7 business time-wasters that steal your freedom

Summary

seven things that are eating your week. all of them feel productive. none of them are.

1. checking email all day. it feels like work. it’s reaction, not creation. batch it to 2 or 3 windows.

2. unnecessary meetings. most meetings should be a 4-line message. the ones that stay should be tight and on a hard timer.

3. constant phone notifications. every alert is a hijack of your attention. kill non-essential notifications globally.

4. decision fatigue. small decisions compound. build a simple decision framework so most calls take seconds instead of minutes.

5. not tracking metrics consistently. retroactively rebuilding numbers is one of the most expensive things you can do. set a weekly KPI rhythm and stick to it.

6. reactive customer service. answering the same question 50 times. write the answer once, make it discoverable, and stop being the FAQ.

7. multitasking. you’re not multitasking, you’re losing 20 to 40% of effective time on context-switching. do one thing at a time.

the through-line: protect time the way you protect cash. the people who win don’t have more hours. they have fewer leaks.

Transcript

discussion on the importance of defining tasks to enhance focus and efficiency

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. Today we are breaking down the seven biggest time wasters that is really stopping your progress in business and how you can make some changes, some very simple changes, get more productive, ultimately become a better human, make more money, all the things that you want.

All right, this is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and let’s get into it. You know, I, I know I am really good at getting things done in all honesty. Like that’s what I love to do. Give me a checklist, give me a, some sort of item that I need to get done and I will get it done. I love just marking things off a list, but early on in entrepreneurship, the problem that caused for me was I’m really good at getting things done that are very like known objective tasks like answer this email, do this thing for taxes, whatever.

Those tasks are easy because they’re defined tasks. What you have to get good at in entrepreneurship is an undefined task, meaning I need to go grow the business. Maybe I don’t know exactly how to do that. And so when our brain gets a little mushy, we prefer to just go do something else. We’d prefer to do something we are competent in and we know how to do.

And when you fall into that trap, you’re really never going to make any progress. You’re not working on the right things. And it’s even easier today because there are so many things that can take up our time. So let’s jump into the seven biggest business time wasters that I’ve seen and what you can do about it.

So the first one, checking email all day. You do not want to check your email whenever an email comes in, like remove that notification on your computer, on your phone. You should have a set time that you check email. This was really big. First came out the idea, as far as I know, is the four-hour work week from Tim Ferriss.

Setting times that you check email and then just not allowing any notifications of that email and set the times that make sense for you. Maybe it’s one, two, three times a day, be like, hey, I check it first thing in the morning. I check it in the afternoon and I check it right before I sign off on the day.

If you want three times or maybe it’s just one time at the end of the day, that’s the only time you check it. But if you’re checking email all day, every day, or whenever, you know, someone shoots you an email, what you’re doing is you’re reacting to someone else’s to do list and not your own. Because when someone sends you an email or a message, they need something and it might not be what you need.

So that’s the first thing you could do is eliminate the incessant email checking. Second thing is just setting up meetings when you don’t feel like putting your thoughts together. Endless pointless meetings. Meetings are just for a group of people to get on the same page. Sometimes you might have to hash out, you know, or brainstorm, communicate about something.

There are times when a meeting is necessary, but nine times out of 10, the meeting is too long or it’s actually unnecessary. Meetings can very easily be a Slack message. It can be an email. It could be a well thought out message in response. You could do audio messages back and forth. If you, if you like those things, but I think sitting down and crafting your idea or having someone do that, who’s requesting a meeting is the first step in eliminating these endless pointless meetings.

They take your time and your time needs to be spent somewhere else. So you need to eliminate meetings because meetings are a crutch in an organization. They are not the key to productivity. Now another thing with meetings is don’t make them too long. Like I said, sometimes you have to meet. We do an entire team meeting, the entire staff on Mondays and it never goes longer than 30 minutes unless we’re presenting some big massive annual quarterly plan and it’s, you know, we can get done with a group of, you know, 10 plus people.

We can get done in 15, 20 minutes and that’s to check in on like every KPI, every metric and most people set default meeting times to one hour, half hour. I start with 15 minutes. Can we do this in 15 minutes and if we are going to have that meeting, can we, can we do it faster? Can we do it in seven minutes, 10 minutes?

strategies to manage distractions by controlling phone and email notifications

And once it’s done, don’t feel like you have to sit there and fill the void. Use the time that you have left over and go do something else. Do not spend your time or waste your time in meetings. It’s not what you need to be doing. The third thing is you are allowing your phone to notify you. This is a lot like the email thing.

Don’t let your phone notify you of anything. I don’t forget when I first got the iPhone, it has that double notification feature. If you’ve ever noticed like, and this was years ago, I mean this was like right, like close to when the iPhone first came out for Verizon. I would get a text message and I was never the type of person who would respond to a message right away.

I might be doing something else. I want to do that thing and then the iPhone will notify you again. It’s like, Hey, you didn’t check this message. Here it is again. And I hate, I hated that ever since like the iPhone allowed that. But I’ve also taken the stance that the iPhone or whatever device I have is not allowed to notify me of anything.

I will go pick it up. I will use it when I feel like I need to use it again. I don’t want a phone to notify me with some random notification about what I should be doing right now or someone else sending me a message or whatever. Some sort of notification about what I should be doing right now. I want to do what I want to do right now.

I don’t want anybody else to dictate that, whether it’s a piece of tech or a person. So eliminate all notifications from your phone. Just like email, have a chance, like have a time when you go check all those things. You can respond to things, all of that stuff, but don’t just let it sit there and ping and ruin your day with all these, these notifications.

insights into streamlined decision-making processes that minimize decision fatigue

Turn all notifications off for everything unless it’s absolutely important. Some sort of emergency level in which case they should probably not be communicating with you in the first place. Number four is overcomplicating decisions or really decision fatigue by putting decisions off. Most people don’t have any kind of decision making process and you know that these things come up in your business and they are huge time waster and this is more of like an opportunity cost, not necessarily like you sitting around and you know, I’m overcomplicating the decision.

It’s not having the process because we oftentimes, very oftentimes as business owners run up on decisions that need to be made, it’s left, it’s right. What are we going to do? Zigzag. You have to make these decisions. The faster you make them, the faster your business is going to move forward. And sometimes we just sit around, we let it ping around in the back of our head, taking up mental bandwidth.

Slowly we’re thinking about in the shower, in the car, you need to set aside a time to think and decide. So write down your pros and cons list. Do all the research that you have to do, but set deadlines on decisions. Don’t just let something go on and on and on. Set a deadline for the decision and make the decision and then be done with it.

Move on. If it was the wrong decision, cool, you’ll adjust for next time, but at least it’s made and you free up that mental bandwidth and you’re not wasting your time. Next number five is saying yes to everything. We all do this as entrepreneurs and it might be yes to opportunities we think are going to move the business forward.

Yes to a speaking engagement. Yes to this event. Yes to that event. Yes to this podcast. Yes to this email request. Yes to what this employee is asking me to do. All of these things we’re saying yes to when we need to start saying no. Time is precious. Do not waste it saying yes to every single thing.

There are, there’s a difference between an opportunity and an opportunity that you actually need to pursue. So I have said no to countless and I mean countless speaking engagements for a lot of reasons. Speaking engagements take a lot of time. I’m not a professional speaker, so when I get these engagements, it’s not like I’m hurting some level of income.

Some people make money that way. When I do it, it’s often, it can be a paid gig, but I know for a fact it’s not going to take me away from my family. I’m going to prep for it because I want it to be really awesome. There’s probably a travel day. There’s the day doing it. There’s the travel back. It takes up a lot of time and I’m not talking to you specifically about whether or not you should take speaking engagements.

I’m just letting you know. I’ve said no to a lot of things that are opportunities. That’s an opportunity to speak in front of people and further my message and engage with more people, but it’s not what I’m pursuing right now. It’s not a part of my business. It’s not a part of any strategy that I’m trying to pursue.

So I’m saying no to those kinds of things and that’s hard to do because sometimes you’re like, I don’t know if these opportunities will always be here. Was that a big miss? Should I have done it? Those things rattle around in the back of my head too, but ultimately I know by staying focused on my goals, I’m not wasting time doing something else.

the importance of saying no to maintain focus on essential tasks and opportunities

So I feel very comfortable making that decision. Say no to more things. Number six is not tracking any metrics. Now not tracking message metrics. You’re not doing something. So how is this wasting your time? Well, how it’s wasting your time is you’re going to need these metrics to make a decision to move forward, to change strategy, and it’s kind of like keeping your books.

A lot of entrepreneurs early on, they try and keep their own books. They start to get busy and then they don’t delegate that, you know, to, to an accountant or a bookkeeper. And so then they have to do this Herculean effort once a year to do all this backup bookkeeping. Hopefully you’re not in that situation anymore, but I know lots of entrepreneurs who have done this and then instead of the 10 minutes per week that it could have been, it’s, you know, 15 hours in the course of one week all at once because you’re trying to backtrack, do all this stuff.

It’s very frustrating. It eliminates an entire week or more of productivity. This is not just true of bookkeeping. This is true of all metrics in your business, okay? You should be keeping track of the most important metrics. So things like how much money’s coming in, how much is profit, how many leads do we have?

How many sales opportunity calls, like calls do we have or opportunities do we have? You know, what’s our conversion rates? Really basic things. You don’t need more than a handful of three to five things that you’re currently tracking because you’d only track what you can influence. But if you’re not tracking those things, I don’t know how you’re making decisions in the first place.

the role of backtracking metrics in maintaining productivity and informed decision-making

And then second, if you do want to make that decision, you’re like, oh, well I really need to know my lead conversion rate right now. And so you’re going back. You’re doing this retroactive project to try and find out this information. And that’s how you’re starting to waste time. Either automate it, delegate it, do whatever you have to so you can look at these things quickly and move on and not waste time trying to do these retroactive projects that you should have never be doing in the first place.

And then the last one, number seven, is not creating any kind of checklist. There’s a great book called The Checklist Manifesto. You don’t have to read the whole thing, but like the idea is create a checklist. All great areas and professions do it, from pilots to surgeons and everything. Having a checklist is a really great idea.

Now when you’re first creating a process, you might just have to go through it a couple times or refine it and decide what it is, but you need a checklist for two reasons. The first reason is if you’re going to be the one doing it, you’re not going to delegate it or whatever. Maybe you want to do it.

Maybe you have to do it because you can’t hire the team or whatever. If you are going to be the person doing it, you don’t want to have to sit down at a blank page and be like, how do I publish a podcast again? And like you might know it, but you’re like going like, oh yeah, this step, then that step.

So even if it’s a task for you, having a checklist is huge because it takes mental bandwidth out of it and it speeds up your accuracy and how quickly you can do it. So you’re more efficient. So if you have a checklist, even if it’s for work you are doing, it’s going to be so much better, so much faster.

You won’t make mistakes. Checklists are huge. And then I think you probably already know where I’m going with the second reason you want a checklist is if you have a documented checklist, so it’s not just a checklist, it’s a checklist with some like video training. Now you can very easily replace yourself over and over and over again.

If you have a checklist for every single thing you do, whether it’s making a video, a podcast, editing something, or maybe it’s pulling KPIs, how you like to answer emails, whatever, any of these things, if they have a checklist and a process and a little bit of training, you can very easily hand this over to someone else and now they are doing the work and you don’t have to.

So it’s a very easy way to train people up as you go through it. And I highly recommend, even if you’re a beginning business owner, start doing these things now because things only get busier and it’s really hard to onboard an employee if you don’t have any of these things and you’re trying to do it all at the same time.

Like I’m onboarding the employee, but I’m also having to create the training and do all the stuff I need to do to continue to run my business. It becomes very difficult. So get ahead of these things. If you’re new, if you’re like you’re a new entrepreneur, just go ahead and start making these things, forecast that vision that you are going to have this team and that you can do it.

And then for anyone else, just create the checklist. If you do have a team, like why are you making them have to guess through these processes over and over again, build the checklist, build the system, build the process. Now I know once I started doing all of these things, I eliminated distractions.

I have a decision making process. It really speeds up how much I’m able to get done. And so this is not just like a checklist, it’s a lifestyle, becomes a business productivity lifestyle of how you attack your day, how valuable your time is, because it really is your most important asset. No matter how cliche that sounds, time is always going to be the most valuable asset that you have.

And if you are not actively protecting it, someone else is going to dictate your time. And that could be someone else from an employee, like I said, random emails coming in, someone’s going to dictate what you’re doing with your time if you’re not careful as a business owner. So you have to fight for your time.

summary of productivity as a lifestyle and the importance of fighting for your time

It’s not easy. I still have to fight for my time each and every single day and it is not easy. But I will continue to do it and I urge you to do it too. So this is the best way that you can, you know, ultimately not waste time, be more productive, be a better human, build your business bigger, try harder.