Welcome to Digital Podcaster. My name is Dylan Schmidt, if you're listening to this on the day it was released, it's Friday, if it's Monday when you're listening to this, let's treat Monday like it's Friday, because people usually have great associations with Friday, right? There's probably some scientific study out there, where people do something on Friday that they don't do on Monday. Let's just live everyday like it's Friday or maybe Saturday. If it's Saturday, and you work Monday through Friday, then maybe you're then maybe you'd be off. So maybe it's not a good idea to treat like Saturday. All right. Today, I want to share with you about something we all will not we all don't want to generalize most of us. I can't I can't exactly say you're going to deal with this exact issue. But good chance you might. It's, it's dealing with negative people and negative consequences in your life that you may or may not be aware of. Let me explain. So as a creative, which I'm assuming you are, and I am, we have to set boundaries, we have to guard our little, we have to create a little bubble, we have to create a little bubble because we're doing something that's never been done in a way that we've never done it. And we have to protect that at all costs. And what do we got to do to protect that we got to set boundaries, what does setting boundaries look like? It means typically, disabling notifications, it typically looks like putting your phone and do not disturb. It typically looks like not taking feedback from certain sources, which I talked about in yesterday's episode, it looks like not feeling like you are going to over give to somebody. If they comment on your stuff or feel obligated, it's to reduce obligations so that you can dive deeper into something that you want to give. And what I see is people will typically either not have any boundaries so that they have people have too much access to them. And then I also see people will kind of not prioritize their boundaries correctly. I'm saying all this with the preface that I don't do this perfectly. But I recognize it and I try to work on it. I don't think this is something that everyone gets right away. And they do this awesome job that because it usually creeps up in different ways. If you're not dealing with this on the way, then I'm going to kind of share more on then you might shoot you might do it differently, maybe in your place of work or something like that. So what I'm saying is, there are certain people you should give more attention to and certain people you shouldn't, there's certain notifications on your phone that you should give more attention to and certain ones you shouldn't. And I can't tell you exactly what one to pay attention to. That's not what this is about. Like, don't listen to them, listen to them. But I will say that left unchecked, things will just run amok, just like a plant without, if you have an indoor plant, and you didn't have if you had a huge pot in it, and it got the water in the sunlight it needed, that thing is going to grow likely must it's a bonsai tree, which I don't know much about those. I'm looking at my plants over here and they are growing wildly big, even though they're in small pots, they get the right amount of sunlight and they get the right amount of water. And these things are getting too big, like I have to give a couple of them away because they're just too big. And my office isn't big enough to hold these things. Similar to this plant analogy. When you are making something and you're starting to grow an audience, you'll start to notice that more people are going to want more of your time and attention. And you have to be more selective with your time and attention because you can't keep doing even the same things. And even get the same results. If you're giving more of your time and attention away because we only have a finite amount of debt per day. And that looks like like, like let me use an example. If I did if I was giving away more of my time and attention. I wouldn't be recording this podcast I would be responding to comments that I have not responded to on social media. I would be reaching out or leaving comments on pieces of the members community. I've had so much stuff I got to do. So much stuff. I got to do create new stuff for podcasting Academy. All that stuff is scheduled in and it's scheduled in because I have to protect it at all costs, or else I can't even do something like record a podcast. All of that stuff falls apart if I don't have some simple time boundaries. So it starts with the boundaries and that usually starts around time. and focus. But I can't tell you like, I've seen some people's computers or if they're sharing something, or I'm on a zoom call with them. And things just start popping off notifications. You know, and it's like, my attention is broken the conversation, attention is broken, all from their notifications, simply going off, and I'm like, this probably goes off all day. It's kind of like if you've ever heard of social or media, maybe social media video, maybe dating myself, I guess this still occurs. I'm thinking podcasting. But people when they'd call on the radio shows like there'd be the smoke alarm in the background, the people be like, the host would be like, is your smoke alarm going off? Or not? Smoke alarms? Well, yeah, I guess it is smoke alarm. But it'd be like the battery would be dead. So it'd be going in the background and like you listen to that all day. Oh, yeah. It's been going on for months. I need to change it. Like what, wait a minute now. Like, you're going through life, just hearing the smoke alarm. It's not you don't have to reorganize Marie Kondo. You know, your whole life. I'm just saying, Pay attention to the certain notifications that might be creeping in. That could be comments like, personally, I don't get a notification when someone sends me a text message. I look at my phone enough to know that there's times when I look at my look at my text messages on my time. And that's what it is like, what are you making on your time, in your way, for what it is that you need to have happen? Like, just because someone leaves you a comment on Instagram, okay, I'll use this example to this. I feel passionate about this stuff. There was someone that I was watching to you. This was a this was a couple months ago, I was watching a YouTube video, a random marketing YouTube video at like 11 o'clock on a Sunday night. Or I actually know it was 789 10, eight, eight o'clock my time. I'll explain why I said 11. I was watching a marketing video. Around eight o'clock, just on the couch with my dog Wednesday, Adams, one of my best friends. And we were like she was she was sleeping, I'm sure snoring watching this marketing video. And I see someone from my community future featured in this marketing video on YouTube. Just a simple comment, like, oh, wow, hey, that's this person. I screenshot it. I send it to this person on Instagram. This person is older. I don't know exactly how old maybe 40s 50s. I'm gonna round down. I don't know, lovely person. They write me back a message. Wow, thank you so much for sharing. This is incredible. And they're like, well, it's late here. So I'm going to go back to bed is like 11 o'clock, I did the math. I did not think when I'm because I'm thinking operating from my own system over here. I'm not thinking if I send them a message at 11 o'clock their time, anything like that into consideration. I'm thinking, like, they're like me, they don't see any notification that happens, especially from Instagram. Like there's some type of noise that goes off. It made me feel uncomfortable, because I'm like, Oh, I'm sorry. She's like, I'm going to back to bed now. And I'm like, I sorry, I like, you know, I'm just like, I don't even want to respond, because I'm just like, please go back to sleep. I did not mean to wake you up with this random thing I saw. And I know people that's common, I guess is it's not necessarily like you have sound notifications on or all the time. I'm just saying the likelihood at which you'll probably see the notification anyways, is probably pretty high. And I know very little people that need a actual sound notification on ever, let alone an icon on because you'll see it. So I say that because that's a boundary setting of not getting notified when certain things happen. Not you know, not saying you don't need text messages. That's why I said at the beginning, it's not one size fits all. And you decide what is healthy to let in. But analyzing or not analyzing, becoming aware of your relationship between a notification and you is very valuable as a creative and putting yourself out there. Because the only thing that will happen as you put yourself out there more is more people will try to interact with you because you're expanding your audience, you're expanding your network. And quickly if you haven't experienced that before, quickly, things start to get to another level where you start realizing like I can't manage any of this and it gets super overwhelming if you if you leave it unchecked. And you start wondering how does anyone deal with this? Deal with it because they start creating that that wall you know whether people have multiple phones or something like that, or you know people would be like they never responded to my comments or something Do you know how many people are reaching out for this person? And I'm not saying like, I have that level of audience I have worked with clients that do. And there's just no way. And it's funny because there's a certain level of expectation too, if you have 5000 followers on Instagram, I don't know how much people would expect you to respond to direct message. But whatever it is, it's not the same as if you had 50 million followers, if you had 50 million followers, people don't expect you to respond to a message that they send. And all I'm saying is, yes, you want to engage and participate with your community, but not at the expense of losing the thing that losing the reason why you started it or losing the reason why you even, you know, made something in the first place, because some people will see that as a burden, I've thought that I go, I really want to share this Instagram story. And I was kind of battling with this before. Like, I'm weird, I get that. And I like sharing my weirdness because I want other people to feel comfortable sharing their weirdness. But also, it's me, like, I'm just me, I don't know how else to not cannot be me. And I felt like, I'll just shares some silly stuff. Because I've made maybe someone likes it. And then I'll get like, a bunch of messages back. And a part of me almost feels anxiety, like, Oh, I gotta take on everyone's sharing with me all of a sudden, no, this is getting nerve racking. You know, but what I had to learn was like, the reality is, I can respond in my time, they don't need an immediate response. And I don't even have to respond, I can choose to respond. And typically, the healthiest thing for me to do is set a time to respond. Because instead of feeling like I'm checking for messages all day, or, or engaging, or having to engage all day, or anything like that, I set those boundaries, those time boundaries, that also goes back to time boundaries of you know, making sure that I have enough energy to maintain, that's a huge way of how I'm able to put a massive amount of output of content out there is by simply maintaining time boundaries, and managing those boundaries. And it's like a weekly thing. It's not like I'm perfect at it at all. But having the awareness and the remembrance of oh, this is how I can manage my creative outlet, part of the creative output online these days, is being able to manage the input that's coming in, you can't manage the input, you're going to have a heck of a time managing the output. So people are like, how are you confident and all that stuff? Is because I'm not taking on everything when someone replies to something, and I'm not talking about, you know, life threatening things. It's not like I'm a doctor out there giving medical advice by any means. I'm talking about content mindset and things like that. But I can't be responsible for the way everybody takes a certain thing. So if that's something you've struggled with, too, I'd be curious to know, send me a message on Instagram. I can't promise I'll reply right away. You know, no, but it's a bad joke referring to everything I've been talking about. But yeah, I just, I just I know a lot of people out there struggle with that. And I spoke with I have a book over here, I think, last name diesel, I think Melanie diesel. Yeah, she wrote the book, the content fuel framework, that was a great podcast interview with her a number of episodes back on here. And she wrote, essentially, like how to how to bust out a bunch of content in a short amount of time. And one of the things that she said that stuck with me still to this day, is talking about setting expectations. You know, you you set the expectations with others on how to respond to you. So if someone sends you a message, and then you reply, like within seconds, and then they reply again, and you reply, again, within seconds, you're setting a certain level of expectation on the other person in a way, because that's how you're showing up, and might not even be aware of that. So that's something to be mindful of. And I like how Melanie had mentioned that because I had felt that way, but she put it into words better than I had really examined it is, you know, managing that expectations. If you use email, you can delay send emails. So say someone emails you back and you're like, This doesn't deserve an immediate like it doesn't need an immediate response. And you know that if, you know it might be better to send that email if you have a feeling they might respond at another time, especially if that's not your you know, if you're not dedicating the next hour to sit replying to emails, delay, send the email around a certain time where it might be one, like still timely for them to receive it and to that if they reply to you, you're not going to be in the state of like, oh, I have another email. I got to deal with this. There's so much coming in. So getting good at managing that input only comes from setting getting good at setting boundaries and digital boundaries are huge. There is a book actually. Digital minimalism by Cal Newport digital minimalism. Yeah Cal Newport talks about this in much in depth and really said a lot of things I had kind of thought about but really it is so his books called Digital minimalism choosing a focused life in a noisy world, but the reality is like, that should just be called Digital boundaries. minimalism and boundaries I think go hand in hand. So that books really great. I found it to be a pretty quick read, but I really enjoyed it Cal Newport goes deep. He is a professor or something. But digital minimalism worth checking out if you want to go deeper on this topic. That's all I got for today's episode. I hope you're setting boundaries. I hope you're managing your input so that you can increase the quality and quantity of your output without feeling like you're going to take on more than you can handle. You can handle it with the right systems, the right strategies and the right mindset. I will talk to you on the next episode. Hope you do well.