Speaker 1: Welcome to the Path to Profit podcast. With your hosts Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.

Brad Dobson: Hi, and welcome to productivity month on the Path to Profit podcast, along with my wife, Dr. Minette Riordan, I am Brad Dobson. We are going to start productivity month with three easy ways to improve your focus, your creative focus.

Minette Riordan: Well, I would say, your business focus even more than your creative focus.

Brad Dobson: But, aren’t they the same thing?

Minette Riordan: They could be depending on your business. For me, they’re distinct. Like today, I’m pretty obsessed with that big Buddha painting over there. Like, I’d way rather be painting right now.

Brad Dobson: That’s looking pretty good, along with the one behind us, the new purple one behind us.

Minette Riordan: The new purple one. I don’t know if it’s new. I think she’s been there for a few weeks now.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, something like that.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. If you’re listening on iTunes or listening to the audio wondering what we’re talking about, check it out on YouTube. There’s a whole gallery of my art, my crazy habit for painting on the weekends. My son did a great job of helping to get it hung up so there isn’t so much clutter around.

Brad Dobson: Yes. Now, it just takes up the whole wall.

Minette Riordan: Now it just takes up the whole wall, but clutter is one of the things that we’re going to be talking about today. We’re going to be also talking about-

Brad Dobson: Did you just segue?

Minette Riordan: I did. And, it was a good segue too, except that we forgot the quote.

Brad Dobson: Ah, yes.

Minette Riordan: Do you want to read the quote? I don’t have my glasses on.

Brad Dobson: In fact, you segued to the quote.

Minette Riordan: How about if I read the quote?

Brad Dobson: Go for it.

Minette Riordan: All right. And, before I read the quote, just backup and say that I’m super excited about productivity month because this is a topic that we find that our clients really struggle with. And, I think more importantly, it’s a topic that we really still struggle with as creatives, and as entrepreneurs, there are so many distractions around. There’s a lot of physical clutter around. We’ve got the camera for the video for this poise just perfectly so you don’t really see all the clutter that’s piled around on the desk.

Brad Dobson: That’s right.

Minette Riordan: But, it’s a super important topic. We spent the whole morning today before we recorded this really sitting down and doing planning. I find that planning is one of the best ways to eliminate overwhelm and be more productive. We’ll talk about that this month.

Brad Dobson: We did quality planning too. It wasn’t just navel gazing type of planning. We actually-

Minette Riordan: Yeah, we’re good at the navel gazing too.

Brad Dobson: We did some good stuff.

Minette Riordan: We did.

Brad Dobson: Quote.

Minette Riordan: Yes, sir. Totally went down my rabbit hole about productivity there. Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination.

Brad Dobson: Ow.

Minette Riordan: Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination.

Brad Dobson: So, basically, open loops.

Minette Riordan: We’ve got to say who it’s by.

Brad Dobson: That unkept desk is just an open loop.

Minette Riordan: It is, and that is an awesome quote. I found it multiple times online, so it’s a popular one with people by Christina Scalise. As I was reading that quote, I was thinking about some of the things that are on my personal or our family to do list that aren’t getting done, like, we’re in the process of doing some estate planning, setting up new will and trust. We have an 18 year old, so things are changing in our lives right now. We got the poke email from the attorney’s office today saying, hey.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, you came to us.

Minette Riordan: You came to us and asked for help. For me, and then, the physical clutter manifestation part of that is that the envelope from them with the documents to be signed, and to be filled out, and the document feels overwhelming. It’s like a big fat document, and it’s sitting right below the new one that came in the mail, which is the tax planner from the accountant, which is also requiring our attention. I love this quote. I never thought about my clutter being a physical manifestation of my procrastination. It’s so true.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. I could kind of go deep with this because I definitely have had and continue to have that issue of leaving things open and finding an excuse to not complete it.

Minette Riordan: Could you define an open loop? Like, when you say, open loop, what do you mean by that?

Brad Dobson: Perhaps an unanswered email, perhaps a request to get some work done that’s going to take more than five or ten minutes to do that I couldn’t respond to. Maybe it’s an un-filed notice from, you know, Anthem Healthcare, or what is it? Blue Cross now.

Minette Riordan: But, it’s also things like collecting on money that’s owed to you.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: Or, figuring out a budget so that you can make better decisions in your business. And, they take up mental space. I think in the quote, Christina Scalise was talking about physical clutter and how it creates mental clutter or is a physical manifestation of what’s going on in our head. For me, the scary part and the stressful part about open loops is they take up mental space, right? They’re like an actual physical burden that stops us from moving forward.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. If I’m honest with myself, I think I use them as a, maybe not a crutch, but a way to reinforce how I view myself as overwhelmed, right? By keeping all of these things incomplete, but they definitely steal away cycles that are otherwise, or just turn into distractions. I think one little habit to help with that is, or two actually that came up in the last few weeks, one is, anything that could be done in under a minute, is to do it immediately. And, the other one is to do lazy cleaning, which is to just pick up one thing as you go by every time you go by. Not, once a day. Every time you walk past your desk put away one thing, or whether it’s the kitchen, or your desk, or whatever it is. Same is true with email, so those tiny little things.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. I usually say, five minutes or under for email because sometimes it takes a minute to propose a response, or make a lot of graphic designers, you may have one correction to make, but if it’s going to take more than five minutes, it needs to go on a to do list, or into your schedule in your planner.

The three things that we want to focus on today are pretty important. And, they’re clutter. We’re going to share a fun tip about having a distraction to do list. We’ll say more about that in a minute. We want to talk about sleep, but we’re going to start with clutter because we think that clutter is the most important and it’s the one where clutter doesn’t tend to bug me in the same what that it bugs Brad. But, noticing how physical clutter in your space creates mental clutter and vice versa.
What clutter often does is inhibits creativity. If you can’t see a clear space to just sit down and work, write, draw, paint. There’s days where I might spend six or eight hours copywriting. I can’t do that if my space isn’t clean, so I find that lazy cluttering is great, but I often find that decluttering doesn’t take as long as I think it does.

Brad Dobson: That’s true.

Minette Riordan: So, right before this call, we’d spend all morning planning and we knew we needed a break, and I’m like, let’s go for a walk, and Brad’s like, why don’t we go clean out back, which is great because we didn’t have to put shoes on, and it’s a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and we find we don’t sit outside on our back patio, which is lovely, and our garden as often because the table is covered in dust, or the chairs are covered in dust.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: In 10 to 15 minutes, actually I threw stuff away, threw some old Legos away that our nephew had left in the garden.

Brad Dobson: Perfect.

Minette Riordan: Brad got the fountain running, turned the sprinklers off, moved the umbrellas. Now, we have this beautiful clean space that’s inviting us to come, and sit, and connect, and create.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and I need it much more than Minette does. As she said, I really struggle with, I think it’s more of a sensory overload type of thing for me. I’m looking for that in a room that I sit in. I’m looking for it at my desk. All of those things, whether it’s laundry, or papers, or dishes, they all represent just things that my mind needs to work on. So, I struggle with that. I tend to keep my desk a lot cleaner. It hasn’t been great lately, but I definitely like it that way.

Minette Riordan: It’s paperwork, right? Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork is the thing that tends to pile up the most. And, we aren’t even in a business or an industry that requires the amount of paperwork that we used to be.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: But, still it’s that paperwork. Maybe for you it’s kids’ homework, or junk mail, or bills to be paid, and things are pilling up. And, maybe they’re piling up in different places. This is the time of year, as we are thinking ahead to tax season, we always have a file folder, or an envelope, or some place we put, as soon as it comes in from the mail, all the tax information goes in one place.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: Then, we’re not scrabbling for, where was that mortgage insurance statement, and where was the tax property assessments statement, and all the other things. I did read Marie Kondo’s book, The Art of Tidying Up. For me, it was a little extreme.

Brad Dobson: A little over the top.

Minette Riordan: A little over the top, where you touch everything once, and if you love it, you keep it, which I did love that part, but everything has a place and there’s a place for everything. I like my little bit of messiness.

Brad Dobson: That’s pretty AR.

Minette Riordan: But, there’s elements of that process of really pausing to evaluate all the things that are around you, and asking yourself on a regular basis, are you ever going to use this again?

Brad Dobson: Sure.

Minette Riordan: People talk about it in terms of closets, especially ladies like love to talk about it in terms of our closets and what we’re wearing and cleaning out our closets. I think the same is true for creatives. How many pens do you have lying around that don’t even work anymore, or just how many pens in general do you have around? There’s a lot in my office. I love to pick up free pens at trade shows. A lot of stuff starts to accumulate that we truly don’t need. Looking at it from the perspective of, am I going to use this in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Brad Dobson: Right, right, right. Circling back, this is just one of those things that is stealing time away from your business focus and your creative focus. It’s an awfully big challenge to really get into a creative flow when all those things are pulling on you all the time, pulling at your focus.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, that’s so true. I love that. I wrote down stealing time. It’s a good one, that clutter is stealing our time. One of the fun strategies.

Brad Dobson: Number two.

Minette Riordan: Number two on our list of three easy ways to improve your focus is, to do, what we call, a morning brain dump. This could also be combined with something really creative and fun like Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, or your morning journaling time, but it’s when you get to your desk in the morning and get ready to get to work, whether that’s your home office, your kitchen table, or you go to a physical office, it’s literally to just sit down and dump everything that’s going through your head at the moment on to a piece of paper that can be set aside, right? This is what we call your distraction to do list.

It might be that thing on the way to work, and you were going, who was the actor in that movie? You don’t need to go to the IMDBF on your phone right now and look it up, right? Or, you might be thinking, oh my gosh, I can’t remember to Maggie a snack so that she has that snack for piano lessons, on the way to piano lessons this afternoon. There’s all these things that distract us from just sitting down and getting to work. Create a distraction to do list, and then, use it during the day for a fun pause.
That one about, who was it that sang that song again? Give yourself some playtime to go surf around a little bit on YouTube, and watch that fun song.

Brad Dobson: Gotcha.

Minette Riordan: For me personally, I’ve got this Buddha I’m painting, and his nose just isn’t quite right. Brad and I literally spent like 10 minutes going, this little part of the nose needs to be redone, and it was a fun 10 minute distraction in the middle of our painting. So, a distraction to do list.

Brad Dobson: There might be a Cohen in there about the Buddha’s nose. I’m not sure.

Minette Riordan: About the Buddha’s nose. A Cohen about the Buddha’s nose, so that might be fun. Having a distraction to do list, and then, making those distractions almost like a reward because they’re, the truth is, we can only focus for so long and we need breaks.

According to the Pomodoro Method, which is a great one. Once an hour, you should take a 10 minute break. You can do some of these fun distraction things like we went and cleaned the garden, and while Brad was cleaning the garden, I cleaned the kitchen, and so, just fun things. You might not think that cleaning the garden and the kitchen are fun, but for us they are actually. I love having a clean kitchen. It makes everything else work better for me. So, whee Brad likes a clean desk, I like a clean kitchen.

Brad Dobson: There are opportunities for a little zen as well. If you’re with that program, you can turn off other things and just focus on actually cleaning.

Minette Riordan: Yep. And then, the third thing we want to talk about is, drum roll please.

Brad Dobson: This is the reverse. This is the to do list the night before. I had started doing this based on some things I had read and then, there was a recent study out of Baylor that-

Minette Riordan: Do you want a link to that study in the show notes?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, definitely.

Minette Riordan: Okay.

Brad Dobson: … where they’d given a couple of groups of people, either an assignment of five minutes of writing out tomorrow’s to do list before they went to bed, or not doing that. The folks who wrote out the to do list got to sleep faster, and so that meant that they got better sleep. That’s one way to get to number three, which is better sleep.

For those of you who have listened to us for a while, you know that I’m kind of on a sleep quest.

Minette Riordan: A better sleep quest.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. It really is the core to everything. I can be best Brad, best me, when I’ve had a great night sleep. I think that’s true for most people. That’s our number three, and perhaps, core way of helping improve your focus.

Minette Riordan: And, so from a business perspective, the things that contribute to a lack of better sleep are, clutter, especially mental clutter. Those open loops can keep you awake at night.

Brad Dobson: Financial stress.

Minette Riordan: Financial stress can definitely keep you awake at night. Caffeine can keep you awake at night.

Brad Dobson: You bet.

Minette Riordan: Brad ended up giving up caffeine completely, and I have cut back. Alcohol can keep you awake at night as well.

Brad Dobson: It gets you to sleep faster, but then, you’re up.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, but the older you get, then you’re awake in the middle of the night is what we found. And, we’re not at all proponents of drinking or not drinking, or caffeine versus no caffeine, but we’re about-

Brad Dobson: Like, this isn’t the abstinence show.

Minette Riordan: No, this is not the abstinence show at all, but it is about finding what is stopping you from sleeping and testing those things. It could be any one of those things. Brad and our daughter, Maggie, both, too much garlic gives them crazy dreams and impacts their sleep. And, sometimes, Maggie will say, I want to eat more garlic so I have those crazy dreams again. And, Brad’s like, I don’t want the crazy dreams.

Noticing physical clutter to mental clutter, to diet and exercise habits, what’s keeping you awake. And, we’re not here to talk about, there’s a million studies, podcasts, and articles on how your technology can interrupt your sleep as well.

Brad Dobson: Sure.

Minette Riordan: That’s a whole other area. But, in the terms of increasing an improving your focus as a creative, we find that doing whatever you can to get a good night sleep is really crucial.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I could say that again, and again, and again.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been testing out recently and I feel like it’s personally having an impact is the Headspace app. Really love the Headspace app. I’ve been listening to the falling asleep, so all of his meditations are primarily done in 10 to 30 day sequences. Right now, I’m doing the sleep one. It’s just talking about sleep, and I usually fall asleep during it even though that may not be the intention of the meditation. It doesn’t replace my other meditation practice, but there’s something about completely shifting mental gears by just breathing, and focusing, and conscientiously relaxing that has really helped me personally.

Brad Dobson: Mediation in huge, right?

Minette Riordan: Brad’s doing his brain dump and his journal the night before. I’m doing the Headspace app. Those are just a couple of the ways that we’re personally experiencing that. We said, three easy ways, but we could probably add exercise to our one of the things that improve sleep.

Brad Dobson: Oh, absolutely. Clearly. You need to work your body to, and of course, I’m a big proponent of that. When you get your heart rate up and your lungs working, and your muscles in use, your body wants that, and it helps you sleep better. It just does. Sex, that helps you sleep better. Lack of stress from meditation, all those things.

Minette Riordan: I think more sex was on our to do list for this year, right?

Brad Dobson: Clearly.

Minette Riordan: It’s clearly on productivity, yes.

Brad Dobson: I wanted to go back to one last thing about taking those notes before you go to bed about what’s going to happen tomorrow. You check your Google calendar. You see what appointments are on, you write that down. You write down your big six, whatever mean things you think you need to get done the next day. The neat part about that is that overnight your brain works on that.

You’re much more clear the next day about getting those things done and getting a focus on them. Perhaps, if you’re looking to have a creative focus the next day, you could write down what creative things you’re going to do tomorrow. Then, magically those are going to flow out of you the next day because your brain’s ready for it. It’s been eight hours kind of mulling it over and it knows what it wants to do.

Minette Riordan: Or, three, or four, or ten.

Brad Dobson: That’s right.

Minette Riordan: Depending on how many hours that you sleep. It’s so true. I love checking my Google calendar to make sure I know what appointments are coming, especially if I have sales calls coming the next day, and just being able to dream, and feel like I’m in a really, really good place to have those conversations is super, super important. We’re kind of talking around in circles here, but I wanted to go back to the clutter one for just a minute because I had a memory of one of the life coaches that Brad and I worked with, probably about 10 years ago. An amazing woman named Jenny Bare in Dallas, Texas.

Jenny used to say, 15 minutes a day. Like, set a timer, get the whole family, and the kids thought this was hilarious, so they were really young when we were doing this. We would pick a room, set a timer for 15 minutes, and say, go. Everybody would pick something up, or grab a broom, or contribute to cleaning. I know that my pattern in the past would have been to spend an all day Saturday cleaning the house.
Then, I felt like my weekend was gone. That was frustrating, and there was no down time, or playtime, and the kids were grumbling and complaining because they were like, all we do is clean around here, right? It didn’t contribute to the type of lifestyle that we wanted. Making sure that you’re focusing on the clutter in a way that feels really healthy, and supported to your entire family. This is a lifestyle issue and a lifestyle choice, especially when you have two people that don’t necessarily have the same feelings or thoughts around clutter in the same way.

Brad Dobson: You got it.

Minette Riordan: I had another thought but it just scared.

Brad Dobson: I think that 15 minute method also supports the lazy cleaning, right? So, pick stuff as you go by. Then, also knowing that you’ve got that 15 minute block to perhaps get a little deeper without it turning into a whole Saturday, or a whole weekend, or whatever it is.

Minette Riordan: And, it’s movement, right? It actually gets you up from your table and your desk and gets you moving a little bit more, walk those extra few steps to actually put things away, as opposed to just maybe lying it on the couch for hours and hours on end, binging on Netflix.

Brad Dobson: That’s right. I think we’re wrapping this one up. This was show number one of productivity month. And-

Minette Riordan: And, we have an awesome special gift for you guys.

Brad Dobson: I was going to wear it with the next podcast outfit.

Minette Riordan: Oh, you’re already going to the next podcast. Well, we’ve got to tell them about the fun part. One of the things, and Brad mentioned this a few minutes ago was one of the things that we teach our clients is our whole time management system. Part of that is what we call the daily big six. This is never having more than six things on your to do list that you commit to doing before you go to bed at night. No fewer than three, no more than six. It can be a combination of personal or business related, but it’s learning how to chuck out things down into tiny bite size steps. It’s amazing how small steps create massive momentum in your business.

To make that process artful and fun, which is my favorite way to get anything done, is artfully and playfully. We created the artful profit planner. This is a 30 day planner. You can download it totally for free at the artfulprofitplanner.com. There’s no, the in it, right? Just artfulprofitplanner.com.

Brad Dobson: That’s right. And, we’ll have a link in the show notes too.

Minette Riordan: We’ll have a link in the show notes, but if you’re trying to-

Brad Dobson: Cool. Our clients really love it.

Minette Riordan: It’s really cool. It’s been probably the number one thing that’s created the most impact and results from a financial perspective for our clients. It is about how to make a profit in your business, which as the Path to Profit podcast, we’re pretty excited and passionate about profit.

Brad Dobson: You bet.

Minette Riordan: So, go check out artfulprofitplanner.com and download your free planner. You also get a couple of fun videos that will tell you how to use it because, you know, a planner without instructions is some, not very useful.

Brad Dobson: That’s right.

Minette Riordan: And so, playful, artful, and useful. I think that’s my mantra for today.

Brad Dobson: Very nice.

Minette Riordan: Awesome. Thanks everybody, and we’ll see you on the next show where we’re going to talk about, don-don-dah.

Brad Dobson: Slow down to speed up.

Minette Riordan: Slow down to speed up. That will be a great topic. All right see you guys later.

Brad Dobson: Bye guys.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.