COACH'D
Join us on COACH’D, a podcast where the some of the world's top athletes, coaches, and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right.
Think of it as a "locker room" chat — unfiltered, raw, and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and culture.
COACH'D
BRAIN DUMP: Shifting Chaos To Clarity - My Current Productivity Hacks, Balancing Maker vs. Producer Days, & Why Talent Is Just As Important For Coaches
Each week I'll share some of my thoughts in a mini episode called "Brain Dump" with some of the things that's on my mind.
These are designed to be short, sharp and straight to the point (maybe with some ramblings).
This episode explores the vital relationship between being busy and being productive, especially in sports and coaching. A blend of personal anecdotes and valuable strategies offers listeners insights into effective time management, ultimately enhancing their success and satisfaction in their endeavor.
• Examination of the maker days vs. producer days model
• Importance of structured days for maintaining productivity
• The distinction between being busy and being genuinely productive
• Introduction of tidal vs. seasonal approaches to work
• Discussion of talent in successful coaching and its significance
• Encouragement to identify and plan for an ideal day
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https://open.spotify.com/show/1YJMztpYSgnPusEXB3fWcc?si=FJsWITv7QdSCSgCt3lkElw
Join us on Coached, a podcast where some of the world's top athletes, coaches and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right. Think of this as a locker room chat unfiltered, raw and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and sporting culture and sporting culture. Hear from those who have played, coached and built their way to the top with athletes from the field, coaches and medical in the performance setting, or owners, managers and brands in the front office, while also getting an insider's view on my own personal experiences in this high-performance world. If you're passionate about sports, curious about the minds of champion athletes or looking for information and inspiration on your own journey, coach is the place for you. Welcome back to another episode of Brain Dump. Hope everyone had a great weekend and a great week. It's great to be back in the swing of these now that we've got a bit of a runway of guest podcast bank. Like I mentioned last week, this week's guest is a bit of a secret one. It'll come to later in this episode. I'll have to I'll have to, uh explain who that guest is. If you see my instagram story that week, you probably saw who it was as well, but it's a bit of a different take on how you typically hear and see what that particular uh practitioner does, so very excited to get that out there and hear people's feedback. So I think it provides a very different and unique angle from what you're used to hearing from him. So, off the back of last week's episode, I actually got A a lot of downloads, which I was very surprised about, to be honest, and B also a lot of questions around being good at time management, understanding time management a little bit. Now I'll be the first to say that I have not nailed this. I am just going to share my experiences and hopefully it can maybe help you out a little bit. But I've got a few key things here that I'd like to chat through and chat around and, if anything, maybe it's just one thing to maybe think about how you might be able to potentially look or schedule or plan your week going forward or maybe into the future, because you can't do it right now. I think that's also really important to understand that sometimes when we hear these things or we hear people say these things, we think, okay, well, that's not possible with where I'm currently at or what I'm currently doing. But if you maybe take a step out or zoom out a little bit, maybe in six months or maybe in 12 months, it's something you could go back and maybe review and maybe work towards or look at doing later on down the track. So I'll sort of kick it off. So the key concept is, when you're busy, you're being busy but not productive.
Jordi Taylor:Look at, that is um, or how uh, an episode from homozy which really stuck out to me. Um, which is probably I don't know gone on a year ago now, if not longer, was how he broke up his week. Um, based on several factors. So it was called either a maker day, so I'll make a day means that now I might get this wrong, by the way, but let's just pretend they don't know what I'm talking about here. A maker day was essentially when he was busy making content, doing those sorts of things that are making or being very creative. So think about, I guess, from his perspective, it's making content, those sorts of things, and then he has days that are producer days. So for him, and in his role, a producer was more so about meetings, going over internal structures, all those sorts of things, so things that are very different from making content. And the reason that he broke those days up was and I think anybody can relate to this, and especially when I heard it it did really shift how I was trying to plan my days, because I got caught in this trap is you're in a really good role, whatever you may be doing.
Jordi Taylor:Let's say, for example, just for argument's sake, to keep it simple, we're going back to this as making content. You're in a really good role, you're writing an article, whatever it may be, and then all of a sudden you've got a meeting that pops up and the meeting doesn't affect you when the meeting's on. The meeting affects you prior because you have to be ready if you actually give a shit. So 10, 15 minutes beforehand where you may be reviewing notes or making sure you've got everything that you need, and then it's the meeting length itself, however long that goes, and then usually there's like a little bit of a break after meeting where you're probably going to get distracted, grab your phone, whatever else, and then you have to get back in the flow of rewriting the content. So, argument's sake, let's just say that all adds up to an hour plus. You've then lost that hour of really good flow. So the whole concept of trying to segment or block out your days Now, for a lot of people, including myself, that can be pretty impossible to have, just to make a day and just to produce a day.
Jordi Taylor:But a great example of how I implemented something very similar to that today was. Today, for example, for myself, was a bit of a producer day. I had a couple of coaching sessions in the morning, first things, which gives me energy, makes me feel really good, gets me out of bed in the morning, even though it's a bit chilly now in Sydney and the sun's starting to come a little bit later. And then I rolled into a massive day of producer work, which was admins, meetings, onboardings, all those sorts of things. Now I look back at the day and went holy shit, I got through a lot of work, but and it also moved the needle forward but I didn't feel like I was productive because or sorry, I didn't feel like I was being busy, because being busy is when I'm coaching, and when I'm coaching I feel like I'm being productive, but it's actually the inverse sometimes, or it actually is inverse most of the time. So, looking back on today, I looked at the schedule and I got through a shit ton of work and things that are not only going to set myself up for this coming week or coming quarter, but also long-term into the future as well, which is really exciting and like.
Jordi Taylor:Those days are really, really important and you need to make time for those days. I know for myself that those days when I sit there and you look at that big list you have to get through, it is quite daunting at times, you know, especially when there's a lot of different things and got a finger in a lot of different pies you have to either make content for or have prepared, et cetera. So yes, the day was very draining, but how I've flipped that is. Then tomorrow I'm basically coaching from first thing in the morning all the way through to early afternoon. So it's five or six sessions back to back to back to back to back, and then that gives me the feeling that I'm being busy or that I'm moving the needle forward. So I've kind of like broken my day up like that. And then Wednesday is kind of like an in-between day, bit of a morning coaching, afternoon admin. Thursday is a full day admin, and then Friday is that half day as well. So coaching in the morning and then the producer sorry the maker work in the morning and then the producer sorry the maker work in the evening.
Jordi Taylor:So it's even hard to get the terminology right sometimes. And there's a guy who I can't say just yet, who has been mentoring me a lot lately around a lot of different things and you know he also refers to there's times that you have to have seasons. You know things where, and I'm sure people heard this as well, because it's starting to become a bit of a thing. But times when you have to have seasons you know things where and I'm sure people heard this as well, because it's starting to become a little bit of a thing but times when you go a bit harder, times when you can pull back, all those sorts of things. I actually, in my head, have framed it a little bit differently because I think seasons correlate myself towards, like winter, summer, autumn, spring, which are longer periods of times. I using Dan Hasler, so thank you Dan, shout out to you If you haven't listened. Jump back into Dan's last two recent episodes.
Jordi Taylor:I've used the strategy of zooming out a little bit and for me I think seasons are too long. Sometimes you can't see the finish line, even though you know it might only be arbitrary. It doesn't have to be a season, but in my head, how I see season, it's a very long period of time. So I actually have reframed it to being like a tide. So in the ocean, tides have to go in and tides have to go out. It can't stay full tide all the time, it can't stay low tide all the time. So there's going to be shorter periods of times where the tide's in and there's going to be shorter period of times where the tide's out, and so for me that's a really good reframe, in that I probably have to chunk things down versus chunk things out, because I have a tendency of going day-to-day on things, which is great because it means that you're more in the moment, but then you can obviously miss out on not thinking more long-term or not having long-term strategy. So that's something that I'm trying to adjust and deal with. So my mentality of that is basically combining the being busy and productive, the maker and producer, and then understanding that you're going to have days where you're going to go really hard and you have days where you're going to go not so hard, and it's okay to have both. So hopefully that gives a bit of a bit of help and maybe a bit of a reframe as well.
Jordi Taylor:And then, kind of off the back of this and this does sound wanky when I say it but when you go, when you listen to the podcast with Alan that comes out later this week, we speak about, like, what your ideal day is, and I know for a lot of people that that again, as I said, it sounds pretty wanky. But at least when you know what your ideal day is, you can start to plan around it not now, maybe in the future what that looks like and how you can then structure your whole business, whatever it may be, so that you actually feel like you have a life. Because that's probably a big thing that we get all consumed in what we do and we don't feel like we have a life because we don't have a plan. Ironically, going back to what I was saying there before, and like my old boss Lachlan said, he apparently listens to this all the time, so shout out to you, lachlan, if you are listening. I appreciate that, mate. He always used to say you know what gives you energy? He's a big energy guy and there's a fantastic book on this which I don't think I've ever told Lachlan, so I read, which was called the Energy Bus, a really, really good read on that whole topic of just energy itself. So you kind of combine those two grander ideas, one being you know I was discussing with Al later this week around what's your ideal day or ideal week and then what gives you energy, and then, hopefully, if you can sort of chunk that back down to those other topics we discussed or briefly mentioned there earlier on, you can kind of start to identify areas of opportunity, maybe ways you can structure your day a little better, to be a little more productive. Also, maybe days and ways you can structure things so you're actually less productive, which means you actually get a break, which could be a bit of a different way of thinking about things as well. I did want to keep this episode short today, so there's only one more thing I want to chat around and that is the one thread a week that I like to elaborate on a little bit, and this one this week got a bit of slack, which I kind of like getting a little bit of slack and a bit of flack because it's sometimes pretty fun, because obviously it means it struck a nerve to some people, so the thread was unpopular opinion.
Jordi Taylor:Talent is always spoken about and correlated to athlete success, but not coaches. There's not a single coach that's successful that doesn't have talent. All the certifications, all the upskill, all the high education doesn't matter if you can't combine that with communication, grit and talent. And I truly believe that I think there is some fantastic, fantastic, fantastic, fantastic coaches out there that are so book smart but can't relay a single thing towards a person in front of them. And then there is the complete inverse where you've got these coaches that are just absolutely so eager, so border gate, that can talk to absolutely anybody, but don't have the knowledge that underpins that. So they live on the one end of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The other coach lives live on the one end of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The other coach lives on the probably the other end of the Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe towards the middle of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and you've got this big disparity.
Jordi Taylor:But the thing that underlines that is talent and really good coaches especially. And you've got to keep in mind that I'm going to often refer to the private space, the private side of things, but this still does correlate a little bit in the pro, from my understanding, from speaking to other people and things like that not my experience that talented coaches will find ways to whether that be, implement, change, get their message across or try to get their message across, find opportunities, find ways to be able to work in with athletes, work in with coaches all these sorts of things. And that's talent. You can't teach that. It's just a thing that someone has, or they don't. Just like you know, the best athletes have talent, but the athletes that have talent and hard work and those other factors are ultimately the ones that succeed. So I reckon it's something that we probably should be a little bit more aware about that.
Jordi Taylor:If you do see talent in a coach, let them know about it, let them know there's something special and that they do have something that someone else can't have the unteachable, the intangible, which is what I kind of explained it to someone who asked a question that I didn't know whether it was either here nor there, but that's regardless. It was the intangible the things that you can't see, the things that you can't coach, the things that just don't come across your desk or your office every day. They're the people that have that talent. So, yeah, that's a short, sharp one this week.
Jordi Taylor:Let me know if that helped. Hopefully that elaborated a little bit and if nothing else, maybe gave you one or two things, maybe a little reframe. I really love the tide concept of coming in and out to think about it in probably the micro and then maybe, if you want to zoom out even a little bit further and want to look at the macro, you've got the seasons there that underpins that, and then in the day-to-day action you've got the being busy versus being productive, the maker versus producer concepts there as well. So let me know your thoughts. Have a fantastic week and we will chat very soon.
