Time to Reset - Strategic Time Management & Habit Audit! EP #359

New Year – New Strategy! ✨ 📈

The start of a new year is the perfect time to take stock of what’s working—and what isn’t.

 We explore how strategic time management and a deep dive into your habits can unlock new levels of success, both personally and professionally.

You’ll hear actionable tips on how to prioritise, stay disciplined, and make smarter decisions with your time. And how seemingly small distractions—like partying or indulging too often—can impact your productivity and long-term goals. 

Are you ready to take control of your time and set yourself up for success this year?

TVM: Den Lennie, Alana Tompson, Caleb Maxell, Matt Smolen

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Transcript

 Hello and welcome to the show. We've been just discussing a few things before this episode. So apologies for the slight giggling but we're going to keep the things we're trying to do, it's real life. We're not trying 10, this is anything but what it is. Now this is a great time of year for resetting.

And I think a lot of times we can come up with excuses why we're not able to do more in our business. And it's I don't have time. You do have time now. It's the perfect time of year for really no excuses because practically nobody's working. And it's a great opportunity to, get a bit strategic, maybe do a bit of a time audit.

So yeah, Alana, let's kick off with you. Cause this was a topic that you really, that you came up with. And I think is a great topic. What do you see here? Feel out there what inspired this topic and please do share your views.  Yeah. So I, yeah, I suggested this topic because I have a lot of different conversations with a lot of different people, and something that comes up a lot with people that want to scale their business but don't know how is the excuse of, but I don't have the time. 

And I just see that is a bit of a sort of mindset shift and that people need to perhaps do a bit of an audit of their habits and what they're doing and look at if their habits are actually serving them to achieve what they want. So for me, it's if you're trying to be an elite athlete, you're going to be doing habits like training daily.

You're going to be eating the right food. You're going to be, working on a positive mindset, things like that. And I think the exact same thing relates to scaling a video production business. I think people really have to look at their habits and are those habits serving your greater purpose of wanting to be an entrepreneur.

So maybe you need to ditch Netflix and instead get on Sales Navigator, making sure that you're looking after yourself. Putting yourself in the right frame of mind for that. So yeah, I think you've got to get really strategic in all areas of your life. What do you think, Caleb?

Yeah, that's what I was just thinking as you were saying I remember back to when I was like in that mentality mode of operation it was kids spoke I'm coming to you as a father of three little boys and. I still, find time to grow a business and  I sometimes do hear people, not throwing any shade on those who do not have, don't have a family, or haven't embarked on that journey yet.

They say, I don't have, I just don't, I'm so busy, I don't have time. and I look back at myself when I pre-kids. I go if we were. I know. It's wow, I didn't have time. I didn't know what time was like like the perspective shift is all a matter of perspective. All a matter of, it's very subjective.  It's like you do a full-time job before you start work. And when you knock off from work, you're doing another day's work, getting into bed, and then you're doing work after that. Yeah, I had a friend of mine who kept saying every time we'd catch up, it was always like, how are you going?

Oh, I'm so busy. And that was just like the default. But I think when we realized it was just, that was the default operating for everybody, everybody's busy. It then lets you go. We're all busy but what I actually want to do and what am I trying to achieve in this time yeah I think realizing that it's all relative you might have 20 kids and a full-time job whatever or you might be you know single and with heaps of quote-unquote time you'll still feel the push and pull of busy but I think.

This topic about it, being strategic, it's all about the intentionality you use your time, right? I always like to think of the quiet time of the year and go, you know what, we've got the luxury of space and time without the pressures of immediate client projects, right?

You can pretty confidently say there might be a week or two where there's not a whole lot of other projects going on. So how do you take that?  Space and time that you've got to really expand your thinking around, what you do with your time day to day. What does a good busy look like? How are you going to set yourself and the team some goals for the future? 

And also just keep that as the kind of underlying driver behind any other tasks you do. So when you do get busy, what's the thing you can always fall back to, to go, no, actually the priority with my time is this thing. So I'd be really keen to hear what you guys think about what those kinds of drivers are underneath your strategic time management because I think they're really good guides for, wanting to scale or wanting to.

Sell more or whatever it might be. Yeah, I reckon for me, it was just getting out of the sea of options and ideas and just I was always playing in this the ether of we could do this or we could do that. And I had no business skills really, or knowledge of. How I was going to achieve these things and they were all a bit intangible.

I couldn't grasp them like I had concepts, but no, it led to no action. And so w when I started to get some real traction around time management and being effective and contributing to something specific and growing my business, it was when I was able to put get some learning foundation of learning of.

And processes behind a specific thing I wanted to achieve. So firstly, it was like, I needed to learn how to run a business really. And that's like a big topic, right? I needed to learn that business is all about systems. It's all about something a structure that helps you achieve an outcome with small repeatable tasks.

I had to realize that discipline was a really massive and important part.  Of achieving things and that my life wasn't just going to be all peaches and rainbows, but I like highfalutin creative concepts and projects that the day-to-day life of a business owner is doing boring things that you you left the motivation to do long behind you.

And, it's contributing to the outcome that you've set. And that, that just the discipline of doing that, those things is going to, it's going to edge you closer to the goal, whether that be A financial goal, which we all have financial goals. We all set them every year and track those every month.

But then what is the business that I want to build here? What, put some flesh around that. What am I actually building? Am I, what's the impact I'm going to have on the world here? What are the values that I'm expanding into my community? We all here have. A really strong set of language and about those values.

It's not just we're building a business to so that I can go on more holidays and escape from life like those in the rat race, right? Where we're building something for a purpose and we're building something of meaning and all those good things.  I love how you said discipline, it all comes down to discipline at the end of the day, doesn't it?

And I think being aware that  I'm like, I'm going to prefix with that is I'm not against people having a good time and partying and I've done plenty of that in my life,  but  I, there's been periods in my life where I've been drinking booze every weekend, glass of wine at the end of the weekend, been a big week, let's get a bottle of wine, couple of beers. 

And I think certainly in Australia, there's a big culture of, Hey, have a drink, socialize, relax. And I didn't drink for six months as an experiment. And then I've really backed off the booze again.  And what I've noticed is this correlation between if I'm really serious and committed to my business,  it needs all of my attention whenever I've got available space and time.

We've all got commitments.  So you make a decision.  Is having this beer or this wine going to help me to achieve my goals, or is it going to slow me down, hinder me, make me a bit sluggish, it's a depressant, and so the next day you always feel a bit down. And again, I'm not judging anyone for having a drink, it's not that.

It comes down to prioritizing. And Alanna and I were talking this week about just some of our kind of outside-of-work habits and things we enjoy. And it was something that Alanna hadn't done for a while and it was so great. And we had a conversation about, what life was like maybe 10 years ago, out partying versus what life is like now and how we've both kind of separately channeled a new way of getting fulfillment and it doesn't involve artificial stimulus. 

And I'm not trying to be cryptic on purpose. I'm just being respectful of it. It was a private conversation but the point being but the point being is that having a drink is a stimulus and I've noticed that by not drinking and replacing it with these dashed waters, which are just zero, zero calories, it's not sponsored, but if you'd like to dash yeah, why not?

Why not? Just, it's really interesting, especially this time of year when there's been a lot of socializing, I've just really observed the disassociation between having a drink being how I relax. And finding other ways, and that has helped my mental state, my mental capacity to deal with challenges in the business, quiet periods in a year, things go up, things go down.

I just wonder if that's something that relates to this, yeah, it's funny you should say that, cause I haven't drunk in quite a while, just by choice, not for any particular reason. It just doesn't feel right anymore. So I just stopped. I'll have a drink every now and then, but it's definitely. 

With me scaling my business and then not going out and not drinking, it's definitely occurred at the same time. And I think it's because I'm putting that energy now into my business. And I think you almost have to look at it like a pie chart, right? This is your time, your attention, and your energy.

And if you're putting more of that energy and attention into partying, less is going to be going into your family or your business. And so you just got to look at how much of your pie chart you want taken up by certain things and where your focus needs to be. Yeah. And I guess too, like talking to that pie chart idea is that if you feel like it's set up one way, but you want more of a different part of it, like maybe it is family time or.

Or something like that. Just by removing the other parts and putting more time into the business to, you then open it up, right? So you do have to have those really hard conversations with yourself and go, is this the best use of my time right now? And am I doing this for a reason that is valuable?

Now, again, I also drink, I have, go to the movies, do whatever. And sometimes you need that. You need those outlets and those sorts of releases. But at the same time, if you find yourself doing that to the detriment of the goals and desires you have in your business or in your life something has to give somewhere.

There needs to be sacrifices or compromises too. We can't have everything. So what do you focus on and get the most out of that? And so I think as business owners, we've got the most opportunity to us because we have all of these tools at our disposal to, to leverage and create more for ourselves.

Maybe it's bringing in the team. Maybe it's selling more. Maybe it's. Yeah, whatever it is, we can move things to create the life and the business that we want for ourselves, but you can't have everything you can't be watching Netflix 10 hours a day and running a really successful business and see your kids every day of the week.

It's justthat  something has to change there. So be really critical of your own time used. And then going right, I want to address these things, and putting in place some structure and intentionality behind it just means that you are much clearer and focused on what you're going to achieve.

And I think, the quiet points of the year are the really good opportunities to, to reflect on that without the kind of immediacy of okay I just got 20 minutes to think about this, now I gotta go to a job. It's no, you've got. The luxury to, to be able to spend, a day, a week on this and really plan it out and set that as the benchmark for what you want to achieve. 

I think what you're saying is a really great point. It sparked the thought in me that there's often a perspective shift that needs to happen. Especially for those early in business. I know it happened for me that. I treated, I set up like a little prison for myself, subconsciously, I treated my business as something that controlled me rather than something that I'm building.

And so it's really, I think it's really easy to step slip into that powerless mindset of the, like a victim mindset of like my time's not my own. I have to do this. I have to do that. Someone's telling me I have to do this. And really as business owners. We create all those things. They're all made up.

They're no real,  sorry to say we, we are actually the masters of our own destiny, but there, we  actually have to step into that persona, that perspective and own it. Or else you will just slip back into, you'll put things in place that you can tell yourself control that control you're putting in place your own, fake masters to make yourself feel more comfortable about not taking the action that is actually going to build the life that you want.

And I think part of the process that we go through in in the video mentors and the VBA is that, that vision boarding exercise.  And it, that's really about connecting with what do I want? What do I want and will I step into the person? Will I become the person I need to be to build that?

Rather than am I going to be led by the circumstances of life and just play the victim?  The life audit Den's life audit was really eye-opening for me with that. It was the first time I'd actually sat down and gone. How much of my time is going to family, to work, to friends, to spirituality. And yeah, getting me to do that practice was very revealing. 

Yeah. We're talking about habit audits, aren't we? Really? It's understanding that a business does not grow itself. It takes enormous amounts of your own effort and the ability to make decisions fast. And the ability to trust your instinct, but also to be  brutally honest with yourself about your habits, the ones that are serving you and the ones that aren't.

And it's very confronting. It's it's actually not for everyone. Running a business is not for everyone. And I think there's a very fashionable trend that, everyone should be an entrepreneur. And they see the back end of a journey. They see Janine Ellis, they see Elon Musk.

They see all these people going, Oh my God, they've made it.  But I think Matt, you were telling me you'd done a lot of work for Janine's company and in the early days she'd be around and now she's less so because she's more of a personality  and I think social media perpetrate, perpetuate, perpetuates this of people only show a curated end game.

Here's what it looks like when it's done.  And, the fact is that the real hard work,  a few months ago, Matt and I had a conversation, a really raw conversation about, it was, it'd been a really tough month for me and him in business for a number of reasons.  And we had a conversation after school and reflecting on the fact that is the business journey, how you respond when things are,  and there's a dozen things that can happen on any given day that can make your business tough and make it potentially risk falling over at any point. 

And you have to just be developing that awareness around your habits and how you think about these things, how you process them, then the action you take subsequently, and then the outcome of that. I think, yeah, like recognizing your own strengths, weaknesses, flaws, biases, all of these things, even if you can't act on it in the moment, but just being able to recognize them puts you in such a great position to be able to take the right course of action for whatever you need.

For me, we had a really challenging month as Den alluded to, and you go through you can have the rock-solid steely belief in what you're doing, but as things get harder and harder the more that self-doubt and that, imposter syndrome creeps in but you just the ebbs and flows of that, you have to just ride out and be brutally honest to yourself and say yeah, am I feeling this?

Is this me? Am I being, the best version of myself for this? Do you really believe in your thing? And I'm really just curating what you're doing with your time because those voices will creep in at any stage. And I think that as soon as you can recognize, all right, maybe I've become more complacent or I'm not showing any humility here and owning the mistakes or the times I'm not showing up or whatever it is, just gives you that platform to be able to move forward from.

If you don't recognize these things that you're in your own way or that you're constantly putting up barriers and saying, yeah, no, but this is going to happen and blah, blah, blah, and putting in excuses. You're just cheating yourself in those situations. By prioritizing, recognizing what's in front of you and the challenges that you might present to your own situation through the way you act and behave recognizing that just frees you up to then make a really conscious decision. 

I also, I heard a really great quote. A couple of weeks ago that it was easy to look over the other side of the fence and go, the grass is always greener on the other side, but that grass still needs mowing all grass needs mowing. So it doesn't matter if it's greener or not, you've still got to mow the grass.

And it's like you have the most successful business in the world, be doing millions of dollars or be at the start of your journey, making, a couple of grand a month by comparing yourself to somebody else. It's just, it's impossible because you need to focus on your own grass and make sure that's tidy and under control.

Look in your own backyard, really assess where your challenges are, and what your blockers are, and then go, how can I tackle this? How can I overcome this? And maybe it's bringing in some external support, maybe it's outsourcing some stuff and whatever it is, right? It's all very case-specific, but look in your own backyard and really just determine what's holding you back and then make a strategic decision to, to overcome that. 

That's so good. One thing that makes me think of is This kind of three-stage formula of how your philosophy of how you take action, how a human takes action in their life. Every action you take is led by a decision that you've made. You have to decide to take an action. But every decision is influenced by a thought and so the whole philosophy is that the foundational work that any of us need to do is up here.

How do we think about ourselves? How do we think about our time? How do we think about our employment and our future? If we can do some foundational work and Matt said, you're not, you, it, this is like journey stuff. It's not like instant instant results. I'm gonna, I'm gonna rewind my brain and then I'm instantly gonna think differently.

But the first step is acknowledging and searching and going, man, how do I think about this? How am I thinking about this? And just the actual action. Questioning how you approach something and how you think about a certain topic, yourself, your business, your work, whatever, your time gives you the opportunity to do that audit and to discover things.

You're like, what do I believe about? Eh, what do I believe about how effective I'm going to be? Or what do I believe what's stopping me from doing the things that I know I should be doing or what's stopping me from learning? Those are all really foundational things. And they, when you change your thinking and change the way you think about something, it's going to change the decisions you make.

And when you've changed those decisions that you make, like we're talking about. Whether I'm going to go have a beer and get sloshed on the weekend, cause that's what I see people around me doing, or whatever the reason is. Then you change your decision making and it changes the actions that you are taking and that changes everything. 

Change your thoughts, change your life.  Yeah. It's powerful stuff, hey?  And then, it takes a while. There's a certain amount of emotional maturity that.  If I'd had 20 years ago, I might be in a different place, but I went through a whole career as a cameraman and it was very boozy and drugs and all sorts of stuff.

It was like, it was just one big party. We're talking about London in the. Late nineties, and early two thousands did a lot of entertainment, like music and entertainment. There were just parties everywhere and it was great. Like I don't regret it.  The penalty I've paid is I started my business late and I learned this really late in life.

Now I still feel I've got bags of time, but if you're 25 and listening to this, Oh my God. Can you imagine knowing this earlier and having The discipline to go, Oh, maybe I won't do that. Maybe I'll just do this instead.  There's a great story. And I can't remember the player's name, but there's an NBA player who was in the gym at midnight on New Year's Eve one year, and he's probably done it for a number of years.

And when asked by a bunch of reporters what are you doing in the gym on New Year's Eve? He's nobody else is in the gym. That's one more training session I've got in than anybody else. And it's that's the mentality of the guy that wants to be the best, right? Like it's. If you want to get ahead, you can't just sitting back on your laurels and expect it to come to you.

You need to put in the work, put in the reps, put in the effort to get what you want. So if we come back to this time management thing, like if you're really brutally honest with yourself and going, I'm actually wasting a bunch of my time and I'm not getting as much enjoyment from that as I actually believe I am, because society's telling me I've got to go out and party and all these things.

It's a great opportunity to go, you know what, let's put into place some more really strategic decisions about how I build my business over time. And I think it's probably worth mentioning as part of all of this is that I don't think we're advocating for Hustle 24/7, never have a break here.

Like it's always,  the balance is important. There is time and space to enjoy the life you create for yourself, right? But I think finding the balance is the key and making sure that the equilibrium is not weighted too far one way so the other stuff is missing out.  So let's bring this back.

Yeah, see I've worked every night this week, but tonight I'm going to be doing Netflix. Yeah! 

But I'm also just curious if we bring this back to staring at the top end of a year and going, okay, I want to do this year differently. This is the year I'm going to make my business work. And we talked about a lot of the kinds of by-products of, making unhealthy decisions that are for your business. 

But if we think back to that idea of strategic time management, it's a, it's a kind of very grown-up thing, isn't it? Strategic time management. It all sounds great.  What does that mean in reality? If you're sitting in your home office right now going, I've got nothing in the calendar and I want to do things differently this year,  but what are the steps, what are some practical things you need to be doing to make those changes?

Because everyone gets very. Motivated at the beginning of a new year or a new cycle saying, this is the year I'm going to do it differently. And when things are quiet, it's I'm all focused. And then something happens and then it, and you quickly fall off the wagon and you go back to your old habits.

So what are some of the practical things?  You'd be thinking about if you could wind the clock back to when we were all, just the lonely freelancer, Gwent. I want to build this thing up this year. What can I do differently?  I'll jump in if that's all right. Cause I, we're talking about this quiet, really challenging period.

It's been one of those moments to go, all right, what do I need to get back to? And what's the most efficient and strategic use of my time to change the situation we're in? And it is, it's about the simple things, right? It's about what moves the needle, what brings in business, what moves the conversation forward in the sales process, and then just do that relentlessly.

In a really important time of the day. So start of every day, nine to 11, two hours of really focused follow-up, cold outreach, phone calls, and then that sort of builds out the rest of your day. So it might be like, Hey client, we haven't worked with for a year. How are things? Great. Oh yeah. Awesome. We've been up to this blah, blah, blah.

Then I'll send you some examples that become a task for later in the day, but then you know that you can follow up with them in a couple of days and just, you That compounding effect of just sales mentality. It's repeatable, it's simple, and it's the thing that moves the needle. That's the thing that I think is the easiest and most simple version of this to do.

But I think the other thing that is really worth implementing is looking at your goals for the next year, but then breaking it down into those, yeah, you use quarterly sprints or 90-day sprints. And basically going, cool, I want to achieve, 20 percent more revenue this year than last year. What does that look like on a month-to-month basis?

Okay, if I have to sell an extra 10 grand a month, what does that mean I have to do weekly? And then developing some actions off the back of that to really have a direction for what you're doing with your time. So if you go, cool, we need to bring in all these extra sales and we don't have a really strong marketing plan.

We need to develop a marketing plan and a strategy for how we do that. Then you just break it down into those individual tasks and it gives you something tangible to work towards. Because if you just go, cool, we want to make an extra 20 percent this year, and that's your goal. It's like how possible is that?

It's a bit too intangible at that stage. So breaking something down into shorter bite-sized weekly or monthly goals just makes it so much easier to then progress and move forward.  That's great. I'm I dunno about anyone else, but I am a,  I love following a process and I have identified that I work really well if I can find a structure and then just play within that structure.

Winding my mind back to earlier on in my career in this time of year.  I,  the times where I was able to really leverage something was being able to latch onto a plan that someone had created or a philosophy or some sort of something to structure me towards whether it be a 90-day planning or a big picture kind of process we use a big picture process and and defining, learning that system and then being able to follow that.

So I'd be looking at learning, right? What am I going to learn? I don't have the skills or the knowledge right now to get to where I need to go. Where am I going to go to find that?  That'd be me.  I'm not a huge structure person. I'm trying to become more structured. I'm very much got a creative brain.

But like for me, the thing that I find that has the biggest impact.  Even it happened this week because we wrapped up, Oh, hi, I  love the contributions that are your efforts. Good little side note. If you're not watching the video version of this podcast,  there's a lot going on,  you're missing heaps.

You're just missing YouTube talks. So we just wrapped up a whole lot of projects. And so of course, instantly I got that fear of got to get more work, got to get out there, hit the pavement. Cause we were shooting a lot this week. There was just one morning where I could get up at 5 am, get on sales navigator start conversations, and start talking to people.

And from that one morning, I got a contact that I had a coffee with that we're now pitching a 15, 000 job to. So it's it's just one 5 am wake up, it's 15, 000. So for me, I would just be like. Even if you don't have a big plan, even if you don't have structure, just get out there, show up, talk to people,and  have conversations like that.

I feel like that's the most powerful thing you can do. It's just put yourself out there.  Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good, it reminds me of this diagram I saw of what people think showing up is and it's like a cup full every single day, but the reality of showing up is that sometimes it's full, sometimes there's a little bit in it, sometimes it's half, sometimes it's spilled, but you've still got a cup and you're trying to fill it every single day.

And I think that the key to it is just showing up with the intention of doing what you need to do. There's good days, and bad days, but just show up and it'll follow.  Beautiful art. 

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