[Transcription]
Hi….Rob Brown of Encore Partners here.
Thanks for joining me in the 21-day Time Mastery challenge.
I’m going to show you how to get 5 to 10 hours back in your week, each and every week, and massively improve your productivity. To do this, I’m going to share with you a series of success habits. You’ll get a message from me each day for the next 21 straight days.
Hopefully, you’ll go through these habits and try to implement them each day in succession, but, if you miss a day, don’t worry, you can pick up where you left off.
But, it is critical, to try to do each one of these exercises in succession, in order.
They build upon each other.
You may find that some of the things that I’ll suggest during this program are things that you’re already doing. That’ll make it an even easier for you.
And, some days, it may be a bit more of a struggle. It may take a little bit more than 20 minutes I have planned. But, I want to promise you, in the end, you’ll more than get that time back.
When you take these ideas seriously, you’ll to get 5 to 10 hours back in your week immediately…and potentially forever.
More importantly, this is all about helping you get more done, so that in the end, you crush your biggest goals.
Time mastery plays a big part in this.
As I told you in some of the information leading up to this kick-off, I’ve been a bit of a time management junkie for my entire career. One of the things I learned, very early, in fact during my rookie days at the old Dean Witter, is that sometimes we tell ourselves we have to put in more hours to get more stuff done.
When, in fact, if we just concentrate more for a fewer number of hours, we can actually do more in less time. Less means more.
The first time I really noticed this was in my rookie training class at Dean Witter (on the 70th floor of the World Trade Center) back in 1984. We had a successful young advisor come and speak to us at the end of our month in training.
After a bunch of “experts” from the “home office” had told us we would be working 12, 14 or even 16 hour days, this rookie, one of the successes of the training program, came in and told us he only worked 6 hours per day.
The jaws of the folks on the stage almost hit the floor because they thought he was going to support the lie that more meant more. That the more time you work, the more you get done, the more money you make, the faster your business grows.
And he was there as a rookie, one of the top rookies, saying nope.
He just worked 6 hours a day.
He just was very conscious about how he spent those 6 hours. That was really the beginning of my journey considering the best ways to master time.
So, in the first few days of this program, I’m going to talk about creating space.
There are some things that I’m going to ask you to do later in the program that may actually take a little bit more time, but if I can help you create space now, then I know you’ll have time, not only to implement the ideas that we’re going to talk about during this program, but also get the stuff done that really matters to your business.
Over the first few days, we’re going to talk about creating space. I want to quickly help you get one to two hours back in your day, each and every day. The first place we’re going to do that is with your email.
I call this section of the program Email Nirvana and there are a couple of parts to Email Nirvana. For now, I want to jump right in to the activity that I want you to be working on today as part of your first day of the challenge.
The very first thing I want you to do is I want you to eliminate or filter email list subscriptions. Just go into your email system, whether it’s your deleted folder or your inbox, and look for things like notifications that you get from social media sites.
Turn them off.
Look at the email newsletters and publications that you get. Turn 80% of them off. Most of them you don’t read on a regular basis or you don’t need them. Use that unsubscribe function at the bottom of the email.
Get rid of them.
If you’ve bought a product or a service and you get a lot of follow up emails, unsubscribe from those as well. If you’re on distribution lists from forums or chat groups that you participate in and each time somebody comments on a post that you made, you get a notification…turn them off.
Turn off those comments on posts.
There’s just no reason to have these interruptions coming in to your inbox. Things that are important will have a way of making it to the surface.
I can promise you, if you take the time to do this today, in the first day of the challenge, you’ll probably get a minimum of 30 minutes back in your day…either in your work day or things that you’re doing after hours.
Don’t worry about eliminating the wrong thing. You can always go back. Those lists that you unsubscribe from will welcome you back if you really need them.
But I bet you won’t miss them because more than 90% of them are time-wasters.
And if you’re wondering, well, how do I decide which are the right ones to get rid of? As you’re looking at the email, ask yourself does this email add real value? In other words, are you learning something or gaining something from it? Or is it just satisfying curiosity, filling space or making you feel good because you know that it’s somebody’s birthday today. (You can go to Facebook later and wish them happy birthday.)
Does it really add value?
You can also ask yourself if the information really help you achieve your goals. So, in particular, these are things that you’re looking at throughout your day when you’re looking at your emails, are they really helping you achieve your goals?
Will they help you reach the milestones that you’re going for?
If they don’t, just eliminate them.
If eliminating makes you nervous, set up email filters. Have your recurring emails sent to a special email box where you’ll perhaps look at them later. Filtering emails, filtering those list subscriptions is only a secondary way of approaching this.
Eliminating, and I’ll talk about lot about eliminating throughout this program, is the best way to do it.
But the first thing I want you to do is I want you to go through your emails and I want you to eliminate those notifications, those newsletters, those product purchase updates, the distribution lists, the post comments.
Stop letting them interrupt you throughout the day. More than 90% of it wastes your time. This is critical.
The second thing that I want you to do today and this will take even less than time, in fact, it should probably take less than a minute, I it want you to delete your deleted emails and your junk emails permanently.
I have a philosophy that the more you let pile up on your desk, the more you let things stack up, the more of a distraction they become. It’s like going into a kitchen where the sink is covered with dirty dishes, it’s really hard to start cooking.
That’s why one of my big time mastery topics is don’t let the dishes stack up.
But when you leave a bunch of email in your deleted email file or in your junk email file thinking, you know, I’ll get back to that later, you’re distracting yourself. So, if it’s in one of those files, you deleted it or it’s junk, it’s there for a reason.
Just go ahead and completely get rid of it. This will save you time each day. This will save you from being distracted by things that aren’t important.
So, that’s it. That’s your day 1 challenge.
We’re talking about creating space, working with your email, and eliminating those subscriptions that don’t matter, deleting deleted items, deleting junk email to clean things up. I promise you, you’ll get back at least 30 minutes in your day.
Thanks for listening and be on the lookout for tomorrow’s challenge.