at. If it's never significant or urgent enough to be done right now, then over time you develop the confidence to do what you should have done originally, which was eliminate it, which is the permission to ignore, or you figure out a way to automate it or delegate it, or if it's none of those three, then at some point when you come back around to that item and you say, can this wait till later? The answer changes from yes, it can wait till later, till no, it cannot wait. It must be done now. And then it slides down into concentrate. At that moment, you have the next most significant thing. You have the thing that you know will multiply your time. And so you shut the doors, you turn off your email, you ignore incoming phone calls, and you concentrate and protect until that task is. Until that task is done.

I almost feel like I can't concentrate anymore, Rory, because of the damn phone. Yeah, it's to the point where, like, I'll be working on something, and then I, like. Like a, you know, like a. Like a ferret on a double cappuccino. I'll have to check my email. I don't know why, but I get, like, this little dopamine hit in My brain and I feel like I have to go to like these extreme measures. Now is this something that is common or am I just distracted all the time and I'm not getting any deep work done? Like, like what do you see as far as when you go into these big companies and you talk to these high level executives? Because I could imagine that they've got very little time to do any real concentrated work because they've got meetings, they've got emails, they've got more meetings.

Right.

When do they get the real work done?

Well, it's an interesting thing, real multipliers. Just because somebody's a high level executive, I wouldn't necessarily say they're automatically successful at this. A lot of them are really struggling and everybody's struggling with this. I mean it's a major, major deal. And one of the key differences that we outlined and one of the reasons for procrastinate on purpose was we realized that today time management isn't just logical today. It's emotional. And you're battling these feelings of guilt and worry and anxiety and this stress. To feel like you always need to be caught up and you have to have a zero inbox and that you owe everybody a respons and that you have to be at every social gathering and you have to find time to work out and you know, there's this emotional pull. And so in terms of where do you find the time? So let's talk a little bit about the psychological part and then I'll give you a couple practical things relating specifically like to the phone. So the way that you multiply time in one sentence, right? This is what the whole book is about or the TED Talk. There's a TED talk called how to Multiply youy Time that you can watch also is you multiply time by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. You give yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that will create more time or more results tomorrow. That is how you multiply time. We mean it literally. It is not a superlative, it is not an exaggeration, it's a mathematical calculation that there are certain things that you can do today that will create more time tomorrow. Now what you're battling, Mark, you hit the nail on the head, is you're battling actually some biology you're battling. Dopamine is exactly the drug that you're battling. So dopamine is the pleasure releasing drug. And what happens is we literally are addicted to distraction, we're addicted to the Insignificant. We're addicted to the trivial. The reason why is because every time you cross something off on your to do list, you get a little hit of dopamine. You feel like you've accomplished something meaningful. You feel like you've accomplished something successful. And the proof of this is if you've ever had something that you completed that wasn't on your to do list and then you added it to your to do list just so you could cross it off, that is proof of that feeling. So what happened is we start chasing the com. We start chasing completion of a multiple different things, right? And what multipliers have realized, though, is that success is not related to the volume of tasks that we complete, rather to the significance of them. And that why most people are running around frenetically trying to accomplish a thousand things. They're living in what we would call the urgency calculation, making no consideration of tomorrow or the next day or the next day. They're just kind of going, oh my gosh, all I have is two hours open in my calendar. Do they have a thousand things to get done? I'm not going to get all thousand things done. So let me take the hundred things that I'm likely to get done. Rather than a multiplier would say, I don't care how many I get done, Let me take the one thing that if I get that done, it'll create more time in the future. And so what multipliers have given themselves is what we call the permission of the incomplete. And that is the emotional permission that goes with the procrastinate stage, which is really like the fourth stage in the focus funnel. It's the permission of the incomplete. It's the permission that not every email needs to be answered. It's the permission that not everything needs to be said yes to. And even the things you say no to can just be ignored. You don't even have to respond and say no. You. It's. You don't owe anybody an obligation to respond to every input. So there is an emotional part of this that is the real deal. It is. It's almost in some, in some ways, and I don't want you to take this too far, but in some ways, you have to give up on keeping up. You have to give up on keeping up or give up on being caught up is probably a better way to say it, because in our minds, caught up is zero in emails. But even if you got to zero, it's only a matter of minutes before something next will start flooding in. So I'm not saying you shouldn't try to have zero emails. I myself work to keep my inbox down. But what I'm saying is you want to give yourself permission that it's more valuable to spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow, and it's okay to leave those things incomplete. So it's an emotional thing, and then there's some tactical things you can do as well as it relates to your phone and whatnot.

So, Rory, would you mind giving us a concrete example in your own work life where you looked at a, you looked at your day and said, okay, I can actually leverage my time by doing X, Y and Z, so tomorrow I have more time?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, there's tons. But let me try to give you a ubiquitous one that would apply to everybody, right? So let's say, for example, let's say setting up online bill pay, okay, all of us probably at this point have a bank that has online bill pay. And you know, there is that availability is a possibility for you. Now, let's say after all of your meetings, you know, you've got meetings and appointments, and you've got some urgent deadlines you have to hit. Let's say that today you only have two hours of time on your calendar where you would say, okay, I have two hours to dedicate to something, to getting something done. And if I were to ask you, I said, okay, would you use that two hours to set up online bill pay? Most people would say no. They would say, why would I set up online bill pay? That seems so trivial. There's, number one, I never have two extra hours open in my schedule anyways. And if I did, I certainly wouldn't use it to set up online bill pay. But a multiplier evaluates that decision completely differently. Multipliers make what we call the significance calculation. So the urgency calculation is only thinking about here and now today, and thinking, okay, I have a thousand things to do. I only have two hours in my day. That is living in a world of urgency, living in a world of significance is saying, well, what about tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day? And so what happens is a multiplier will realize that if I give myself the permission to spend two hours setting up online bill pay today, and that saves me 30 minutes a month from paying all my bills, then in just four months time, I will have broken even on that investment. And, and every month thereafter, I will get something that we call roti, return on time invested. So that is an example of Automate, which is the permission to invest. The permission to invest the time and energy today to set up online bill pay, not because of what it does for you today, but because every month thereafter in the future you're going to get a return on that. And it's very similar to the way that multipliers think about time is very similar to how rich people think about money. And the reason why is because automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns money into more money, automation takes time and it turns it into more time. So while online bill pay may seem trivial, it's actually a very multiplicative effect on your time. And it's. It's all the result of the significance calculation. The significance calculation changes everything.

I love it. I love it. Well, Rory, we're at that point in the podcast now where Scott and I are going to put you on the spot. Scott, you want to put them on the spot?

I think so, yeah.

Before we do that, Scott, I mean, I feel like I've been dominating this conversation. Do you have any other questions you have?

No.

I mean, I'll tell you, I think that I love what Rory just said about automation is the equivalent of compound interest in time. That's something that you and I live by. And I think that he's right on.

The mark with it. Yeah. I mean, between OGPAS and Loan Geek, that's. We're all about that. It's fantastic. So, Rory, what is your tip of the week? A website, a resource, a book, something actionable. With Art of Passive Income, listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Yeah, I'm actually going to go with a book because I go through a routine. I read a lot. And this book that I'm reading right now is just, it's amazing. You've probably heard of it. It's so short and simple, but it is so powerful. And the book is called the Go Giver and it's by Bob Berg and I've had Bob on my podcast before and. Oh, did you just have him on, man, and that is one of his older books. He's had other books come out since then, but it is so. And John David Mann co authored the book with him. And man, it's a game changer. It's a complete game changer in the mindset and the mentality of, you know, instead of being a go getter, being a go giver. And so I just, I just love it. It's been really edifying for me and I would encourage anybody to check that out.

The go giver. Bob Burke. Fantastic. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week? Mark?

I know what your tip of the week is going to be, but I got to tell you, my tip of the week is to go get and if you've already done it, do it again. Procrastinate on purpose. It is a book that is a game changer. Don't just read it or listen to it. Go back and study it and focus. Like, learn, Learn about the funnel, because the funnel will change your life.

All right, I'm getting it right now. Corey, did you do the audio?

Yeah, I did. I read it. I read it. I read both. I'd read both audios just because I felt there's a lot of stories, personal stories in there about like, my mom and stuff like that. And I was like, I gotta, I can't have somebody else read this. I gotta, I gotta read it. But I think you'll like it, Mark, because, I mean, if you think about the concept of passive income automation and multiplying your time, it's like, it's passive time, you know, because time is money, right? It's, it's, it's very much a connected concept.

No, absolutely. I was actually thinking about going to extreme measures and I was actually going to go today because I have a dumb phone and I have my iPhone. When I take the dumb phone with me, I don't. I lose my, my, you know, my audiobooks, which I like to listen to in the car. I lose my podcast, which I like to listen to in the car. I lose the GPS navigation. I have like a worse sense of direction. So I thought, well, maybe instead of getting, why don't I just get another smartphone, don't have email on it, and actually get like something like an Android phone or a Google Pixel phone. Because I know myself, right? I'm making fun of Android all day long. Like, why would I, you know, spend the time to learn it? And that way I'll get the gps, I'll get the audiobooks, I'll get the podcasts, the only three things I really need in the car. And then after my day's done, I'll lock up the iPhone, I won't check my email because I can't check my email and I'll be more present. Do you like that idea?

Yeah, I think that's a cool idea. I mean, you know, whatever you have to do to get control of your focus. But one simple tip that I would encourage you to try before that is just on your iPhone. Okay. Of course, first of all, turn off all beeps, chirps, alarms, and buzzes when something comes in. Okay. But the next level of that is take your email icon and your text message icon and drag it over to one of the side screens and take it off the main menu at the bottom. Because what? Every. Otherwise every time you turn your phone on, you see the counter and it says like 14 new text messages and you get sucked into it. But if you push it off to the side, then you only. You only answer messages when you're going specifically with the intention of answering messages. So push it all the way to the side. But you know, if you have to lock it up, whatever you got to do to get your focus.

I've tried that. I have no badges. So I look at my email. Like, I don't even know if there's any email. I have to check it yet. I'm still so addicted to it.

Yeah.

Like, even same with the message. Like, I hide the mail icon. I can't find it. But then like, my wife's, like, when I open up your email, why'd your mail come up? So, like, oh, because I was just checking it. Yeah, yeah, I've got. I've got some self discipline issues. We're going to have to have you back on the podcast. Anyways, my tip of the week is learn more about Rory vaden. Go to roryvadenblog.com I will have a link in the show notes to go to his blog. Rory Vaden.

Are we good, you guys? I think we're good. Thank you so much for having me. And I just remember, everybody, success is never owned. Success is only rented. And the rent is due every day.

I love it. Thank you so much, Scott. Todd, thank you. And I want to thank all the listeners. And Scott, should we. Let freedom ring.

Let it ring.

Let freedom ring.

Let freedom ring, man.

All right, we'll see everybody next time. Yeah.