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You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on October 24, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- How do I deal with a lot of urgent tasks coming up and distracting me from my goals?
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Everybody, welcome to the live Q & A for the real world productivity group. And today is the 24th of October 2019 and I am on the road. I’m not out in some, like Italian Villa or what do we got here a field behind me. But I am now sitting in taking care of my mom’s dog which is awesome, I get to hang out with the dog.
And it’s fun to play around and get to do some of that where I don’t have any pets right now at home. So it’s nice, spend the weekend, just be able to go out and get out more and walk around and interact with dog and lots of dogs because you know, have dogs get they want to go meet each other and so end up talking to people, but we’re here to talk about productivity and time management and I’m going to loop back around to that in a minute.
But this is Episode 99. Taking a few weeks off while been on the road, putting on a live event meeting up with some business partners in another area. and wanted to get back and kick this off before I head back home actually tomorrow. But anyways, getting into it. What I want to talk about today is definitely about time management and kind of on a weekly basis, and then how that pertains to travel.
Obviously, that’s fresh on my mind. But that’s something that people have been asking about. So I’m going to talk about that today. So real quick, if you’re checking this out on YouTube, you can join us in the real world productivity group. You’ll find the link down below, you can do that. And you have to answer some really tricky questions like what’s your number one productivity and time management issue?
Just want to make sure that you’re interested in productivity, automation, time management, that sort of stuff, and that is the right place for you if you are interested in those topics. So let’s get into it. had people asking and saying that their main issue was having having no real way to make sure that they were doing a weekly review.
You know, they had a daily review that kind of had a day to day routine and Oh, hey, girl, what’s up, and then they were then having issues during that larger time scale, right? Because you can get the day to day down and you know, you, you feel like you’re knocking out the day, but you realize after a while, oh, I needed to set up some larger scale reviews so that I can tackle some of the larger projects, right.
A lot of things we work on take more than one day. And so when things spread out like that, it gets tougher. If you’re not able to take a step back and kind of plan out your week, maybe plan out your month, plan out your quarter, stuff like that. So the one thing I suggest is, you know, what’s the 8020 rule here is don’t make it hard on yourself.
Try applying the same things first. If you’re able to do a daily routine, there’s something that’s triggering that in you right and part of is just the habit I get that it’s daily so it’s easy to get into that routine. But the other thing that you can do is look at again, what you’re using, are you using it like to do list are you using your phone alarm, whatever it is do that for the weekly routine, and then pay attention to what works.
You know, I’m certainly not perfect. I don’t know anyone who is, but find what’s working and what’s not. Maybe if you’re trying to do it on a Sunday evening to plan for the week, but you almost never do it, then don’t do it. Don’t even try to do it there anymore. Right? Try and maybe Monday morning, you give yourself an extra little bit of time.
So that instead of just doing your daily review, you do your daily review, and then take kind of that weekly review, look at your calendar, what big projects do you have going on? Things like that. So I find that that will help solve that problem, at least over time, or if nothing else, if it doesn’t solve it, it’ll let you see what the problem is. So that then you can try to attack that from different angles.
Because the payoff is real, right? You really do get a lot out of these longer, always called longer term planning, or at least kind of looking ahead and starting to incorporate that then back into your day by saying, Oh, this is the weekly projects that are affecting my monthly project that is part of my 90 day goals. You know, you see how that all ties together.
It’s like the Dogs, and that then fits together so that when you come in and on your daily tests, you’re attacking the right things. And that affects your priorities by making sure that what you’re working on is not only just important, but also helping you towards those longer term goals. So, hopefully that helps. There’s something else I wanted to touch base on.
And somebody was kind of asking the Well, the question was like, how do I deal with a lot of urgent tasks coming up and distracting me from my goals? And I think that what I just talked about with having, you know, making sure you’re doing your daily review, have a longer term planning, and incorporating that back down into your daily review is how you stay on track.
And then that helps you block out these urgent tasks. Now, I’m not going to say that, you know, that makes it so you never have to put out fires, you never have to do anything. You know, get out of that mindset and just say, Hey, I’m just trying to get rid of 80% of the junk. That’s bothering me? Because there’s things that always come up.
But if you have a system maybe for, hey, if there’s a support issue with the business who have, who do I have that I can delegate this to? and send it to, so that I’m not the one responsible, right? If there’s an issue with an automation breaking, can you train someone to deal with that stuff? Right? That’s one way to look at it.
Excuse me. But on a larger scale, again, talking about goals, understanding what you’re working on, why you’re working on it, and then reminding yourself on a daily basis, a weekly basis monthly, quarterly, whatever you’re planning and kind of goal setting time frames are that trickles down then backwards into that daily and you’re saying no.
I can’t be derailed by this urgent task that came up because I know if I don’t get this other really important stuff done that may seem more mundane or not as urgent, but I know if I don’t get that done, the longer term stuff that is really important is going to really provide those results won’t happen. So anyways, that’s the way I like to look at it.
You know, again, it’s about trying to get this done most of the time, you’re always going to have something crop up from time to time that you have to deal with and that’s life. All right, and then just getting better at delegating, having processes in place that can deal with some of those things so that you don’t always get derailed and then just rolling with the punches and getting back up and getting right back on track.
Alright, so I think that’ll do it for this week. I am going to sign off and head back home tomorrow. So hope everybody has a great rest of their week and I will see you next time.
