Mastering Time: Overcoming Common Productivity Pitfalls

Ever wondered why you often feel you're running out of time despite having the same 1,440 minutes in a day as everyone else? Discover the three major time suckers that are silently draining your productivity and learn actionable strategies to regain control of your precious minutes. Mike Mirarchi, your host of the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast, breaks down how negative people, procrastination, and bad habits are holding you back and offers practical advice to eliminate these obstacles from your life.

Join us as we explore the importance of reducing time spent on distractions like social media and TV, and how to fill that newly freed space with productive activities. Mike discusses the transformative power of the 80-20 principle by Richard Koch, emphasizing the value of focusing on the most impactful tasks and relationships. Whether you're aiming to enhance your personal productivity or optimize your business efforts, this episode is packed with insights designed to help you maximize every minute of your day. Don't miss out on these essential tips to boost your efficiency and achieve your goals!

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Link to my website: The Toilet Paper Salesman ™ – Who Says Selling Toilet Paper isn’t Glamorous? ™

Link to my book: Wisdom from a Toilet Paper Salesman | BookBaby Bookshop

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Link to David Mirarchi's website: David Mirarchi

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:19

Welcome to the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast. My name is Mike Berarki. It's great to have you back, and today we're going to be talking about time management. How do we make the most of our time that we have? As I've said in previous podcasts, we only have one day. Tomorrow, we don't know right, but today we have. How do you make the most out of each day we have? How do you make the most out of each day? We only have 1,440 minutes in a day. How do we use those minutes the most productive as possible?

Speaker 1 0:49

There's three time suckers that we can eliminate. The first time sucker is people and or customers. In business, it's customers, and it can be people as well. And then there's people in our lives that tend to be time suckers. Well, what's a time sucker? What does that mean? These are people who, when you talk to them, they do nothing but suck the energy out of you. They focus on the negative, they're always complaining, they're always finding something wrong. They're always the people who can't do it instead of those who can. And customers in the same way. You have customers who constantly have issues, who constantly are grinding you down on the price, who aren't really partners, but are suckers of your energy, of your business. They're not really good strategic customers. If you can eliminate those out of your life, that's going to make your life a lot better and a lot easier and it's going to bring your mood up and it's going to make you a lot more productive. So that's number one.

Speaker 1 1:48

Number two procrastination is the number one thing that holds people back from them achieving their goals. How do you eliminate procrastination? And then the third is bad habits. Habits drive everything. If you could change your habits and make them good habits, that will drive good behavior, but your habits really drive everything If you think about it. Every day you wake up, you've got habits. You do certain things and those are either productive or they're negative. So if you can take those negative habits and change them into positive habits, that'll help you be way more productive in your life. Replace people, customers, habits and procrastination and you're going to be more productive.

Speaker 1 2:33

Now, once you create the space, then the law of vacuum takes over, which is you create space, it's going to be filled by something, and that's important for you to fill that space that you create with something really productive. Where are areas where you can create space? Number one social media. Take a look at your phone each week, you get a update of how much time you've spent on your phone. That'll give you a good indication of how much time you have to be able to get productive. A lot of people spend hours and hours on TikTok and YouTube videos and everything. It's okay to do some of that, but if you can take a portion of that time and I'd say 80% of that time and move it into a productive task, that's going to make you way more productive. And the other area is TV time. If you take those two areas your social media and your TV time and you look at how much you're spending in those two areas, you can create a lot of space. Once you eliminate those things, you're going to have to fill it with something. Make sure that you're filling it with good, productive tasks, whether it's a hobby, whether it's something you want to pursue, no matter what.

Speaker 1 3:44

The next thing is to utilize the 80-20 principle. There's a great book if you haven't read it yet by Richard Koch called the 80-20 Principle, and it truly applies to everything in life. 20% of your customers equal 80% of your sales. 20% of your salespeople write 80% of your business. It's pretty universal all the way around. So if you can spend 80% of your time on your most productive tasks, you're going to be in great shape, but you really only need to make sure that you focus on that 20%. That's going to give you the 80%, and in business, a lot of people spend 100% of their time on 100% of their customers. If you can spend 80% of your time on your top 20% of your customers, you're going to get the most bang out of the buck and you're going to be way more productive in your work because you're not going to bog yourself down with your lower end customers that are time suckers.

Speaker 1 4:41

The next thing is, when you're doing projects, 90% is good enough most of the time. If you're doing anything, if you can get it to 90% for the most part, that's going to be good enough, because that last 10% is really what's going to take the large amount of time to try to get it perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's like this podcast If I try to focus on perfection, I'll never get an episode done. At some point you're going to have to let it go and say 90% is good enough. Most people don't know if you've left something out or you forgot to say something. Most people have no idea. They're just going to take the podcast or whatever you're doing at face value, and so they don't know what you left out. You know what you left out, but they don't know If you can eliminate that last 10%. That is the time sucking part of the project. You're not going to get perfection, but most of the time that's good enough. Now there are times when you need to get that extra 10% in, especially if it's a technical type project and it really requires major detail. So there are times where you're going to have to put that extra effort in, but for the most part and for most projects, it's not necessary.

Speaker 1 5:55

Stop procrastinating. Procrastination is the major thing that holds you back from your goals. One of the tricks that I learned is that if you want to do something and you're procrastinating about it and you're just dragging it on and dragging it on, tell yourself you're going to work on it for five minutes. Just say, look, I'm going to work on it for five minutes. If, after five minutes, I don't want to do it anymore, fine, I'll stop. If you do that and you start working on that project for five minutes, I guarantee you're going to get sucked right in and you'll get the job done. You want to do one step at a time towards your goal. Small steps equal massive results. That's one thing and it's one universal principle you want to remember. Take small steps. Small steps over time equals massive results.

Speaker 1 6:46

And then you want to delegate unproductive tasks. Look at the tasks that take the least amount of skill and are the least amount of fun for you and delegate them. It's not worth your time to do them. In my case, it's mowing the lawn. I don't really like to mow the lawn. It's not something that's fun for me. It doesn't take a lot of skill. I delegate that task off. Even though it doesn't take a huge amount of time each week, it still is time that I have to do other things and then use tools to be more productive.

Speaker 1 7:16

Two of the tools that I use that really help my productivity one is Sanebox S-A-N-E-B-O-X. It's an email management tool. I highly recommend it. There'll be a link on my website if you want to try it out. It has been the one tool that has truly helped me to become way more productive in my business and in my life and essentially it helps you to manage your emails really effectively. There are many days that I have zero messages in my inbox, which is typically unheard of. So check that out. And the other tool that I use is called Remarkable. It's an electronic notepad, which helps me to stay organized. And organization, of course, is another area where you can really pick up a lot of time, because if you have everything in one place and it's organized, your notes are in order then you're going to be way more productive.

Speaker 1 8:08

The next tip I'm going to give you is to handle everything only once. If you're doing an email and you finish the email, then delete it. You're done with it or move it to a place where you're going to follow up. Only handle it once, if possible. When you have to go back and handle it over and over again, then it creates more time, because every time you have to handle it it's going to take X amount of time. So if you can complete an email task, delete it, then it's gone. If you're going to move it to a reminder, move it to the reminder and then do it. When you do it, get it done. Do it once.

Speaker 1 8:45

The next step is you got to rest. Rest is probably one of the best areas where you can really help yourself to be more effective in time management. There's two guys who were chopping wood and they were in a competition. The competition starts, the wood choppers start chopping and the one guy is chopping away and chopping away and chopping away. And he looks over and the other guy's just sitting there. It doesn't look like he's doing anything, and they chop away and chop away. Finally, they finished the competition and when you look at the piles of wood, the guy who was chopping the entire time had a smaller pile than the guy who was taking breaks and just sitting around. And the guy who chopped all the wood asked the other guy who was sitting around what were you doing while you were sitting around? How did you chop more wood than I did? And the other guy said I was sharpening my axe. So you really need to sharpen your axe.

Speaker 1 9:41

So how do you do that? Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to sleep well. Eight hours is the rule of thumb. Everybody's different, but a good sleep is really important. Of course, you need to eat well and, ultimately, you need to nourish your mind and soul, which means you want to continue to gain knowledge about anything that you're interested in, you want to connect with your creator, because that is the source of everything that you're doing. And then you want to take a day each week and try to rest as much as possible by taking a day each week and really try not to do work. And what I say by work is that's your business work. If you want to do hobby stuff, great. If you want to get tasks done, great. But just take a day and really just kind of make it for yourself instead of working on your business. The biggest thing is experiments never fail in any of this. Just because I do something a certain way doesn't mean it's going to work for you. Experiments never fail.

Speaker 1 10:40

There's a great book that I recommend. It's by Dale Daughton, called the Max Strategy. It's a really easy read. It's actually out of print, which is amazing to me, because I find it to be one of my favorite books of all time. It talks about experimentation. It talks about creativity. It's a really tremendous book. That's all I have for today. If this was valuable, like and subscribe to the podcast Until next time. Who says selling toilet paper isn't glamorous? We sell toilet paper. That's what we do. Thanks a lot and have a great day.