EntreLeadership - #276: Can I Have Your Attention? with Curt Steinhorst

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

While it may not be possible to eliminate all the daily distractions (we’re looking at you, 24/7 emails, social media notifications, and nonstop text messages!) in our lives, best-selling author Curt Steinhorst says we can all become measurably more focused by being intentional about what we pay attention to. Tune in as Curt details the four elements that affect your focus and offers solutions that can boost productivity, efficiency and, ultimately, your bottom line. Ramsey Solutions Senior Vice President Daniel Tardy and Ramsey Personality Christy Wright also join us to discuss simple ways to handle everyday distractions. entreleadership.com/podcast Get a free chapter of the book: Can I Have Your Attention? A 7-Day Plan to Triple Your Productivity 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

The truth is digital is super awesome. It's just not super awesome being the method that we use for everything all the time. 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, for leaders. Thank you for joining the conversation. Here's what we've got coming up for you.

Kurt Steinhorst is the author of a book entitled, Can I Have Your Attention? Christy Wright, you know her well. She's the author of Business Boutique. She'll join us. And of course, we've got some great free resources. So all that coming to you. Now, Kurt Steinhorsd, love this book. As I said, it's entitled, Can I Have Your Attention?

Inspiring Better Work Habits, Focusing Your Team and Getting Stuff Done in the Constantly Connected Workplace. Now, this is really important stuff because Kurt has spent a long time in his career studying the impact of technology on human behavior. And here's the reality. We still don't really understand as leaders how much the ubiquitous nature. It's just everywhere. Technology's everywhere. How does that affect our human behavior? And then specifically, how does it affect our productivity, which then takes us to how does it affect our profits?

that's why this is important. So really interesting. I think you're going to enjoy it. Here is my conversation with Kurt Steinhorst. Let's dive right in. What is the problem? Paint the picture. Because I don't think anybody's going to be surprised

by what you're about to share with us. One of the challenges actually that any attempts to make a simple definition of the problem actually can feel good and can lead to some tips and tricks. And we'll say, I'm going to do better tomorrow. I'm going to throw away my phone. I'm going to make some really practical changes. and then we find ourselves back on our phones or back distracted a week later. So if I were to define it simply, I would say that technology grants us access to all of the awesome stuff that our brain tells us is important.

Yeah. And that's a challenge. It is. So let's stay here because I was reading through the book and preparing for this. And I was just telling the team before we walked in the studio, what I love about what you're doing here is you're addressing some societal norms. Like culture, our environment has dictated to. us things that we feel like we have to do. For instance, Eval, I'll just take on one of the things I hate most about technology. Email to me is such an irritant because there is a tyranny of the

urgent. Somewhere along the line, we just felt like, oh, I've got to answer all these emails in a timely fashion, or I'm rude, a jerk, lazy, poor worker. Yes or no? Isn't that what we're talking about? Yeah, and 86% of emails that we receive are not crucial to work in a given day. There's some cultural components for that and societal expectations. But I actually think one of the more interesting areas that we look at is it can get really frustrating. We'd say, oh, it's the phone that's the problem or it's that person that's the problem. Or if we're more honest at times, we're the problem. But I think it actually points us towards something and says, what is it saying about us? What is it saying about the world we're living in? What is it saying about the work that we do that the gap between where we want to be and what we're actually doing seems so far. Yeah. Well, why does it seem so far? What's going on? Well, first off, we actually are made to be distracted. I always say, well, is technology distracting us? And there's a lot of noise right now about the fact that the technology is being designed to keep us from being able to focus on what we're supposed to focus on. But even more fundamental, I would say that a lot of times we misunderstand what distraction is. distraction in many ways is our curiosity that fundamentally our attention has been designed, wired to be curious. My son, 18 months old, he didn't have to be taught to be curious. And the only

way to be curious is if we look at new things. Yeah. And so that's very, very important. Yet here we are trying to beat the curiosity out of our kids. Don't get me started here. You cut me off if I go too much further. Our audience knows I'm very, very passionate about this. As we know from research, University of Michigan, that toddlers are asking hundreds of questions a day. To your point, nobody's teaching your little dude to ask questions. He's trying to get to the bottom of things, period. So stay here with us. We are created to be distracted, right, because of curiosity. So what do we need to take here? Fundamentally, this is really beautiful. It sets up our entire conversation. What's good distraction versus bad distraction? Where does the natural curiosity

begin to hamper us? I think one of the fundamental challenges we have to ask ourselves is what are we aiming towards? And right now, the model that we are using as we think about what it looks like to work, as business owners,

what it would be to be the best business owner possible, is almost as if we could just be a machine. The truth is that our brain has a right hemisphere that is perfectly attuned to zoom out and experience the world and see all the new stuff in a left hemisphere that's designed to throw out, anything new and anything unfamiliar and zoom only in on the things that are predictable and repeatable

and that's how we master stuff. What I would say is we definitely need to rethink what we're allowing to distract us and the volume that's coming at us, but we also need to rethink whether we're actually trying to become more like a machine, which we're never going to be in order to live in a world that actually needs us to be more human than ever. Right. So am I hearing you say we need to be intentional about our distractions, right? You got a stat in here. I was reading Facebook's busy hours are in the middle of the workday. Now that makes HR people and managers and leaders, you know, get indigestion, but that speaks to what you just talked about. At some point, the brain needs a break. That's right. We are not ever going to be good at staring at a screen

all day long. Yeah. And not just that, we're not going to be good at trying to manage 40 different things because we're going to flip between one thing and another and another thing and another thing. That doesn't mean we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. But it does mean when we try to add big tasks that are totally separate in terms of the domain, what we'll end up doing is we'll do them all slower. The quality of the work goes way down. And so we give ourselves this idea that we need to juggle and we just constantly keep juggling. And then in the process, we actually don't actually know what is important. And at its core, attention is what matters. It's what matters. So now I want to kind of take us into the book. Obviously, we've talked a little bit about some of the philosophy and the challenge that we're all facing.

Summarize the book. Then I want to dive into some chapters. So what now that we've got a good sense of the problem, nobody's shocked by what you just said. What do you attempt to do here for the reader? Yeah. So the very first part is what everyone is already saying, which is we're distracted. Yeah, right. And, you know, sure, we got to know that it's worse than we probably realize. But then we have to realize it's not what we think it is. It's not text fault. It's not a certain generation. It's not an individual person's fault. It's actually a group thing. Like all the work that we do is all about understanding how distraction, productivity isn't personal. Self-help might say we can do it alone, but it's actually like you can be the most focused person in the world. If you're in a group of people that are interrupted and distracted, you're going to be distracted. And so then the book

unfolds by looking at every major sphere of life and of work that impacts whether we focus or are distracted. So that would be where you introduce focus-wise. That's right. Give us that phrase, set us up, because you really do use that. It becomes really a foundational phrase in the book. One of the big problems is we think we want to master our attention, but we don't know what it is. Focus is where our intention and attention collide, right? And so being focus-wise is to say, you're not going to be a machine. We live in a world that is filled with distractions. And the question becomes, how do we accumulate wisdom about how we're playing? spending our attention in the work we do and in the lives that we live in every other aspect.

Yeah. All right. So I want to go right to section two, chapter six of the book. If you're taking book notes, page 41, four elements of focus. Break down those four elements, because I think this is really helpful. The four elements we talk about are energy, meaning that because we're made for exploration and to be curious, that means that when we try to not be curious, zoom in, it's really exhausting. Then our, environment, the space we occupy, where we are shapes what we pay attention to. We pay money to go to a movie theater because that room tells us to focus a certain direction. And so our space shapes what we pay attention to. I can't get work done as I have the TV on and my kids

are screaming and how come I can't lock in? And then number three is our experience, our past. So the decisions we've made in the past shape what we attend to. We at some point said there's a million things we can look at, and most of them I don't even see. The reason I don't see them is because it's already been assessed and no one cares. Doesn't matter. And then the last one is our emotion. It's amazing how we can be doing something that would be miserable, but because we know it matters and we care about it, we'll actually find ourselves pushing through. Yeah. I want to go back into experience because you just triggered something there. I think that's really interesting. And this is actually from the book,

you write what you have focused on is what you will focus on. So the idea that we've got all these past experiences, I certainly think of this from a negative positive. That's what my brain is naturally going to. And I think that that's huge, but take us a little deeper there because I want leaders to, for just a few moments, self-assess, and then maybe have a construct for how they can assess their team. Yeah. The experience is this tapestry of stuff. that's just overlaid on ourselves and our team that could really be the biggest hamper to our focus. Yeah. Put simply, it's not the things that you are aware of. It's the things you don't even see. That's right. You're in default mode now. That's right. Incidentally, I will say about this, though,

it is what you can't see. But I think for a lot of business owners today, in the world where we've gone from like incremental exploration to just infinite, always available, often what hampers us is the awareness that there's got to be something out there. Like, FOMO for a teenager might be not on a vacation on the beach, but FOMO for a business owner, that's a constant reminder of what could be looming that they should be doing better. So with that said, there's a few things that we can actually do to help this situation. We can hire for it. This is why we hire someone to say, we use the label, attentional diversity, that we want to

hire people whose natural lens looks very different through which they see and they don't see. All of a sudden, we can offload rather than worry because we know someone else can see what's on the horizon. It's one of the big ways that we do it. But the last thing I would say in this category is as we get older, the left hemisphere of our attention, which is that focused, familiar, actually starts to take control. And that means we punt that which is unfamiliar. But like to start a business to succeed to grow, it involves the taking of the new and the reassessment and the change. So we have to be very aware that when we throw out all that is unfamiliar, we are sure that the results will only at best be what they have been.

Interesting. But you'd write in the book on this particular subject that fighting that brains, proclivity to kind of jump, okay, I've been on this project and now I'm jumping off. That might be an experience issue where you've done things in the past. But to develop a long-term kind of task habit, speak to that, because I think that'll help a lot of people as well. Yeah. So first, I should say, I have 80.

So there's something like you. So do why, actually. I mean, this is no joke. Yeah. Yeah. Which, by the way, is really interesting because you hear a lot of people that are entrepreneurs and in the spaces that we're in are people with ADD. Well, it's because we've got to actually enjoy that and appreciate that and say that's valuable because especially as machine learning takes over the efficient things, we're not going to be doing well anyways. That's right. The good news is habits can either be really hard or they can be really small. And for us, that's really good. Rather than say, I am looking at fantasy sports, fantasy football, it's a Tuesday, it's a waiver-wired day. And I'm a terrible human, so I'm never going to do that again. Right. Like, I'm just not going to do it at my desk right here for the next week. Right. Because now what's happening is my brain has cues when I walk into this space. And a week later, it doesn't naturally tell me that what I should do is I should check fantasy.

So we make little decisions rather than big ones to say we're going to set the space and a location to align with the experience. Love that. You talk in Section 3 about FocusWise space. Again, you mentioned earlier the idea of a movie theater. I thought that was a great example that when you walk in, it's very obvious. You'd have to be a complete and utter moron to not know why are we in this room. So I'm going to move past it because we don't have time to get to all of this. Then you go into Section 4, which is Focus Wise Technology.

So much here, but this is so vitally important. We touched on it just a bit when we started. What are you teaching us here? Focus wise technology. What's it look like? We're teaching that technology isn't the problem. That's right. It's a tool.

And actually, we need to start by realizing that we want technology to be a solution when it's actually just a tool. And often we say, we need to change this. It's never going to solve all the problems. That's right. It's a tool that we want to use. And the question becomes, how do we make decisions about the technology we're using? I'm a product of the 80s. And in the 80s, we always ate cereal with all the sugar in the world for breakfast.

It's like what we ate was the best. Captain Crunch, buddy. That's the best. Coco puffs. There you got chocolate milk at the best. But we don't eat that anymore because we finally got smarter. We realized like all the sugar in the world isn't good for a kid with ADD, right? And the same goes with technology that we now have access to all the stuff, but we can make better decisions about how we set up our technology and to facilitate focus and more of what we want and to eliminate from us the things we don't do well anyways.

Yeah. Let's skip forward to focus-wise communication because this is huge. You have three chapters in this, just giving folks a great summer because I think this is such a great read. Can you hear me now? Chapter 14, Chapter 15, digital communication, email messaging and everything in between, and then Chapter 16, face-to-face in a Facebook world. I want to camp out here because I think we preach community so much here in Entree leadership. And I'm thinking about leaders right now who, A, want to be more focused, B, want a team that is more focused in a healthy ways we're discussing here. Let me tee up just to give us summaries of each of these chapters. I think they're really good. Can you hear me now? The volume of digital communication is insurmountable.

Yeah. It's almost turned into white noise. That's right. It is. It is white noise. And actually what's interesting is everyone thinks we have an email problem, which we do. Yeah. And email is like plain hot potato. I get a burden when I receive it and I get a relief when I send it. And then it speed it up. It flips back and and forth. But then we actually go to messaging software that's supposed to solve the problems of email. And we often on our team would make the joke that slack is crack. It can be very valuable. But But the solution is we've got to lower the barrier so more people can communicate all day long through digital channels. And the truth is digital is super awesome. It's just not super awesome being the method that we use for everything all the time.

We have to know what channels we're trying to use for what types of communication. You know, it's supposed to, again, make things more efficient, but it actually is robbing people of their productivity because it seems to me that the things we do on Slack and email, could be solved in a regular meeting that may only happen once a week. How do we filter what could be solved in a face-to-face versus I'm creating more work for everybody by sending 17 emails? Yes. And why don't you see me on all of them? That's exactly right, yes.

So what you've done a really good job of articulating is that it's actually not going to be a tech solution that will solve it. It has to be a cultural solution. Ah, good. So attention and the way we allocate our attention was never an individual endeavor. It's always been from the time we're born until the time we die, we're social, our attention is directed by other people, starting with our parents and all the way growing up. And so in this case, we have to make very explicit, intentional, and agreed upon rules that dictate how we communicate with each other. We talk about everything. We communicate about everything except for how we want to communicate with each other.

And so, you know, if you want a really practical way, how do we reduce the volume? Number one, we've got to get together and say, when do people not have to be available? What are the expectations? And number two, what channel are we going to use for the emergencies? Because if all the channels are available and we feel like the emergency could come across any channel, we're going to be available on all of them. But if we say, hey, like my team, phone calls, because no one calls anymore, you're like four calls a day. A phone call means I actually got to stop what I'm doing and deal with it. Otherwise, now I'm not obligated because it's not an emergency whenever I get it. Yeah, that's good. So phone calls are the emergency channel for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but see,

this brings up a good point. I love this. I love stepping into this tension here. What happens when people violate what's really an emergency? You've got to have enough guts to go, hey, appreciate you, love you. Got you an answer this time. By the way, that's not an emergency. That would be my approach. What say you? Totally. Well, the good news is that's what bosses are for. Yeah. Bosses are for that. And I think one of the big challenges here is actually, it's not just that we're social and that we have communication problems. It's that we have different Social spheres, like community is really important here. Well, a community is a place where people say we agree on what matters.

Like, we agree on what deserves our attention. Well, now you've got the committee you're on a fundraiser who says this is what matters. You have the client who says this is what matters. You've got 30 of them hitting you. And so I think at some point you have to ask what spheres, what groups actually matter to me. And then in those groups make decisions that say, when are we going to actually be fully available? And when are we going to not be available to one another? I know someone are going, okay, Kurt, I agree.

You can. Great. Appreciate the conversation. It's therapeutic. How do I change this? I mean, that's my question. On their behalf, is it worthwhile? I'm going to go ahead and say yes before you even hear the question. All right. A favorite kind of question. I know, I know, right? No pressure at all. I'm fine with disagreement. But I think it's worth having an all hands-on deck meeting. Oh, yeah. After leadership has had a chance to get some feedback, I just want you to just prescribe, if you will. I don't care if it's a company of four or a company of 40 or 400. Yeah. At some point, don't you have to say, hey, this is our recommended rules of engagement on all of this stuff based on feedback?

I mean, how do you truly reboot? So, yes. See, I knew it was yes. The short and simple is the volume of the messages that you receive, regardless of where you are, come from a very small number of people. and then we complain about the hundreds of others that give us occasional messages. And so we have to get on the same page explicitly. These are the rules of engagement for the key stakeholders. That is absolutely.

And that's technology plus meetings? It's all of the above. Yeah, it's everything. And actually, maybe before you even asked channels in availability, what are our biggest communication challenges? Probably be a good place to start in terms of questions. Yeah. And we're talking about what happens when this would take place?

What's the change look like? The good news is when you start to dissect it, you realize that, oh, wow, that which feels overwhelming actually can have some really short and simple solutions. We worked with an asset management company publicly traded. They live and die by information access as quick as possible, but the problem is they could die by it because there's technology that can make this better. And by setting these simple rules, we did an audit three months later. and the clearest place that we saw massive advantages was in the engagement levels, that people were happier at work because when you have so much that no one can manage, what ends up happening is everyone is aware that they're not doing enough.

There's no potential for victory. This is one of the unique challenges and facets that leaders today have that have never been the case in the past. That's an opportunity. Yeah, I want to go to Section 7, which is focus-wise leadership, because we touched on leadership, the first filter. Talk to us about that. Our attention is being driven by something that we know is important. The biggest cause of distraction in today's workplace, according to employees, we did a recent survey on this, is their boss. And so the first filter is the primary filter that we give our whole team that says, before we ask, should I do this, should I not, do I need to reply to this, do I not? We put it through a simple filter that says, this tells me if it matters. And if it doesn't,

hit that, then it goes away without me having to make an extra decision. Let's go back to that survey result. That was interesting. How? What are you seeing? Why and how are the leaders distracting the workers? You know, it's funny because the short and simple is people can send an email. And if I have a question that I'm in charge, your job is to fix my problems, then I'm going to send it to you rather than have to look for it wherever I have something. And leaders have 100 things coming to them. So we're going to pass it on down. But I think when we pull back, what we're actually talking about taking place is that we share demands as leaders without sharing intention and values and purpose behind it. It's not a distraction for an employee to receive a new task from a manager if the employee and the manager both know where it fits in the context of work.

It's when the employee says, I was trying to finish this job that I had and you just threw this at me. And then you asked me about this. And then you said this. And I can't get this one thing that's my job. And you just expect that I would be able to do it all at once. And so that's where we have a real challenge. So it's a cycle. Oh, yeah.

And so what do they do? They go watch a funny cat video on YouTube. Right. Because they're just like, I need a break. Yep. That's right. Interesting. Well, you talked about that in Chapter 23, competing with Zuckerberg and really

taking on social media. We've kind of talked about that. But I want to come at it a different way. If leaders acknowledge what you've been saying, if they acknowledge what you write about in this book. And I don't know how they can't. The data is there. It's indisputable. And what does that say about what we need to do in releasing people from eight hours a day, nose to the grindstone. It's not realistic. It's not happening. The data says it.

Just for fun, based on what you know, create a new eight hour a day. Okay. So I'm going to push back a little bit. Well, fine. That's great. But it's a great practice. But one of the big challenges is like we live in a world that's It's super complex. And so there's like different types of people enroll. We worked with a semiconductor company that their subject matter experts were getting like 30 minutes a day to do the work because they're having to answer questions. Well, for them, we need to hire someone who could actually answer all those questions, which means that person was super distracted all day long.

So everyone's different. But with that said, one, punt the eight-hour workday as a simple idea. Work-life balance in general is based on a world where after we had one cohesive community, when the car came, in, we have a work community and a home community. We've got two of them. We've got to balance those two. Well, now we got 30. Name an interest you have. You probably have an online community for it, right? So that's not realistic. But what we can do is we can say we're going to know the type of work. We're going to gather the types of work that are most mentally strenuous, challenging, that actually create and satiate our desire for curiosity. We're going to do those

early. We're going to do those in places that aren't distracted, meaning they're going to be like, we call them vaults, walls, headphones, let people get blocked out. And then we're going to have space where we do the stuff that's collaborative as we hit that lull of the day in the afternoon where all of us wish there was a nap pad like we could sleep. We'll do group meetings that are in motion and we're walking and we're outside. And then we end the day by actually reminding ourselves what we accomplished so we can feel like we're successful rather than feel like that we're failures. And then we'll start the next day by doing this soon. Yeah, love it, love it, love it. So much here. What would you say to leaders who are thinking, all right, I'm going to dive into this book,

and I'm going to apply it in my life and in my office. How do they go about doing this? What do you want them to take away? Number one, we live in a unique moment in history. No one should have to choose between finishing their taxes for the business or reviewing taxes and watching a funny cat video on YouTube. That's like a totally unreasonable proposition. It's not fair. And so it's time for us not to feel guilty that we're not perfectly focused. It's time for us not to feel like the expectations we have for our employees or that they would never be distracted. It's instead that we want to ask, how do I make everything in my space and the technology and our communication? align so that our attention resources that are driving business are moving towards the things that will actually make a big difference on the bottom line, which means blocking out a lot of

background noise to get focused so that we can drive forward. Yeah. Good stuff. Kurt, love the book, love the topic. I think it's much needed. Thanks for coming in and talk with our team earlier today and then hanging out with us in studio. We're better for it. Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Kurt Steinhorse for hanging out with us. Again, the book is, can I have your attention? I highly recommend it. I think it'll be a great read for you. Let me tell you what else I recommend. Entree leadership's got a great tool. It's one of our most popular resources we've ever given out on this program. It's called Triple Your Productivity.

So who doesn't want to do that? There's nothing else to say. Okay, here's how you get it. Text episode 276. That's episode and then the numbers, 276. Text episode 276 to 33444. That's 3344. And as you're using this and you start to get some breakthrough on productivity,

Will the producer is so bored, he wants to look at what your week looks like. No, we really want to see how you're using it and what the breakthroughs are, and we will share it with your permission with our listeners. You can email it to podcast at entreleadership.com. That's podcast at entreleadership.com. Coming up next, Christy Wright, my fellow Ramsey personality, joined us recently in studio with Daniel Tarty. Daniel and Christy talk about how to deal with distractions.

Good distractions? Bad distractions. At home and at work. Here is Christy Wright and Daniel Tarty. Well, today we're talking about distractions. Yeah. Certainly that's true. This is a good topic for you and I.

We can get distracted. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're going to get distracted before this conversation's finished. But we've seen this, Christy, for years and years. We've worked with small business leaders and really just across the whole spectrum of humans. Having focus and intentionality, we know that is required for success. And we also know that we live in a world where we're just inundated with distractions. And so I think it's just this constant thing.

I know in my experience, it's like, I know I have goals, I know I have priorities. And I can even put them on paper and then I head off towards them and then I look up in two weeks and I'm veering off the path. So what's going on there? How do we approach this whole idea of having distractions? Well, I think a lot of times we get distracted and then we get down in ourselves. And we think, like, oh, I've done something wrong. I didn't meet my goal, especially entrepreneurs. And you and I are wired this way where we're so goal driven that if we fall short

of the goal, then we just beat ourselves up and get really discouraged. But I think there's a wide range of distractions that we experience, and they're not all the same. So I'll give you a really practical example. There are some distractions that you can control and change and fix and habits. And there are some that you can't control. So real true story, last night, my baby Conley, who is a year and a half old, woke up screaming crying at 1.30 in the morning. I went in, I rocked him. He was having nightmares. I got him back down. Got back in bed. I hadn't fallen asleep yet. Maybe 15 minutes goes by. My son Carter starts screaming crying. This doesn't happen that often, but last night, both of them are having fits. So I go in and he's mad. He doesn't have the right

stuffed animals. So I give him his stuffed animals, get all that taken care of, go back to my bed. Couldn't fall back asleep. And so it's four in the morning. Now, I had planned, I had a goal to get up and work out. And I had a goal. I had my stuff set out, just like I teach people who had my running shorts, everything set out. And by 445, I still hadn't fallen asleep, but I was getting really close. And I made the commitment. I was like, if I fall asleep, I'm not going to get up and run. Because that's a distraction, I couldn't help. And I don't want to start my day. You're Friday. At 1.30 in the morning. Like, if I can get another hour, I need that hour more than I need that run. Now, I didn't just get off track there. It was my children that woke me up in the night.

I'm a mom. I had to take care of that. Now, you contrast that was something where, let's say, I have a goal to clean my house or get something organized, get my office organized. And I get on this rabbit trail of going through old fires. Oh, here's some old pictures. And what if I made a photo album? And so that's when I can stop me. Like, this is not the most important thing. I'm not making a scrapbook right now. Get back to the task at hand, which is organizing my office or whatever. So some we can control and some we can't. And I think we need to differentiate if we're going to make life change and not get down on ourselves when there's things we can't help. Like kids. Makes a lot of sense. Well, I want to come back to this situation of kids waking up in the

the night because I know for myself, if there's subjectivity in me interpreting whether it's a legit distraction or not, a lot of times I can turn, in that case, it's very legitimate. You need sleep as much as you need to work out to be healthy and sustainable. But I know a lot of times I'll have that goal and it won't be quite as extreme of a situation as that. Maybe I stayed up just a little bit too late and I'm only getting seven hours of sleep instead of eight. But then I turn that into an excuse, but I justify it in my mind as, well, that was a distraction. So how do you avoid give myself excuses all the time to not do this thing that if I have a goal of working out to stick with that and have some level of consistency. And I could have distractions all the time in

theory, right? So how do you kind of keep the course? I think it's like, let's stick with this example of working out and like staying up late or something like that. I think there's going to always be a great area. There's a clear line where it's like if we get to bed by 9 p.m. we can do it. If we're up past 2 a.m., you shouldn't do it. But in that middle is the great area. It's like, do you want to push through? And, you know, one of the things that I kind of hold myself a accountable to is, which result am I going to be more satisfied with, more proud of, more happy that I made that choice, and almost future thinking. And that's hard to do in the moment, because in the moment, you're tired or wanting to make excuses and give up and that type of thing, but you never

regret a workout. You always regret those you didn't do. And I think when you start to look at it through the lens of, which will I regret more, not working out or working out, or launching that product or not launching that product, or hiring that person or not hiring them, or whatever the thing is in your business. When you look at it through that lens of kind of future thinking, it helps you make a better decision in the moment. You know, you told me something like a year ago, let's not make a permanent decision based on a temporary problem. And on a micro level, we're saying the same thing. Oh, well, I guess I didn't get an extra 30 minutes. I guess I can't do it. Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. You can push through that and just having that discernment in the moment. No doubt.

I know one of your tools is to just have a plan on paper, have things written down at the idea of journaling or goal setting and just doing it in writing. Do you do that all the time or is it do on a quarterly basis? What's kind of your method to make sure you don't lose sight and you've got kind of your goals stay in front of you? I definitely write down my goals and I assess them each season. So like fall, spring, and summer, kind of my main seasons that I, how I handle things from the business side, but also from the family side. But it's funny because I think that what we need to work on as individuals, as business leaders, as entrepreneurs, really depends on the areas in which we're weak. So you don't have to tell me to be a driver. Like, that's just what I

do as natural as breathing. You do have to tell me to slow down sometimes. And I love the verse in the Bible that says, he makes me lie down in green pastures. And the key word there is makes me. He has to make me lie down sometimes. Slow down children. Yeah. And so sometimes my goals look like, spend at least an hour of quality time with your kids every day this week. And that's a goal. Now, that's not a really hard driving metric of success in the business, but for that summer season or every Friday afternoon we're going to go to the pool. And I make a goal of that because when I write it down and I set a goal, I set my intention there, and then I'm much more likely to follow it through. But I think we set goals in business, or even in fitness or even in finances, but we don't set

family goals or rest goals or hobby recreation goals. And so those things never happen. And then we end up burn out and we end up unhappy and we're like, man, I haven't seen my kids in a while. Well, it's just because we didn't set a goal and, to your point, write it down. So I think it's important to write those things down and set your intention there in all those areas, not just the obvious ones like money or business. So true. We agree. But, but. But for a second, talk to this business owner who's going, hey, that sounds nice, Christy. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to take my kids to the pool Friday afternoon.

Yeah. But if you were in my world, you would understand I'm the salesperson. I'm the one opening the shop in the morning. I'm sweeping the floors. That's right. My best person just quit. I've got to work Friday afternoon just to keep the lights on. I'm in survival mode.

How do I give myself permission to have a life when I've got to get this business moving forward? And right now, I don't feel like we're moving forward. We're going to be stuck if I don't show up 80 hours a week and pour my entire life into this thing. I mean, really? Sure. Take my kids to the pool in this scenario. So there's two parts to this.

Number one, when you are in either startup mode or some type of survival season, which is reality for a lot of people for different seasons, my advice would be to focus on quality over quantity. So maybe you only get 30 minutes with your kids a day. Maybe only 30 minutes a couple times a week during that season. But you focus on quality of quantity. You're going for a walk. You're going to the playground. and you're engaging with them.

You're making eye contact. You know, I didn't see my mom a lot growing up. She ran a small business and she worked all the time. I spent more time at our cake shop than with my own friends. But the times that we were together, it was quality time. So I would as a child or even as a parent rather have two hours of quality time where we're engaged than eight hours all day where everyone's staring at a phone or TV. How do you define quality time?

Where you're engaged. And that could be, you know, making eye contact. So no iPhones in the middle of the phone. activity. Yeah, and even TV, like, I don't hate TV, but if you're in survival mode, do you want to spend the few minutes you have with everybody staring at a screen? Like, I want to look at the person. Sometimes that means putting screens away. Sometimes it means just getting outside. When you get outside, you do new fun things. You're active. Your endorphins start going, like your energy is up, go for a walk. The other day, I was just being silly with my boys,

and I'm very playful anyway as a mom. And so my son Conley had gotten all the mixing bowls out, his favorite things to do, just make a huge giant mess in the kitchen. So I was like, all right, everybody pick a bowl. We're doing Olympic mixing bowl races. And Carter got in one calling one, and I started racing them across the kitchen. That's quality time. That's funny. Those are stories they're going to tell and memories that are going to have where we didn't sit down and watch another episode of Mickey Mouse.

So I think the quality is a big piece of this during the survival season. I also want to challenge them, it should be a season. You should not be five years of survival. So the quality is a really big piece of that. The only other thing I would say is figure out what you can let go. Like, as a mom, I have things that are really important to me. Engaging with my kids, top of the list. Picking up toys in the bonus room?

It's not. It's not. That doesn't have to happen. They're going to get them out the next day. So any day, anytime that anyone comes to my house, the bonus room is a hot mess. And that's something I'm willing to let go. Because if I only have so many hours in a day, I'm not going to spend them putting toys away. I'm going to spend them doing mixing bowl races.

I love it. And so even in your business, what are you willing to let go? There are some things you have to do and some that you've got to be willing to let go. in that survival season. This is fantastic. So I'm really hearing three key things. One is, you know, challenge whether you actually need to do it or not. Right. Does it have to be done? Two, if I've only got limited time with family and life balance kind of stuff, make sure that it's quality time, not just I'm kind of going through the motions or turning on the TV. And then, you know, the third piece of that is you're really doing it for season. It's not a long term. Maybe it's a two-year

thing and you tell the family, hey, we're in this together because we're going to launch this. And then eventually you're going to get out of that. that season, but I know as well as you do, some people stay in that season indefinitely. They think it's going to be a season. They don't. So how do you hold yourself accountable to, I'm going to transition out of this crazy survival zone at this date? How do you actually make progress to making that transition? So it's something we talk about a lot in Entre leadership and Dave talks about. I know you talk about if you say, okay, in two years I want to be here, three years I want to be here, whatever the timeline is, then you back out of that and you say,

what has to be true today? Well, if I want to have five new team members, by the end of the year, then right now I need to start identifying what are the KRAs, what are the roles they're going to play, how are they going to produce ROI for me? How long does it take me to interview? You begin to timeline this out and map it out because if not, what's going to happen is it's December 1st and you're like, I was supposed to have five, do 10 members. I guess I'll go scramble and find some warm bodies and then that doesn't work out. So it really is just the, what we're talking about, the strategy and the planning ahead where you say, what has to be true today to get me there. So like, 2017, the spring, my husband and I sat down, even with Dave and Suzanne and everyone

on the leadership mapping out the book tour. Here are the expectations. Here's how we're going to be all in, heads down. I'm going to be on the road for two and a half weeks. Here's the travel and media leading up to it. And my husband and I were on the same page. Yes, this is the childcare we've got. This is the help we've got. Here's our plan. At the end of that season, I spent a lot of time at home. I hung out with my kids. Matt had an end in sight. And if your family doesn't have a end inside. Not only is it hard on you, it's really hard on them. They're like, oh, it's another late night at the office. It's another missed holiday. It's another missed holiday. It's another missed birthday. They start to lose hope that it's ever going to be different. So they can see

a finish line with you. That's right. It's for you and for them to say, okay, here's what we're working toward to get there. Wow. And why it matters. I love this. Well, all these things you're talking about having a plan, communicating with the right people, communicating with your family. It's hard to do those on the fly. So I know that you have to be able to retreat and actually think and kind of get above all of that stuff. So talk about the importance of solitude. and being alone and having the space to actually do some of that thinking and planning. Yeah, you know, I'm 100% eye on the disc, and I used to think that I hated alone time because I had a lot of it before I got married and before kids, and I was an only child,

so I was like, I hate me alone. I just always want to be around people. I get my energy from people. And then I had kids, and I'm never alone. And I'm like, oh, long time, please. But it's amazing how when we are in that survival mode or we're treading water and we're just running so hard, you can't think. You're just doing. You're just doing. You're reacting. You're making decisions. You're not thinking ahead. And if you don't, it's spent, even if it's 30 minutes a week, you wake up at 5 or 5.30 before you start your day to dedicate that time, you will have so much more clarity and so much more sense of peace about the right decisions and where you're going as a leader through your organization. You can't have that clarity in the chaos. And most of our businesses all day every day with people and interacting, being busy, are kind of chaotic. And that's the fun. We love. We love. We get the energy from that. I love it. But that's not where the clarity of where you need to go is going to come from. It only comes from being alone. My best content comes when I go to the coffee shop and I sit down with the computer and I put my noise canceling headphones on and I write my best ideas. You know, I'll start shooting emails. What if we did this? What if we did this? So it's not just writing time. It's just strategy time. And that only comes from getting alone and getting out of it. The key is you have a space, you have an environment, you have time on the calendar. You know, I've often wondered, I used to not be a morning person. And I started

kind of hitting my plateau and my performance, and I realize I got to get up early to have that time in the morning and start my day right, have some quiet time and space to think. So do you find that a lot of leaders, whether it's by nature or intentionality that they become mourning people, is there something like getting up early and having that time before the day starts? For sure. And I will say, I am admittedly not a morning person either. Like, I am a night owl. I would rather write until two in the morning at night. I love the night. But there is research upon research upon research that highly successful leaders, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are all mourning people. And even if they're not wired that way, they choose to be that way. Because it's this

time that you can steal just for yourself that you can do at no other point in the day. So it's a gift available for you. All you have to do is take it. So talk to that guy or lady listening who's, you know, maybe they're going, Christy look, I'm doing all this. I'm getting up early. I'm driving our business forward. I'm trying to carve out the time for the family. and be quality over quantity, maybe in the season, but I'm still exhausted. Yeah. And I'm feeling stuck, and I'm feeling, frankly, I'm feeling really distracted. Yeah.

Are there any practical things you would encourage that person with to kind of disrupt your pattern and get above it all just to go get some oxygen? So one of the things that I think we're guilty of, and I'll speak for myself. I'm guilty of. I just continue to add more and more things to my plate and I never assess what needs to be taken off. I just keep adding to. And we do that. A lot of times as business, oh, I'll take that on. We'll start this new initiative.

We'll hire this new people. And hiring people takes work. the way, and intention and training. And so instead, I would encourage them to look at their calendar, look at their list of responsibilities, however you want to approach it, and find, set a number, maybe that's 20%, maybe it's 30%, but an aggressive number where you say, I'm going to cut out this percentage of things. Cut it out. Because I'd be willing to bet, like, when you purge your clothes every season, there's stuff you haven't dealt with. That doesn't need to be there. Haven't worn it in years, but it's still in the closet. Another silly example. My husband and when we

planned our wedding, our wedding planner said, okay, here's your budget and here's the amount of people you've invited. These don't match. Cut 10% from each category, 10% of your family, his family, friends, work people. So it's 10% across the board. And it was this very diplomatic way to get it under budget. But what if you did that with your calendar? And you said, I'm going to cut 10%. I'm going to cut 10% of the stuff that's here. I know you have 10% or 20% of the stuff. You don't really need to be doing. And when you carve out that margin, what's going to happen is you're not only going to be more rested and more energetic and less stressed because you're not running ragged, but you free up time to put new things in there that maybe actually give you energy.

You know what energizes you, but if you don't have things on your schedule that energize you, you only have things that deplete you, of course you're going to be worn out. So I would approach it from pick a number, 25%. That would be my challenge. 25% go through your calendar and cut out 25% of the stuff that's there. It may be scrolling Facebook and watching TV. That's easy cut. Yeah, sure.

And then instead you fill that with exercise, playing with my time. kids and those things give me energy and you'll find more fulfillment even if you have the exact same amount of hours you're using them differently. I love that. You know, I've done this and it's a little scary because even when it's not Facebook and things that are more trivial, I look at my calendar and there's meetings that I'm in and I learned that I'm a little bit of a narcissist. I think if I'm not in that meeting, the works. It can't get that right. When I purge or I go out of town for a trip and work gets done without me, it's like, oh, how did that happen? People stepped up to the plate. Other people can do it too. I could have been delegating a long.

time ago and it's been better for them and for me. So sometimes as leaders, we just got to go, there's a reason we have a team. That's right. You don't want to give them too much rope that they fail and they don't have the training and they're not equipped. But a lot of times we hang on too long out of kind of being controlled freak. For sure. You know, someone like me. For sure. But I think if we can start to see the reward and the benefit of giving some of that rope out, like, oh, here are all the things we're going to gain. And you focus on the reward, not just the fear and the sacrifice and say, okay, it's worth it for me to give this up so that I can do this thing over here. And then you have a lot more freedom, a lot more flexibility, a lot more satisfaction

with how you're using your time. Because again, it's the same amount of hours, but you're using it so differently. A lot more satisfaction. These have been incredible insights. Christy, before you go, any final thoughts for somebody listening, words of encouragement to somebody who's dealing with distractions and they want to break through? I'll give them a really practical exercise. This is something I've done with Entree leadership coaching, whenever I've done coaching with your clients. If you want to work on your schedule, the whole 25% thing, let's say that a really practical exercise they can do is to write out their ideal perfect schedule. Just write it out, what is your perfect week look like in a perfect world with the responsibilities and commitments that

you know you have to do and have to have. And then look at your current schedule and begin to make changes to move from this one to that one, from your current schedule to your ideal schedule, it'll give you more clarity about what needs to be cut. Because sometimes when you look at it, you're like, oh, all the things are important. You're so emotionally invested. Instead, here's where I want to be. And then you start to see the difference in the gap. And you can start to close that gap over the next three months to six months and eventually you're working your ideal schedule, but it all started with that simple exercise. So that'd be a good kind of put it into action activity. It's so good. And it's so convicting. I'm already thinking, what can I go cut? So I got to

get out of here and start further my schedules. So this has been a lot of fun. Christy, thank you for the wisdom, the insights. Thanks for having me. I love you now. A lot of good practical stuff. I hope you guys took notes and hopefully we can have you back on the Entree Leadership podcast real soon. Thanks so much. We enjoyed that. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Christy is, of course, the author of Business Boutique, a woman's guide to making money doing what she loves, can follow everything that she's doing to help women all across the country at business boutique.com. Up next, Infusionsoft bringing you life cycle marketing. First of all, what is that?

Life cycle marketing is the process of providing your audience, the kinds of communication and experiences they need and want, so that you can move them from prospects to customers, and then ideally advocates. You really want to turn them into evangelists for your brand and your product and service. So this planner from InfusionSoft is going to give you a simple model so that you can implement lifecycle marketing in your business. So you've got to get on this right now. The link is in this episode show notes. It's episode 276.

You can get it at Entreeleadership.com. Click on podcast, episode 2.2. 276, the link for the lifecycle marketing resource is in the show notes. Well, that's going to do it. 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. Hey, folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions.

Here's a sample of Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses. If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart and you've ever wondered if you could make money doing it, I'm here to help. Join us on the Business Boutique podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique in iTunes or go to

businessboutique.com.