In this episode, we discussed how using task stacking to help you fit more into your day and the best way to do so.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about fitting more time into your day and the first way I fit more time into my day is that I do something called task tasking. I stack two activities on top of each other so I’m not just spending my time on one activity. The reason why I obtain a lot of information is that I squeeze learning into an area that would otherwise be wasted.
When I go to the gym, instead of listening to music, I listen to a podcast. When I’m waiting for an appointment to start like at the doctor’s or while I’m waiting at the mechanic waiting for my oil to change, there is an opportunity to open my Kindle App and start reading. If I’m cleaning, I listen to a podcast. There are times where I do listen to music but the majority of my time is spent listening to podcasts.
You have to realize that the average self-made millionaire reads two books a month. If you spend 20-30 minutes a day reading a book, you will finish two books a month. So what I would do is look for ways to add deep thinking tasks to your shallow thinking tasks.
To read a book, it requires me to pay attention to. To fold laundry, it’s pretty much a task that I can do on autopilot and if I’m folding clothes without any music, my mind would just wonder anyways. If I mismatch two socks, it’s not the end of the world, the same thing if I don’t fold my shirt in the right way. This is the key thing, you’re not pairing two tasks that are deep thinking because that would be too much. I can’t write and listen to a podcast at the same time. My mind is trying to think about two different things and I end up being really slow in finishing my tasks and I can’t remember anything from the podcast because I wasn’t paying attention to it that much.
I need to have ideas in order to run my business and to write these podcast episodes, so I need to consume a lot of information. Plus if I can recall that information at the right moment, I can look like a superstar. The economy that we live in is the information economy. The more useful information that you can bring to your workplace, the more opportunities you can get for yourself. So utilizing task stacking for your learning will be an excellent opportunity to learn some valuable information. The amount of audiobooks and podcasts that we have access to is amazing. Some of the podcasts that I listen to is so amazing that I keep going back to help me with another problem that I’m facing. So I would highly recommend that you use task tasking with your learning to help you get some fresh ideas. The car, the bus, the bike, and just walking can provide valuable time to start listening more.
The second way I fit more time in my day is that I batch my day. When I do a task, I try to only do that task. When I’m writing, it’s best to turn off the wifi and turn my phone on airplane mode for the hour so that I can focus without having the distraction of the internet. Once I’m done with writing, then I take a little break, and then I focus on the next activity. When I look at my day, I know what activities I need to do and I focus on the activities that are going to give me the biggest return o my time. It’s not good to switch from task to task because when you do this, your brain is still thinking about the previous task and it can take up to 30 minutes to shake off that previous task from your mind. So when you do something, make sure that is the only thing you’re going to focus on. If you keep getting interrupted, remove yourself from the distraction or put up a barrier so that distraction knows you’re working.
This can save you more time since instead of taking an hour to do something, you’re getting it down in 30 minutes and compound that over a year and you’re going to accomplish a lot of cool stuff. I would also recommend that you do the toughest tasks as soon as possible. I usually do my writing as the first thing on my to-do list because that is when I’m the freshest. I’ve tried writing at the end of the day and I always seem sluggish and it takes me longer to write. So look at your do and see when you have the most energy I guess and schedule the more difficult tasks during that time period because that’s when you’ll be less likely to quit and to think of more creative solutions. I tend to batch my administrative tasks at the end of the days because they don’t require that much high-level thinking, I just have to follow the process and I can listen to music while I’m doing it or a podcast depending on the task.
The other way you can fit more time in your day is to hire a virtual assistant. I’m really close to start to hire my first full-time assistant and I’m just documenting all the tasks that I want them to do. I use zoom to record my screen and just go through the task. So when I hire a virtual assistant, they can just view that video and get the work done without having to bother me. I also learned from a podcast that you give your employees roles to do, not tasks. For me, the person would be in charge of producing this podcast and updating my website. And tell them this is the role and their role is to improve processes as they see fit. This will give me more time to focus on bigger picture items and to focus more time on my clients.
Learning to delegate tasks is so important if you want to have more time. Over the past couple of months, I’ve used Fiverr to hire some people to do some projects for my website and to do my logo. That saved me so much time and it allowed me to work on other things that I’m better at. If you’re a level four at a task, either you need to become a level 10 at that task or you should delegate that task to someone else. An hour trying to create a logo that looks crappy is not a good use of my time when I could hire someone for $30 to do that logo. Unless I really love that task and it’s valuable to me, then I’m not going to do it. There are hobbies that you can enjoy, just make sure they stay hobbies and don’t eat up a lot of your valuable time.
Doing these things will save you time and that’s important because it’s the most valuable resource we have. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. I don’t want to continue to work 60-70 hour weeks for the rest of my life. I want to have the flexibility to choose my schedule. I love working and seeing client but there are other things I would like to do in the future like more public speaking opportunities and working with organizations to make social changes that I want to see in the future. An hour working on my business means and hour that I can’t spend somewhere else like with family and friends. Life is a balance and as people, we can design our life to fit the way we want to see it and that comes from knowing how to manage your time.
You only have one life, might as well spend that life living.
That’s it for today’s episode, and to summarize it, we need to know how to fit more time in our day. You’re not feeling rushed and you’re spending your time on the things that you want to do. If you take advantage of task stacking, delegating, and batching tasks, this can save you a lot of time that can be spent more on your hobbies, with friends and family, and for recovery time. There is a lot of things I want to accomplish in the future and they are only going to come true if I can spend my time on the right task and limit my time on the things that don’t matter. Your life matters and you should treat your day like your life matters, so make sure you design your life in a way to accomplish this.
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
