194. Running a Business with the Full Focus Planner

All right, Blake. We have a lot of business owners who listen to this podcast, and we also have this thing that we talk about on a weekly basis called the Full Focus Planner. And some people are new to business. Obviously you know this as you work with quite a few business owners. But understanding how the complexities of learning how to run a business and how the Full Focus Planner can help that process, which makes it a little bit more simpler. But do you have any immediate thoughts, top of mind that would help that business owner utilize the system or the Full Focus system to help grow their business or really grow themselves as they grow the business?

Absolutely. And we’ll get into three specific ways in this episode. But first and foremost, if you’re trying to run your own business right now, we feel for you, it’s hard. It is difficult, especially if you are someone that doesn’t have an executive assistant of your own. It could be really challenging.

Maybe you’ve read some of Michael’s books and you’ve thought to yourself, “Oh, well, that would be nice if I could do that. Or you’re further along than me.” And maybe you’re feeling like, “I’ve tried these productivity tools, or I’ve tried the planner or I’ve got a planner and I just can’t seem to get the traction with it that I’m wanting to,” that’s very, very common, and I would just encourage you to hang on for a moment. We’ve got some good stuff for you in this episode, but know that the planner is something that is going to affect your whole life.

In fact, I remember when I first started using the planner, I didn’t think I particularly needed it. It was more I had a good friend who’s a productivity enthusiast who had had mentioned, “Hey, you should check out Michael’s new planner.” And so I did, and what I didn’t expect was that taking small steps with the planner. For example, for me, I didn’t do anything outside of writing in daily pages a little bit, and that was it. I didn’t have the goals, the detail pages, definitely didn’t have…

Right. These small steps.

Any rolling quarters or index work happening back then.

That’s high level work there.

But the first thing I noticed was that I started sleeping a little bit better. I noticed that I was a little bit more present at the dinner table. And the potential that this tool has for you, if you’re running a business, I believe you have an opportunity for an even greater return. Because work is really challenging and it can be consuming and it can spill over very easily into your personal life.

But the beauty of this is that it’s going to give you a path to get what we call the double win. Where you’ve got more clarity, more effectiveness at work, but more presence, more peace, more enrichment at home. Stick with us. We’re going to get into three ways that you can start leveraging the planner better. If you’re running your own business.

Welcome to another episode of Focus On This. This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. My name is Verbs here with Blake Stratton and none other than producer, Nick. Happy Monday to you both.

Happy Monday unto you, Verbs.

Happy Monday, Verbs.

Verbs, I’m loving your whole setup, the whole vibe you’ve got going now.

The little… Yeah.

You got a little neon cactus happening. I see what’s happening here. Okay, I put a plant behind me.

You see what’s happening.

You up the ante, so next time I’ve got to really step it up. I appreciate that. If you’re just listening and you’re not on YouTube, you’re missing out.

Go over there now.

Because we’ve got fashion icon/renowned producer in his studio over here. We’ve got Nick with his trusty Catman. And then you have me. Basically, you’re not missing much on this side of things. But you know what? We’re on YouTube. You can check it out.

I think one way to maybe up the ante, Blake, is that next time we record, you should should be recording on a drone. And you can walk around and talk to the drone like that. It’d be pretty cool, like man on the street stuff.

Sure, yeah. And I could go, I’ll just… You know what I should do is I should pull out my Lambo and do it in front of that so I could be in the Lambo or maybe taking it for a joyride around my neighborhood. Because I definitely have… I mean, let me tell you…

Lambo.

This podcast is sweeping the nation, and so it has its perks.

Yeah, they gave you a Lambo.

They gave me a-

That’s our sponsorship right there.

It’s weird. The license plate says big three on it, and it has these…

That would be pretty cool.

It was weird. I thought it was weird they plastered Michael’s face on the side of it. I thought, it’s a Lamborghini, but it kind of works. And his mouth opens with the doors on the side. It’s like, “Rawr.”

Okay. That’s real nightmare fuel now.

All right. Back to this podcast where we banish distractions, like me pretending I have a Lamborghini.

We banish and walk our way through them to get back on track.

Yeah. Well, Nick, you’re here. You run your own business. You used the planner, but you didn’t always use the planner, so why even start to use it? What was the motivator for you?

Well, as I think I’ve told this story before, and I’ll keep it short. But you don’t fully… It’s like you’re the fish in the fish tank. You’re that’s just the environment you’re in. You don’t realize that your day is just a constant stream of decisions and problems solving and stuff like that.

I’m living this life, I’m running this business. I got all these clients, having to communicate with them all the time. Push out episodes every week, every other week. And it didn’t occur to me that it could feel any different. I just went, “Oh, this is what running a business feels like. You’re stressed and you’re behind and that’s just how it goes.”

And then I got a new client, which was back then Michael Hyatt and company. And they kept talking about, “No, it doesn’t have to be like this. You can feel better.” And I think it took two years before I was able to internalize that, “Oh, they’re talking to me too.” I thought that was for superhero people. Better people can do a planner. I’ve never been a planner person.

It took a long time. And to be honest, I struggle. It still isn’t fully a way that I express myself. I have to be in a certain head space to be 100% rocking my planner. When I do it, is better, my life is better. It is a thing that I like constantly I’m having to recheck in with.

I want to add too that I know one common story that I hear is with business owners is whether they study or practice medicine, whether they study law. It’s like you go to school, you go to university to study the thing that you’re going to do, but then, there’s no course on how to run the business in the thing that you do.

When you have the desire to go out and start a business, whether it’s a podcast, recording, whether it’s you’re a doctor, you’re a lawyer, the struggle comes when actually having to run that business because there’s no foundation to run off while you do the thing.

And so, I’m glad that the three things that we’re talking about today, one make you ask yourself the question… Hopefully you’re asking the question, why am I doing this? And as we work through these three ways that we’re going to talk about, it helped bring some more clarity, more definition, and help you be productive in the running of your business using this Full Focus system.

One way business owners can start leveraging the Full Focus Planner is to duplicate your weekly plan. Duplicate your weekly plan with a tool in your planner called Ideal Week. One of the biggest issues I hear from my business owner clients is they feel like they’re constantly treading water, reacting to things. And they don’t have the time they’d like to have to be building what they want to build.

And they can have a plan for their week, but that even can take effort. Because they have to get up extra earlier if they have to take time on the weekend to plan. And then something happens, a team member needs something, a client needs something. And so then they’re just responding and reacting to that thing. Before they know it, it’s Thursday, it’s Friday, and another week is rolled by. The goals, the growth, it feels further off.

Here’s how the ideal week can help you specifically with this. The ideal week is simply a template for your week. a way that I’ve done this, because I’m running my own business now, and the way that I’ve helped some of my clients do this, is to define the different roles and responsibilities that you’re carrying.

Being a business owner is different. You don’t typically just have a job description handed to you with responsibilities really ironed out specifically. You’re probably doing a bunch of different things. And then if a ball gets dropped, you’re jumping in to do that thing as well. List out all of those things that you’re doing. And ensure that you’ve got blocks of time on your calendar to be doing that type of work. For example, if you’re the main rainmaker, block out time in your calendar every week for sales.

Now, you can do this on a weekly basis, but that’s hard. Because here’s a real life example of how this happens. You start your day with a plan. “Oh, I’m going to get this to-do list,” and then something happens. A client reaches out with a need. And you have a value to respond to the client, to take care of the client, to let them know that they’re important.

And so, you drop what you’re doing, you lose focus and you just respond. And the reason is because you do not have a regular plan for client communication. It’s just something that exists whenever it comes up. What you could do instead with the ideal week is say, “Okay, I’m going to have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday be heavy client days.” Client response, client meetings or something like that. Or even I’m going to have eight to 9:00 AM one to 2:00 PM be client response times those blocks of time. Every week on my calendar those are the hours that I’m doing that.

And here’s the subtle thing that happens is you get a message, you get a call, and you don’t have to feel stressed or even pressure to respond because you already know, “No, I get to that at this time.” And over time, you can begin to train your clients like, “Oh, right. Here’s Blake’s or here’s Nick’s time where I can probably expect a response because this is his rhythm.”

You can do that for every aspect of running your business, from sales to finance, to internal meetings. And when you build that ideal week, it’s not that everything goes perfectly, it’s that you can know, okay, this what’s required from me to keep this business running.

If I can plan it once, it’s like a budget. If you had to imagine from scratch how to spend your money every month, that is time-consuming. You’re going to lose time, it’s going to be really hard to discipline yourself. Then you’re going to get discouraged, then you’re going to make bad decisions, then you’re going to feel worse and have less money.

You set up a budget then, and it’s not fun probably to set up the budget initially. But then you spend less time planning, you make better decisions, you build momentum over time. Before you know it, you got more money than you used to have. Same principle is true with the ideal week.

Blake, couple of follow up questions to that. Let’s say, first of all, there may be some listening who are new on that business journey and aren’t quite familiar with the ideal week as you just explained it. But as a new business owner, it seems like anytime you’re trying out a new tool, there could be some of that anxiety that surrounds it to where the thought of, “If I’m not responding to these clients and there’s money attached to the other end of this call, can I really push that off to another day of the week. Or a certain time during the week to where I only respond this day from this time from one to 2:00 PM?” Whatever it looks like.

What can you say to that person? It’s like, “Well, I got to get these calls in because the faster I can turn these things around, that helps the business.” Is there anything that surrounds that you can offer to those types?

This tool’s really powerful. And a lot of business owners think they need to graduate to it. Once I get my goals and my big three and my weekly preview and whatever, because it’s called Ideal Week. But specifically for business owners, the ideal week is actually a great place to start because it will force you to reckon with how many responsibilities you actually have on a weekly basis. How much buffer or not buffer you actually have in your schedule, how much time you’re actually dealing with.

Because there’s a good chance you don’t have a firm grasp on that, which is why you can never turn off or why you’re always working on the weekends. Is because you only have a grasp on the meetings that are on the calendar rather than having a calendar where every hour is accounted for in some way in terms of where you’re going to put your focus.

Make it easier on yourself, create that time budget, so to speak with your ideal week. And you can duplicate your weekly plan.

Moving to way number two, we could say hypothetically that business owners may have more than three tasks that need to be done daily.

There’s a chance.

It could be possible, there’s a slight chance that that happens. And so way number two, can you say, we’re going to be talking about what defining what success looks like on a daily basis for you? How to define success every single day. What kind of thoughts do you have for how we can define success better utilizing the daily big three?

You definitely have more than three tasks to do on a given day if you’re running a business. And one of the biggest differences between a business owner and an employee is that, for the business owner, everything’s really on you, ultimately. You carry all this responsibility.

And the job is never ever done. It’s not like you just sign off at five and it’s somebody else’s problem. Everything comes back to you. Also, there’s always more to be done because the nature of a business is growth, so you will never be done.

And I talk to so many of my clients, they struggle with this belief of, “Well, I can’t have relief, I can’t relax, I can’t be happy until I get everything done.” And the hard reality is, okay, then I guess we’re never going to be happy. And unfortunately, a lot of business owners never do feel the emotional rewards of the freedom that they’re trying to build for themselves because there’s always more to do.

True.

This is why the daily big three is so valuable is because when success is just this ambiguous growth out there in the future, then you will never get to enjoy success because it’s literally unattainable, because the goalposts are always going to be moving.

When we say set a daily big three as a business owner, yes, of course, you recognize, probably if you’re listening to this podcast, there’s value in prioritization, there’s value in deciding what’s the most important thing. Absolutely you get that. But why it’s so valuable for our business owner specifically is because you are saying this is what success looks like today. This is how I define what done means today. Because there’s going to be tomorrow, there’s going to be the next day. There’s always going to be more to do. But can I define what done looks like today?

And when you do, let me tell you, there is massive relief, satisfaction. The ability to sign off and say, “You know what? Yeah, there’s more I could do, but I’ve accomplished this big three. That’s what done looks like today. I’m resting.” And it helps your brain.

If you’re a business owner and you can’t stop thinking about work when you’re at the dinner table. If you wake up at two in the morning and you’re cooking on, “Oh, that client and this thing tomorrow,” I promise you, by physically writing down your daily big three and physically checking that off each day, it will massively help your mental health, your ability to rejuvenate and recover. And you’ll come back stronger the next day.

Nick, can we pull you in on this one? As you were getting into the system and you realized, “Well, I have all these tasks, how can I just pull these into these high leverage, big three items?” For you, what did that look like? How long did it take you to get accustomed to realizing, “Oh, this, I can be done with my day if I knock these out and get to everything else at some other point”?

Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who picks up the planner, it feels unreal and scary. You’re like, you write three things down and your brain immediately is like, “No, I have to do this other stuff. That’s not real. It feels incomplete.”

It takes time. And I still struggle with it where I’ll write a big three and then I’m looking down at the other task section. And I’m going, but these are also big four and big five. That’s how I emotionally feel about it. I have to fight against that. And the best way to do that is to have some forward vision about what you’re trying to get to. Otherwise, everything does feel urgent.

And so, starting the planner, even just doing a big three without large goal, just getting accustomed to that practice of feeling that you really can get a lot done. Doesn’t mean you don’t do anything else that day, but that you are able to feel very successful if you’re only just doing your big three is a huge emotional win. It’s like a trust fall into the planner. You go, “Oh, this is real. I can do this.”

And so, that’s helpful. And again, I just want to stress, I still struggle with some of these elements. It’s like it’s just, it’s like going to the gym.

Absolutely.

Right. I just have to keep going like, “No, this is why I’m doing this. It does help me. I feel better.” I think some people do or it fits really cleanly, but I know that I am worse off when I don’t do it. It’s like when I don’t drink enough water. I don’t really love drinking water, everybody. That’s my hot take. I’m not like, “Ooh, give me water,” most of the time, but I feel better when I drink water.

And I think it’s important to mention too, Blake, you mentioned how important rest is and those sorts of things. But to make it, it’s going to sound a little bit more constraining when you actually utilize one of your big three items as a non-related workout item. Whether it’s finishing a book or whatever you do to rejuvenate.

And again, this isn’t something that has to happen every day, but you want to make sure that you’re implementing non-related work items into your big three just so you can continue to grow as a person and as an individual in other domains of life and not just on the business side. That’s just the thought that I wanted to throw in.

That was way number two, define success every day. Moving on to way number three, don’t ignore rejuvenation. Blake, I’m assuming this could be a struggle point also with some of the business owners you work with because stuff has to get done. When do you rest?

Sure. It’s really connected with way two. When we don’t have a clear definition of success or a clear definition of done, when do we get to rest? When do we get to rejuvenate? When we were… A lot of business owners I work with used to work for somebody else and it was easier.

It’s ironic, we start a business because we want to have more freedom. Oh, I want to have freedom. I could travel, I could spend more time with my family and I could do things I want to do. And yet, we don’t even realize we’re actually signing up for heavier chains. Because we can never rest because it’s all on us to make sure this thing continues to work. There’s a tool in the planner though, called the Weekly Preview. And the Weekly Preview is a great weekly refresher to stay on track with your goals, be aware of your different commitments, plan your week, all that good stuff. But there’s a section in there towards the end that is about planning rejuvenation practices.

Michael has this saying, “What gets scheduled, gets done.” And that’s very true, particularly when it comes to something like rest and rejuvenation. For a business owner, unfortunately rest and rejuvenation for a lot of us can feel like this reward this. This, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to treat myself with a bit of fun. If I get all this done, then I’m going to go get coffee with a friend.”

But the beauty of planning this and scheduling it during the weekly preview, preview meaning it hasn’t happened yet, you’re looking forward at the next week, is that you are prioritizing or you’re baking in from the start, the rejuvenation. And the reason you do that is because rejuvenation is not a reward, it’s an asset. There is no greater asset to your business than you.

This goes to that concept of first order, second order consequences. Okay. If I give up one hour of productivity, two hours, then, ah, what if I don’t get these things done? Well, the bigger question is recognize that the odds are against you if you’re running a business. Something like 94 or 95% of businesses don’t make it 10 years. Maybe part of that is cash, marketing, whatever.

I think it’s probably because the business owners burn out. Because if you don’t burn out, think about it. If you’re running your business, imagine if you felt rested, rejuvenated. If you’ve been having fun, your social connections are positive. If you’re in a marriage or partnership, if that’s thriving, imagine the energy you can give to situations that sometimes are dire or sometimes are a struggle. You’re mentally sharper, stronger, more resilient, more emotionally able to give to your team to bring them up.

But if you go one week, two week, two months, three years, five years, and you don’t have that as part of your lifestyle. Guess what? When the storm hits, it’s going to be harder. It’s going to be a lot harder to survive it. Planning rejuvenation as a asset to your growth is a big mental shift. But the weekly preview in the planner and even the planner community. If you’re one of us, if you join the community or if you’re in business accelerator for instance, then that’ll allow you to begin to shift that mindset so that you can be planning those things and actually leveraging the energy you get from rejuvenation.

Yeah. And I got two thoughts along with that is, and I think this is something we’re all still learning, people who work, is we actually work better from a place of rest than working and then resting. That rest that we have at maybe at the top of the week is that’s the reset time, to where you shut it down. Allow yourself to recalibrate, allow yourself space to where you can be ready for the new ideas, new thoughts, the work that’s ahead from a place of rest versus the other way around.

And secondly, going back to way one that we mentioned about the ideal work week, is when you have that blank canvas in front of you that’s the ideal week, that grid of what you’re going to do with your time, how you’re going to budget your time. Ideally, a good place to start would be dropping in those blocks of rest, whether it’s a Saturday, whether it’s a Sunday, whatever it may look like for you. If it’s time with friends, family, some of your best relationships, try dropping those in first.

That way they don’t get immediately crowded out. And then before you know it, it’s not in your regular duplication of your week. And you’re missing out on the proper rest that you need, that you genuinely need to be able to run your business successfully.

For today’s tip, for Level Up Your Focus is if you are a business owner who loves the Full Focus Planner, consider what else Full Focus can do for you by scheduling a free call to find out about our business coaching program called Business Accelerator. All you need to do is just visit businessaccelerator.com to learn more. And with that, we want to thank you for joining us on this week’s episode of Focus On This.

This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so I’m told by Verbs.

Algorithm, stats.

Share it with your friends. And don’t forget to join the Full Focus Planner community on Facebook. We’ll be back next Monday with another great episode. But until then, stay focused.

Stay focused.

Whoa, that was so together, that ruled. I’m so excited about that.

And we’re delayed a little bit so that [inaudible 00:27:11].

I know. I was going to say. It’s not, you don’t try to time it. You have to time it… You have to decide how off you’re going to be so that with the delay, it sounds like it’s the same.

That was amazing.

That’s next level.