Next Level University

#1538 - Not Everything Is Important

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about the art of task management and the liberating concept that not everything is as important as it seems. They shine a light on the societal conditioning that often pressures women into believing that every little thing is essential, leading to unnecessary stress and burnout.They talk about eliminating tasks that contribute little to your overall vision. It's about automating, delegating, and eliminating tasks that don't align with your purpose. This approach affords you more time to focus on what truly matters.

Links mentioned:
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level Hope Foundation- https://www.gofundme.com/f/next-level-hope-foundation-2023-holiday-event 


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Show notes:
(2:10) Productivity
(6:40) The result vs. the process
(8:34) What is important
(13:39) Helen praises Alan for providing safe and empowering coaching services with Next Level Business Solutions
(14:29) Credit for the process
(16:36) The value of productivity
(23:23) Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Speaker 1:

Just thinking hard about it. All right, not everything is important. Yeah, I'm tired, man I'm. I'm crashing too a little bit, oh makes sense.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was humbling as hell yesterday. It's like, oh my God, I can't do it.

Speaker 1:

Just trying to stick with the basics. It's like just the basics. Let's yep how, kick the can and see how much, how much fuel we have left and then let's kind of kind of go from there. Last night, every bone in my body after you canceled, all I had to do is do PGU and I was like, oh, I'm going to be done at four I'll be able to relax. And I was like, honestly, I need to use this time to do stripe stuff and yeah, but I wanted it so bad.

Speaker 1:

It's like I need a minute. I need a break. I still have to do the gross stripe finances. I got to catch up on that so tomorrow's going to be.

Speaker 2:

What Gross breakdown. Yes, I've been doing it when you don't. I don't know if you noticed that.

Speaker 1:

I haven't been in it. Yeah, I've been doing it. I haven't been in it. You don't have to, because I will do it. It just might be a little bit later, I won't miss, I promise.

Speaker 2:

I promise I won't miss Okay. Well if I knew what was what you know, I could do it. I have no problem doing it because I'm in there anyway. It's, it's. I'm already doing it on one of the sheets, so it doesn't it makes sense for me to do it. The only reason it doesn't is I don't actually know what the breakdown is.

Speaker 1:

Well, I can. Can we do on Monday? Can you and I really mastermind around? Yeah, man, sops for NLPS? Yeah, because I'm just realizing, with different clients, people have different expectations and I don't really know. You know, so we got to revisit that. And then the NLPS payment thing. It's fucking mayhem, man, I don't fucking know how to keep. Now we have social media, so it's like 20 days of that, we'll get you a sheet.

Speaker 2:

We'll get you a sheet. Yeah, I'm out here. And we'll have it calculate specifically for every client and then whenever a client changes their run rate, all you do is change a number and then it'll change when you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I need that, I'll make it work.

Speaker 2:

I see you All right. All right, this is about every. Not everything matters, not everything matters, okay. So Amy L told me that women, in particular her words, not mine Think everything's important and their condition to think everything is important. That's where I'm going to kind of go, and then I'm going to go into the the a little bit of the thing on my way forward.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm going to, I'm just going to open it and kick it to you. Okay, that's my thought. Awesome, how do you? You like it? Yeah, all right, what are we? What are?

Speaker 2:

you plugging next, so nation's same same thing ever forever, forever. I'm going to plug what If you are local, yeah, and attending, yeah, excuse me the landing page. The landing page is up to RSVP yeah there we go.

Speaker 1:

Next level nation. Welcome back to another Episode of next level University, where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed our latest episode. It was episode number 1500 and 37. Detached from the outcome and what that actually means. Very hyper conscious episode today. For episode number 1538, not everything is important you have heard us talk about this many times where you're most likely not going to get everything done. You're always gonna have some sort of to-do list and very rarely, if You're focused on growing and evolving and getting to the next level, will you get to the end of the day and say heck, yeah, I got every single thing done I was supposed to do today. Usually that is more of a pipe dream than anything, but Alan wanted to do this episode based on a conversation that he had with someone on the NLU team. So, alan, I'm going to kick it to you and take it easy for the rest of the episode.

Speaker 2:

So, first and foremost, productivity is not the the sexiest term or the sexiest thing to talk about. It's definitely something I've studied a lot, something that I adore, but I know that not everyone does. So I'm gonna take you way, way, way back to where productivity was kind of born, quote-unquote. The idea was farming and produce, and when a farm was winning, it was producing a lot of crop, and so the more crop you produce, the more you eat in this metaphor and so if you're more productive, you're gonna have a better future. You're gonna have a bigger, better, brighter future, and that's really the idea here. So I was on a Department meeting, slash coaching call with one of our team members, amy Lanias, who all of you know, if you're in next level nation, and she said Alan, this is such an important Conversation because and this is her words, not mine she said women are so conditioned women like me are so conditioned To think everything's important. You're supposed to be the best at laundry and the best at cooking and the best at Career now, and you're supposed to be the mother and you're supposed to wear all these different hats and and You're supposed to think that everything is urgent and everything is important. And so where that conversation stemmed from was I showed her something called the Eisenhower Matrix, and the Eisenhower Matrix is a simple grid that I actually have on my whiteboard up over here and it's it's the y-axis. The vertical axis is Important and the x-axis is urgent, and so the upper right quadrant is important and urgent. So a good example of that would be this episode. This episode is really important for our work, but it's also urgent because it's due. It's dropping tomorrow, right yeah, so this is urgent and important, so nothing else should get in the way of this. Something that's urgent but not important might be the dishes in the sink are there and my cat Will, like, eat the food if I don't do them, so that that makes it urgent but not necessarily important. Dishes aren't that important.

Speaker 2:

Then the bottom two so you've got on the bottom left. You've got not urgent and not important that Quadrant you basically want to eliminate. You don't want to do anything that's not important and not urgent. So something like it's a good example of that someone you don't like wishes you a happy birthday and and you're busy and you have important emails and important messages to get back to. The last thing you should do is get back to someone that you don't like, who's been unkind to you, and you don't really want to build a relationship with that person anyone. Anyway, that would be something that's not urgent and not important.

Speaker 2:

And then the bottom right is things that are Urgent but not important, and so, on my whiteboard, what I tried to do is I have, I have this quadrant, there's four, four quadrants, I have this axis, and in the upper right I have top MIT, which is my most important task. In the left, I have PPT and calendar, which is just a reminder. Ppt is just a habit tracking peak performance tracking, if you're a new listener, we have habit trackers that we use. And then calendar is Anything that's on my calendar already and so to the left, is important but not urgent. Calendar, things that are proactive about, and PPT those things are important but they're not necessarily urgent. So, for example, 20 minutes of learning is on my peak performance tracker. It's important but it's not urgent. It's not like oh my god, if I don't read today, I'm gonna everything's gonna burn tomorrow. It's not that urgent, but it is super important because if I don't read today and I don't read tomorrow, I don't read the next day. Eventually I'm not gonna grow and then everything will be less.

Speaker 2:

And Then the bottom ones. I actually just have X's through them Because I decided and I hope that everyone considers making this decision Inside of themselves I decided this must have been a month or two ago. I just decided why do I even have those quadrants there? I'm just gonna X them out. I don't want to live a life of miscellaneous things, I want to live a life of importance, and so I kind of decided I'm gonna not do anything that's not important. And what's important varies, right like I still have to clean the litter box every Wednesday. I have that written down.

Speaker 2:

You know, there's certain things I still have to do the dishes sometimes. Those get urgent when they're piling in the sink or whatever. But at the end of the day, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna live a life where and this is the example Amy used she said I've coached so many women and they they Often get praised when things are done, not the process, and so a lot of times they're always stressed out of all, the laundry is not done, the laundry is not done, the laundry is not done and she's like well, the laundry is never done.

Speaker 2:

So talk about a losing game where you basically only feel good when the laundry is done which is what at most one day, until there's more dirty clothes. So Emilia and I, for example, we have our hamper and that thing just stacks until we Well, we used to do it, we used to batch it. And batching, by the way, is, instead of answering your messages every single day, all day, you batch them in the morning, get them all done and then you don't batch them again until the next day. Batching is a really cool little productivity hack. I don't know why, I just winked at the camera, but anyway.

Speaker 2:

Anyway so yeah expert tip, pro tip. I don't know if it was a purposeful winker, I'm just twitching because I, because I'm still waking up, but anyways. So we have a housekeeper, clio G. She comes every other week, so bi-weekly, twice a month, and we just let the laundry stack and and fortunately she does that and we're very grateful and that's definitely expensive but that allows us and frees us up to be more productive in other areas.

Speaker 2:

And and so the idea here is how do you automate, eliminate, delegate, procrastinate the things that are not important in your life? And important is entirely subjective to you, to your goals, to your core values. So, for example, you know Christmas is very important to a lot of people, so make sure you take that time off. Emilia and I we don't care that much about it, so we're not really super concerned about it, but the Next of the Hope Foundation event is really important and so that's getting a lot of my time and attention right now, which I'll talk to you about at the end of the episode. But the important thing here is to realize that what's important to you is your choice. And if Amy's statement is true of, women are conditioned and I think we all are to some extent, but women, in particular she mentioned, are conditioned to think that everything's important. I think that's setting you up for a losing game, because the only way to win an unwinnable game is to opt out of it.

Speaker 2:

And I used to be everything to everyone back in college. I talk about how I was the athlete who lifted with the athletes, when I was the nerd who studied with the nerds and I was at every party and there was 12 fraternities and I was everyone's best friend and I had tons of friends and tons of friends, friends and tons of friends, friends, friends. And I had my high school friends that came in with my college friends and I brought my college friends home to part of my high school friends and I was just spread so thin and in hindsight I was so miserable, and now I live a much more discerning life of only focusing on the things that I deem really, really important, and I think that's what maturity is. I think eventually you just get older and you realize that a lot of that stuff didn't have a very strong ROI in terms of growth, fulfillment, impact, finances, that kind of thing, jesse.

Speaker 1:

I was talking to Jesse the other day. We were on a NLSM Next Level Social Media Call getting some things buttoned up, and she said how do you get everything done? And I said, well, first of all, I don't. I get a lot of stuff that people see done, but there's a million things behind the scenes that nobody sees that I am so far behind on. But to your point, they're just not as important. We've got I don't know, we've gotten something like seven, six or seven or eight Next Level Social Media Clients in the last few weeks. Last month. That's been the, that's it.

Speaker 2:

When I wake up it's been so that's the most urgent and most important 100%, and it's been very, very, very weird.

Speaker 1:

So I can understand when you start letting go of things that you believe are supremely important, there's a little bit of guilt, or maybe there's a little bit of fear or uncertainty or discomfort, because I find that too. Alan and I were talking yesterday or the day before and I said I'm having a mini identity crisis, not in a bad way, but it's different for me to wake up and then just really only focus on a few things throughout the day. It's very strange for me. I don't feel like I'm doing enough. Yeah, I don't feel like I'm making progress, even though I know I am, but I have let go of a lot, of, a lot of things that I just I wasn't doing well and I most likely wasn't going to do well anyway. It doesn't mean I'm not going to pick them up in the future. We'll see. I don't know. We're going to see how things evolve, but if you're already not doing it, you're beating yourself up for not doing it. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably not that important.

Speaker 1:

My next level nugget is wouldn't it benefit you to just let it go anyway, if possible? Obviously there are. To your point, alan. There are certain things we can't let go. Unfortunately, I still do the laundry, tara, and I split it. She usually does the sheets and the bedroom stuff. I do the towels and my laundry. She does her personal laundry. But I don't have that much laundry because I don't really do anything. I just go to the gym and then I come here and sit in my pajamas.

Speaker 1:

That's not something I can just say, well, that's not important, I'm just going to not do it. But here's the thing that's your original point. I can do laundry far less than a family of seven people. Of course, I can do it once a month. I'm good because I don't wear that many clothes. I literally bought like six packs of boxers, so it's like I'll just buy a bunch of underwear when I do laundry. I'll just hammer through and I'll just have to do an entire batch of underwear. I'll just say, pardon, my too much information if that's too much information. That's really my thought for this episode is this is something that I'm experiencing as well, obviously differently, obviously, personally, business things are different, but I do understand the fear of letting go of something that you think you should be holding on to, even if you holding on to it isn't really accomplishing anything.

Speaker 2:

And when you let go of something that is no longer serving you at the highest level, it creates the space to latch on to something new and better. What would be a good example of that? If you to the example Kev gave with, if you have a family of seven people and you're in charge of laundry, that's a full-time job. I mean, you're basically just doing laundry every day probably.

Speaker 1:

I was just going to say it might be urgent and important because the kids need to wear something, like they need stuff for school, and you and or your partner have certain things that you wear to the office or to your jobs, or you have uniforms or whatever it may be.

Speaker 2:

Well, aime said this. She said, instead of only giving yourself credit for when the laundry is done which is what once a week until the next day, give yourself credit for the process, the fact that you're you know, I do kitchen man. So the kitchen is never done, it's just a. It's a. We went grocery shopping last night, at nine or something like that, and we just finished all of our Thanksgiving leftovers, which I'm grateful for, because not only was I sick of eating the same thing every day, but I also just have a system and it was messing my system up. Man, I so I do the dishes, I do, I do the food. I make sure we basically hit our macros within reason and I am making sure that we have great meals that are, that are nutritious micros, macros, new calories. But then sometimes we go off the rails with fast food or whatever is like a treat, domino's, whatever. But the Thanksgiving was messing up my system. But the point that I'm making is, if I only feel good when we're eating, that's not very efficient. I should feel good in the process of my intentions, as I'm doing it, and that's the difference between results and process. And what Amy said was most people are only rewarded and applauded for results, not process, and I feel you on that because you know when, when the book is launched, that's when you get the love and the appreciation. No one cares when you're writing a book every day behind the scenes with zero love and just basically feeling terrible about your writing. But that's life, I think, and hopefully you can give yourself a little bit more of the positive dopamine along the way with these little.

Speaker 2:

You know, I got to be pumped with every blog and I got to be pumped with every time I write first thing in the morning. I can't just be pumped on my first book. How am I going to? How am I going to? That's like putting gas in the tank when you already get there. You have to put your gas in the tank as you go, and so I think the last thing that I'll share here is, I think, the question of productivity. How productive are you?

Speaker 2:

And I think the deeper through line of this is Do you understand the value of productivity? Because what I've found is a lot of people who haven't studied productivity. They're like well, why does it matter if I'm more productive? The truth of the matter is you're going to earn more money and you're going to have a better life. I mean, as crazy as it sounds and I can't go too deep on this, but the reason Kevin and I have been able to create our dream life, really underneath all of it, is that we are more productive than other people.

Speaker 2:

That really is kind of underneath all of this. Obviously, we make better choices, different things like that, but at the end of the day, when we first started, kevin and I were not very productive at all in comparison, and now, every single day, every single week, we've learned how to do things more effectively and more efficiently and because of that, we're able to produce more, in this case, more crop, quote unquote like the farming analogy. And when you produce more crop, you make more money, and then you can reinvest that money into better tools, better equipment, better team to produce even more crop, which makes even more money, and the farms get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then your whole life gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so hopefully, this productivity is not a super sexy topic, but I do think it's an important topic to the pun intended of things that are important and urgent.

Speaker 1:

Fundamentals. Fundamentals are not always sexy, but they are always well. Yeah, I would say, they're always important, I would go as far to say that, but they are not sexy, unfortunately.

Speaker 2:

What was your next? You didn't love studying productivity.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I enjoyed it, but not in the beginning. No, in the beginning I didn't, and it felt very constricting in the beginning.

Speaker 2:

May I ask you a quick question? When we were in the beginning and I was talking to you about productivity and back then I had no idea that not everyone studied productivity, because I was very ignorant. What was that like for you? Were you interested or were you like? Why does this even matter?

Speaker 1:

Probably more of the second one. I always felt like it was a treadmill that never ends and only gets faster. It's kind of how it feels. Even I used to say this I don't remember the exact quote but 99.9% of the journey is the process. Let's just say you write for 364 days and then the book launches on the 365th. You're done with the cycle. Now you have to start again. So for 364 out of 365 days you were working on the book and then one day you launch it. It's like nice, awesome. You're kind of always doing the process of whatever it is, just like us. We'll finish this episode, close out this episode and then we'll do tomorrow's episode or whatever the episode is, and then it's just rinse and repeat that forever.

Speaker 2:

What would you say to you? I know we got to jump, but what would you say to you if, when you didn't understand productivity and its value and you were early in starting your own business, but just in life in general, what would you at this point say to you about, like, why does productivity matter?

Speaker 1:

I used to think productivity was just about time. Now I would say I'm sure there's a real definition, an actual definition of productivity. The definition that would probably have landed with Kev would be it is the quality of output, the quantity of output and the alignment of output. So the quality of what you're doing how well are you doing it? The quantity of how much are you able to do at a high quality, and then the alignment with how aligned is that for the goals that you have?

Speaker 1:

Yeah that's fine. I think that would have helped it land, because back then I thought it was just do as much as you can in an hour.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, always, and it kind of is. And to you it's like, well, what's the point of that? Because, well, even now, If the treadmill always speeds up, then Right, right, but even now Feels like a losing game yeah, an hour doesn't mean I'm spending 60 minutes doing 60 things.

Speaker 1:

It could mean I'm doing 60 minutes doing one thing. Yeah, definitely Extremely well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, In the beginning I didn't understand that One really important thing extremely well, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So that's what I would say Cool, strong one.

Speaker 2:

My next level, nugget, is open your mind a little bit to the idea that not everything is important and really more importantly than that is just be discerning. Be really discerning with what you do and don't do. Be more discerning. Your whole world will get better the moment you get better at saying no Definitely.

Speaker 1:

I concur with that Next level nation. If you are looking to find more like-minded people who maybe have gotten further along on the journey of saying no to misaligned things and yes to more aligned things, please join our private Facebook group, next level nation. It is not private so we can keep you out. It is private so you can feel safe to be yourself and you don't have to worry about judgment. You don't have to worry about all the things you say being public. It's a safe place to be yourself. Your true, authentic self link will be in the show notes.

Speaker 2:

Speaking of aligned things, the website is up for the Next Level Hope Foundation. If you are local and you are a single parent and you've been to our events in the past Father's Day or Holiday this is gonna be our fourth one, because we've done Two Fathers Day and One Holiday last year. If you came last year and you're still listening to the show, please click the link in the show notes RSVP, bring your children. You can pick. Actually, at the front desk you're gonna be able to pick which gift you want for your child. Your child will be able to get a football, a frisbee, a basketball, a ball toss game. We don't really know what to call that one Ball toss, so what we'll call. What was the fifth one? Do you remember Soccer ball?

Speaker 2:

Soccer ball, Soccer ball ball, toss, frisbee, frisbee, frisbee, yep. And so bring your children. They'll open a gift. We'll play sports all day, we'll eat food, we'll eat pizza, we'll get arts and crafts going, we'll face paint. It's gonna be awesome. And if you haven't checked out the video yet, please do. The link is in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

And regardless of how old or young your child is, they will be able to beat me at basketball Most likely, no matter what we should probably give the ages.

Speaker 2:

I think the cutoff is 14. Something like that it's anywhere from like, cause we had a two year old or a three year old, two, two, yeah, anywhere from two to 14.

Speaker 1:

I'll have my face painted, most likely We'll see. We'll see All right Tomorrow. For episode number 1,539, should you focus more on your strengths or weaknesses? That is something we talked about in the Detach From the Outcome episode and I said maybe we should do a full length episode on that, another hyper conscious one. That is what we're gonna do tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU we do not have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Speaker 2:

Focus on the important things. Next, subination.

Speaker 1:

Boom, good one, it's so good.

People on this episode

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Alan Lazaros

Host
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Kevin Palmieri

Host