High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 364: Managing Your Productivity in a Virtual World with Jan Lehman, Productivity Consultant and Speaker

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the high performance mindset. Welcome to episode 364 with Jan Lehman. This is your host, Dr. Cindra Kampoff, keynote speaker and executive and certified mental performance coach. And I am grateful that you are here. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place. And today we're talking about productivity with Jan. And I was thinking this would be a great topic for all of us to consider given that our world has changed quite significantly in the last five months and we are pivoting more and more to a virtual world. And Jan is a

Starting point is 00:01:31 productivity consultant and speaker. She is the founder and CEO of CTC Productivity, which is a Twin Cities-based Minnesota women-owned and operated business. With over 20 years of corporate consulting experience Jan personally understands the unique challenges of leading a busy professional life she has three children a company to run so she understands the importance of work-life balance so before starting her company CTC she worked with a number of fortune 100 companies including with Kraft Foods in Sweden and in a consulting role with

Starting point is 00:02:06 Accenture. She helps her clients all over the country be able to manage productivity in this new virtual world. So Jan and I talk about in this episode her top strategies to help you work more effectively in the virtual world, how to keep the most important thing we need to do top of mind over all of the other maybe more distracting things, the best way to manage our email and use email, and ways to leverage technology to help you right now. Today's rating and review is from Ganesha. Tons to gain and learn here. Must subscribe. Thank you so much for your rating and review, Ganesha. I'm so grateful for you and everyone who's listening today i would love to

Starting point is 00:02:45 read yours next week so wherever you are listening the easiest way to leave us a rating and review is to scroll up on your phone if you're listening there click on the rating and review link provided in the show notes and if you enjoyed today's episode make sure you share it with a friend you can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening or take a screenshot, send it to a friend. I would be forever grateful. All right, here's Jan. Jan, I'm so excited that you are here joining us here today for the High Performance Mindset Podcast. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you. This is super fun. We met, I heard you speak a year ago or so. We're both trying to figure out exactly where that was, what time frame that was.

Starting point is 00:03:30 But I'm really excited for you to join the podcast today. I have a few questions that have been submitted for you, so we're going to talk about those. But to get us started, just tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do. Yeah, I love, just love that question. So I, I hate waste. And I think, you know, I kind of had this aha moment a couple years ago, like, what drives me? Why in the world am I in this profession? And it really is about eliminating waste. And you know, in silly little ways, like I hate it when my family wastes food, I'm an avid recycler, right, the day today stuff. But one of the things that just drives me crazy, and I see it all the time, is the waste

Starting point is 00:04:11 within organizations. And it typically falls into three areas. Wasted time is huge. And we see that a lot of leaders really have no clue the amount of wasted time within an organization. And then wasted talent across the organization. So managers not taking the time to develop people effectively delegate. So people are just are underutilized. And then third, and one of my favorite areas is really that technology is underutilized. So yeah, so anything we can do to sort of help companies or individuals in those three areas is super fun for us. Well, that's great. Give us a little sense of like, how did you get to where you are now? And tell us a story about like CTC productivity. Yeah, so well, like, I think probably what happens with most people is you go to school, go to college, you know, I really don't know what I'm going to be when I

Starting point is 00:04:59 grow up, right. But you kind of gravitate toward the classes that you do well in, and you're excited to go to you're not, you're not blowing them off. And mine were basically process improvement. So kind of the Lean Six Sigma concept. And then I went into a profession, I worked, either worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, or I was a consultant and my clients were Fortune 500 companies. So Kraft Foods, United Airlines, Security and Exchange Commission, so some pretty big guys, and did many, many years of process improvement work. And then 10 years ago, started my own business. So that's kind of the history and the progression.

Starting point is 00:05:32 And I just couldn't be more thrilled. Yeah, that's fun. So there's several things that I wanted to talk a bit about today. I think just continuing to be productive in this new world, I think is really important, this virtual world. And there's so many changes that people have experienced in the last five months or so, Jan, you know, like, I think about for me, I was on the road a lot, I was traveling a lot. I realized I only like filled my gas, my car with gas, like one time in three months. And I was like,

Starting point is 00:06:01 I normally feel it like every day. What's happening here? We've had to pivot and adjust our business, our world, you know, a lot of people are working from home. So I think today, our content is going to be really helpful for people. And so, you know, with so many people who are working from home right now, like, how have you seen people's work change? Yeah, it's kind of a mix. It's, you know, it's interesting. I'm seeing some really senior leaders that typically were in back-to-back meetings that maybe now have a little bit more time. They're sequestered up in their cabin all by themselves. And so they actually have time for more productivity-based work, which is

Starting point is 00:06:40 great. The vast majority of the employees, though, within companies that definitely are taking a productivity hit. And it comes in a lot of different ways. One is, it's harder to communicate and collaborate when you're not with your people, right? So that's a certainly a big space. The other is people's ability to focus. There's the distractions of having young kids as home, as well as the mental distraction of worried about your health, your family's health, those sort of things. So productivity is, I think, more important than ever right now than, I mean, it always should be important, but it's more important now. Because the other thing is productivity and employee engagement and job satisfaction are really linked. And so if you can help someone be really productive, and they can get their work done in an eight hour day, they're like super happy. So it's got kind of a double win there. And so engagement is an equally important

Starting point is 00:07:30 thing right now, for sure. Yeah. And there's some people that I work with, I'm just thinking about my work with, you know, as a coach, and some people have said, well, I actually feel like I'm more productive at home, whereas some people are really struggling with that. What would you say are, you know, some of your top strategies on how to, you know, just manage this virtual world that we're in right now? So there's hundreds of ideas, but let's think. One is really leveraging technology in a different way is super important. It's critical that all businesses move their data off of their servers and hard drives and all that into the cloud. Because what happens then is everybody has super easy access to information. So if you've got this young dad who's, you know, got whining kids at home, and he's like, all right, fine, let's go

Starting point is 00:08:22 to the park. And then he gets the emergency email on his phone from a boss that he needs a piece of information. Now he's like stressed out because it's on the server, needs to get home, log into VPN, all that kind of stuff. So getting the data on the cloud just makes the ability to really work anywhere so easy. So that's a big one. The others would be giving yourself a break. I think it's really important right now that anybody who's in charge of people really reset expectations. And if somebody had in their goals for the year, strategic thinking work, and that's a young parent at home with young kids, it's not realistic. So let's shift the expectations. Let's give them some more tactical work that they can do in between, you know, childcare, that kind of stuff. I think the ability to focus is probably the biggest area that's

Starting point is 00:09:10 taken a hit and new strategies there. It's really hard as a mom, we know it's just really hard, even if you have somebody taking care of your kids to hear the background noise that there's a fight and not want to know what's going on. So simple things like the wax little earplugs or whatever to drown out, you'll still hear the baby crying in the crib, but you won't hear kind of the background noise that's so distracting. And again, the list goes on and on, but those might be some people should consider. Yeah, I think those are really helpful. I'm thinking about myself and my kids have been home and my guess is they'll, you know, we're not, I don't think we're going back full time to school or we'll have to see how that goes when school starts here. But let's take this first one of like, or I guess the second one that you said about like

Starting point is 00:09:56 giving your employees a break and shifting their expectations or shifting just expectations. How have you seen, you know, some of the people that you've been working with do that effectively? You know, I've heard of, like Organize Audrey actually did a presentation for our NSA chapter, and I thought it was really interesting about, you know, some of the companies she's seeing are actually saying, hey, focus on yourself at home first, so, you know, you can then get back to work engaged, and those are great strategies. I'm seeing when I do presentations, I speak to a lot of CEO peer groups, and I talk on kind of all these aspects, like the ability to focus, the ability to leverage technology, and then the engagement piece. And I'm really happy to see that many of the CEOs have more

Starting point is 00:10:42 questions around the engagement piece. And we talk a lot about things like if you do an employee engagement survey and you follow the Gallup Q12 questions, one of the 12 questions that Gallup recommends you ask is, does anybody care about me personally at work? And that is like alive and very important right now, right? So we spend a lot of time with senior leaders talking about strategies around that. So like the next time you're on the video with one of your workers, and their kid comes in, you know, don't let them shoo the kid out of the room, right? Engage, like learn, get to know that family, because getting to know somebody on a deeper level will build that trust. And so pivoting to really more engagement strategies right now is a super important thing for leaders to focus on. I think that's really helpful. It's like, sometimes we think of like work should be

Starting point is 00:11:30 separate. Like you don't, don't involve the personal or merge the personal, but I think our lives are so different than they were a year ago. And I liked this, this idea of when you see the kid or the dog or the cat on the, on the video chat, right? Like engage with them. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, most of us are visual learners. And so, you know, to be honest, I don't know how many times people will tell me, oh, I've got three kids, two boys, and I can't remember it. But like, if I were to see on video, their kid coming in the room, I'll forever remember they have a toddler, right? Because it's visual. It's, it's just, it's like a perfect time to really get to know people at a deeper level. So when you're

Starting point is 00:12:09 talking with CEO groups about like engagement and how to, you know, continue to make that as a focus during this time of COVID and just how our work is shifting more at home, what are some of the top strategies that you might share with them or talk about related to like engagement? I think if there's more, it's probably, I think being more available. So one of the things I hear when I talk to more maybe individual contributors in a company is they don't know when they can interrupt their senior leader. They're like, I don't know, like, are they working the same hours they did before? You know, should I bother them? And, and so one of the things we've been recommending, which has been a big hit is start to use your calendar as a communication tool out to the rest of your organization. And kind of indicate this

Starting point is 00:12:58 is when I start my day in my day. And one of the things that I'm recommending to senior leaders is put on your calendar like office hours so you know like back and we're in college and our professor had like open door office hours yeah really important for senior leaders basically to emulate vertical in a virtual world my door is open because right now they don't know that right they don't in the office you can look over the cubicle wall and go the door door is open. I can stop in and chat. So it's really important for senior leaders to say, hey, I'm available. Let's talk.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Let's chat. Here's this window of time. You're not interrupting me. I'm here for you. So really kind of opening their schedule up to say, please, I'd like to engage with you. It helps immensely. Yeah, excellent. Being available and open, that's what I'm hearing hearing about like putting those office hours on there. Yeah. And, and we have the same in the virtual world, a lot of people are using chat and popping in and all that. Or, yeah, it's, it's, it's really

Starting point is 00:14:14 important conversations are happening around, like, when do I want to be interrupted? And when don't I? So don't use chat when I'm like, really trying to focus on something. But here's this window of time that if you want to pop over and chat with me, that's great, because that's where my head's at at that point. So identifying effective communication policies, like how do we know when to communicate and how to communicate really important in a virtual world. Yeah, super helpful. One of the questions that was submitted, Jan, was this question of like, how do you keep the most important things top of mind? And I think that has to do with your point of like focusing and there's so many distractions. So maybe I'll give you an example for me. I'm writing

Starting point is 00:14:57 my second book and I'm almost done. I can't, I can't get my first one done. So good for you. It takes a lot of discipline. So I put time on my calendar to work on it, but then there's like these emails that pop up or this list of things I got to do. And so it's really hard to sometimes like the most important things, the things that are maybe needle movers in your business, right? It's hard to make those a priority when there's like all these maybe less important things that need to get done. So what would you say, you know, to help people think about how do they keep the most important thing, you know, top of mind? Yeah, so two things. One is, well, a couple different things. It's so important that the leaders in particular, but everybody really balance and make sure their priorities have time as well as the priority of others. Because often what happens is leaders that

Starting point is 00:15:51 have direct reports get sucked into responding to emails and answering phone calls, and they never get to the bigger work. So it's really balancing that. And so I'm a huge advocate of everybody blocking their calendar for quiet, uninterrupted time to do your most important work. And everybody deserves that. Leaders need it as much as any, because otherwise you do fall into that trap. And understanding that it's acceptable not to be highly responsive during that time. So one of the things that I do a lot with leadership teams is facilitate a conversation around what's a true emergency. Because if you don't define what's a true emergency, everybody feels they need to monitor emails constantly to see if a customer email comes in or whatever. And you never allow yourself to have that focused on interrupted time. So that's a really important definition to figure out.

Starting point is 00:16:40 And then once you've defined that, you can say, you know what, there's nothing in this business that really is that much of an emergency. Or if it is, someone's going to call me on the phone. You know, they're not going to send me an email because that's not the tool we use to communicate an emergency. So you give people the ability or the approval to not look at email constantly. So that's one big one. The other is turning off all those god awful notifications and pings. It is too hard to get distracted. And there's really no reason for them. The only notification I personally feel should be in your face is something to say you've got a meeting in

Starting point is 00:17:15 10 minutes to wrap up, you know, really, truly time sensitive. So the next time your orthodontist says, Do you want text notifications about your orthodontist appointment and say, no, you don't, it doesn't need to interrupt you like an email is fine. So yeah. Yeah. Isn't that so true? And sometimes at one point I looked at the research or how many times we look at our phone and it's something like, it's crazy. Yeah. Highly reactive world. And, and I don't, you know, I don't blame the younger generation, you know, they grew up with, I order something on Amazon and it's on my doorstep the next morning. So they grew up in this ASAP environment.

Starting point is 00:17:49 So unless leaders reset expectations to say, hey, our customer response time is 24 hours. You don't need to drop everything every time you get an email from a customer, unless it's an emergency. But otherwise, do your focus time, do your most important work, and then look to see, you know, if a customer needs help. Yeah, I think just putting time aside on your calendar for like your most important work, I think is really key. And then, right, turning off all the distractions, maybe even turning off your email.

Starting point is 00:18:19 You know, it's a personal thing. I have some clients that have to turn their computer off. Like they print off whatever is on their computer they need because they're just, it's a willpower thing. And you can actually strengthen your willpower and improve, but it is definitely a willpower thing. And so the more hurdles you can put in there, the better, right? Not having the donuts on the counter would help you, right? Not have the willpower, not eating a donut.

Starting point is 00:18:41 Same thing with this. But the other piece I want to mention, Sandra, I forgot is you also have to have that planning component. And sadly, I don't see enough of that across companies. So if you don't take the time to plan, then typically email will be your day because it's just in your face. It's telling you what it wants you to do. But typically, our most important work doesn't come through email. So in addition to reserving that focus time, that quiet time, it's having a time of day when you back up and you think, okay, what's the most important thing I need to get done

Starting point is 00:19:09 tomorrow? What are the three most important things I want to get done tomorrow? One should always be the thing you're going to do during focus time when you want uninterrupted quiet time, just so you have a plan. And the goal is come in and do that stuff first, especially if you're a morning person, get that done first before you do other things. You may need to triage email, look really quick because you might not be able to focus until you make sure there's no emergencies. But don't get sucked into the trap of responding to emails. Just look quickly.

Starting point is 00:19:37 No emergencies. Great. Set the world aside. I'm going to focus now. And then I'll get back to email after I get my most important work done. Yeah. I think so many people just kind of jump in, you know, jump in the day. They don't really plan it or think about like, what are the three things that I need to get done today? And I like this

Starting point is 00:19:56 idea of just like three things, because if you got 10, you know, like that's overwhelming. So one thing that I do is like, what's the three things I need to do once I get those three things done? Okay, then how about I make my next three things? Yeah, perfect. Yeah, three is realistic. And if it's a longer list, then you kind of blow it off and you go home feeling defeated. If you have three and you get them done, you'll go home feeling like I did a good day's work, even though I still have like 200 emails in my inbox. If email is driving your day, you'll never feel like you're ahead of the curve. Jan, one of the things I want to talk to you a little bit more about is this idea of like managing your emails. And that's when I heard you speak is like you were talking about this subject.

Starting point is 00:20:38 And so there was a few questions that came in about this particular topic. Maybe just to get us started, what would you say are some of, you know, your top strategies to effectively deal with emails? Yeah, so there's lots of different ways to manage email, but the one that we found that works for the vast majority of people, and a lot of people just don't stop and think about it, but your email inbox should really be like a to-do list. It should only contain things that you really need to act on. So it shouldn't contain things that you've already read and you might want to refer back to later because then you're mixing action items with reference material and that's when things get lost. And also it makes you feel more overwhelmed because you could have

Starting point is 00:21:21 2,000 or 20,000 emails if you're going through that strategy. So just the concept of I'm only going to keep things in my inbox that I still need to act on and then having a way of referencing that other stuff and getting it out of there is the second part that's important. And historically, most of us would create a nice little folder list and we would move our emails over, but we just we can't keep up. We don't have time to organize at that level and nor do we need to. Search is amazing and people just, they leverage it on the internet, but they don't leverage it in email. And so a lot of area where we spend time is helping people understand how to use like, let's call it advanced search. So when I ask people if they know how to use search, they'll go, yeah it all the time although I'll tell you I did have a client this year that has been working for 25 plus years and

Starting point is 00:22:10 didn't know you could actually even search in email for basic stuff think about the productivity loss for the many years that we've had email but don't take stuff for people take for granted people know stuff but um for instance if you go in and you go in the search field, and let's say I put in your email address, and you and I run a company together, I would get back any email that you were, it was to you, from you, you were cc'd, your email was in the body of the language, or in the body of the email. But if I go in and click on the search field, and then go up to kind of the ribbon above and click on in Outlook, click on from and then put your email address. I'm only going to get the emails from you.

Starting point is 00:22:51 And then I can click on, oh, yeah, by the way, it has an attachment and it'll shrink the search results. So the more you get comfortable knowing that I know how to search and find stuff, the more you'll be comfortable with the idea of just lobbing the vast majority of your emails into a catch-all folder. You'll still need to organize certain things. If you're nervous, you wouldn't be able to find it. I always say, you know, I would be nervous if in three years I got audited from a tax year three years prior, and how in the world would I remember all the receipts from that year? So I have a 2020 expense folder, and I'm diligent. Those

Starting point is 00:23:24 emails go there. 80% of the other ones go to catch all. And I'll tell you the focus time, the priority setting and catch all folder to do list inbox. I think I've been the magic weapon for so many of my clients that have gotten huge productivity gains. So I highly encourage people try it. Ah, really good points. And so Gary asked this question, like, how do you stop your mind going to the email when you, that's not the most important thing that you should be doing? And I think about like how email many times kind of feels like other people's agendas instead of like what we really need to do. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, how do you, you know, really turn, like when you said, you know, when you sit down at the beginning of your

Starting point is 00:24:10 day, you know, kind of check in, but then, you know, turn it off or close it. But what if that's hard for you? Yeah, it's, it's a mindset shift. And again, that's where having that plan, writing down what your top three things you're going to do is a good strategy. Because when you especially I actually write it on a post-it note. Like I that's my you know, I do digital for everything, but my top three go on a post-it note. And when you write something in your handwriting, it cements it in your brain. You're making a commitment to yourself. So there's there's a lot of sort of psychology around it. But it really is that combination of recognizing that you can't always

Starting point is 00:24:46 be at the beck and call of everybody else. Because more often than not, the stuff that you're going to do, again, maybe somebody at a leadership position, is helping really a broader group of people versus just one person. So it's changing your mindset. I think a lot of my clients say, you know what, Jan, you're giving me kind of approval to close my door and do this work. I'm like, yeah, like you're not being selfish. You're really being smart. You're really working in a smarter way to help a broader amount of people. But it takes more discipline to say no to the emails and all the interruptions.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Yeah. How much time do you think is lost just on distractions? And maybe it's even more happening right now during this virtual world. Yeah, there's tons of studies on it. But the average that we keep coming back to as we look at all the different studies is if you're focused on something and somebody asks you a question and your executive functioning needs to shift to kind of think a little bit about that, by the time you come back to what you're doing, you've now lost 20 minutes. So you've lost the time that you've spent helping that other person, but you've also now take 20 minutes step back to regroup.

Starting point is 00:25:54 And so that's why we're a big advocate of, you know, for stuff that requires deeper thinking, you don't want to be interrupted because, you know, you just, that's where you're going to lose the big chunks of time. If you're just working on email and you're sort of responding and somebody interrupts you you might lose a minute or two but not quite as big of a hit but it's it's all these together that really save that but it's been interesting cinder one of the fun things that i've had time to do during covid because we've had a little more availability right time to do is we've really been looking at a lot of our metrics. And that's when I've really identified there's so much time loss within organizations. Like it is super easy. You give me a willing and interested participant, super easy for me to give you 10%

Starting point is 00:26:35 time waste reduction. And that's like more than a month a year. Like it's, it's massive. And it's all for silly tactics like that. If you're doing, if you're losing 20 minutes constantly throughout the day, that's hours in your day, right? Right. Yeah, for sure. Hours in your day that you aren't necessarily doing the things that are really important are really going to help you, you know, be your best. And for me, I think about reaching your goals and reaching the vision for yourself. So let's kind of go back to what we were talking about related to emails, Jan. And so what do you do? Like, what are your strategies on like, okay, when you know, maybe these emails are coming in, but it's not really what you should be focused on. What do you do to make sure that they don't just kind of suck you in? Yeah. So, well, a lot of people, again, get distracted in different ways. And so there's, there's a whole category of emails that we get that fall into the definition of gray mail. So it's not spam, you know, it's stuff you'd like if you had the time, you much time managing your inbox, that you set up rules or filters within Gmail to have, let's say, newsletters and all that. I call it like C

Starting point is 00:27:50 priority work. Like you're not going to get trouble if you don't get it done, but you'd love to do it. So setting up rules so that what's happening is as those emails are coming to your inbox, they're really skipping your inbox and going to a folder. And then you're at the park with your kids on the playground. That might be the time you pull up that folder where all those emails went and read up on all the newsletters or blogs or that sort of work. Because it's, you know, maybe at that point, your head's not in the game to do strategic thinking, but it's, you know, a great productivity thing to catch up on reading. So getting those emails to leveraging technology to have it be automated. So you're not maintaining saves you time and then not having them in your inbox, in your to-do list, it stops you from being distracted.

Starting point is 00:28:30 So again, your most important work is really in your face. Absolutely. And so what's the best way for us to kind of manage this email box that we have and with different folders or maybe rules, give us this kind of like a sense of when you see the people that are most productive and really, you know, doing the most important things first and keeping that front and center, what do they do? Yeah, all these strategies, I would say. So it's again, a catch-all folder so they can quickly just move emails out. Half the reason people leave a lot of emails in their inbox

Starting point is 00:29:00 is they're not in the mood to file it. They're like, I'll just figure out where that goes later. So it's having a good organizational structure that's realistic. It's having the discipline that when you're done with something to get in that habit of moving it, also getting in the discipline of being realistic and going, you know what? I would love to do whatever this email is, but I just, I'm not going to get to it. Delete. So just accept the fact that the busier you get, the more you need to accept the fact you can't do everything you used to do. And you might deploy, you know, delegation

Starting point is 00:29:30 strategies, things like that. So if you can't keep up with the volume of emails, I often tell people, you might not be an effective delegator. So that's when you need to make a decision. So I just tell people back up and take a bird's eye view of your email and see like what's coming and going. And, you know, is there a piece, is there a responsibility I can give somebody else and redirect all those emails to that person and then they can loop us in when they need us. So there's lots of different strategies around there.

Starting point is 00:29:58 Awesome. I think about, and maybe I heard you talk about this. Let me know. I think I'm crediting it to you at least, that keynote that I heard you talk about this. Let me know. I think I'm crediting it to you at least. Keynote that I heard you talk about. But I think what you said is like, just look at, like touch your emails once and, or something like that. And was that you that said that?

Starting point is 00:30:20 It may have been. It's, I mean, most productivity strategies, I'll be honest, have been around for a long time. I think the value is the ability to diagnose which productivity strategy a person needs. And so the. Like you can triage and look and again, look for emergencies, but otherwise don't even bother opening them. Just wait till your time to actually sit down and address the emails. And then when you're reading it, respond. And because a lot of people think, did I respond to them? Because they remember reading it, but they don't remember that they didn't respond.

Starting point is 00:31:02 It gets very confusing. It does, especially if you're looking at things on your phone, right? Yeah, at night, and then you think maybe you responded, but you didn't. So yeah, yeah. Touch it once is just a great organizational productivity strategy in many areas. So Jan, you just said something about like, prior C priority. And that got me thinking, like, do you have an A, B and C priority? Or like, tell us more about that. And like, how do we find out what our priorities really are? Yeah, so yeah, so C. So like 20 years ago, Sundar, you and I both got to our C priorities, like, right, the world just wasn't quite as busy, the information wasn't quite as voluminous. And

Starting point is 00:31:43 but we just most people don't get to their C priorities in, but people don't accept it. And so it's that having that discipline to recognize, again, this is not something I'm going to get in trouble for, for kind of have start off by having a definition of these things. I would call an A priority over a B priority. A priority is certainly anything that has like, you know, a hard deadline. And again, you'll get in trouble if you don't get it done. But I would also give a priorities to process improvement type work. So things that somebody's not asking you to do it, but you know that if you sat down and thought through a strategy on how to leverage the talent on your team, and start to coach and develop people that you're going to get years back in your day,

Starting point is 00:32:24 because then you can start taking work off your plate and giving it to others. So the A priorities are probably the stuff that have, you know, deadlines, but they're really process improvement related strategies as well. And again, if you don't have the discipline to put everything on hold, and take time to focus on that, it's never going to happen. So you're always on that hamster wheel of catch up. Absolutely. So Jan, I know that you have, you know, gone through changes just like we have in the last five months or so, something that we didn't expect to happen as speakers, as business owners. So give us a sense of like, what have you been doing during this time to, you know, deal with the changes that

Starting point is 00:33:05 you've had to deal with? Yeah, well, I've gotten my virtual speaking certificate that many of us may have gotten through NSA. So I definitely have a ton of virtual engagements. I just had a two and a half hour CEO presentation virtual and 100% of the attendees said that they would recommend it to others. So I'm like, wow, okay. I obviously can keep being engaging when I'm not there in the room. So I feel very good about that and starting to see the calendar pick up, you know, with speaking engagements virtually in particular. The other is we pivoted like every company. You know, what's everybody worried about?

Starting point is 00:33:39 What are they focused on? And so our big pivot is helping people work more productively in a virtual world. So again, a lot of these same strategies where focus time might be harder at home than it was in the office, leveraging technology, but I'm noticing I can get people's attention if I'm trying to solve that problem right now on helping the employees be productive and engaged in this remote workforce. Right. So that's been a big focus. And then the other has been just honestly enjoying this time to do a lot of those projects that every one of us delays and doesn't get to.

Starting point is 00:34:10 So we've been doing a lot of workflow automation where we can set up things like within our CRM. So when I get a new customer, I can now check a box. It'll send out the W-9, all the stuff I normally need to remember to send. And so we've been, yeah, we're practicing what we preach. What have you been doing in terms of a mindset perspective? You know, is there any strategies you've been using just to stay positive and hopeful and optimistic about, you know, the world and business and how you can help people during this time?

Starting point is 00:34:49 Oh, that's such a good question. You know what, I'm typically an optimistic person. So I haven't really struggled there. And I think, you know, I, I think in it with any business, you have to be bullish and think, you know what, I'm always going to be in business, I can always there's work for me, whatever. So you can stay focused and stay engaged. So I don't know if I can speak to that, because I don't struggle with it personally. But I would, I mean, I do have a number of clients I've, you know, recommended, but you know, why don't you meet with a therapist or, you know, vitamin D, you know, anything you can do to kind of build up your optimism and your, you know, if you're an extrovert, and you're feeling alone in the virtual world, you know, what can you do to get in front of more people and get engaged? And you know, there's some strategies there. I wouldn't call myself an expert though,

Starting point is 00:35:28 on that side. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I was just curious on like what you've been doing, but one of the things I just heard you say is like that you're relying on your optimism, right? And you need to be resilient during this time. So, Gian, how can people reach out to you, follow along, you know, get any resources that you might have about the topics we've talked about today related to productivity? Yeah, no, that'd be great. The easiest is probably just go to our website. So ctcproductivity.com, my nice little like on my wall there. CTC stands for circle the customer. The idea being that we're really ultimately helping clients in every aspect of life. Some of our clients want more time in their day to sell more widgets and

Starting point is 00:36:08 some want more time in their day to hang out with their kids. So ctcproductivity.com is where you can go. Go to the blog and sign up for our blog so you'll get our newsletter on any updates and things we have going on. We'd love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn. That would be fabulous and have them reach out to me. Okay, that sounds wonderful. So I'm going to do my best to kind of summarize what we talked about. Good luck. I know. Okay, here we go. I think just like this idea of that the world is changing and will probably continue to change, right? So how can we still be productive in this virtual world? And I think what you said about like, just like leveraging technology during this time,

Starting point is 00:36:50 giving yourself a break, maybe shifting expectations. And then just like working on your ability to stay focused. You talked about, you know, how employers could actually shift expectations right now, get to know people, like in terms of who they're working with and, and improve engagement that way so that there's more of a personal connection. You talked about this importance of like having quiet time to do the most important work and putting it on your calendar, turning off emails and notifications. And then this idea of like like I thought the gray mail was really helpful like the things that are like c priority like yeah that you know what like I would

Starting point is 00:37:33 love to do I'd love to look at all these like newsletters I get but maybe doing it at a time where I don't need to be doing my most important work and maybe time where I can just like maybe on the weekends or I'm just chilling right with yeah with the whatever I need to do so and then I liked what you said about like this a b and c priority just continuing to keep the most important stuff top of mind yeah so good job good notes that was really good I always like to do that at the end because not everyone's always taking notes is there. Yeah, that was great. Jan, what kind of final piece of advice or thoughts would you have for people who are listening or watching on Facebook where we are right now? Yeah, I would just say make productivity a priority. I mean, the more you can invest in

Starting point is 00:38:21 looking at smarter ways to work, it's just going to pay back year after year. So we'd love to help if anybody's interested, individuals, whole companies, but productivity should always be an A priority for you. Awesome. Nicely said. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you. I appreciate it. Way to go for finishing another episode of the high performance mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow. Did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.

High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 364: Managing Your Productivity in a Virtual World with Jan Lehman, Productivity Consultant and Speaker

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