Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast we're going to talk about one of the most important elements of your business… The feeling of abundant time, and we want more than just the feeling of abundant time, we want the actuality of abundant time!
The number one way you're going to achieve what you want to achieve is by wrangling your time.
People often tell me, the thing that stands in their way is that they just don't have time. They're too busy, so I want to help you get control of your time and use it in a proactive way, and the way to start is to eliminate all the reactive activators that are stopping you from implementing the things you want to implement.
I've got a really great strategy for you that I call it the 50 Minute Focus Finder, and what you're going to listen to right now, is a complete training, elegantly 50 minutes long, that’s going to give you a tool you can use for a lifetime to get anything you want to get done, done.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 155
Dean: Hello. We've got a really great strategy for you and I call it The 50 Minute Focus Finder. What you're going to listen to right now is a complete training, elegantly 50 minutes long, that is going to give you, and equip you, with a tool that you can use for a lifetime to get anything that you want to get done done. Enjoy this episode.
I just want to see how many people think that their business would be better off if you had more time to get stuff done? How many of you think that your business would be better? Sometimes, this is what I found when I was talking to people about productivity and about getting things done, and the common thing I kept hearing is, "I just don't have time for everything." I thought, "What a great name for a peak productivity program," Time For Everything. There is time for everything. I'm going to show you how to really make big, big improvements in the way that you approach the way you manage your time, and your ability to get things done. You guys know that there is no shortage of cool ideas and things that you can install in your business right now. Even learning dialogues like you learned this morning to really take them deep and really master them guess what that takes?
Audience: Time.
Dean: Time. To get the 30 Day Lead Blitz installed guess what that takes?
Audience: Time.
Dean: Time. It all takes time. Here's how the afternoon is going to go. We've got the whole afternoon here and so what I want to do and share some ideas with you, some of my top peak productivity practices. We're going to do that and then for the rest of the afternoon what I want to do is help you guys overcome any of the blocks, or any of the things that you need to get clarity on or some help with, around our three lead-generating programs, The 30 Day Lead Blitz, Getting Listings, and Finding Buyers. We're going to do some table exercises, and the second half of this afternoon will be a big sort of workshop type of experience.
Get ready to take some notes during this section, because these seven things that I'm going to share with you are going to really make an impact in your business, bigger than anything that I've ever discovered. The battle that we're facing as we're moving into trying to get things done is we're fighting the proactive reactive battle, where we know that in order to get things done we need to proactively schedule time to do them, figure out what it is that we want to do, and actually keep our commitment to get those things done.
Now, the struggle that we have is that what's happening is that there's constantly this tax on our time, that we're focusing on the reactive things that happen in our day. How many of you realize that real estate and mortgages are a reactive type of business? We have very little time to do the proactive things. What we really want to do is flip that around and focus our time on doing the proactive things. In order to do that we need to get rid of all of the reactive things that cause all these demands on our time. Here are the seven powerful peak productivity practices. Say that seen times fast.
Number one, eliminate the big four reactive activators. Now, when we talk about going into reactive mode. You're going to notice that this is absolutely true that there are four big things that set us off into reactive mode. Number one is email. How many of you when you first get into the office the first thing you do is turn on your computer and check your email, and that's how you start your work day? Now, immediately you never know what's going to happen on your email, do you? You never know. You could have a couple of leads that have come in. You could have a problem that's come in. You could have a funny joke that's come in. You could have a link to a video that one of your friends has sent you on YouTube, and you watch that and that was funny. Then, the next video comes up and you watch that one, and you get off into this whole reactive tailspin.
What's attached to your email? The internet is attached to your email. Have you guys noticed that you can waste a little time on the internet? When you go into that mode it's very, very easy to let hours slip by. Nobody is immune to this. I start asking, just casually, my friends about how much time they actually think that they spend online. I would ask you guys this. How much time do you guys think you spend online?
Audience: About four hours.
Dean: About four hours a day. What about you? About four or five hours a day. How about some people over here? More than that you think? How about you guys? When you really think about it. I coined this phrase because I had started observing it in me that I coined this phrase. I started calling it the OCD loop. Where you would go in and check my email, then I would go and check leads, and I would check stats, and then I would check my stocks, and then check a couple of blogs that I go to. Then by the time you get that you go right back and check my email again and then you check your stats again. You get into this whole loop and you say, "Just one more time, just see what's happened. Pretty soon you're not getting anything done.
A lot of times we kind of use the internet, and we use email, as that filler time. Okay, I don't have to leave for this appointment, I'll just check my email and I'll do all this, so you default to going online, checking the message board, doing all those things that you're just kind of checking again and again. It's very distracting. You're never going to get anything proactive done while you're caught in that reactive loop of email, internet, and all that time wasting.
I'm going to say that you all spend a minimum of two hours a day online. Would that be fair? I think if you timed it. Before I started realizing that this is what's happening, I started timing it for me and it was about three plus hours a day. I thought I was doing pretty good at that, but then I realized, "Wow, that's a lot of time online." Sometimes awareness of it just builds its own momentum.
If you were to go online and go to Google and do a search on online timer. This is what I started doing just to kind of cut down on it. I put up that timer in one of my browser windows, so every time I would get online that day I would press the timer and it would count up how long. When I got offline I'd stop it but not close the window, so I could keep the cumulative total. I think you'll find there's a lot of time there. I'm trying to help you find some time to be proactive, and the internet and email is one of those places that you can find it.
The second big reactive activator is the telephone. Has anybody ever gotten a phone call and that sent them into a reactive zone? When you think about it we're sitting there. We've all got our cell phones right here. We're all at any moment we could be reacting to something. Phone calls can cause you to go into great elation. It could be somebody referring somebody to you, or somebody who was referred to you. You could get a new listing. You could get a phone call that a contract has fallen apart, or that something's not going to close, or any number of things can cause a negative tailspin.
Being reactive to that phone is another thing that drives us out of the proactive zone, reacting to the telephone. Now, that's why we talk about it at the main event and use the real time voicemail message. How many people use a real-time voicemail message? Don't you feel freer for the time that you're not answering your phone, so you can put that aside? You guys have a big head start over most people who are just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring.
The third big reactive activator is people. If you're in your office and you're surrounded, and people might just pop in, "Hey, you got a minute? Are you doing anything?" You get into all kinds of conversations. You could talk about productive things. You can also sometimes talk about not-so-productive things. It's easy to get caught up in a half an hour at a time talking to somebody that isn't really a proactive conversation. They were just there and they started this conversation and off you go. There's lots of opportunity there for eliminating those reactive activators.
Now, the biggest reactive activator, the hardest one to get rid of is your thoughts. How many of you can go into a reactive tailspin just with a thought? It's funny have you ever heard of the butterfly effect where the whole thing is if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo can that start a thunder storm in Houston, the displacing of the wind, or the atmosphere can start this whole chain of events? I don't probably have to point out to you that there's probably been a whole series of things in your most recent memory that started with a thought. You start thinking something and that reminds me, "Oh, I should call Bob." Then you call Bob and that leads you into, "I got to do this, and I got to do this," and you get all these pop-up thoughts that happen all the time.
One of the easiest ways to eliminate those distractions is start scheduling time to play golf.
Audience: Yes.
Dean: Yes. Now GOLF, of course, is an acronym. I started looking at my own life. This is maybe years ago when I was starting to really look at, "How can I get more done in less time?" I started thinking about how come it's so easy for me to play golf? I never had a problem with that. I could block four hours off and I could go play golf anytime and it's very easy for me. I started looking at it and I came up with this acronym. Where G-O-L-F all stand for one letter of a process, a thought process here.
Goal is the first one. When I'm going to play golf I've made up my mind that that's what I'm going to do. I made a decision that I'm going to play golf. If I make the decision that I'm going to play golf that means that while I'm playing golf I can't go to the movies, or I can't go online and work on the internet, or I can't write an ad. I can't do any of the things other than what I have decided I'm going to do, which is to play golf. O is an optimal environment. Now, an optimal environment for me, for the things that I do, is an environment with limited distractions where I have nothing in my way of getting things done. See, the first three reactive activators are sort of easy to eliminate. You can eliminate email, you can eliminate the telephone, and you can eliminate people by removing yourself from their path. If you put yourself in a room where there is no telephone, and there is no internet, and there are no people you're not going to be engaged by those three reactive activators.
A golf course is the optimal environment for playing golf. It's set up perfectly for the task. You've got 18 holes. You start on number one. You go all the way through. It kind of propels you into, it keeps you on track. You start at the first hole, you go all the way to the 18th hole, and there's not many other things that are competing for your attention while you're on the golf course, unless you've got your Blackberry, or your iPhone, and all that stuff with you. That's you're defeating the whole purpose then.
F is a fixed time frame. I know that when I make the decision to go play golf that's a four and a half-hour decision. I know that from the time I make the decision I'm going to leave my house, or leave my Evil Scheme Hatchery, to get to the golf course, get my golf clubs, get on the course, play around, get done, get in the car and come back home that's at least four and a half hours. I know that so I block it off in my calendar. It's interesting how when you have something like that, a hobby, or something that you really enjoy that's kind of effortless to do very little gets in your way of doing it. How many people have a hobby or something that you like to do that you get that same kind of thing for? You set out the time. Some people like to go to yoga. Some people like to go to the movies. You do that same thing when you go to the movies, but you're also do it in your business, too.
When you got on a listing appointment you're playing golf. You've got a goal. You're going to see about whether these people are five-star prospects and whether you can help them sell their house. You've got an optimal environment. You're right there at their house. You're going to see all about their house. You've got limited distractions. You're not in the middle of the listing appointment saying, "Can you wait just a second. I'm going to check my email real quick." A cell phone rings you're not picking it up and answering the cell phone and talking to somebody are you? You're not bringing other people in to socialize with you when you're having this booking. "Come on, keep me company here. I'm going to go to this listing appointment." You've got a fixed time frame. You know that your listing presentation might take one hour. It might take 90 minutes. It might take two hours. Whatever it is that's how long it takes and you block that time off on your calendar and you're playing golf.
Same thing when you're taking a loan application. You've got these things in your life right now and it's just a matter of applying that same thing to actually getting the proactive stuff done. I'm going to give you a little tour of my Evil Scheme Hatchery here, one part of it. Now, this is my focus room right here and there's a nice big table here. You notice it's not very cluttered. There's nothing really in here. There's a nice big table. There's about an eight foot table, some comfy chairs. Usually I'll sit right up there at the head of the table with that nice natural light. It's kind of a textured glass window there, so it lets in some filtered light, nice natural light to work with here. Sometimes I sit right here at the end of the table. There's my big white board where I put up all the brainstorms that I'm doing, all the things that I'm thinking or need to kind of illustrate or work through. This is a great room.
I can have up to six people in here and have a really great focus session. I've had a few people from Buyer For Your Listing come and do some summits here where we think all about the wonderful things we can do for you guys.
Now, when you look at that environment that is the optimal environment for getting something proactive done. There's no telephone in there. There's no internet. No email, and because it's behind two locked doors to get to it, there's no people who are going to disturb me in there. They know when I'm in there not to disturb me, that I'm focused completely in there. But, even when you eliminate all those physical reactive activators the thing that you carry with you are what I call your free-range thoughts. All the thoughts that are rolling around in your head that can send you off into a reactive tailspin. Have you ever sat down, you had the best of intentions, you've set up your optimal environment, you decided you wanted to do something, you've eliminated the telephone calls and your email, but you sat down and as soon as you sit down to focus something pops into your head and you think, "Oh, I got to call this before I get started," or "I've got to do this," or "I've got to call about this contract. I've got to get this waiver," and you get sucked back into your day. Has anybody ever had anything like that happen?
Yeah, of course you do. Now, the thing that you can do to corral those free-range thoughts is to use the 50 Minute Focus Finder. Now this is something that I use a lot. I'll share with you how and why this actually works. When you are going to focus on something. When you're going to focus all of your attention on something and you want to give it your full attention, the only way for you to really focus on that one thing is to be completely confident in your mind that that is the thing that you should be focused on right now, that you're not going to get in trouble for not doing something else.
Now, there's not many things in your life that can't wait for two hours. Would you agree that sometimes things happen quickly but you're not so worried about it when you're on a listing appointment. Even if you have a pop-up thought during a listing appointment, what do you do? You dismiss it, don't you? You kind of know, "Okay, well I have to do that right after." Has anybody in the room ever left a listing appointment because something popped into your head that seemed like it might be more important? I'm pointing these things out because I want you to really think about that. I want you to see that you are playing golf some of the time. You are doing it already. You're doing it when you're with your clients, with things that you perceive as very high value.
There's resistance that we face when we try to do it proactively when we're not sitting there with somebody else. The 50 Minute Focus Finder, the way this works both Joe and I use actual timers for doing this. One of the most freeing things that I ever discovered was the use of a digital timer that will go off at a certain interval of time. If I can set it to 50 minutes and know that that buzzer's going to ding in 50 minutes, I can focus all of my attention and not have to worry about how long have I been in here or what's the time, or anything like that. I know that it's going to go off in 50 minutes.
Now, here is what I would recommend for you as your very first 50 minute focus finder, is to get a yellow pad, or four sheets of paper, and set your timer for 50 minutes. Here's what I want you to do in that 50 minutes. I want you to write down every thought that's on your mind, everything you can possibly think of. Now, it seems like you're thinking, "Wow, there's a lot of stuff going on there." Here's what's going to happen. For the first 10 minutes you're going to have thoughts as fast as you can write them, as fast as you can write them down they're going to come. You might start slowing down at seven minutes or eight minutes, but than a couple more will come. You'll feel like you're completely done at 10 minutes, but you're not.
At 10 minutes what happens is now you can focus into instead of the things that are immediately on your mind, all the surface things, now you start moving into the proactive things, the things that you'd like to do, the things that you've been meaning to do, the things that you would love to do at some point. If you spend 50 minutes writing down all of these thoughts, I would challenge you to get to 100 things that are on your mind that are all right there. The first thing that you're going to notice when you get all 50 of those done is that you will have an immediate sense of relief. You'll immediately feel like, "Wow."
It seems much more manageable when you look at it on four sheets of paper than when it's rolling around in your head. No thought is too significant or insignificant to write on your sheet of paper there. It could be as easy as get milk, or it could be as big as how am I going to pay for retirement, or how am I going to pay for college? It could be any of those things. When you get them all out on that piece of paper what you're going to find is that you've got enough ammunition on that piece of paper to fuel all of your proactive endeavors for the next 60-90 days and beyond.
Now, what you'll also notice is that as soon as you do that 50 Minute Focus Finder, you're going to see that a lot of the tasks kind of group together, especially the ones on the first page from the first 10 minutes. You're going to look through them and you're going to see there's a lot of phone calls that you might need to make. You might want to go through and kind of put a little check mark beside all the phone calls that you have to make. There might be a whole list of things that you can pick up when you're out and about, so you go out and you block them all at one time, to go out and pick up your dry cleaning, and drop off that waiver, and get yourself a timer, and get some office supplies, and get all the things that are there for you.
You might find that there is a whole list of things that you want to do online, proactive things that you want to do online, listen to any of the trainings, or start going through the 30 Day Lead Blitz or the Getting Listings Program. All of those things are proactive things. A lot of times you may have had those in your mind that, "Yeah, I would like to get that Getting Listings Program going, or I would like to get the 30 Day Lead Blitz going," but it never gets beyond going to the top of the list because it can't jump over all the things that keep popping up whenever you schedule time to do the proactive things.
Number five is the 50/20/50 solution. This is how I get everything that I get done done. What I look at doing is blocking off a period of two hours, a two-hour chunk of time. In all my days I'm looking, and I know that the first thing that I'm going to do, the first proactive thing, is to block off that two hours where I'm going to do a 50/20/50 block. What that means is a 50 minute session of on where I'm completely focused on that one thing. The buzzer goes off, the timer goes off. I press stop. I set it for 20 minutes and then I completely disconnect for 20 minutes. I may lay down. I may stretch. I may go down to the café and get a mocha and come back up to my office. I may look at magazines. I may take a nap. Whatever it is I know that that buzzer is going to go off in 20 minutes, so I'm not worried, again, looking at the watch or figuring out when I've got to get back to work. I know that the buzzer is going to do that for me.
As soon as that buzzer goes off I get right back and do another 50 minutes. That is a two-hour block of time right there. You've spent two 50 minute focus sessions on something, one task that's very productive. The more time that you can find to put in those chunks of two hours into your schedule the more that you will get done. You'll be amazed at a couple of things. First you'll be amazed at how long 50 minutes is the first couple of times that you do it.
You've got to ask yourself and look at it. It's all about really flexing your focus muscle. How long can you right now focus on one thing? Can you go five minutes focused on one thing? Can you go 10, 20, whatever it is? I guarantee you're going to find that that 50 minutes is a lot of time to sit down and focus on one thing. Now, what you'll also find is the first few times that you do it, after you get into the rhythm of it you'll be able to flex that focus muscle and be able to get a lot done in that 50 minutes. You'll be able to focus on one thing for those 50 minutes. But, you can't do it unless you've corralled all of those free-range thoughts that are rolling around in your head so that you know that while you're doing this 50/20/50 block that you're okay, that there's nothing that you really have to focus on other than what you want to focus on for these two hours.
When you practice this, when you start doing it, it will become the most productive thing that you've ever done. We talk about just even eliminating, or controlling, a lot of those reactive activators, the telephone, email, be all that time online. Every one of you has two hours in your day that you are wasting, or that kind of slips by, or just gets filled with default activities. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. This is going to be a proactive way to do it. A couple of things that I've found in doing, in blocking these two hours, is that the longer you can stay in the proactive zone for the first few hours of your day, the better you're going to be.
If you can avoid, break that habit of the first thing you do when you get into your office, or the first thing that starts your work day is checking your email, or checking your voice mail, or doing all those things, the longer you can go into your day without getting into that reactive zone the better off you're going to be. That's why the morning time is often the very best time to do it.
How many people have had an experience where you've made the intention of spending some time in the afternoon on something and then all of a sudden you got sucked into all this stuff that was going on? When it comes time to actually do it you're not done wrapping up what all this reactive stuff was that you've been working on. It's less likely to get done if it's not the first thing that you do. Over time the more you get used to doing these two-hour blocks of time, or the 50 minute focus sessions. You may only want to start out with one 50 minute focus session and build up to doing two, but the more that you get practiced at this you'll find that you can do it anytime anywhere.
Joe has been sharing this with me. Me, too, we spend a lot of time traveling, a lot of time in different places outside of our normal environment, but I travel with my little timer, and I know that I can sit down anywhere, set my timer, and I've got my little journal if I'm doing a brainstorming, or I'm working on an ad, or working on a presentation, or anything like this. I can sit down with my little journal, my pen, my 50 minute timer, and I'm in the zone for that 50 minutes. I can do it anywhere. You'll get to where you're able to do that, too. The faster that you can make the decision that you're going to do it, actually get it started and get going, the better off that you'll be.
Now what helps, when you schedule this two hours is to know exactly what you're going to work on before you sit down to do it. Sometimes we get into a time where we block off the time but we haven't really thought through what is it that we're going to do? Then we spend all our time wondering what to do, or thinking what to do. All these options keep popping up and we don't really get any decision. What you're going to find is with that list, with your list of your free-range thoughts those are going to be the seeds of all of the time that you're going to spend in your optimal environment, playing golf. If you know ahead of time what you want to do, what the highest priority thing is, it's easy then for you to break it up into chunks that are going to take 50 minutes, or that will be two at a time, to do a two-hour chunk.
Here's what it looks like for me. This board right here is cork board and I have my projects all listed right up here, little envelopes and everything to do with that project is inside that envelope, so we see strategic form there in my Buyer For Your Listing. Each of these cards that I stack up down the left-hand side here, each of these represent a focused session, is what I call it, where it represents between one to two hours of focused, uninterrupted time thinking, or working on one specific project. What I do is I come out of the comfy sitting area. When it's time to go focus I pull off one of these focus tickets here, grab the envelope for the appropriate folder, or project, and then I go into my focus room.
Now that for me, that's in a little hallway, the transition from the front room in my Evil Scheme Hatchery to the focus room. That wall there is that big cork board where I put an envelope for each of the projects. Now, how that might look for you, and it doesn't have to be a cork board. It could be a binder, or it could just be envelopes that you have for each of the projects that you want to work on. You could have a 30 Day Lead Blitz envelope, or you could have a For your Customer Experience Timeline envelope, or your Client Party envelope, or something where it's a project that's going to take multiple steps to actually get done. A lot of the things that all of our leaders are going to share tomorrow with you, you're going to get ideas that they're going to show you exactly how they do things. Those are going to be projects for you.
What I do with that left-hand side there is I write all these little things on what I call focus tickets. They're just index cards that I put one project, isolate one thing on that index card. That way I can constantly sort through them and figure out which ones are the highest priority. I put them in order of what I want to do, so I don't have to spend any time thinking about what I'm going to do when it's time for me to do what I'm going to do. I can walk right in. I know I've got that time scheduled. I walk right in. I take the top ticket, I take that envelope, I go in, I set the timer and off I go. I know that that's what I'm focused on. The same thing will work for you.
Number six is to stop multitasking and focus on one thing at a time. How many feel like you're good multitaskers? Yeah. Now here's the myth about multitasking, is that there's no such thing as multitasking. You cannot do two things at one time. What you're really doing is you're switching between things really quickly, so you're not really doing any one thing. I always do a little experiment like this whenever I'm with somebody explaining this concept of not being able to multitask. I will have them get a clean sheet of paper, and I will get a clean sheet of paper, and together what we'll do is we have three columns of things where I'll have them write the... Let's do it.
Let's do this right now. Get clean sheet of paper. Now, get a partner. Turn to one of the people right beside you. This is going to be your partner here. What we're going to do is we're going to have a little race. You got one sheet of paper big enough to have three columns in it, so divide it into three columns first off. Now in column one what you're going to do is you're going to write the even numbers between two and 24, so you're going to go two, four, six, eight. Don't do it yet. Don't start yet, but that's what you're going to do in that column. You're going to write the even numbers between two and 24.
In the middle column what you're going to do is you're going to write the months of the year, January, February, March, April, May, in long-hand. You're going to write the whole word out in that middle column. In the third column what you're going to do is write the odd numbers from one to 23. Okay, so first column is even numbers, two to 24. Second column is the months of the year, and the third column is the odd numbers from one to 23.
Now, one of you is going to write each column individually, so you're going to write all of the odd numbers down, then you're going to move on and you're going to write all of the things from column two and all of the things from column three. So, that will be the person, the non-multitasker. Look at your partner, decide which of you is going to be the non-multitasker. Have you made your decision? Now, the multitasker, here's what the multitasker is going to do. The multitasker is going to write them horizontally one row at a time, so you're going to write two, January, one. Does that make sense? So, you're going to switch between all of the columns all the way through.
Now, when I say go, here's what we're going to do. I want you to write as fast as you can, as illegibly as you want, but you have to write the whole words out, and your partner is going to be watching to keep their eye that you actually did it all. Now, what I'd like you to do is as soon as finish one of the columns. This goes for both of you, as soon as you finish one of the columns I want you to yell out "done," and then go onto the next column. You should yell out "done" three times in a row here. Are you ready? Any questions about how we're doing this? Everybody is clear? On your marks, get set, go.
We won't see some like Flight of the Bumblebee music, or something.
Audience: Done.
Dean: Oh, there's are focusers. Oh, done. There's a second wave.
Audience: He's laughing because I'm the multitasker and he isn't.
Dean: Oh really. You're just a faster writer. There we go. Now, it is kind of hard isn't it, doing all that. Yes. Done, done, done. There we go. Now, we had a flurry of done-ness at the end by all of our multitaskers. Yes. Here's the thing. How many of the focus people actually won the race first off? You know what, I'm going to show you guys how that actually works when you're focused on making money, when you're focused on your proactive projects that are going to make you money. Let's say that you've got three different projects that you want to work on. You've got the 30 Day Lead Blitz, you've got Getting Listings, you've got Finding Buyers. Let's just use those for argument sake, that they each take the same amount of time. Let's say that they each take three units of time to complete. One approach, the multitasking approach, might be to take a little bit of time to work on A, then work on B, and then work on C, and then go back and do A, B, C, A, B, C.
That would be the multitasking approach, and after nine units of time we'll have all three of the projects done. Now, if instead of multitasking and going switching back and forth between all of them, if we focus on just project A, after three units of time we're done with one of them. We've got something, and this is key because these projects are projects that actually get you bankable results, which get you what?
Audience: Money.
Dean: Money. You've got a money-making project that is out in the world done and creating revenue for you. Now, you're working on project B. After six units of time you've got two money-making projects out there getting you a result, before you would ever have gotten one done using the multiple approach. Now here's what really happens. Often we start out with the A, B, C method but by the time we get ready to come back around to A guess what pops up? Then we get back to A, B, C, D, and what pops up then?
Audience: E.
Dean: E. How many of you are on that kind of a time management loop where you get all of these projects, you've got all these things going on. None of them are done. You've got them all sort of half done. The thing that you really want to focus on is how can we get one thing, the most important thing done? All of these programs I assure you are going to be valuable and useful to you 90 days from now. They're going to be valuable and useful to you six months from now. You don't have to feel like you've got to get it all done all at once.
How many people have been Buyer For Your Listing members for more than five years in this room right here? Now, have you run out of things to do? No. There's going to be lots of things to do. Are the things that you did in the first year still valuable and creating value for you today? Yes. How many of you are still hoping to get your first thing done sometime in your fifth year? That's really what happens sometimes, isn't it?
Number seven is to focus on free time and remodel time. You'll always have time for results. You'll always have time for results. No matter what's going on if somebody calls you up and says, "Can you come over and talk to me about listing my house?" If that happens on Friday when you get back into your office. If they say, "Can you come over and talk to me about selling my house?" How many of you would be able to fit that into your schedule? That's the kind of thing. Results you fit in. Somebody wants to come and talk to you about getting a loan, you fit that in. Somebody wants you to talk about helping them buy a home, you fit it in. Results always fit in.
The thing that you have to really proactively focus on are doing the things like free time and remodel time, because nobody's hounding you to do those things. There's no sense of urgency around those things. When you're in the reactive zone there's no reactive zone that reacts you into spending free time on something you really want to do. It's always more of a thing where you're getting robbed of your free time, and you're getting robbed of your remodel time by the reactive zone.
To practice this, focus on your remodel time and your free time. What would you do just to practice if you had two hours to do something that you would really enjoy doing. It has nothing to do with work. It could be going to a movie. It could be going to get a massage. It could be going to a yoga class. It could be having lunch with a friend. It could be date night. It could be any of those kinds of things that you would really enjoy, practice by blocking those things off and working around them first.
Same thing with your remodel time. If you've already got your first few 50 Minute Focus Finders blocked out. You've got your first task is to do that list of 100 free-range thoughts. Get them all gathered out. What that will lead to is that's going to give you all kinds of ammunition to fill the next seven 50 minute focus blocks where you can take 50 minutes, make a lot of those phone calls that you have to make, or take a two-hour block, go out, run all over town and get all the things that you have to go and get, or drop off, or do. Those are going to fuel all of your initial remodel times.
Once you get those immediate things I talk about this concept of being in time debt. Does that ring true for anybody? Where you've got all these things that you have to do, you've been putting them off or they're kind of piling up on you and It's hard to focus on proactive things when you know you've got all this stuff that you really have to do, or you should do, or you need to clean up, things like your inbox in your email, things like your physical environment in your desk, or your office, or your home, or anything that's like that, your car. All these things, those will be good things for you to proactively take care of in your focus sessions initially. It will fuel everything else. What would your ideal week look like? Take some time to think through, what would your ideal week look like if you had complete control of it?
A great exercise is to think about a week one year from now, not this next week, or not a week next month but one year from now what would your ideal week look like? Would you like to fit into your ideal week time to play golf, physical golf, real golf? Would you like to block off time every week to go do yoga, or to go to the movies, or go to a spa, or whatever it is. Make a list of the 10 things that you love to do, things you would do with a two-hour block of time, with a four-hour block of time, and with a full day of time.
See, so often we don't know what to do with the time, because it's been so long since we've had free time. It's very interesting, but if you just make a list of three or four things that you can think of that you would love to do if you had a two-hour block of time, a four-hour block of time, or a full day. Block off the time and then just for fun pick one out of the hat. Pick one of your all-day activities. Pick it out, block the time, that's what you're going to do. Now, if you focus on all seven of those things you could have the most productive 2009 that you've ever had. You've got the time right now to start practicing those seven. They're all skills. The more you use them the better you get at them, the better you get at flexing those muscles.
There we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, go deeper in how the eight profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now you can go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com, and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and you can listen to the back episodes, of course, if you've just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process. You can download a book and a score card and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at BreakThroughDNA.com. That's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about Breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. That's it for this week. Have a great week, and we'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.