EntreLeadership - #263: Thriving in the Age of Overload with Juliet Funt

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

According to WhiteSpace at Work CEO Juliet Funt, oftentimes the key to accomplishing more is to momentarily do less. A strategic pause, what she calls “whitespace,” taken between activities to recalibrate and recuperate can help you reclaim lost productivity, creativity, time—and money. Juliet estimates that mindless busyness (such as pointless meetings, endless emails, redundant reports) costs businesses at least $1 million annually for every 50 employees. Her invaluable advice has helped teams at corporate giants like Nike, P&G, and Pepsi find greater balance and improve overall performance—and it can do the same for you. Join us to learn how to incorporate whitespace into your every day to reboot your exhausted brain and body. entreleadership.com/podcast Summit Swag Bag from EntreLeadership Personalized Growth Planner from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our feature interview this episode is with Juliet Funt. She's the CEO of White Space at Work. And then Daniel Tarty, our senior vice president of business and leadership,

here at Ramsey Solution stops by with some great content as well. And oh my goodness, we've been talking about it for a long time. Summit Week is here. This is the first of five. That's right. Five episodes coming to you this week. Don't forget some great resources coming your way as well. Well, Juliet Funt is, in fact, the CEO of White Space at work.

What do they do? Well, they train and consult organizations, their leaders, and their teams to flip the norms of business in order to recline. their creativity, productivity, engagement. So there you go. Creativity, productivity, and engagement. Who among us that is listening today doesn't want to see more creativity, more productivity, and more engagement? She's a nationally recognized expert in this area, and you're going to enjoy this conversation. Here is Juliet Funt. Juliet Funt joins us here in studio. Glad to have you. Thank you. It's a treat. This topic of White Space, which of course is a big part of what you do, White Space at work,

is your company and you're dedicated to White Space. I think it is probably one of the most underrated concepts in all of personal productivity. I don't care who you are, where you are, what you do. I'm really excited about this. So let's start with what is White Space? What does it look like? So here's how we define it. We define White Space as a strategic pause taken between activities. So any pause, even if it's half a second, three seconds, up to half an hour, longer pauses, to recalibrate, to recuperate, to use basically thoughtfulness as a business tool. And it isn't really one of the things we tend to keep in our business toolkit. But that's our mission is to move companies from companies of exertion where people are just doing and doing and doing and doing to companies of thoughtfulness where there's an element of stepping back and objectivity about the world. Now, I want to clarify something.

This is not meditation. I'm not saying, I say, I want people to make sure they don't just kind of throw this out with the, oh, well, I don't have time to meditate during the day. How is it different? So there's actually three categories of what we are not, and it might be good to walk you through all three. Absolutely. Not meditation. Meditation is a disciplinary experience. And in meditation, your mind wanders. And your goal is to pull it back and monders and pull it back. Then there is mind wandering. This is getting a lot of press now. That's the non-volitional aspect when the mind is slipping away, but it's against your will. you're working on a very important spreadsheet and all of a sudden you are in a Groupon

for a Caribbean food and you have no idea how you got there and you're just like boom, this is the mind wandering and then there's mindfulness and mindfulness, of course, tons of press. But mindfulness is also disciplinary in that it's asking you to take a thing and put all your senses and energy. So I'm feeling the cup, I'm drinking the water, I'm feeling the sun, I'm paying attention

in a conversation. That mindful element also has discipline. Whereas white space has no rules or rules. goals. If you are in a white space moment, it's boundaryless, it's freedom, it's where your mind can follow instinct and find an unfunk thought and improvise and there is no structure. Is there a practice? I mean, we're just going to dive right into this. Okay. Because then we'll apply it to so many things. Yes. But is there a practice that you have found or that you would suggest as you begin to say, I'm going to start testing this? So we're four minutes, five minutes

into this and people go, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, how do I start this? where I can just let the brain go. So before they start, I think you really do have to appreciate why, because why would you even be bothering to start unless you have a little why? So I'll just tell you that I think there's an incredibly underappreciated benefit to doing this for individuals, for business owners, for business people. The secret we're missing is that this is a very profound source of professional power. If you're a salesperson and you don't have two minutes in the day where you step back

and really think about your customer, who are they, who's not getting more? them the way you could. What's their empathic experience? If you're a creative leader and you're saying to your people innovate, innovate, but they have no time to innovate, your company can never get where it wants to go. So I just want to talk for one second about the why, because it's so purely critical. So in terms of the how, the most important thing is to understand that white space is kind of like a glass of water and it sits on your desk and you just take little sips. So we're not suggesting that people jump in a giant pool of luxurious two-hour white space, which feels completely unattainable and impossible and you just want to forget about it. But you could take a

four-second break and you could take a 10-second break and you could take three minutes before an incredibly critical meeting to step back and think about what you're about to do. And you could take one full minute when you turn your keys off in the driveway before you walk into family to switch hats from work self to home self. It is the interstitial use. It's the lacing through the day with these small interstitial pauses, that's really where the access point is, where it's not intimidating and when it has a lot of benefit. Okay, so are we just sitting quietly? Are we closing our eyes?

Good. Are we in a quiet room? Are we just off the hallway from where we're walking in? I want to paint a picture for how it is best to do when you're saying, okay, whether it's four seconds to use your analogy, or if it's four minutes. But you seem like a guy who likes rules or boundaries. So the- Do I like rules?

I don't know. No. At all. Well, you like specificity in that. One of the problems with that request is that if you don't have autonomy in somebody's white space practice, they will reject it. So there are people for whom they want to close their eyes. There are people for whom going for a run is white space.

There are people who use a timer and they like to set the timer down and they have three minutes. And if there is a practice without a really powerful flavor of autonomy, it's very off-putting to people. And so I can't prescribe for you, but I can say a couple things. So when you stop a blender, all the blender stuff keeps spinning for a little bit. So you stop your mind for a moment. It's not meditation.

You're not attempting to return to any breath or mind or mantra. So a lot of times you're just going to be churning a to-do list for a little while. You're just going to be, I got to change the gutters and pick up there. I forgot the lettuce at the start. All that low-level blender stuff. stuff. But as your mind has a little bit more time to pass through that process, then there's a little bit more freedom. And because people tend to have fear in the freedom, we give them what's called white space boosts. There's all sorts of little questions that you could ask yourself. So for instance,

a boost question might be, how's my life going really? It's a little piece of candy to play with in the intimidating openness of the white space. A boost question could be, how would my team describe me? It's not really so directional because you can veer off of it, but it's just a little something to start the conversation because what people have trouble doing is giving themselves permission and freedom to trust the output of their mind and to trust that maybe you're going to think about first that you need Pippin Apples and then you're going to think about that your suitcase broke and then you're going to get to a great idea and you have to trust that improvisation and free flow in order to get there. One of the ways you define White Space, these are from your company, a boundless freedom for your brain. And I asked that question because I wanted different personalities and different people to go, okay, this just needs to be my white space. So whatever that looks like, whatever works, but it is that moment or whatever it is, however many moments, where you can go, okay, I'm just going to let my brain just kind of be present. And there's two main flavors that might be helpful to you, too. So there's recuperative white space.

So that is, I am rebooting my exhausted brain and body. That is the Olympian taking a recovery set between training. That's just, right? Then there is constructive, which means now I'm using White Space, as a business tool toward a result. I'm thinking about innovation, strategy, introspection, professional reflection. That constructive use is more purposeful.

The recuperative use is incredibly important now because people work in maniacal, exhausting ways. And so there's that balance of sometimes your white space is just... Yeah. Yeah. And it's phenomenally important because otherwise you start running on fumes. So we work with a lot of sales teams and people who have a very arduous job where they have to keep going, going, going. And it was just with the sales group, so they're in my mind.

The last third of their sales output in the day is never as good as the first two thirds. Because without those interstitial pauses, even though they're pumped up and they got their Red Bull and there are those power personalities, the human brain and body and psyche can just go so far. And so those little recuperative sips make an enormous difference. Yeah, I love that breakdown right there. So constructive and then recuperative? Recuperative and constructive. Okay, so let's break those down. Okay.

And let's start. We're here. I've never done that. Oh, well, good. The business space. So this is so important. Where would you challenge leaders? What types of moments throughout the day that they experience in their normal day-to-day

leadership where they need to go, you know what, I need to do a quick little recuperative thing before I move next. The types of things that leaders need to just intuitively understand. I probably need a little bit of recuperation here and some white space. Yeah. So on the recuperative side, you notice how you and I are on a lot of planes, I bet, or I don't know if you are, but I am. Yes. If you go on a plane at 11 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock, all the grownups are asleep on the plane. Why are we all asleep during a day on the plane? Because that's the only place where we're sort of forced to. So if you take away technology and you take away stimulation and you fall asleep,

It means your body has been screaming in your ear for however long to try to get a break. Now, we're not wellness people. We're business people. But I can tell you that you can feel this in a team. Testiness. Eaton low-value junk all day long. Running so hard. Literally running.

I was just in a large office building and I was walking with this woman. And I actually pretended that I had a little sprained ankle because she was running through the hallway. And I didn't know how to say, I don't know. don't want to walk this way through five buildings with you. I just bring my angle a little bit. Can we slow down a little bit? Yeah, sure. So we just get so jacked up and we're so used to this pace and cadence and everybody else around us is doing it. And we call it symmetric inertia. That's not my term. It's a psychological term that means nobody changes, so everybody changes. So we're just all in this posture. So for a leader, the problem with knowing when they need recuperative time is

that the precursor to that is awareness. And when you're drowning in busyness, you numb. a lot of your awareness. So it's this vicious cycle of no self-awareness because you're so busy and fried. So you don't even notice that you're so busy and fried that you can't take a break and it just goes in circles. The way that you can break the cycle is to start making some of this cultural. So if you're in a company and you have the luck of seeing a leader, I'll tell you, 80% of organizations have the problem, only 8% do anything about it. So there's an enormous gap of people that need this shift. If you're a leader or you're with a leader who gets this problem, who's leaning forward like you and I are saying, this is a problem. You can begin by making

it cultural. Say to your people, we're going to try to move in our mindset and philosophy away from all exertion and towards some thoughtfulness. And the more you talk about it, the more you stay in mindset philosophy and culture, the more the tips and tools and parts like that will work themselves out later. Because yeah, I can tell you stuff about emails and meetings and interruptions and workflow and blah, blah, blah, and that's all important. But mindset culture philosophy is, where it has to start. Otherwise, what happens is things quickly fail. So companies who don't try the mindset culture piece, they'll do individual interventions around the problem. They will do no meeting Friday. They'll figure, oh, you know, my people need a break. So we're going to do

no meeting Friday. And it's like planting a plant on cement, because you have this nice idea, but it has no context or soil. No meeting Friday lasts two months. Then there's a month where everybody starts breaking it. And then six months later, the only thing is left is that people make fun of no meeting Friday when they're in a meeting on Friday. And so this atrophy of ideas keeps happening. That's why we are sticklers about the mindset piece first. Yeah, absolutely. Because that's how it really sticks. And something I'm thinking of here is a leader has a tough meeting. Whether it be with a client. Oh yeah. You wanted to do specifics. Let's do that. Well, you know, there's a couple scenarios. I think of difficult conversations. Yes. So a leader has to, it's a stressful conversation,

maybe because it's a hard conversation. It just didn't go well. So you've got a tough thing there. Maybe it's with a client. Maybe it's with a team member. The point is you come out of that. And you've got the rest of your day, however long that is. And to your point, if it's go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, you kind of numb those feelings.

You think. Push them down. Push them down. But then you go into another meaning. And here's the reality. It affects everything. Correct. So that's where we can use white space.

Yes. And you're reminding me, you're asking for specific. So that white space afterwards to digest those emotions and let them kind of have their way with you before you move on. Super critically important. Before the difficult conversation also, so many of the times you know it. You know you're about to walk into something. And I can't tell you how much more effective you are when you take three or four minutes to orient. Let go in the morning.

Get ready. Imagine being a little emotionally resilient. Think about what you want to say. It's just a kind of thoughtful preparation that we don't do. So you're asking me for other transition times. email is a big one. If we can teach people leaders to take a micro second of pause before sending email, all sorts of things happen. We call it the wedge. So a little wedge of like a half a second of white space to decide, should I send it at all? Is it written right? Am I about to sound pushy or

domineering or thoughtless? Is it so long that no one on the green earth would want to read this? We don't take these reflective moments before an email. Let's say you receive an email. It's one of those two-dimensional affronts where you know you're bothered by it or it's insulting or it's a little edgy and you're not really sure what you're feeling. Same thing as your leader, you can sublimate those negative feelings all day long or you can take 30 seconds ago. And then you're kind of done. It's like watching a child have their emotions. Do you have kids? Three.

Three girls, boys? Two boys and a girl. Okay, so I have three boys. You have a child, they have a big emotion. If you try to push it down with a lollipop, it stays in there in some sort of, form. If you just let it go and they cry it out and it's all through and then they look up at you and they say pizza and they're truly organically completely done. And there's a parallel to adults that we don't tend to take but it's very important. Wow. It's so true. And I love this analogy here.

This takes strong leadership to not only do it yourself but allow your team to do it. And I'm calling myself out. Yeah. My daughter, I've got one and love my little girl. But girls and boys very, very different. The way the boys manifest their emotions very different. And it drives me crazy. Be crying. It's very loud. Too long. It's extremely long. And I try to suppress it. And the reality is, if I'm a healthy dad and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, I got to let that go to the extent that it's not. It's very hard. It's very hard. So, you know, picking on myself in this analogy, it's hard for leaders also to say, hey, I need to institute this, not only with myself, but how does a leader begin to model this in a culture? So modeling white space looks like you're a leader who leaves after

business hours and doesn't need to send any emails in the evening. Or modeling white space could look like you're a leader who takes their vacation and before the vacation you say, I'm going on vacation and that means I won't be working. So unless somebody is bleeding or on fire, do not call me or contact me on my vacation. Modeling white space could be a leader who sits at a meeting and and never touches their own technology during the entire meeting and is just truly present and available for being focused at the meeting. There's all sorts of mindset elements that kind of come in, but those might be a couple. Yeah.

But the point I was trying to make is as a leader begins to model this themselves, but then say, hey, I want to see this happen in the culture. We want to encourage this. This is what it looks like. This is how you can use it, do it your way. Right. But as they begin to do that, I'm thinking of the owner or the business leader out there is going, okay, I just, you know, how do we, how do we do this in a way that it just doesn't

become some, you know. Fairy, fairy. Yes, and productivity thing. And you would say, oh, this is going to help productivity. The whole point is that the path to white space requires that you get rid of junk. So we work with a lot of companies. We actually put numbers behind the waste. So the emails and meetings, the Dexter reports, the paperwork, the junk in the workplace,

cost companies about a million dollars for every 50 people in their organization annually. So these are the numbers that we're seeing. And actually, those numbers have already been cut in half for the purpose of being incredibly conservative. So if you have a leader out there who's saying this sounds a little airy-fairy to me, and I don't know, do I need like yoga pants to do this, the point is that you have two choices. You can have unidentified waste that is costing you money by wasting capacity of people that you already pay, or you can eliminate some of that waste and devote a portion of the found time to being thoughtful. And we believe that the latter is a way that a company should go. It's not easy to eliminate that waste. it's a process. It took a long time for you to get overloaded. It takes a little while to get

unoverloaded. But that's what a leader needs to start thinking about. Yeah, I just think for leaders of small businesses who sometimes are the chief everything officer. Yeah. They've got to do what you're prescribing here to program some white space in every day. I mean, not just once a day, I don't think. I think it's got to be this fluid thing. Is that where you really are coaching leaders to get to where this white space? It's not just one time a day. It becomes a part of your natural organic movement. interstitial, lace through the day. Little pause, little sip.

Think of it like water. We've been talking. I took four sips of water in 22 minutes. Little pause, little breath. There's a hundred ways that you can do it. If you and I are in a conversation, you ask me a question and I don't know the answer. The bravery to take five seconds to think before I respond to you is white space. The ability to step back on an offsite and have part of your agenda be nothing and not cram and cram and cram the agenda with learning and lessons.

as an act of white space. So there's a million ways to do it. I do, though, want to make a nod to that very small business owner because I have been there. And for those people, it feels impossible to take any. And so I just want to say literally baby steps. If you could take a minute or two, maybe the only thing that you do is when you walk to Starbucks and you walk back, you don't multitask with your phone while you're walking. And that's the only moment that you have in the entire day, but you allow your head to literally lift up and out, see the world, think about your company, If that Starbucks walk is all you have, at least don't be texting while you're doing it. I don't want to lead you too deep into this because you know you know so much about it, but I do want to talk about the science behind this.

Sure. The brain works this way. Yes. This is not, again, some theory that you've come up with. This is all scientific. How do our brains respond when we do stuff like this? Sure. So if you had an MRI scan of your brain when you were taking one of these things that looked like a pause,

It would actually be a very colorful filled time of complex activity in a part of the brain called the default neural network. So you would see insight and introspection and memory all linked through activity in the brain. What you look like when that's happening is? Yeah. Right. And this is why it's so hard to value it when we come around the corner. So one of the further explanations of the science is that there's a lot of different ways that

a brain can take a rest. And there's one kind called unfilled rest. And that's what we call white space. You can take a lot of different kinds of breaks at work. You could take a break to check your phone. You could take a break to eat. You could take a break to socialize. Not all of them have a recuperative element for the brain.

Actually, if you take a break and what you do during your break is you check Instagram, that cognitive activity at Instagram is exactly the same for your brain as the cognitive activity of the spreadsheet you were building five minutes before and there was no break. So it has to be that real unfilled rest, even if it's a little foreign to you, to just experiment with a little bit. Well, we at Entree Leadership try to acknowledge as much as we can with our guests and their content that these men and women that are listening and watching aren't just businessmen and women. They're also parents, wives, husbands, whatever the role is.

I would love for you to also encourage us on how to use white space in our home and our personal lives. That's my favorite topic. Oh, good. That's literally my favorite topic. I think this is huge. Well, it's enormous, enormous, enormous with children. So I live in Los Angeles. I don't know if it's more over-scheduled in most cities, but every child.

that I know has archery one day and flute the next day and guitar the next day and Spanish the next day. And we are incredibly passionate when we're working with client companies to shove in a little bit of white space at home content and to encourage to cancel some of those after-school activities, shove kids out in the backyard and let them rekindle the ability to just pick up a stick and make up a world and find dragons and dinosaurs in their head. And maybe this is the reason that creativity scores have been going down for 18 years in the United States because everything is so programmed. And they're shuttleed it from their little activity to activity to overloaded homework to far too little sleep, which is a

separate issue. So the kid piece of it is really passionate for me. The family piece of it is lovely to explore as well because when you have a busyness in your body and you're at work and you're busy, busy, busy, busy all day long, you bring it home on your shoes. And it's very hard to change the cadence of your body to sit on a Sunday and sit on the couch and watch a bird and have tea and let some little person maybe see you modeling that is okay to be a person and not be on your way somewhere. And so bringing this flavor into the home, I can't say enough about how powerful I think that is. I'm thinking right now of an idea where, and we limit devices after 7 o'clock, based on an interview I did here on this show.

But just even if it's 30 minutes family white space, like we're all in our own little white space. We're in the living room, but we're all just kind of practicing. I think this would be really, really important. So if you want the real challenge level, you do white space weekend, which is you pick a weekend on the calendar. Okay. And nobody can plan anything. And you wake up on Saturday morning and there are no plans for the entire weekend. I love that. And you just say, is it waffles? Is it an amusement park? we very rarely have that found time unless something cancels. And you know that ecstatic experience where you were going to go to Aunt Mearnah's birthday party in Cincinnati and she gets sick

and they cancel everything and you don't get on the flight and you sit there and you go, wow, this feels cool. Oh, yeah. That's forced white space. Yeah. Yeah. So with families, there are ways to do it too. I do want to echo your device thing, though, because the devices are the Voldemore of keeping this alive at home. And so learning to create some tools and tactics around device use at home, I think is really worth maybe a minute or two here. Yes, it is. There's a wonderful technique in white space called Find a Home for your phone. And that means that there should be a place in your home where your phone lives. Usually it is at where you charge your phone. And it might be fun for some of your viewers to try experimenting going to their phone when they need to touch it as opposed

to carrying it around with them all the time at home. So if you need to make a note, if you need to change the music on the Bluetooth, you walk to the phone and you interact with it. And so that allows all the other times that you're in your home and your yard and your space to be phone-free. Another really powerful technique with families is called phone narration. And we use this in business also, but I love it for families. And that means when you touch your phone, what happens is you go into something called present absence. You're there, but you're not there. It's like those Star Trek guys who just you disappear, right? So nobody knows where you've gone. So you're sitting with your family.

They have no idea what you're doing. You've just disappeared into the phone. So if you narrate, you say, I'm just going to check my flight departure for tomorrow. Or, oh, look, grandma's asking me about what time we're meeting tomorrow. As you narrate, your family does not have the experience of you mysteriously disappearing into the phone. They can see you interacting with it, but they know what you're doing. And they know that you haven't actually left them. It's a powerful tool in business, too, because people tend to mindlessly pick up their phone in the middle of business.

But I love it for families. Yeah, well, that's good. All right, I've got to ask you a question. Sure. Can we do white space and exercise at the same time? Yes. Yes, you can. So now I become the white space guru is exercise, is it the treadmill as it can't. If you think it's white space, it's your white space. When I'm out running, I will say one.

Even if I got music going on? Yeah. My mind is exploding in lights. It's great. I get my best thoughts. The only caveat would be if you're actually watching TV while you're exercising, there's something about the device use that would cancel it out, I think. good. But yeah. If you're eating at a restaurant and you're not reading a book, it can be white space. If you're walking and you're not chatting with a friend, it can be white space. We can have communal white space together. There's so many different ways to use the term and the tool. We like to be very careful and let people have all that freedom. What is your favorite, or a couple,

give me your favorite little white space techniques and things that you do, just you, just curious. So I like a tool called the Yellow List, and the Yellow List is a tool to reduce email. So email is the number one perpetrator of stealing people's white space, so people want to have less of it. The yellow list is a small document that you keep in your phone or computer, and you put the name on it of people you interact with frequently. So I would have one for you. Your name is at the top. When I'm about to send you an email, instead of sending you an email, I take one little second, I say, does this actually need to be an email? Is it time sensitive? Does it have an attachment? Or could I just put it on my yellow list. Put on yellow list. Yellow list accumulates. And then at some point I come to you, I say,

we need to have a 10-minute yellow list conversation. So all of that back and forth email that's not happening when I'm sending to you and you're responding to me, those arduous threads of silly long conversations that shouldn't even be conversations can be avoided by the use of that yellow list tool. Just one to throw out. That's really good. So I got to tell you, one of my favorite white space, I've never defined it this way, but this is what I do. I love a pencil. And a moleskin. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Me too. And sometimes I just stare at the blank page in a category that I'm white spacing on, for lack of a better phrase. Yes. And I find great freedom with the pencil. This is just what works for me, but I'm curious for you to analyze it for our listeners because I love that I can write anything down in that moment. And I don't have to think about it because I can erase it later. I can come back edit. I've never tried the pencil.

I'm a pen. I like a certain rolling nice. Well, yeah, it works for you. And that's the thing is those tactile appreciation that's had as a pencil, feel, the pen, the pad, you're already at a level of awareness that you can't be on a computer. And then a lot of things happen. This is why I think it's sad that children are being taught cursive anymore in schools, because there's actually data behind something that happens in the mind,

in the creative element of learning to write in a cursive manner. When you write block letters, the same thing doesn't happen. So our mind is aware of what kind of recording tools we're using and responds to them differently. That's brilliant. And that's why I like the pencil. Because for me, it frees me up to write whatever. Instead of thinking about it while I'm writing it. Just I get it out because I know that later, I erase it and edit it. So it's an editing function for me, which frees me up. Right. So while we're on phones, I'll give you another one that I like called fight Pavlov. So this is a technique that you use to strengthen your resolve of resisting your phone. So the Fight Pavlov technique is to wait until your phone audibly barks or bings or yips at you and to feel the Pavlovian impulse. to touch it immediately and choose not to. Maybe you will touch it three minutes later or five minutes later or an hour later, but to ride the arc of that craving and not touch it over and over and over

to develop that strength. Because a lot of times we are completely subject to the whim of the phone. Obviously, we all know this. We get a lot of dopamine from touching the phone, so it's kind of biological. It's beyond our control now. That fight Pavlov technique is very good for strengthening that resolve. Boy, I tell you, that's going to be a tough fight. It is a very tough fight. calling myself out on that one. Well, before we let you go, I want to give you the last word to encourage our listeners. Also, tell them how they can connect with you.

We are at whitestpaceatwork.com and always happy to entertain any conversation about thoughtfulness. All right, fun stuff. She is Juliet Fund, whitespace at work.com, the company, of course, WhiteSpace at Work. This is great, fascinating, I think very important discipline. Thank you. And a rhythm that we all need to adopt. So thank you for hanging out with us. Sure, it was great.

excited to have our senior vice president of business and leadership. Daniel Tarty back with us now. He's been on the podcast many, many times. And when it comes to entree leadership, what it's about, what it means, how it gets applied, nobody knows it better than Daniel Tarty. So we asked him to stop by and talk about a very, very big felt need that we hear from you, our audience, and we know that leaders universally struggle with. Here is my conversation with Daniel Tarty.

If you've been listening to this program for any amount of time, well, you know who he is. But he moved up the ladder. And Sarah Sloan has jumped in in his place and doing a great job as VP of Entree leadership. But he still hangs around and we love having him here. Daniel Tarty, welcome back. Thanks for having me. And I got to tell you, you started calling me way back the grand poobah. And now walking around in public, people go, oh, Daniel, you're the grand poobah.

Do they really? And I had no idea what a poobah was. I had to look it up. I thought it was like this jab. And it's actually kind of an endearing thing. Oh, well, first of all. Full disclaimer here. You and I are friends. No, I know we're friends, but I mean.

So it was always a term of honor. It was me having a little bit of fun. You know where it comes from, right? It's like royalty back in the king and pharaoh kind of days, and the Puba was the guy that he had his status. Yeah, you're the chief, man. Yeah, I don't know. I look at it as this chief. It's fun.

All right. So here we go. Time. So every leader. I don't care, Daniel, what industry, what role, what level on the ladder they're at. time is a fleeting thing. It's like we're constantly grasping for it. It's like a vapor. And especially for a lot of our entree audience who, many of them are chief everything officers, or they got a lot going on. The tyranny, the urgent, becomes a huge distraction.

Before they know it, they're feeling down. They're feeling behind. I didn't use my time wisely. Let's start with some of the things that lead to this problem. Okay. So in our minds, when we get started with anything, something we're passionate about the product that we want to launch, the service we want to provide. We dream it up in our minds and then we start messing with it. We get it out there and we sell it to people. We start making it and shipping it and we're just in the trenches of being an entrepreneur. And honestly, it's addicting.

It's a lot of fun. There's kind of this high that goes with being the person in the middle of something that's adding value, that's helping our customers. It's getting the team together. And we can have fun in that season. But typically what happens, Ken, is we look up and we go, oh, my gosh, I'm touching everything. Things only move when I'm there and when I'm not there, things start to falter. And that's not really a business because a business is something that you can step away from for a second and the machine keeps running, right? And so our job as business leaders is to build systems and to build teams that can automate all of these processes.

Early on, you can't automate it. Early on, you've got to do it all. But you got to migrate as a business leader from when I start, I'm doing everything, but I got to do it just long enough that I can start putting a team and a system in place that eventually I don't have to do anything. So I can do the next thing that we got to go face. Yeah, so I love that. So some of the traps or myths that you have outlined, I can fix it by calling a meeting, someone else will eventually notice the problem and fix it. I said it. So that means everybody must have heard it and understood it. And then I'll take care of it when I'm caught up. These are some traps that until you create what you just talked about can create this urgency all the time. And then it's just this cycle of activity, but not a cycle of efficiency. Well, let's take that last one. And I got to confess, guys, I have never felt caught up. Yeah, I'm going to say. Have you ever been like, okay, I'm good. I'm on top of everything. And even if you feel good in business, I mean, you've got your work life balance, your family and social life and all that kind of stuff. We're just never caught up. It's the nature of life that there's always more challenge. There's always more you got to get out there and kind of catch up with the next thing.

But in the effort that you're putting there, something else starts to fall off. So you got to give yourself a little bit of grace and, go, we're never going to be caught up. So quit obsessing about doing everything and be very selective about doing the right things. That's really where it starts as a decision to say, I really can't get to everything. So if I have to choose, let's make sure the things I'm doing are the best things where I'm going to make the highest contribution. Now, one of the things I admire most about you, A, because you're good at it. And B, I'm not wired this way. So I look at you and I just have all this, you know, I just am jealous of your ability to do this. You do it very well. You're very, very, very processed thinker and you kind of look at, okay, so you've got a problem like, I'm not going to

ever be caught up. I got a million things coming my way. You've got some questions that you employ. And you also teach our team. This is what I want our audience. So if you got pen and paper, you're in the gym, this is one of the things where you want to hop off the treadmill for a moment, start typing in the note section of your phone. Some key questions here that you use that help you not be completely victim or slave to all the work. and all the stuff coming at you. And what we call that is the tyranny of the urgent. Yes.

Whatever's urgent and in our face is always the thing we're tempted to just respond to because it's there. It's flashing at us. Think about your text messages throughout the day. Oh, gosh. Could you possibly get through the whole day, not answer any of your text messages, and people still live? Yes.

Yeah. Everybody's going to be fine. But because it buzzes, there's this hit of dopamine that says, get me, now, find me. Come here. Come here. I need you now, now, now. And we just get sucked in. And then while we're answering a text, we see a tweet come through.

And then all of a sudden we're on Twitter and we link to an article. And then we see while we're reading the article, this ad and we go, oh, that's cool. We click on that because they targeted us. Hello, these marketers know what they're doing. And then we're on this webpage for this thing buying something. And as we're buying it, we're trying to find the CVV code on our debit card. And it's like, how did I get? I just spent 30 minutes on something that was starting with a text.

And all of a sudden, I lost my time. I wasn't controlling my time. So I think the first question that I've got to ask when I'm doing anything is, does it have to be done? I'm always challenging, does this really matter? Could we just eliminate it? So that's question number one. Can I eliminate it? If I can eliminate it and I go, no, it matters to our business.

It is worthwhile activity. Can I automate it? We should never automate something, though, that we could eliminate. Right? That's silly. It's wasted effort. But then if I can automate it, then, okay, now it's taking care of itself. But if I can't automate it, well, can I delegate it?

Could somebody else do it? But don't delegate something that you can automate, okay? Because maybe you got your time back, but now you're wasting the time of somebody on your team because you could have automated this. And then I kind of go, okay, maybe I can delegate it, but is it really urgent? Does it need to be done right now or does it just feel like it's a fire? And we could wait and kind of solve this at a systems level or a root issue instead of just reacting to it with emotion. And then if it is urgent, maybe we deal with it. But if it's not urgent, but it's still important, well, then what's the best way to activate an approach to this where we get the right people in the room?

We come up with a plan. We put the plan on paper and then we start executing against the plan. And Ken, I got to tell you, probably four times out of five, it's the last thing on that list where we go, yeah, it's worth doing. We need to get the right people together. Let's address it, but it's not on fire. But our temptation is to treat everything like it's the first thing on the list where we go. it's urgent and it's important and it has to be done. But the truth is you start working through that list. A lot of stuff gets eliminated. This stuff gets automated. You'd be amazed with how much

time you get back in your life to work on the right things when you start to push things into those other systems. Yeah. I have to have a follow-up here because I think people have heard similar things like this before. But I want you to speak to what I think is below all this. And this is below the surface. And I'm going to call myself out, Daniel, to let you teach on this. So there certain people that if they text me, you're one of them. If you text me in the middle of day on a business item, I feel an urgency to get back to you. But there are other people who I don't work with, who are acquaintances. I'm thinking of somebody right now who texted me the other day. They had a question. It was not business related. And I didn't texting back until that evening.

I mean, didn't even touch it. So I let this dude sit there without a response from me until six or seven hours later. So here's my point. We already self-select a bit. Yes. So that's an acquaintance and it was not an urgent issue. But to your point, a lot of the text and emails we get during the day from our compatriots, people were working with colleagues, they're not urgent either yet we still feel a pressure. I guess I'm asking you, why do you think we feel this pressure to get back to everybody in a work sphere when in all reality, if we're honest with ourselves and step back, we can go, well, three of the 27 did need a response in a timely fashion. What's driving that?

Yeah, I think we feel pressure when we don't know very clearly in our mind the critical things that should trump that. So if I know exactly what's important for today and things that only I can do, and I'm all in focused on that, it's very easy in those moments to go, sorry, you can wait. Because if I let these things go, I'm going to disappoint everybody. The whole business is going to fall apart if I don't focus as the leader on these conversations with these people about these objectives. And so when I'm laser focused on that stuff and I know why it matters and I know how critical it is to the whole team's success, for me to stop in that moment, put that on pause and go, hey, I'm going to get back to you guys.

I'm going to go respond to this thing just because this guy thinks it's urgent. I'm stealing the opportunity from the whole team. I have a responsibility to say no to this guy at that point. But if I don't have these things set as their goals for the day or goals for the week or goals for the quarter, and if I haven't defined those in my mind where I can give myself permission to be what feels a little bit maybe rude or a little bit standoff, none of us want to be rude. But we have to give ourselves something that's bigger than what's urgent to keep us focused so that we can give ourselves permission to go, hey, I'll get back to that person. It'll be fine.

Before I let you go, you've got a great construct. I'll call it the rule of the top three. I'm making that up. I don't know if it's a rule or not, but it's certainly really a good construct. Share that with us. Rule of top three is as a leader, it's hard for me to keep in my mind

more than about three big rocks of this is what I'm really responsible for right now. So when you know your top three things that you're focused on for the day, for the week, for the quarter, everything else is just kind of noise. Some of it you do need to respond to. You can't just be so hardcore

that you're inaccessible as a leader. But most of the time, if you got three big things and you focus on those, the other stuff's going to take care of itself. And here's how I think about all that other stuff. It's like the dishes on the countertop in the kitchen. When the dishes are dirty, I put them in the dishwasher,

and then I wait. And when there's more dishes, I put them in the dishwasher. And it's not until the dishwasher's full that I actually take the time to put the soap and set a dishwasher, and I run the dishwasher, and they all get taken care of at once. And so throughout the day, I'm grabbing these tasks that are coming at me, and I'm putting them on my to-do list. I'm setting them aside for when I meet with this person,

we're going to talk about these things instead of me texting them, write them and interrupting them. If it can wait, stick it in the dishwasher. You don't run the dishwasher every time you have one dirty plate, but we act like that sometimes during the day with our time. So true. So how many more plates can we get into the dishwasher and go, we're going to run it once every night?

And then the next morning we unload it, and then we just do that every day. And so I see small business owners all the time. They're chasing their tails and they're responding and just reactive mode all over the place. get your top three things that you are going to spend your time on, put everything else in the dishwasher, run it once a day, and then come back to your big stuff. That's where you really make your highest contribution. Boy, that's good. And you know, I love that analogy that keeps playing out. You spend

all your time washing dishes. Yeah, that's right. And that's not what you're out there to do. That's not what you're here for. You're here to make a difference. You're here to follow your dreams. You're here to lift your team up and make a difference in the marketplace. Yeah, that's really good. Well, there you go. That's why I call him the Grand Poubal. He gets it. Really good stuff. Daniel Tarty, thanks for stopping by. Ken, thanks for having me.

Always fun. All right, folks, about ready to give you some free stuff from Entree Leadership. But before I do, I told you at the top of the episode that we are bringing you four additional episodes this week,

Tuesday through Friday. So if you're listening to this on Monday, you're going to get some great content live from our Entree Leadership Summit. Will and Tim and Eric and Chris and more people than I know are working hard to bring you content. straight from San Antonio right to your ears.

So we'd love for you to subscribe and you're going to get the episode automatically and then you can enjoy it at your leisure. We'd love for you to share it as well. We're so excited about this week. We want to give away the goodness to you. Speaking of giving you goodness, as I said, we're in San Antonio, Texas this week, over 2,000 liters packed in a room getting better. And, you know, I'm a man of the people.

I always have been, always will be. What does that mean? It means I'm always angling on your behalf. I lobby the team and will the producer has come through big time. We've got a summit swag bag, but we can't ship it to you, so we made it digital. You'll get a download of the book, Entree Leadership, which is the playbook of everything we do here. And you'll also get a PDF download of the Summit workbook. So think of all the great speakers that are there this week, from Alamalalli to Seth Godin to Dave Ramsey and beyond. You're going to get the summit workbook with the speaker's notes. And that is an absolute no-brainer for you. You definitely want to take us up on this offer.

You'll have their talking points so you can actually fill in the blanks and take away their great content. This is a terrific resource. So if you are subscribed and listening to each of these live from Summit episodes this week, this is for you. We want you to win. So take us up on this offer. Here's how you get it. Text Summit Show. That's one word smash together.

No space. Summit show. Text that to 33444. That's 33444. And speaking of free stuff, how about our friends from Infusion Soft with a great tool? They're giving you the personalized growth planner. So this will help you create a sales and marketing strategy for your small business. And we know that many times that can be daunting. That's why I love this resource. Marketing your business is more complex than it ever has been in 2018. So you can actually navigate all this complexity with a plan. And Infusionsoft brings you the plan. It's going to help you get more customers, grow your sales, and save time.

So go to infusionsoft.com slash get my planner. That's infusionsoft.com slash get my planner. Or you can get the link to this great resource in our show notes at entreleadership.com. All right. That's going to do it for this episode. But boy, oh boy, we're bringing you four more this week, live from our summit. It's going to be a great event. We're going to bring as much as we can to you.

So on behalf of Will the producer, Tim the engineer, and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.