580 | Mastering Your 9-5 schedule

Introduction

Join us as we uncover the key principles and strategies that help busy leaders take control of their schedules and maximize productivity. That is coming up next.

Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are today. In this episode, we are going to take a different angle on time management.

We're going to, we're going to look at time management through the lens of mindset. We're going to uncover how our beliefs, our emotions, our attitudes, how these all shape the way we structure our days and prioritize our tasks.

Now, why am I saying that's a different route, a different angle? Because usually when it comes to time management, we look at it through the lens of just the logistical aspect. We're going to hit that, too.

We're going to hit that side as well. But for me today, what I would love for you to experience and come to understand is that the way that you've been looking at time management most likely doesn't give you the greatest benefit for your day.

Instead, and again, I'm not saying--

As I go through this, you're probably doing some good stuff, but really what I want to get into is your mind, into your mindset of how you structure your day and the things that are holding you back.

And the incredibly important pieces that are probably jacking up many of your days, many of your hours and causing you to lose out on great productivity.

When, if you discover these things and solve these things, it increases your productivity exponentially.

Now, I can tell you, if you look at personality styles, every single personality style struggles with time management, everyone, and how we schedule the correct things and the right things and the, the things that are going to have the biggest impact and so on and so forth.

So while it is not a specific personality style issue, it is interesting how each personality style looks at time management in different ways.

I'm not going to dig into all of that heavily. I just want you to focus on how you tend to like, what do you usually see when you're, when you're looking at yourself, scheduling your day, when you have a lot of things to get done or a lot of very important things to get done.

So we're going to kind of get into that today, hopefully walk away with some fantastic strategies that you need to put in place to make sure that you're getting the greatest productivity out of your day.

So first thing I want to do is I want to break down the difference between time management and productivity. Yep, there is a colossal difference.

Just because you're managing time does not in any way, shape or form mean that you're being productive. In fact, there is a lot of folks that have their time managed potentially really well, and yet they're not getting to the greatest productivity.

They're feeling good about it. They may walk away from their day and say, man, I accomplished 97 things today, but it doesn't mean that they're getting to the greatest productivity of what they're trying to accomplish or what they need to accomplish.

First thing is you have to understand that time management is the process of planning. It's the process of organizing how to divide your time into specific activities.

So when you look at time management, most people look at it through the lens of, you know, the logistical sense. It's the why do a + b that equals C. Great. Fantastic. And that's true, and that's good.

And there's great processes out there to do this. We teach a bunch of stuff on that as well. But what you have to understand is that productivity, on the other hand, is the measurement of how efficiently tasks are completed and how goals are achieved.

So if we're going to be productive, we need to make sure that we are handling our tasks, our goals, in the most efficient way. Well, Chris, that sounds pretty logical. Logistical as well. Absolutely.

Mindset Over Logistics (00:04:28)

Here's the part that affects this whole process from being a logistical, logical aspect, and that is the common mindset barriers that absolutely hinder effective schedule management. Right?

Such as perfectionism. That is a big piece. Now, I know a lot of you out there going, well, that's not me. I'm not worried about that. And some of you out there are going, oh, abso-stinkin'-lutely. Perfectionism.

And which, by the way, we all know you're not actually being perfect in this process, but you're trying to crank out the most perfect aspect of whatever it is that you're working on, whatever it is that you're doing.

That process will keep you from actually delivering on the tasks and the goals. What it does is it keeps you staying stuck in reworking and reworking and reworking the task, the project, whatever it is, because it's never good enough.

It's never at the right place. And I get it. I understand it. I've been there. But here's what I've come to understand, and I know a lot of you have heard this, that getting something out good enough is better than not getting it out at all.

Getting something done, getting a task accomplished, I'm not saying, you know, do it halfway. I'm not saying, you know, get it 90% good and get it out there.

That might be good enough. It's possible. I don't want you to be leaving parts out of it or, you know, not getting to everything that needs to get done.

What I want you to think through is if you are spending four, five, six times the amount of scheduled time trying to make something perfect, what's happening to your productivity?

What's happening to being able to get something moving and actually optimize it along the way?

What if you got the task done or the goal done or the project out, then came back and actually went through the whole thing, reevaluated it, optimized it, and put it back out again?

What you would end up with is a better product, better, better goal, better task accomplished. Right?

So a key piece to this is if it's a task. And a lot of times people are saying, well, Chris, a task is a task. I mean, it's, it's not done until it's done.

Again, ask yourself the question, what does done look like? What's the expected result? If the expected result is perfection, you're probably never going to be done with that task.

You're probably never going to experience productivity because you're not going to ever get to perfection. Another terrible common mindset barrier is procrastination.

Oh, for the love, man. As somebody who struggled with procrastination in my earlier life, I am an 88S.

So in my earlier life, I was one of those folks who would just allow things to, to pile up and convince myself it was going to go away and convince myself that, you know, if I didn't look at it, that it would resolve itself or solve itself or, you know, whatever.

Only to find out that I had this pile of stuff that I had shoved under a rug and eventually it came crashing down on me. Procrastination is one of the biggest barriers to productivity.

Now, here's the funny thing. You can still schedule your time incredibly well with procrastination. What in the world are you talking about?

It is a common thing for folks who do not want to face that difficult task, that difficult project, that difficult conversation, whatever it is, to actually schedule the daylights out of themselves with easier things.

It is common for folks to spend an incredible amount of time going through emails instead of solving problems that are right in front of them.

It is common for people to push things away and fill their plate up with all kinds of supposed important things, to not tackle the really big important things.

Procrastination is a mindset barrier and-- a mindset barrier. It is a barrier to a productive mindset. Let me say it that way, because it pushes off the things that need to get done right now.

And here's the bad thing, all of that's bad, but here's a really bad thing. The more you push things off, the more they pile up.

And then instead of handling one problem at one time, because you know, you've got to, you know, you've got to get to it, you end up having to handle in emergency mode a handful of issues because they build up.

They do become a problem. They do become an issue. So procrastination absolutely affects your productivity.

Another big killer of productivity when it comes to time management is fear of failure. And it goes right alongside, you know, the procrastination aspect.

If I'm afraid that I'm going to screw something up, if I'm afraid that I'm going to fail at something, the crazy thing is, is I will convince myself.

And as I say, I, I'm talking about people, right? Everybody experiences this. I will fill my day up with really important things that keep me from getting to that other important thing that I might fail at.

So if it fails, I'm so sorry, but I was really busy doing all these other important things or things that seem like they're important, right? Fear of failure can absolutely have a chokehold on you when it comes to productivity.

When it comes to your mindset, if that's something you're struggling with, then you've got to know you're going to find 17 other things to put in front of it.

And when you do, you do know on the back of your head that what you're doing effectively is you're pushing off that project, that task, that whatever, and it's going to come back and it's going to bite you in the butt.

Breaking Barriers (00:10:51)

The best thing you can possibly do is recognize these mindset barriers, these barriers to productivity, and crush them as fast as you possibly can. I learned this when I was younger because I used to procrastinate a lot my early twenties.

I believe it was my early twenties that I found myself procrastinating a lot and things just coming back and biting me in the butt. And I hated it. And finally one day I just got really frustrated.

I'm like, enough! Tackle stuff as it pops up. As something comes up. Tackle that sucker. Now. Again, that's not necessarily talking about effective time management.

It was talking about I had to bust up this mindset barrier that just kept robbing me of joy because I kept getting problems that would come back at me and.

And then it would be on top of another problem and another problem. And so I had to destroy this. So I would just start tackling things as fast as I possibly could.

If ever something negative or something that seemed like it was going to be a big problem or something that looked like it was going to be a failure came through the door, man, I jumped on it right away and handled it as fast as I possibly could.

That became one of the best things I could do as a highest to actually move myself in the direction of then managing my time incredibly well and getting to great productivity.

Emotional Intelligence (00:12:15)

So one of the biggest things we have to face when it comes to our time management and our productivity is our emotional intelligence. And what am I talking about?

I'm talking about the ability to understand your emotions, the ability to express yourself, the ability to control. Control your emotions, right?

This ability to be able to look at yourself and go, this is what I'm struggling with. I am struggling with fear. I am struggling with worth issues.

I am struggling with, you know, I don't want to tackle this tough conversation because I'm going to feel out of control if I do whatever it is. We've got to start with the emotional intelligence piece.

We've got to start making a strategic plan of how to handle our emotions. It involves understanding and managing our emotions. Being able to sit down and go, you know, as I did in my early twenties, what the heck am I doing?

Why do these things keep biting me in the butt? Because it's conflict, and I stink and hate conflict. I don't want conflict. Okay, but let's take a look at this. In the long run, doesn't it become greater conflict, especially as things pile up?

Yes. Then if I cut it off early, won't I be limiting my conflict in the long run? Yes. That is an emotional intelligence process that I had to walk through.

I had to help myself to understand what I was experiencing, what I was doing, what I was struggling with, how I was hurting myself in the long run, how was frustrating myself, how I was robbing myself of joy.

I had to walk through those processes, and so do you. You have to sit down and start asking yourself, what is it that I am doing specifically or what are the reasons that I am specifically holding back on accomplishing things?

Why am I allowing this to happen? And then you hit those things as hard as you possibly can.

You have to have emotional intelligence when it comes to your, your fears, your struggles, these barriers that are happening in your mind as you do this, as you handle stress and you handle conflict, then you begin to make more effective decisions.

The more you make effective decisions, the more you flush out this conflict and stress and fear and procrastination.

Then you start prioritizing your tasks better because you come to a place of realizing that the sooner you get to the difficult things.

And for me, I've always enjoyed putting the difficult things on the, on the beginning of the day because, so I know for, you know, as we teach in Killing the Leadership Crazy Cycle, if you've not been through that, you need to experience that.

What we teach is to close out your day, set up your next day with the list of things you need to tackle first thing, put them in priority, and then go in and blow them out, get them knocked out. This is a great strategy.

I'll talk a little bit more about this, but what I like to do is I look at, if I know that there's something difficult I've got to handle tomorrow, then I want to put that sucker as early as I possibly can.

Can I get to it first thing in the day? Why? Because of a couple reasons. One, if I can knock that thing out quickly, I'm done with it. It's over with, done.

I can move on to everything else. I don't have to worry about it being a stress. I don't have to carry conflict throughout the day.

I don't put it at the end of the day and worry about it and then get to the end of the day and I'm like, I still don't want to face it, so I'm going to move it to tomorrow. I get it done.

The other reason is what if it blows up? What if that potential conflict issue that I'm concerned about, what if I get into it and it becomes a bigger issue than I thought?

Well, wouldn't I rather be handling that at the beginning of the day? What happens until you wait until the end of the day and that thing blows up?

Oh, my gosh. Then you're handling it well into the night or you're going through the night stressed out because you can't do any more with it and you have to get it first thing again in the next, the next morning.

Get it done. The more that you intellectually handle your emotions, the greater your decision making, the greater your task prioritization. It's that powerful.

So I hear you saying this, Chris, but this is where I'm stuck. I'm stuck in that fear. I'm stuck in that procrastination. I'm stuck in that place of hating conflict.

Okay, I get it. I've been there. Here's what you do. You plan to tackle the difficult stuff as soon as it comes in. I heard you just say that. Yes. But here's what I want you to understand.

The more that you will handle things, the sooner they crop up, the more that you will begin to build emotional resilience. What do I mean by that?

The more that you jump on something, you're gonna probably mess it up a little bit. You're probably gonna struggle with it. It's probably gonna bring you a little bit more conflict than you wanted or expected that it would be.

That's okay, but keep pushing until you get through it. The more that you were able to tackle those things, and this is exactly what happened with me, the more I jumped on stuff.

A couple of things happened. The first thing that happened is I realized, oh, that was nowhere near as big of an issue as I thought it was going to be. That didn't take me near the time as I thought it would be.

So I was pleasantly surprised that if I just tackled something, that it usually was way less of an issue than if I waited for that thing to, you know, try and go away, you know, for a week, two weeks, a month, whatever.

The faster I jumped on it, the easier it was to tackle. The faster I jumped on it, the less conflict showed up. I mean, it just wasn't as bad as I had worked up in my mind.

So I had to start building my emotional resilience to say, hey, this isn't that bad, man. And it allowed me to bounce back faster if there was conflict.

And, you know, usually there is some level of conflict, it allowed me to bounce back faster and allowed me to move forward on the next thing faster.

So as you tackle it, first thing you're going to realize is this probably isn't as much conflict as you thought.

And I'm not saying that's every situation, but I'm going to tell you that's probably eight, nine out of ten situations.

It's nowhere near as bad as your brain has convinced you it is. So jump on it, get it going, get moving. Start to build up that emotional resilience. Another thing is, is the sooner you get it done, the sooner you recognize you have less conflict in your day.

It's already conflict because you know it exists. That's not going anywhere. That exists in the moment. It's there, you know, it's there. You know, you've got to tackle it.

But here's what happens when you do tackle it. Once it's done, amazingly, you look at the rest of your day and there is a 95% chance I'm making that number up on the fly right now.

There's a 95% chance you don't have any other big conflict pieces in the near future. You're probably going to be able to go a few hours a day, a few days without anything that was as fearful as that one specific situation was.

So again, what it does is it builds up inside of you this resilience to being able to handle these types of situations. Instead of being focused on fear of failure, instead of being focused on procrastination, instead of being focused on perfectionism.

What happens is you tackle stuff, you feel better about it, you get that muscle memory, that it actually works, that you can do it again and again and again, or at least you could tackle the next one, probably pretty quickly, and you build that emotional resilience.

The more emotional resilience you have, the better at productivity you get because it'll be much more effective and then the better at time management.

So again, first thing, jump on. Second thing, surround yourself with people who will uplift you and support you in these processes.

What I'm talking about is surround yourself with people who can look at the situation and they're not emotionally handcuffed to the situation. So they can tell you, hey, I think you need to jump on this.

I think you're over reacting to this. I think you're building this up too big. I think you're experiencing a lot of emotional conflict right now. Let's walk through this.

How bad can it possibly be? That's one of the things that I have done forever with clients for decades, is whenever something like conflict comes up, fear of failure, I usually will ask them the question, hey, let's say this does go wrong.

Let's say this is bad. How bad could it possibly be on a scale of zero to ten? And they're usually almost always an eight or a nine. Oh, I see this as being like an eight or nine.

I mean, it could just be really bad. Okay, now let's talk through it. And we talk through, what are we talking about? What does it look like? What does the outcome look like?

What could the, what are the failures? You know, how could this fail? What, what's the thing you're fearful of? Bing bing, bing bing bing. Go through all those pieces.

And then, as we have great perspective, I asked the question again. So once again, how bad could it be? Oh, gosh, probably only a two or a three.

So really one of the biggest issues is that we've built up in our mind that this thing is going to be way worse than it actually is going to be.

So when you have somebody who can walk you through that and you just take it to them.

Hey, friend, hey, you know, spouse, co worker, and again, make sure it's somebody who's healthy and can really look at things with a really good objective lens and understand you well and empathize, you know, with where you are.

That's a big part of emotional intelligence, is the ability to empathize or with where somebody is...

Somebody that you have in your life that can look at the situation, evaluate it, tell you what, you know, how they see it, help you, uplift you and push you in the right direction with support to go get it done.

It is fantastic to have that type of input in your life. Now, some of you out there like, oh, gosh, I would hate to have that. That's the last thing I want.

And that's probably because the people that give you input are not the people that are incredibly supportive. They're probably the people that are more controlling, more demanding.

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people who care about you, people who want to help you through this process.

So next thing is, is make sure that you're supporting yourself with people, surrounding yourself with people who are very uplifting and supportive to you.

Folks, if you've been listening to me for any length of time, then you know the number one issue when it comes to business, when it comes to family, when it comes to friendships, is having a lack of high quality communication to make sure that you are absolutely winning in every aspect of your life.

It all starts with having great communication. The best way to get that communication is to understand your personality style and to understand the personality style of the folks that you're spending the most time with, whether it be at work, whether it be at home.

The best way to do that is to go to chrislocurto.com/store and get your personality profile and personality profiles for your team today. Get it for your family members today.

As you go through that profile, you will begin to see the greatest ways to communicate. Go to chrislocurto.com/store today.

Next thing I want you to do is I want you to reflect on past experiences so that you can identify what things we want to create a strategy out of things that you've already already done that helped you to manage the stress effectively.

There are things you've done, there are decisions that you've made and you know that you've done it. You just got to go back and really reflect on it.

So write down like five decisions that you would have wanted to procrastinate on or situations that you were full of fear and struggling or spending too much time trying to make it perfect.

Go back and look at those situations, especially the ones that you managed well. What worked? What helped you? What emotional decisions did you make? What logical steps did you take?

What are some of the things that helped you to get through that decision faster than you normally would?

Write those things down because these become part of, of the strategies of solving these productivity issues, these time management issues.  All right, now I want to shift gears.

We've talked about the emotional side. I think everybody can understand and connect with what I've just shared with you.

Practical Strategies (00:25:55)

I want to walk through some good task management strategies because it's one thing to handle your emotions and go, okay, I can do this, I can tackle this.

But a lot of folks don't actually have good strategies of how they're going to handle tasks, projects, goals, achieving things.

So I'm going to walk through some of the logistical aspects of things that we use and, you know, stuff that I think would be very helpful.

So the first thing, and I highly suggest this, and listen, all of you High Ds out there, you're going to hate this until you actually get in it and use it, and then it's going to be your favorite tool ever.

I suggest implementing a task management system, something like Asana. We use Asana. Asana. Asana is an incredible tool that you can organize tasks with that you can set deadlines on. You can literally track the progress.

So, leaders, this is powerful for your team. Our team has been using this for years.

Every one of our leaders can look into any project, any task, any whatever, see where it is, see how effective it's being, see where it's got some roadblocks, ask questions, hold people accountable.

I'm just. It's great. I sound like I'm doing a sales ad for Asana, which apparently I am. Asana, give us some money for this. We would like that. This is a tool that we use all the time.

So, for example, a fantastic thing to do. My whole team uses this. I use this, my wife uses this. Creating daily to do lists and prioritizing those tasks based on the importance and the urgency is powerful for how you tackle your next day.

Again, like I said, Killing The Leadership Crazy Cycle. One of the things that we talk about is closing out your day. A lot of folks like to wait until the next day and get in there and bust out a to do list.

And a lot of folks hate to do lists because for some strange reason they feel like it's controlling them. Oh, my gosh. It's a incredible tool.

It's such a good tool for you to knock stuff out. It is one of those tools that will save you up to 2 hours a day bouncing back and forth on things, you know, oh, I'm supposed to do this, so I got to go do this thing right now.

Oh, I got to handle this instead. It helps you to really itemize by importance and urgency the things you've got to knock out and get them done. It will save you so much time.

It is incredible how many folks come through this lesson, killing the leadership crazy cycle lesson and realize that they end up with multiple hours at the end of the day because they didn't realize they were sucking up all that time.

They're like, well, man, I got through my list. I had a couple hours left of things I could do. It's crazy powerful. So what we suggest is, is that you do it at the end of your day.

I suggest that people put a 15 minutes block, maybe it's 30. It depends on what you're doing. Again, in the lesson, I tell people put a 30 minutes block on there because there's some other things we want you to get done as well.

But if you just take a five to 15 minutes block just for brain dumping, the current things you're working on and the priorities that you have right now, dump those out into a list, and you probably--

If you've been doing it the way we suggest, you've already got a list that you're checking off what didn't get done, reprioritize it, reschedule it for the next day, add to it the things that you need to put after those things and set that up by time blocks and then go tackle it, go knock it out.

I mean, it is just insane how much stuff that you will get done. So Asana is an incredible tool for this. But what about projects? We've got full teams where every person who's working on a project is in Asana, on the project.

Their tasks have been assigned to them, their input is being put in there, so on and so forth. At this point, I'm just giving you way too much information on Asana. It's incredible. This is a great strategy.

For you to make sure that you're handling your sets of time really well. Another thing you need to do, and I'm a firm believer of this now, I don't think any small business owner or entrepreneur works a 40 hours week.

If you do, great, that's fantastic. Awesome. Love that you're able to do that. And it's not that you can't do it. It's usually that you have a passion or excitement for what you're doing that keeps you from only working 40 hours.

However, there's a ton of folks who aren't working 40 hours because they have so much work to do and there's so many things to get done. So here's what I'm going to tell you.

You need to set clear boundaries around work hours and personal time. Folks, let me say this again, because you're not doing. Most of you are not doing this.

You are taking way too much of your work home. You were taking way too much of your work into your personal relationships, your marriage, your family, your kids.

You don't remember what your kids' names are because you spent too much time focusing on work that is not healthy to have a healthy work life balance.

And yes, there is no exact work life balance, but to maintain a healthy work life balance, you have got to put parameters around the time that you work and the time that you're with your family.

Now, with that being said, I always have a caveat. If the ox is in the ditch, get the ox out of the ditch. What does that mean? If something has gone wrong, if there's a problem, we have to solve this thing, get it done.

I mean that. Just make it happen. It's got to happen. We were up at the farm one day and the team that works up at the farm was about to leave.

And this huge, massive oak tree, literally right at like two minutes before they're supposed to leave, brakes. Crashes down right across the driveway.

I was like, well, all right, folks, if you want to go home, go grab some chainsaws, because nobody's going anywhere until we get this thing gone.

And I mean, this thing was like, you know, 3ft in diameter at the base, maybe even a little bit more than that huge, massive tree. And so we spent some time getting that thing out of the way.

Everybody had to work a little bit longer to get the thing done. You're going to have some projects, you're going to have some tasks, you're going to have some things that get torpedoed, and there's going to be some problems.

If it is an emergency, get the stuff done. Get the stuff done. That is the exception to this rule, folks. Let me say it again. That's the exception to the rule. Instead, your family should be more important then your business.

Did he just say that? Yes. Yes. Your family. And for those of us that are believers, God. Go read Ephesians 4, 5 and 6 and take a look at how God lays out the priorities of your relationships.

Starts with him. He should be the most important, then your spouse should be the most important human being in your life. That's the second most important relationship. Then your kids.

Your kids should not come before your spouse. Your kids should not come before God. Your spouse should not come before God. Then it's the work life, the team members, and you know, if it's.

If you're a team member, then it's your leader. If it's your leader, your team members, right? The people who put food on your table. Your work should not be more important than God, your spouse or your kids.

Your kids should not be more important than your spouse. That's disgusting. I hate to see these people who put their spouse in place because the kids are more important than the spouse is.

Listen, at some point those kids are going to leave. Well, in your case, if that's you, they probably aren't leaving until they're 40. So it is vitally important to have right relationships, and it's vitally important to have a healthy work life balance.

So schedule specific blocks of time that are focused on work. Allocate time for breaks if you need it. Allocate time for relaxation if you need it, but get stuff done.

I love being able to put a set of time to say, hey, I've got to accomplish this, this and this. Here's the timeframe. Bust it. Try and get it done. And then when it's done, lift your head up.

Take a look at the rest of your schedule. Go after it if you need to take a break, take a quick break if you need a longer break, take a longer break. Okay, whatever it is.

But do what you need to do and then get after the next stuff. Right. But keep those schedules of time away from your family time. Keep them away from your family. Spend specific time.

Put your freaking phone down. Put your computer down. Put your phone down for the love. It is amazing to me how many people will spend so much time on those stinking phones.

If you come to our offices or if you're around me enough, you will find that the great bulk of the time around me, my phone is face down. I use it as a computer. I use it to communicate when I need to.

My phone does not control my life. It is not my addiction, I can tell you that. But for so many folks it absolutely is. So make sure that you're spending quality time with your family.

Don't let your kids be on screens and watching tv or playing video games or watching YouTube or whatever. Spend time with your family. They are way more important than your work.

Next thing, use good technology tools like calendar apps or time tracking software, which there's a bunch of great and easy ones out there nowadays so that you can manage your time effectively.

So for example, blocking off time for specific tasks on your calendar and using timers to stay focused help you get to effective productivity.

So for example, if I knew that I had, and by the way, there are plenty of studies that have shown that the person that knows that they are going to spend 12 hours at the office today, like the business owner who's like, well, or the leader is like, I got a lot of stuff to do.

So I'm just going to be here until 7 or 8 tonight. There are tons of studies that show when a person believes that they are going to stay longer than a normal day, they don't get any more work done than they would have if they had to leave on time.

Guys, think about what that's saying. When you know that you're going to work until seven, eight o'clock at night, you slow down.

You slow down your pace because you know you've got time. So you'll take time to get things done. Crazy thing is, if you are using a good time tracking app and setting timers for yourself, then what happens is when you know you've got 47 minutes to work on this.

Next thing you bust it, you get it done. You realize, I got to get this done only at 47 minutes. Then I got to move on to something else. And if you go over, you go over. There's always adjusting.

You can make adjustments for it, but the key is when you recognize that you have to get this done in a time frame or you should, you get it done, you bust your butt.

You don't dilly dally. You don't find other things to do. You don't spend too much time in email, you don't spend time scrolling through instagram, you bust it out.

So make sure that you're using good tools, you know, especially time tracking tools, calendar, apps, all those kind of things, you know, even just a timer on your phone to help you to get through tasks.

Alright, next thing I want you to focus on. And this, this really needs to be, this needs to be big. I don't have enough time to do this justice. We, this is an area that we focus on in StratPlan about making sure that you're aligning your actions with your goals.

And so a way to make sure that you're accomplishing things with great productivity is setting goals ahead of time. Know what you should be focusing on.

Again, like I say, in StratPlan, we put out a six to twelve month program of things that people are going to be working on to fix all the things that are holding them back in their business to fix.

Or at least the most important things that we've discovered at that time to get things done, to get these things efficient, to get these things effective, to help people, to lead people to success.

All this stuff, StratPlan is pointing all of these goals in the same direction. This is becoming a unified, pointed direction destination. Right. You have to define what those goals are.

You have to define what you're wanting to accomplish. You have to know what the next destination is, where are you headed? You have to have that defined.

And then once you know where you're headed, where you're going, even if it's, you know, you can have 700 different destinations.

But what's the next one, two or three? It doesn't have to be a massive destination. It's funny, as we talk through vision, a lot of people think of a number, well, I want to add a million dollars.

Okay, how long is it going to take you to do that? Well, an extra million dollars is going to take me, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9 months. Okay. Can we get some smaller goals in between?

Let's put together a strategy of steps of how we're going to get there, but let's reach goals along the way. So instead of it being a million dollars in six months, what does it look like to be able to accomplish $200,000 a month minimum. Right?

Can we accomplish that? Can we accomplish a little more than that? What does that look like? And then what are the steps it's going to take to get to that goal?

Right? So let's say the first month is $200,000 and if we can get there, 175,000 or whatever it is, a million divided by six. Right? If we can get there, then we know exactly how much time we have to get to that number.

30 days get to $200,000. Great. Okay. What are the steps that we are going to do to get us to that next goal, that next destination?

How are we going to achieve that? What are the overarching objectives? Right? What should our focus be? And then break those steps. So think about it. $200,000 in 30 days.

Steps that we have to do to get to $200,000 in 30 days. Break those steps down by daily tasks. So now, you know, I've got a million dollar goal in six months, but here's my next 30 days. And here's my next.

You know, you could break it down into a week. Here's the things I need to accomplish in this one week. And break those down by goals every single day. Now you have aligned actions with your goals.

Use that with a calendar, app, time tracker, all these things we've discussed. And you're going to destroy those goals in a good way is what I mean.

You're going to hit those things, right, because you've broken it down into easy, bite sized steps and you've put time frames on it.

So you can literally get to the end of day one and ask yourself, are you ahead? Are you on track? Are you behind? What do you need to do to adjust?

The more you focus on this, the more you are really heavily integrating these goal setting principles, then you're going to discover that this becomes your roadmap to success.

This is how successful time management and productivity, effective productivity is done. People who are killing it in this area have systems and tools to solve it, but they're also working on, if not successfully overcoming, emotional issues that are holding them back.

So the more you do this, the more you implement this, the more you make sure you're doing the right steps. Start with that emotional intelligence. Start with getting over fear, failure, procrastination, perfection.

Get over the emotional aspects. Start tackling things. Make the decision that you're going to jump on things right away and then use all of these tools to set your day up for success.

If you do that, you will be blown away at just how successful you're going to be and how much faster.

Folks that have come through Killing The Leadership Crazy Cycle have discovered that they are at a considerably greater productivity, not just them as a, as a individual or as a leader, but that their teams and their companies are actually literally accomplishing considerably more than they had done up until that point.

So two things I want you to check out. There's two episodes we did on time management and prioritization. The first one is 472 | How To Spend More Time Preparing Than Executing

So how do you carve out the right amount of time for planning and, you know, preparing versus doing and executing that's what we, you know, that's a lot of what we just dug into in this episode. The other one is 559 | How To Get More Priorities Done.

So in this episode, we tackle the nitty gritty of prioritization and help you to level up as a leader. So as we wrap up this episode, remember that mastering your nine to five schedule is not just about time management techniques.

It's just not. It's not just about the logical side, which so many people think that the logical side is what's going to solve it for them, only to find out that they struggle heavily.

It's about cultivating a mindset of intentionality. It's about creating this resilience inside of you that when you get you run into conflict or difficult situations that you're able to bounce back.

You're able to be resilient. It's about being self aware. Self awareness is one of the most powerful tools that you can have to focus on you fix things that you need to fix about you and make yourself and your team more successful.

So by harnessing the power of mindset and implementing practical strategies, you can reclaim control of your schedule and unlock your full potential. But Chris, I'm not doing that bad.

Trust me. Walk through these steps and you'll be blown away at how much more you can accomplish in the same timeframe. You'll be blown away at how much less stress you take home.

You'll be blown away at how much more enjoyable time you have with your family or your time off when you're supposed to be off.

So join us next time as we continue our exploration of essential productivity principles on The Chris LoCurto Show. As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.