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there's never enough time to get anything done. Find out what to do on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by converted the ultimate list building tagging and segmentation tool to find out how Convert kid can change your business and w profits. Go to serve the master dot com backslash Convert kit today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I'm still traveling, so the sound might be a little bit different than normal this time. I'm in the heart of Bangkok, but I'm on the 45th floor, so you certainly can't hear any road noise from up here. Hopefully, the sound is good. I can't wait to get back to recording by the beach on the ocean next week, but I'm here for a conference, and I talked about it in the previous episode. Today I want to talk about something really special, which is time. Time is absolutely critical, and I find that it's the biggest struggle everyone faces when they're trying to make it online, trying to build their own business. Everyone is always behind schedule. Every single coaching client I work with, every person I do business with. You always end up slipping behind schedule. We think we have something done in a month. It takes longer and it can be frustrating. It feels like we never get anything done. I can tell you that traveling right now, I'm traveling from us two whole weeks and I might even have toe stay a little bit longer and be away from home for 20 days instead of just 14. And it's very hard to keep your rhythm. So how do you get enough done? What are you doing? Traveling is broken, my rhythm and some of the things I want to get done her behind. But how can we reach maximum efficiency? How can we get a really good groove? And we've talked in some previous episodes a few episodes ago, about mourning rituals and about getting ready for the day and having habits of success. But I want to kind of look at it from another angle every day. We only have so many hours available. We have 24 hours available. If we don't sleep and the more things we have filling up that day, the less time we have. I'm so used to losing time that we don't realise, is there. When you drive to and from work, you say it's a 15 minute drive. But really, when we measure how far drives are, we never measure them accurately. We always say, Oh, it's a 15 minute drive We consider when we get in the car, too when we turn off the car. But really, it's for when you walk out the front door of our house rights when you start leaving, too, when you sit in your desk in your office. If you get to the office and you're the parking lot at 9 a.m. and you walk in, you take the elevator up to your desk and you sit down at 9 12 gets what you're late. You don't do that. Do you want your desk by night. So we have this way when we're talking about commutes, especially of massaging the numbers and the way we measure time is inaccurate. It's why we feel like there's never enough time instead of trying to find more time, you want to eliminate some of the time that we waste. What I'd rather you do is find one area. Well, you're spending time that's inefficient. We shouldn't be doing it and remove that inefficiency. Remove that time wasting activity. There's certain things that I d'oh that waste time, I can tell you. Last night I got distracted. I haven't watched TV in a long time, and I downloaded all of my favorite investing. Shows that two episodes of the show when they help inventors that two episodes of the show, where the guy troubles out and invest in business. It helps grow business. And two episodes of the other one that I like over the guy buys really the orders to grow small companies. Six episodes of TV show and I watched him all in one day. I I couldn't sleep. I was traveling again this morning, so sometimes when I know I'm moving around from City to city. It distracts me or affects my ability to sleep. And I was watching everything. Now I saw recently speaking of television that the average American watches eight hours of television a day with the highest television consuming culture in the world. The report I was watching, I think it was mostly about Children. That was that. Children watch that night as much adults, but I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are plenty of adults who watch that much television. Every single day. I come home from work, finish work at five o'clock, sitting for the TV, 5 30 watch TV till midnight. That's 6.5 hours of television without thinking about it, huge blocks of time and where always absorbing and spending time doing things that don't matter Now. I don't want you to think that leisure time is a waste. It's okay to have time to decompress, but it's important to be aware of what you're doing now. One of the good things about the way I watch TV because I recorded on my shows and watch them. I watched him without commercials. Instead of watching 60 minutes for show, it's closer to 40 minutes. That means I can watch three shows that I download in the time it takes other. You watch, too, so actually watched around four hours of television. Still a lot. It's still huge amount, so more television than watched in the previous 10 days average. I watch maybe 30 minutes of television a day at most. I download something here, and they are really finished shows or really watch movies. But we want to start developing habits, and one of the big habits we have is television and what has it and start to take control of things, even if your problem right now is that you watch too much television, it's sucking with your time. Just switch to watching recordings. This will give you more control. The problem of television. The reason. Such a curse. There's no beginning and there's no end. You could turn on television and watch forever. A long time ago, when I was young and even for his television would turn off 10 or 11 o'clock at night. It would turn into a test pattern to be nothing left. You know, we back tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. We back tomorrow 60 then nothing. Watch tonight and a loose then television would be getting Internet. That's over. That's finished Now. Now you can watch television to your heart's content for hours and hours, days and days for rest of your life on end, and we get sucked into it because we enjoy being entertained. The promise that when you're watching television your brain has the same activity is when you're sleeping, you're doing nothing. Start with small changes and say, You know what? TV's not that efficient. I'm going to start watching no more commercials and get back around 20 to 30% of the time I spent watching television. I want to recapture that time. That's the first way toe start recapturing time. The second thing I want you to look at as we're beginning to look at ways to stop doing things that are bad is what are you doing with her phone. Some people check their phone for several hours a day. Do you get text Facebook messages, tweets, emails? We start getting all these messages to our phone right. We think that it's such a convenience. My phone is not connected to most of the things that I d'oh right now, probably with I have a foreign number. Probably three or four people know the number while traveling in Thailand. But when I switch back to my island phone number again on Lee, maybe 10 people know that number. I don't away my contact details for instant contact of very many people. Instead, what people get is Skype or my email, and most people get my business, Skype, which doesn't go to my phone as well. I do have a second Skype, which goes to my phone, and I only have that actually turned on my phone while I'm traveling here. Normally, when I'm back home, I don't have it either. But it's the way people communicate where I am instead of texting. So it's me adapting a little bit, but your phone can become a massive distraction. You start reading your favorite news sites, you're falling social media. I was talking to my friend the other day. We've all seen massive numbers of viral videos. They become part of the social consciousness, things we can talk about, but I always miss them. He was bringing up like several different really popular training social videos. Right now, they're trending on social media that people that are very viral, that people are doing that I hadn't seen any of my had even heard of them because I'm out of the loop. I've always been at loop on viral videos, even 10 and 15 years ago, but we get in the loo because we want to know what's going on. I used to watch television so that when other people have stuff to talk about, I could join in the conversation. I want to feel left out. We developed these ideas that think, Oh, it's really important to be part of the conversation, people talking about television and our desire to be social causes to do things that are efficient. So what I want you to do is look at your phone and say, Are there things on here that are hurting my time and not doing any benefits? The great majesty of social media is that we pay social media and we do all the work. We create all the content, we create the videos, we do everything and then someone else places the advertising and pays them and we pay, create the content and absorb all the ads were doing all the work. It's like reality television, right where regular people doing all the work stopped doing work for free. I as crazy as it sounds as crazy as it sounds, and it's surprising because I hate the Internet. I hate being online. If I'm not working, I don't like to be online. I don't really like Thio. Spend hours and hours. I probably have five nonwork websites like to go to. I think I gotta one news website to comic books and the trouble to I go shopping on. It's probably it's right more than five, but that's what I can think of right now. I have a very small number websites I go to. It doesn't interest me very much. I you know, I go online to do research or things like that, but most of the time, right, like I don't like to go online for pure entertainment. I don't like to just sit there and bounce around. Now we develop that have it because we worked jobs we hate. We used to go into work at having so much free time that we just want to fill the time I mess around online. We get used to it. We develop that habit. I used to have that habit very strongly. It's not something that I got a writ of overnight. Okay? I've been working for myself with no boss for seven years to me. Seven years to get where I am right now. Many of these habits I had 123 years ago. Okay? So you could work yourself online for 45 years and some of the same bad habits I did. I still about have it starting to break. But removing these things from your phone is the first step. It's an easy step. Okay, Before we start thinking about the computer, there's things in our phone to distract us. Then, yeah, when you next, like, look at your computer and say, You know, I'm only gonna check me Moe once a day or twice a day or once a week. I only check my memo once a day, and that's a great freedom. It keeps me from getting distracted. Not only is that keep me from checking email that keeps me from thinking about checking email like, Oh, I wonder if I might have an email with this or what? I'm Even with that, removing that stress room in that thought from your minds, removing that distraction is very valuable. It allows you to be free throughout the day. That's what it gives me is a great freedom. If I'm working at 78 o'clock at night and I'm working on a podcast or something else, I'm not thinking, Oh, I hope I don't have an emergency email. I don't even worry about it cause I know I don't check in most other 12 hours. And as you train the people you do business with and explain over and over again what you d'oh, you'll stop getting emergency emails. That's why I mentioned all the time in podcast episodes of Block Post. All replace. I talk about how I don't check email all the time. I'm a setting expectations. The reason I do that, it's a few email me. You won't be surprised if it takes you 1 to 2 days to get a reply for me because we're in different time zones. It could be as much as 47 hours. You know, if I'm way ahead and I traveling the em right now, sometimes my rhythm's a little bit off, but I never go more than two days, and normally it's 99% time. It's every single morning, but I can't always guarantee that because something happens. I get distracted or I sleep in or the inner goes out for a day, but very high response rate. But once a day that allows me to have the rest of the day free. That allows me to create a little bit of freedom, and I want you to think about little things you have in your day, that air sucking up time without giving any return. It's fine to have things right. They give us a return that are efficient. It's fine to spend time watching television. If it decompress, is you for an hour to it's fine, just one time with your friends or working out all of those things. What we want to look at is these little habits and activities that are sucking up time and giving us nothing in return. It's when you have five or six bad habits throughout the day. You know you spend your time in the car to and from work during a community, just listening to music on the radio so that's time that's lost. You could spend more efficiently if you wanted to. That's not so bad. But then, when you're the bathroom again, you just listen to comedy stuff and you end up spending. What long in the bathroom? The normal? Because you read on the toilet. You have a bathroom habit. Then you have another habit of when you're get home from work. You spend an hour in the bathtub every night reading a book. Then you watch television for two hours. It's not having leisure or relaxing things. That's a problem. It's when you have too many stacking. A lot of talk about positive habit stacking, and there's a great book. What have It's back in the hole Ideas. Building positive on top of positive habits. One habit of time, and the first step is to start looking at removing habits. It's a lot easier to remove those habits and replace them with something that is to try and just start new ones from nothing. So we're looking for is opportunities of ways to take control of your time. Another problem is that we lose our motivation when the goals too far away. So as you're organizing your time. If you're thinking about a project and you're going okay, this project's only gonna take me six months and I'll make that first dollar That's brutal. I'm always tryingto push people to get things done as fast as they can to make that first dollar. Even if it's in perfect, it's better to put out something that's incomplete than to put out nothing at all. I know there's the fear of putting out something that's inferior, hurting your reputation, and I totally understand that. And I don't want to push you into that where you're doing something that you're not happy with, because that's not what I believe it. But what I do believe in is doing stuff, getting it out there and then improving it. For example, let's take an example. You put out your book on Amazon, you put out your first book on Kindle. Okay, it's not really ready. It's not 100% ready for prime time. You like to do one more, read it, but it's better to get a version up, so you just have a version out there yourself. Two or three copies you only make 80 cents and profit but you get that feeling of money coming in and then you can re add it. The book. Send it back to Amazon, push it. Opted the copy those three people have anyways, and that during that time you can then improve the book. Sorry, you heard that. Hopefully I'll be able to remove the ringing of a doorbell. For some reason. This hotel, they ring my doorbell about every 30 minutes to want to bring me another treat or another snack. And I want to spend my time with you. Another example, right? We are talking about time and something surprising happens. Taking control of your time and trying to develop good habits is about setting goals that you could see in the short term. So right now I'm thinking about is I really want to get further ahead with my podcast recordings right now. I'm doing okay. I'm actually recording episodes about a week in advance. The problem is that I need to get a two weeks ahead to have really freedom and real efficiency. So if I'm only one week ahead, that means that right now it's a Friday McCord Ex Friday's episode. I won't get back the edits until next Wednesday or Thursday. It takes the person that it's my audio edit, the audio, they write, the notes that become the downloadable PdF. That helps me all that content, right that I give back to you. And then I add and try to increase the value. And now, in fact, what we're trying is to get time codes on these episodes. But if I don't record two weeks in advance, there's a lot of time for them to get back all the bonus stuff to make their episodes better. So finding enough time means really focusing on a task in the short term. So I'm trying to record multiple episodes every day so that I can get from one week ahead to two Ex Head. As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, because I've been traveling, the episodes have actually been done, but not always able to get online to activate them. What I really want to d'oh okay and have this specific goal is to have all of my episodes done for the for the following week. All of my notes and all of the edits back to me by Saturday, so that on Sunday. Sunday could be the day that I do all of my podcast for the rest of week and and pre set up Monday through Wednesday's money through Friday's episode. So they're all done and the Automat could go out. I don't have to think about having a goal, and putting it right in front of you puts it to the top of your priority tree. The reason I say that. It's so that right now there are many other things that could be working on other project. You know, the magazine. I've mentioned to you that I'm interested. I'm excited about. I'm finishing and working on my podcast. In course, I want to work on additional content. Some really cool done for your stuff, for my networking course that's already live. But all of those things, How do I choose which one to work on, how to choose which ones efficient. We have to really focus and become focused on or create goals around the thing that would be most valuable to get it done in the short term, as much as it's great to follow the things that were excited about. Oftentimes I get excited about projects aren't gonna make money for a long time. I'm most excited about some of my projects that might not make money for six months or a year. Sometimes takes a long time. You have to prioritize the things sometimes that are short term and it will make money sooner. We have to begin to set those things. So how do we get excited about short term? And that's by creating smaller goals when something's really far away. If I think right now, I'm recording a podcast episode that I don't have to release for 10 days, it doesn't really feel that important. I'd rather not adding the podcast episodes myself. I would record the episode in the morning, added it, create all the notes and then release it that night. The promise that takes up so much time that I wasn't getting anything else done. It was really affecting the rest of my business. And so I realized I had to bring in someone outside, edit the audio for me, right? That takes a massive amount of time. I can record it episode in 25 or 30 minutes, but editing it would take me three hours. It's a huge time difference. For me, editing takes lots of lots of time, but bring in professionals allows me to be more efficient. So sometimes when you're looking at time you go out. It will be better for me to bring in someone to help with the task that's very time consuming rather than very complex. That's the things we look at the same thing for my assistant having assistant help me organize them. My research into build outlines. She does work that's very time intensive rather than work. It's very complex because sometimes we as much as I enjoy, and I actually really enjoy making slides and things about course preparation. But they take massive amounts of time, so it's not a good use of my time. It's not a good use of time and productivity to benefit ratio. A lot of this comes from spending a long time and being in this business a long time and working from herself for a long time. So when a manager expectations a little bit, you're not gonna instantly become a working powerhouse. What? I want you to do it slowly, take control of different parts of your time. Different parts of your schedule. Take back these little pieces of your schedule. Take back 10 minutes a day technique 20 minutes a day. And while you're working on that while you're removing different things, whether it's chicken email all the time, we're getting distracted by Facebook or watching television shows that aren't edifying or educational or valuable in any way. They're just kind of time sucks. They make you laugh, but then you're time disappears. Why you're doing all of that also focus on putting goals and funny that are short term. The big mistake new marketers make is creating something and being very far away from it happening. I see this all the time. People start a book and they don't release it for 367 months. That huge space, that huge amount of time between now and seeing something happened online. Their motivations slowly disappears and it's not active. Okay, it's not intentional, but when things slip away slowly, slowly, slowly, we get distracted by other things they're going on in life. It happens to me too, right now. Okay, My, I'm recording this today. I wanted my new book 20 Candidate should have come out yesterday. It's not gonna come all the way until January. Now there are a couple of reasons for that. Two different editors I hired quit in the middle and set back the entire payment Sarah have me before doing. Different things happened. And part of my problem is that I waited too long to send it to the first senator because I didn't realize that the first editor might quit and send it all back. I didn't rise at the second editor who would do actually still bunch of work, do about 30% of the work and sent me back 30% of the process content and then send it back in all the money. So I'm now on the third editor. It's unexpected, but sometimes things happen and we end up behind schedule and it's disappointing to me. And I know that when I pushed back a book launch, then it stops becoming a focus for me. And even this week I was noticing that I really need to spend more time curating and working on all my books on Amazon, working on rebuilding that rankings and paying attention that I'm so distracted because I'm doing 50 other things. I'm a one man band that certain areas sometimes lose that focus, and they start losing that love. But when you wait too long to launch a book, if you don't feel like it's ready, if you wait too long for any project, you start to lose that sense of motivation. That's why I'm always obsessed with releasing stuff as fast as possible. I was tempted to start this podcast. One month later, I thought about pushing back the launch of the Servant Master book another month. But I resisted that because I knew it's better to put it out in perfect in the wait and never do anything but my website. Still, it's not perfect. It's closer and closer, but it's better to do something that's 80% there just to get something live. So least you're in the game. After you put your book out there in the world. After you've released your videos, you can replace them. You can go into YouTube, you gonna video you go on Amazon and you can click replace, and it will let you upload a new file. I could do the same thing for podcast episodes, too. Anything I release I can create at it. Improve and release a better version. And it's okay, some constantly improving things that go back and edit out books all the time. All of those things. They can be changed. So realize that one of the ways to start feeling good about how you spend your time is to get a feeling of success. And instead of waiting perfection in releasing something that makes you that first dollar quickly, that's very valuable to get you that taste that first dollar online is absolutely critical because there's a huge difference. Green, $01 after that first dollar, you don't really have that same feeling until you make $1000 in the same day. That's the second time you get that strong feeling. But you want to feel like wow successive lines really possible. I can really do something great. So as we're thinking about time and as we're thinking about recapturing your schedule, recapturing efficiency, think about removing things that are a waste of time, taking Pac small pieces of time throughout the day, developing habits and stacking habits that are positive rather than negative setting goals that are short term and achievable, and focusing on making that first all online as quickly as possible. So you activate your higher level of motivation when you follow these steps. When you take thes correct actions, it will make a very big difference in your business and in your success, because you'll begin to feel that efficiency and over time your efficiency will improve more, more and more even seven years later, I still see ways I could be more and more efficient. I still have things that sometimes take me too long to release her. I feel like I'm behind schedule and other people look at my productivity. They go. What are you talking about? You two or three products a month? You do 20 podcasts episodes want to mix and bunch of block post. You do all of these other things that we all measure ourselves in different scales. I'm constantly trying to improve, and by opening the veil by being honest with you about how I want to prove and the things I want to do to be better and better, I want you to see the path in front of you so you can feel okay. There's always ways to get better. I don't have to feel bad about myself. I want you to feel like we're on the same journey together rather than I'm at the top of the mountain. I'm just closer to the top than you, and we're on the same journey so you can take control of your time. You could recapture some of that lost time. You could find that efficiency and you could start really, really succeeding online. You can be in charge of your own destiny. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss. Another episode will be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller, Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Email your questions to podcast at serve. No master dot com and your question with my answer might appear in the next episode.