888 – Take a load off and get faster: Tom talks Lighten Your Entrepreneurial Load

Episode 888 – Lighten Your Entrepreneurial Load
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 888. Think of that 888. Well, it's better than six, six, six, I guess. All right. Episode 888 of Screw the Commute podcast. And this is five ways to lighten your entrepreneurial workload. That's what I'm going to talk about today. I do it all the time and still get tons of stuff done. Hope you didn't miss episode 887. That was business quotations. I look at them frequently for inspiration and, uh, kind of gets, uh, lights a fire under your butt to do some stuff. So, um, that was eight, eight, seven. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number, Business Quotations was 887 and today is 888. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:20] All right, let's get into the first one. And this is going to be fairly quick. You know you may have noticed that I'm doing fairly quick podcast now with, uh, you know, immediately actionable steps in them usually so that you can, uh, you don't have to, you know, go for an hour to get an idea that can help your business. So so here we go. Uh, first idea lighten your workload is make a and this, kind of this and the next one kind of fall into being more efficient so that you're not wandering around and wasting time all day getting tired.

[00:01:57] And, you know, which is, if you're tired with the same amount of workload because you weren't efficient, that's not a good idea. See, so the first tip is, and a lot of people will tell you this tip is to make a list at the end of the day of what you're going to jump on the next day. So you're not getting up in the morning groggy and having some coffee, having some breakfast. And I wonder what I should do today. No, you already know what you're going to be doing today. You jump on it and knock it out. I know, like I think yesterday I knew I had to get up. I had promised an affiliate email for somebody. I banged it out and then I had to do a podcast, uh, recording. So I banged that out. And then I had to review somebody's sales letter, banged that out, you know, so. And then I could breathe a little bit and do stuff that I wanted to do to improve the business or, you know, go out and work on my antique ATV or, you know, whatever I wanted to do. But, uh, it knocked my workload down because, bam, I knocked that stuff out quick because I already knew the night before what I was going to concentrate on. Certainly you're going to run into things that, you know, change that if some emergencies come up. But for the most part, it's going to lighten your workload because you're going to get all the stuff done faster and have more time to yourself.

[00:03:20] All right. So the next one is similar to that, and it's based on this book I've been pushing on you since the start of this darn podcast, which is my automation How to Automate Your Business e-book, which we sell for 27 bucks, but it's yours free just for listening to this show. Uh, but if you use these techniques both on your cell phone and your desktop, cell phones and tablets and desktop, it's again, it's going to knock your workload down because it's going to save keystrokes. It's going to save time where you're looking around all over the place to find something that somebody wanted. Uh, and we use Roboform. We use short keys or keyboard maestro for a mac. And another thing is, I teach people to use shortcut keys on your computer. If you and I. The method that I teach people is, is like, if you took three shortcut keys, you know, like control D is goes to your desktop and on Macs it's command something or other. Control E, control V or command V is paste. You know those kinds of little shortcuts can save you 2 or 3 keys and mouse clicks and multiply that by the thousands and thousands of times that you have to use those kinds of things, and you'll go faster. So the method I teach people is to pick three of these shortcuts. And all you have to do is type in Mac keyboard shortcuts or, uh, PC keyboard shortcuts.

[00:04:52] And there's hundreds and hundreds of them. Pick just three of them and force yourself to use them all day for three days in a row. And you will then own that shortcut and do that for a month now. You've got ten other shortcuts that are going to make you screamingly fast, save you enormous amounts of time right away, and then multiply that by the amount of years you're going to be in business. And on the keyboards. Wow. I mean, it's just crazy to not do these kind of things. So so that's going to lighten your workload by taking a little time in the beginning to learn these shortcuts. And it's going to save you thousands and thousands of hours into the future. We actually estimated that just this one program called Short Keys, that's for the PC keyboard. Keyboard maestro for the Mac has saved me 8 million keystrokes. 8 million. All right. It allows me to spend time with customers and creating products and services and making money rather than fighting with my computer. Okay, the next tip is to learn how to say no. And and a lot of people tell you that one too. But I mean, I'm you can say no gracefully and you can say no and be a jerk about it. Here's how I would say no gracefully. And first of all, I would rather, for instance, there's a guy right now supposed to be helping me with something. He's a big expert, but he's older and retired, and he agreed to help me with it.

[00:06:24] And then he disappears for weeks at a time, leaves me holding the bag, and then he contacts me, says I'll be home for a couple days. Um, let's work on this. And then. Disappears for weeks at a time again, you know, so he if he would have just said no to me in the beginning, I would have been much further ahead. And so don't be that kind of guy or girl. All right. And here's, here's how I would say no gracefully to somebody. Tom can you do this? I'd say, oh man, I would really love to help you with that. But I know for a fact that because of all these other things I have to do, I won't be able to come through. And I would much rather say no to you now and tell you how much I care about it, than to say yes and not and leave you hanging and screw you over. I would, I'd hate myself for doing that. So I have to say no now, and I'll help you figure somebody else can help you. Maybe, but I just can't do it myself. That kind of thing is, is something that people probably not going to feel. I mean, they would feel bad if I just said, no, I'm not doing that. All right. That's a kind of a rude no. Gets the same job done from my perspective. But I don't want them feeling bad that I turned somebody down, that I could have helped.

[00:07:51] Uh, but it's better to say no, uh, gracefully then to say yes. And then people can't trust you anymore, and you feel stressed out. You know, you feel guilty. You know, you promised them and you're not coming through. Now, some of you don't give a shit, all right, that you promise things, but I do. And if you want a good reputation, you won't promise things that you can't come through on. So learn to gracefully say no. All right? Next thing is, focus on a task before you move to something else. And. A lot of people talk about. Multitasking. And I've. I'm guilty of this myself because a lot of times I have ten different things going at one time. But I'm truly, you know, if you really think about it, I'm not multitasking. People can't. Really mentally multitask. Computers can multitask, but people can't. They are focused on one thing, and when they're saying multitasking, what they really mean is they're able to switch between focuses quickly. Some people can't do it quickly. I can do it very quickly, but that's not really multitasking. So even though I've claimed that I'm a good multitasker, you know that's technically not correct. I'm just good at switching between things quickly. But here's an example of how I have to hold myself back from this. Because, you know, I'm a crazy email freak. I get thousands of them a day and I keep up with stuff, but. When I'm, for instance, this podcast when I edit this podcast.

[00:09:38] I wait till I'm done editing the podcast, even though I can hear the emails beeping in. Now, if there was something I knew was critical that I had to wait for it was waiting for it, that would be different. But most of the time it's just loads of stuff that I don't have to address instantly. So I wait till I'm completely done editing the podcast, making copies in WAV and MP3 format, uploading it to my, uh, to the cloud so it's safe and a saved copy. Sending it to Larry, who's going to put it on Libsyn for distribution and all that stuff I do. And then I go check my email, because if I stop in the middle of that, I might miss a step, I might not make a backup, might not get it sent to Larry on time and so forth. So, so practice focusing on a task, even a short task, before you allow yourself to check email or voicemail or whatever, unless you know you're waiting for something that's critical. All right, that will work. Uh, reduce your workload, all right. Because what happens is you say, well, how does that reduce workload? Tom. Well, it it reduces your workload, because if I stopped editing in the middle of this podcast, I would even if I left everything on the screen, I would be my I would have lost my train of thought. I would have lost my continuity. Did I say something twice and I need to edit it out? I'd have to go back and play it all over again to think about that.

[00:11:16] And that would just cause double or triple the time to get the darn thing edited. So. So it saves you work because you don't have you're not interrupted in your train of thought. That's the bottom line there. And the last one, and this one really hurts to say this. This hurts so bad to say this for me, because I have been ragging against this concept for years and years and years, and I will continue to rag against the big picture concept here. I'm going to give you a specific thing here. And this is the topic of delegation. I hear all these two bit people that can't make their their car payment on stage telling you delegate everything, only do what you're good at. Well guess what? If what you're good at is making you broke, maybe you should rethink that and and increase your skills somewhat. How about that? But there are things that you can delegate. And I say delegate carefully. Delegate, delegate judiciously. Try to delegate things you already know how to do so that you can supervise the person you're delegating to. All right. So many people out there think they're too good to make a website, to make a web page to learn the stuff that I teach. And and they're still struggling because they put out money, uh, to people that probably don't know what they're doing, charging them a fortune for things like making a website 5000 bucks where I'll make a world class one for 150 bucks.

[00:12:53] All right. So you're just crazy, or you're lazy or you're arrogant or you're woke and you're you're entitled or whatever you are. If you refuse to learn and increase your skills, you're increasing your workload. Well, how does that work? Tom. Well, here's the thing. If some if you delegate something to somebody else. That's, um. Yeah. Let's say the website thing. All right. You delegate somebody else, it comes back and it's not what you have to go. And you have to carefully go over every word because it's your representing you that takes time. And then you have to clearly write out or, or get on the phone and tell the web person, oh, well, this is what I wanted. And they try again. And because they can't really see into your head what you're picturing and they send back another thing and it's not right, and you had to take time to review it and write out corrections and send it back again, you know, so if you if you took the time to learn to do it yourself, it's your vision right there, right now. No money spent, no time delayed, nothing. Right. It's just done. And so you increased your workload by delegating everything under the sun, because you were too damn lazy to learn how to do it yourself. All right. I tell this to people all over the world. I get these principles of companies that are struggling, and they farm out everything and want to be a big CEO.

[00:14:24] And they're broke, right? Or they're companies going broke because of this kind of thing. So yes, it hurts me to tell you to delegate, but if you did delegate mundane stuff that you already knew how to do and you could critique the person immediately if they're doing it right or wrong and teach them, that's okay. But if you just delegate everything, God help you. You're asking to just piss your money down the drain and you're going to have a lot harder time being successful at it. Now, if it's something super technical, yeah, I send it to Larry. You know, I'm not an IT person, but, um, everything I don't send to Larry because I can do it myself. And I got Mark and I got Jennifer and, uh, uh, Travis and all these people that can, you know, do stuff, and but most of it I can critique, you know, so I feel comfortable. And they've been with me a long, long time. So, um, so anyway, there's five ways to lighten your workload. Um, make a list. At the end of the day, use automation techniques. Say no, uh, politely and caringly uh, focus on a task before you move to something else and delegate carefully and judiciously and get in my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com you will not regret it, I'll tell you that. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.