Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to the Mastermind for business podcast. This podcast is for you, the small business owner. If you feel like you've got a great business, but you just feel trapped by it, if it feels more like a job than a business, then you're in the right place. Because the mastermind for business podcast, we show you exactly how you can spend more time in your life and less time in your business. And in today's episode, that's exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about how to get time back. So if you would like at least a day, a month to go and spend doing what you want to do and not what your business needs from you, then that's what we're going to tap into in this. And I'm going to show you exact tools that you can use to get at least a day a month. And lots of people have actually got a day a week. Let's get that underway right now.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: If you want more time, money, freedom, and have a business that's not reliant on you, then you're in the right place. Each week, Mark Creedon, along with some of the very best business minds in the world world will take you through simple, practical steps you can take to create the business you always wanted. From his own practical experience, Mark will show you how to work less, make more, and get the business you always wanted, the one that you deserve. Now, here's your host, one of Australia's most sought after business coaches, Mark Creedon.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. I'm Mark Creedon, your host. Are you in a service, business or professional practice? And just find that at the end of the day you've got no time? Or what's worse is that time runs out long before your to do list does? In this episode, I'm going to show you three really simple things that you can do that's going to buy back time and get you back on track as far as your to do list is concerned. See, I reckon that the three biggest things that sort of interrupt us in the day are your phone, your emails and other people. And if that sounds familiar to you, then you are 100% in the right place. Let's go and have a look at how we can address those three. We're going to talk about emails first. Now, this is mine. I got this from the four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss. But I've adapted it, I use it, and it's the concept of batching and really all it means is that rather than checking your emails every few minutes, every 15 minutes, whatever it might be. And by the way, you'd probably be really surprised how frequently people actually check their emails. There was a bunch of research done in the states where they looked, were actually counted how many times people checked their emails and it came down to something like checking their emails every five to six minutes. So imagine you're checking your emails every five to six minutes. So I think there's a couple of things you can do and the concept of batching is the first one. Now, all batching means is that you deal with your emails at set times.
And when we're working with our clients in our mastermind business accelerator program, what we do is we say, look, in an ideal world, I'd love to see you checking your emails morning, noon and night. So when you first come into the office in the morning or get on the job or on site, whatever it might be, if you're working from home, when you first sort of hit the, hit the boards running, check your emails, then stop and check them around lunchtime and then check them late in the afternoon before you wrap up for the day. Now for some people, that just fills them with absolute dread. They're so terrified of the thought of things that they might miss out on. There's a couple of, I think, reality checks here. Number one, keep in mind I always say that your email inbox is just somebody else's priority list, right, because they've sent you an email wanting you to act on it. So what you do on it is really around their priority, not your priority. So how you get priority back is by getting in charge of these emails. Remember, emails were supposed to be designed to make our life easier, not to put even more pressure on us. So number one, think about batching them. Now, if that does fill you with dread and you just can't get to that point, go slow. Check your emails at the top of the hour, just the top of the hour. If that still fills you with dread, check them at the top and the bottom of the hour. Right at the top of the hour and half past the hour, check your emails. Then slowly. You can then build up from there to checking them in the hour to checking them every 2 hours to every 3 hours. Finally, you're checking them three times a day. Now there's a couple of other little tricks and I don't know that Tim mentioned these in the four hour workweek, but these are things that I use and I've certainly taught my clients to do. Number one, turn your email notifications off on your phone. The reason we check our emails is because we're constantly getting this ping, letting us know that there's some new, vitally important email that we need to have a look at. And we end up going down a bit of like a rabbit hole, right? While we look at that. And sometimes as we're scrolling through, oh, I saw that. And, you know, because you do it right, we all do. So if you can turn your notifications off on your phone now, you are in charge of your email. You can check your email top of the hour, every 3 hours or preferably three times a day. Number one batch it. Number two is to turn your notifications off so that you're letting your emails know when you'll check them. They're not telling you, hey, I got another email for you. Hey, I got another email for you. The third thing, I think, is to manage expectations. Now, if you are a, if you are a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon or an emergency physician listening to this, I don't expect you to follow this advice, but for the vast majority of the people listening to this podcast right now, that's not you. And so my point about that is that if you don't answer an email in ten minutes, no one's going to die. And we need to realize that, that, you know, it's, most of the emails that we deal with are kind of, they're just perfunctory, right? They're just, they're process driven, they're admin style. I'm sure they might be sales and you might be sitting there saying, oh, Mark, I'm in real estate, and, you know, I might miss a deal. Sure there's going to be exceptions, but there's ways around that as well. And that would be about outsourcing your emails. So you're getting someone else to check the emails and only flick the really urgent ones to you. But in the vast majority of cases, if you're in a small business or a professional practice, in the vast majority of cases, you don't need to check your emails that urgently because no one's going to die and you're not going to miss a deal because you haven't checked your emails in the last hour or the last 2 hours. So apart from turning the notifications off, you can set expectations. And that's a really simple process of putting an autoresponder into your email that says, hey, got your email. By the way, I only check my emails three times a day, four times a day on the hour, whatever it might be I'll get the email to you and you can even add a little thing into the autoresponder if the matter's super urgent. Give me a call, send me a text, which is a nice segue to talk about phones. But just before we get onto phones, let's quickly recap what we're talking about with emails. The concept of emails is that your email inbox is somebody else's priority list. Stop that from happening. In the vast majority of cases, no one's going to die. Number one, batch your emails. Number two, make sure that you set the expectations. And number three, turn the notifications off on your phone. Speaking of phones, let's go at phones because I reckon that's the other big thing. And you can use the same principles that we spoke about with your emails, with your phones. And that's simply you can batch it so you can let people know that you return phone calls twice a day. You can have that on your voicemail. You can. And what I do is on my voicemail, it says, don't send me, don't leave a message, I won't listen to it, send me a text and I can have auto responders on my text that goes, thanks for your message. I respond to my messages two times a day. I'll get back to you. The more that you can educate people, the reason that we feel so nervous about letting go of this is because we're worried about how people are going to react. But the more we can educate the people that we work with on a daily basis, you know, our colleagues, our clients, our team, the more we can educate them, the easier it's going to be for you. So with your phone, do the same thing. Batch your phone. Don't check your phone all the time, right? Don't be checking it every five minutes. The world's not going to end. Nothing's going to change. You're not going to miss that deal. If you haven't checked your phone for 5 seconds, batch your phone. And if you feel that you have to check your phone all the time for those potential deal making opportunities, do that. But then return the non deal making phone calls in a batched way again morning, noon, afternoon. Right? So in the morning, middle of the day, in the afternoon, batch your calls that you're returning and you'll find that you're probably going to get a lot more done. You're not going to get interrupted in between time. And if you have uninterrupted phone time, you kind of zoom through your phone calls as well, the other thing I find is that if somebody rings me and they've got to wait a couple of hours for me to get back to them, by that time, it's given them an opportunity to give it a bit more thought about what they want to talk to me about. And so you find that there's the time that you spend on the phone call is usually quite condensed. I think the third thing is people, how do you deal with people who are constantly interrupting you? And I reckon that might be what we talk about in the next edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. For the moment, let's think about emails and phone calls. You need to batch them, you need to turn notification off, put your phone on airplane mode. How I first came about this, by the way, was, apart from reading the four hour workweek is I was actually flying on a plane. It didn't have Wifi. My phone was on airplane mode, and I got off the plane, and when I got off was two and a half hour flight. All these messages came through, but I realized that people could actually wait two and a half hours to speak to me. You know, I don't have to take the phone call there and then. And it was kind of a little aha moment. As I walked off the plane, I went, how good's that? I've had two and a half hours of solid work, really planning some stuff, working in my genius. Another topic we're going to talk about in a future episode of the Mastermind for Business podcast. But it gave me the opportunity to do that. And you know what? As I said, nobody died. It all went really well. In the next episode, we're going to talk about how you deal with people who constantly interrupt you. If you know someone in their service business or a professional practice who you think would benefit from listening to these sorts of tips, please share the podcast with them. Review the podcast. Let us know if there's a topic you'd really like to hear, or if you are in a professional practice or a service business, you'd like to work half the amount of time, earn twice the amount of money in 18 months or less. Mastermind for Business go to Metropole.com dot au. I look forward to chatting to you next in the next episode of the Mastermind for Business podcast.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Thanks for joining us on the Mastermind for Business podcast. If you're ready to have a business that you're not a slave to, check out metropolemastermind.com dot Au or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the w's see what's possible today.
