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In this episode we talked about:
- How can I stay productive while traveling?
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Alright, we are
So real quick though, if you’re watching the replay, that’s great. If you check it out on YouTube, you can subscribe by clicking the button below Stay up to date with these as well as other videos, reviews and anything covering productivity, time management, automation, team building, all that sort of good stuff. And if you are watching live, you can check that you can ask questions, and I’ll get to those as we go. I’m on my laptop since I’m traveling so things are a little bit more cluttered, so I’ll be sure to circle back here and answer questions. If you’re not checking out
Alright, so first things first.
Let’s see, I wanted to mention that we’ve already got a bunch of people doing the 14 day productivity foundation challenge, which is awesome. If you want to join and you have it yet, the link is in the description. But let me put that as a comment down here, 14 Day Challenge.
And you can go hop in and do that. And that’s if you’re interested in these two main areas, which I consider to be pretty fundamental or foundational, if you will, to a good product productivity framework, and that is the daily review. And then automation. And I like these two, you know, picking two things that we can really focus on and really see some real results with quickly over 14 days.
And these were the two I went with. And I think that the daily review Part is first because it is the most important and I think that’s regardless of whether you’ve kind of got a routine and you might want to shore it up or see some ways to maybe improve it or if you don’t have, It’s one of those things where you’re like, yeah, I’ve been meaning to do it. But, you know, I or I kind of do it sometimes like, check it out, check out the challenge, you’ll see how to kind of build it step by step, so that you’re getting a lot out of it and doing it consistently and how you can again, get the most out of that. And that also had someone asked if it was possible to do with just like pen and paper, or do you need to use apps, things like that.
Of course, you can use pen and paper, you can use a journal, you can use digital, like Evernote or an app, you can use whatever you want. It’s meant to be flexible. And I know a lot of people like myself, I like using something written, although I do use apps then to for like storage or long term stuff. So that said, the second half of that is the automation part. And by necessity, it uses digital stuff, whether it’s apps, or other things to connect up and automate things. The good news is you don’t need some sort of technical background in order to do this. Anyone can do it and it’s really powerful. So I really encourage people even if you are like, Oh, I don’t know number. I don’t deal with that.
Don’t want to check it out, it’s step by step way that you can start to automate little things in the background that you may not even think of right now. But they can free up a whole lot of time so that you’re spending your time on the stuff you do want to be doing and the stuff that makes a bigger difference for you. And then even better would be you can see how some of this stuff is done and how you even make the decision of what to automate and how to do that. And then have someone on your team do it or if you’re not there yet, eventually have someone on your team do it. So pretty powerful stuff. The links down there, go check that out.
So back to traveling. So this comes up occasionally. And then for myself, this is something I’ve had to do is with traveling, of course, you know, I think we all tend to overestimate, you know how much time we’re going to have, whether it’s vacation, whether it’s a work trip, you know, just want to visit family for a day or two, you know, I to this day still do it. You know, I think okay, well, I’m going to be on a trip we have, you know, three days here two days here, okay, so I can work three to four hours a day.
Inevitably it’s, you know, half or two thirds of what I think you know, you have the normal stuff, do you have distractions, and things come up. So what I found to be helpful and you know, like I said, it still takes time and so process I’m improving, but is to have that routine down. And what I mean by that is I literally have a routine that I’ve written for myself in Evernote, because then I can take that little routine and I stick it on to the home screen on my phone.
So I can click that and bring it up real quick. I need a reminder, you know, for from getting started in the day and I realized, Hey, I haven’t done my daily review what’s you know, something feels off. And basically, it’s a truncated daily review, it’s a quick reminder that I need to do a daily review and that it’s okay. You know, to not do the whole thing I don’t need if you know, I’m pressed for time, just to go through and do whatever you can because what that’s doing is building that consistency, it’s building that habit. And that is going to pay off in the long time. You know, of course if you can afford the full 15-30 minutes that’s awesome.
But don’t not do it because you only have five minutes. And that’s what I remind myself so they don’t get stuck in that kind of like guilt trap where you’re like, I’m just, you know, I can’t do this. So I’m not going to do it and you know, and then you get that kind of that rolling loss of momentum. And that’s how you fall out of these habits sometimes. So that’s the first part are my myself up. And secondly, like, I’m wearing my running shirt right now, because I just came in from a run. It wasn’t as long as I wanted it to be, it wasn’t exactly as good as I wanted it to be.
But again, it’s consistency. And getting out there. And, you know, in this case, hitting the road wasn’t able to get on a trail today, like I like to, but I got out there and got a couple miles and go for a walk later and fit in what I can. And again, I have that reminder in my routine of just like Hey, get out and exercise. Here’s what your goals are, but anything is better, you know, then skipping the day. Awesome. Thanks, Justin just said thanks for the content. Appreciate it, man.
And let me pull it pull back up here my routine I lost my train of thought, gotcha the exercise daily review, right. And then the last two things I talked about to myself are just prioritizing and focusing. And these are kind of part of the daily review, but I have them broken out and just telling myself, remember, you know, you’re in control, you get to focus again, if I’m with family, or I’m on a business trip, whatever it is, I can say, you know, hey, family, or Hey, whoever I need, you know, 10 minutes. And so long as that’s not a problem, maybe put on the headphones or go in a separate room and knock it out, set a timer, you know, do a one pot Maduro technique, and you know, maybe use something like that.
But just reminding yourself that you’re generally in a lot more control than you think. And then using that idea to when you’re focusing on prioritizing, you know, I’m on the road, I’ve got a little Chromebook with me, I can’t do video editing, or I suppose I could, it would just I can’t imagine how painful that would be. So being honest with yourself in terms of prioritization, and then really being better about that over time. And again, all of this stuff is about consistency.
And as you go you just get better and better about this. You know, I said, I still make mistakes when I travel about overestimating time and you know, luckily that’s something that’s improved because I started doing this whereas before I would just travel and then you are inevitably I’d come back from traveling and be like, geez, you know, I really things didn’t work out as well as I thought they would, you know, oh, well moving along and then realizing, hey, you know, maybe this is an area where I need to have a routine as well as in circling back after trips and saying hey, what could I do better? You know, not that things went horribly but I’d like to improve this I enjoy traveling I want to get the most out of it. What could I do and going like that? So let’s see.
Justin says still using Tyler yes I am. Actually that’s funny. I decided not to bring the actual doing a horrible job here the like Okta Hadrian thing with me cuz I didn’t want to get it messed up in my bag. So I used a little bit on my phone, but definitely I found that the power of that thing is having it right in front of you like having a physical object. Because I think for myself, time tracking doesn’t work. If I had it’s like out of sight. So I’ve found that that’s really the power for me of it. They’ve also got some really cool updates coming.
I’m trying to remember what their email said they were, they’re looking at doing some more like integrating time tracking with goal tracking or goal setting. And so it’s just something they’re starting to ask people about. So I’m really excited about that still highly recommended if you’re kind of a visual tactile person like myself, like, I like having that right there. And it makes it very easy. And for anyone who hasn’t heard me talking about this, I kind of integrated this you can look up time Mueller, but with Mike McCalla, which is book clockwork and that’s about kind of designing your business and how you spend your time and a lot of your time and working on that, so it’s kind of the proper percentage, you know, you’re spending most of your time as a as a business.
So if you’re the business, then it’s just you but if it’s you and your team, you know, you kind of sum everything up and most of it should be on doing whatever it is your company delivers, but not getting stuck in the trap of having that being 100% of the time, you need to make sure that you have deciding time, delegating time, and then designing time that really high level stuff, man. So I use the time you order device and wrote that on there along with a couple extras like learning, which is something I’m trying to devote a set amount of time to as well as meetings, or just calls and starting to track that instead of being really granular.
So for myself, that’s easy. All I have to do then is decide is the task I’m doing a doing type of thing, like something that’s directly like, just has to be done in is like a task in the business or am I deciding like, Did somebody come kick something back to me? And do I now need to decide for them? Am I delegating and he gets very specific about this, which I like where it’s delegating in the sense of you’re handing responsibility of something over you’re assigning a project and they’re taking ownership.
And then lastly, designing where you’re working on the real high level stuff like what is the business goal what you know, things like that? So I’m ready yeah. So two thumbs up still for time you learn really liking it that came up with a good UI update to couple weeks ago. So yeah, check that out. I’ll pop the link in after we’re done going live. So let me see real quick if we’ve got anything else.
All right, I think that’s about it. I’m going to keep it short today. Like I said, since I’m on the road, but if you haven’t yet, just another reminder, go check out the 14 day productivity challenge. I think this is a good one for just about anybody, especially if you’re interested in either starting or taking your daily review, game up a notch, and then look getting into automation.
So for the second half, when I do the automation, we have one that’s just set out, and you can follow it and I think it’s a really helpful one that could save you like literally a couple dozen hours. But then it’s also more than that. It’s the process of Hey, how do you decide what you should be automating? And then going from there so if it’s something you know, you’re like, well, I don’t want to do exactly this one. Don’t worry, we got to cover you can use the process to automate just about anything.
So that will do it for today. And I will see every back next week looking forward to being home and having a bigger screen and being able to go a little bit longer. So thanks everybody, and I’ll see you next week.
