Did you know that the most common professional struggles are time management, consistency, procrastination, call reluctance, staying on track, and dips in confidence due to a lack of productivity?
Can you relate to any of these struggles?
Just imagine if you had the tools to help manage them.
Our EWTS Certified Guide, Todd Bookspan, is on a mission to teach you how to face and overcome these common challenges – all before noon!
Todd is the founder of Win By Noon, a company focused on helping people in sales be more productive in less time. In addition to this, he is an EWTS Certified Guide, and he can teach better communication skills so that you can work more effectively with your clients.
The To-Do List
Have you ever woken up in the morning with the absolute best to-do list, containing all the super important things you need to get done to drive you forward?
How often do you complete this list?
Most people, Todd often included here, find that these lists remain incomplete by the end of the day.
To feel like you’re keeping on top of this and are on track to Win By Noon, you need to learn how to take the most important priorities and ensure that you are getting them done every single day.
If you’ve had any success, then the chances are that you’ve probably had failures, too. These failures are often where you’ve gained valuable lessons, though. Think of the times that you’ve learned more from your failures than you have about your successes.
Going forward, what could you do differently next time you face a similar situation?
Experience can help you achieve more. Every opportunity taken is an opportunity to learn.
You can learn through your team, and the more open-minded you are, the more you can learn along the way.
The tips that will be shared throughout this blog aren’t necessarily new; you’ve likely heard them before, but what you might hear is a slightly different perspective on something that you’ve tried and didn’t have much success with.
A new perspective might make doing it again more fruitful.
You’ve probably heard the famous quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”
Have you ever got stuck in a rut doing this? Perhaps you’re doing it right now?
This blog is designed to give you some ideas on how to take action and how to be more productive day to day so that you don’t get to the end of a working week feeling like you didn’t get those most important tasks accomplished.
If you've had any success, then the chances are that you've probably had failures, too. These failures are often where you’ve gained valuable lessons, though.
What Are Your Decisions Costing You?
Do you realize that every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else by default?
So, how can you make sure that you are saying yes to the right things?
Todd has a technique where he writes in his planner every day highlighting the ‘opportunity cost question mark’.
He puts that in there to remind himself throughout the day that when he’s choosing to do something, there’s an opportunity cost associated.
You should adopt the same mentality and use a Win By Noon filter every day.
As entrepreneurs and leaders one of the main risks is staying focused on what’s important.
Did you know that 94% of people arrive at the office every day without a plan?
The ones that do that are at a much higher risk of enduring inconsistent months with fluctuating results.
An example of this is the controversial space pen that NASA is rumored to have spent millions of dollars developing back in the ’60s.
The reason that this is still talked about now is that after all of the money spent trying to develop a writing device that was safe and efficient at zero gravity, the Russian space agency simply sent up their astronauts with wax-based pencils—saving a fortune and solving a problem simply and efficiently.
You can use this story as a means of learning a valuable lesson: why make things harder than they need to be?
Think about the things that you could do to make things go faster and make it easier to reach your goals, whatever those goals may be.
Complexity is the enemy of profitability, and guess what? Complexity kills completion, too.
Are you sitting on ideas that you’re worried will fail because they are not perfection personified?
Waiting for perfection can also kill productivity.
What could have happened if you’d launched those imperfect ideas? Could it be possible for you to be further along in your business than you currently are?
Do you realize that every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else by default?
Are You Busy Or Productive?
One of the key ways to win by noon is to determine if you are busy or productive.
Telling someone you’re busy isn’t always going to land positively. When you tell a client or a potential client that you’re busy, they hear that you might be too busy for them.
This is when a Simple Swap can come in very handy.
Swap out the word busy for a different word entirely, such as awesome.
You could say something like: ‘Hey, I’m doing awesome’, or: I’m doing amazing’, or: ‘I’m really fortunate to be working with a lot of clients right now, and I would love to support you as well.’
And ask yourself this – if you don’t have enough time, why is this?
Could it be possible that you don’t have enough time because you don’t have clearly defined priorities?
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith says that if you do not create and control your environment, then your environment creates and controls you.
And this comes down to your productivity gap.
Are your home office days planned differently than days in the office? If not, they really should be.
Your home office days have to be prepared and planned differently because this is an example of your environment creating and controlling you.
But this planning isn’t exclusive to working at home. You could get priority distractions at the office, too. It’s all about prioritization and learning what is getting in your way and distracting you.
The worst time to think about the things that you should be doing is in the moments that you should be doing them.
Be Present
The best focus is to be present.
Everyone gets distracted; what’s your vice? What’s your SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome)?
For Todd, it was his book of excuses. He’d make up reasons why he wasn’t doing as well as others.
Yours could be internet addiction, social media, or your phone. It could even be binge-watching the latest boxset on Netflix – it’s anything that is trying to grab your attention away from the things that matter, and this will prevent you from achieving your very best.
Did you know that the average person who plays fantasy football spends 30 minutes per day playing it?
This statistic is costing companies 13.4 billion dollars every year, and they say that it decreases 4% in overall staff productivity and leads to a 2 % increase in absenteeism.
These stats are worrying and yet completely relatable to most people.
And if we combine this with showing up to work with zero plan, it results in an environment where you are reactive
These situations result in people reacting to whatever’s yelling at them the loudest, and that’s not necessarily going to be the most productive.
So ask yourself this: do you want to be proactive or reactive?
How To Be Proactive
Thinking through what is urgent versus what is important. The question to ask yourself is: Is this urgent, or is this important?
This whole idea is about having laser focus.
Todd believes that habits are hard to start, but the interesting thing about habits is that it’s easier to eliminate a bad habit than it is to start a new one.
You’ve probably heard many different things about how long it takes to build a new habit – 21 days, 28 days, 90 days…
The truth is, it takes time. How much exactly? People can’t seem to agree.
But stopping doing something is often easier than starting it and being consistent.
Your SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome) however might make habit-building even harder, and this is where putting on the blinders is going to help most.
You need to practice blocking out those distractions and remaining laser-focused on the task at hand.
This means keeping things as simple as possible for streamlined effectiveness.
That might mean giving up the notion that you are good at multitasking.
Is anyone actually successful when they are spinning loads of plates?
Multitasking is tough for most people, so don’t try and do it if your goal is to be proactive.
There are even studies that suggest your IQ goes down five to 10 points when you’re multitasking, so you are not going to perform at your best.
In a practical sense, this can be as simple as only checking your emails when you know that you have time to digest the information and reply – not in the middle of doing something else.
Habits are hard to get started, but the interesting thing about a habit is that it’s easier to eliminate a bad habit than it is to start a new one.
Use The EWTS Cornerstones
There’s a part of the Four Cornerstones of Conversational Excellence with Exactly What to Say, and it’s: the worst time to think of what you’re saying is when you’re saying it.
This is also true with your actions. The worst time to think about what you’re doing is when you’re doing it.
So, going forward, think about the following:
- Ways that you can be proactive instead of reactive.
- Get laser-focused on important versus urgent.
- Review things realistically and say no when you have to
- Maximize your strengths
- Start your day by blocking out time to make a plan of your version of WTF (where to focus)
Remember, this is a marathon, not the hundred-meter dash. Your Win By Noon filter is going to be your version of it, so focus on what you need to achieve and what is important to your business.
What are those things that you need to do to drive your business?
