How many to-do lists do you have?
How many of the tasks on those lists have you actually finished on a consistent basis?For many bookkeepers, the answer is likely “not many.”
Why is that?
For most, distractions get in the way such as email, useless meetings and other potential time wasters.
Our guest today, Scott Friesen of Simpletivity is here to help!
He's a productivity expert who will teach you the following...
How to batch the amount of times you check email to improve your focus on more important activities
Why planning the night before to complete 2 top priorities the next day is extremely powerful
Why spending too much time on strategizing “what to do” instead of actually executing negatively affects your results
To find out more about Scott, visit https://www.simpletivity.com/about.html.
Michael Palmer: 01:02 Welcome back
MP: 01:03 to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's guest is another one of those great ones. He helps people from all over the world improve their productivity through his speeches, courses, and workshops. His techniques have benefited thousands of individuals and organizations alike. He has dedicated his life to helping others focus on what is most important and to do it with less stress, which I think we're all looking for. He does this through his company, Simplivity and where he's also going to help us make sure that we've got the pronunciation right on that. Welcome to the podcast, Scott Friesen.
Scott Friesen: 01:42 Thank you so much, Michael, and yes, let's get the pronunciation now. Right, right, right from the get-go. You did very well. He came very close. I refer to the company as simple-tivity simple, uh, and productivity sort of combined, combined together. But uh, thank you for having me, uh, looking forward to speaking with you today.
MP: 01:59 Yes. Well, you come recommended from two different fronts. Our community, uh, Pure Bookkeeping, we have about 70 members in Canada. Rob's on a call with a big chunk of them and I said, listen, we'd love to get your input on who you'd like on this podcast, on the successful bookkeeper podcast. And they said we got you. I listened to Scott Friesen and he's amazing. You got to get him on the podcast. And then I actually got an email from, uh, uh, another member, Patricia Sawatzky who said, listen, Scott was at the IPBC, the Institute of Professional bookkeepers conference out in Richmond. You spoke there and did a great job. So we're really looking forward to putting this content out to all the listeners on The Successful Bookkeeper podcast.
SF: 02:46 Well, again, glad to, glad to be here. I had a lot of fun at the IPBC conference. Got to meet a lot of new, uh, new friends and just a few weeks ago I got to do another webinar for that particular audience. We were all about email in that particular session. But uh, yeah, really glad to be with you here today and talk, uh, how we can be more productive, whether that's in your bookkeeping or, or accounting practice or, or maybe even in your own personal life. Um, most of the training and the tips, the things that I provide to my clients, uh, there's a, there's a big spillover from both the professional world to the personal world. It's not too surprising that we can, you know, meld those two things together. There's a lot of talk about work-life balance, but uh, that's really where a lot of my tips and techniques and best practices come into play that you can apply them not only in your, your workday, perhaps your traditional nine to five or whether it's a Home Office or whether you travel to an office outside of your home or in your personal life.
MP: 03:46 So, yeah, excited to be. Awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about how you got into this conversation of productivity.
SF: 04:00 Sure. I, I spent much of my early part of my career in the technology and software industry, started out as a product manager. You know, as a software product manager, you're, you're very much engaged in, in scheduling, uh, organizing both people and applications as you're releasing new features and really managing the entire life cycle of a software product. And, you know, during that time I worked very closely with a lot of, uh, software engineers, a lot of software developers. And I noticed something that, you know, our most successful, our very best coders were the ones that were able to focus on their work. Uh, we're able to block out other distractions and that really separated sort of your, your average or your OK software developer from your exceptional software developer.
SF: 04:49 And I think very similar to something like the, the art or the practice of bookkeeping to the world of software development. You know the very best aren't the ones that are just doing the most, you know, the very best coders aren't the ones that are just producing the most lines of code. It's the ones that are producing at a high volume but also making very few mistakes. Right? And I think no matter what you do for work, no matter what you do in your professional career, you want to try and minimize as many of those mistakes as possible. And so I noticed, you know, some of these practices, some of these techniques if these coders were using to keep this focus to eliminate or significantly reduce distractions. And I thought to myself, you know, this can be applied in so many other areas, not just in the world of software development.
SF: 05:39 And I think it was around that same time that, uh, you know, I noticed a lot of people coming to me saying, Scott, you got everything organized here. You know, you never seem to be behind. You never seem to be too stressed out about anything. Can you show me how to, you know, manage my tasks or can you show me how to help manage my projects or help manage my team? And so I started doing this sort of ad hoc off the side of my desk. And, uh, several years later I said to myself, you know, one, I, I enjoy this so much, passionate about the world of productivity and time management and teaching others. You know, I think I'd like to do that as a part of my, uh, core professional role. So I, I made a transition, uh, started to work in the world of corporate training, leading teams and providing leadership development and communication skills, a variety of soft skills, but productivity and time management, focus management. Those have always been my passion. And so that's now what I focus on exclusively.
MP: 06:44 Okay, well that's, that gives us a great background. I like the connection to the coding. I think it's very specific and I think it's very relatable to bookkeepers who are technicians and doing similar types of work where they need to have accuracy and speed. And so, you know, you obviously understand our listeners because you've, you've worked with bookkeepers, you've worked with accountants and you've spoken at conferences. So where, where should we get started and in terms of unpacking for them what their challenge is potentially or what the, what the problem is around their productivity and then get into some solutions that would be beneficial for them. And then we'll get into how they can get more information from you to further this journey with you.
SF: 07:31 Sounds great. Well, you know, usually my, my conversations start around distractions, right? Because it is so easy for us to be distracted in our world today. Uh, I just recently finished a book in which there was a quote saying that the most scarce resource in our world right now is focus. And I would tend to believe that more than a lack of oil, more than a lack of clean air, more than sane and um, and maybe polite political, uh, conversation. I think the most scarce resource we have is our ability to focus on our work. And you know, there are a few things that I think we tend to put above or we, we, we seem to put greater importance on than we need to. As I mentioned, uh, one of my most recent webinars with the IPBC group was around email. And I think email is a great example of a valuable communication tool.
SF: 08:31 It's something that we all use. It's something that we require. We need to perform our jobs, but I find often we elevate the importance of email beyond what it should be. It's, it's so easy for us to get lost in our inbox. It's so easy for us to spend an entire morning or an entire afternoon reading and replying emails. And you know, sometimes we get tempted into an activity like that. We think we're being productive because we've sent x number of emails or we've processed or gotten through x number of emails. But when you look back at the end of your day, you know, what did you really accomplish? You know, how far did you really get with your most important project or your most valuable task? Did you spend time with your most valuable customer or client this week? Have you really, you know, have you really pushed the ball forward?
SF: 09:28 And I think email is a classic example there. There are many others, but email is a great example where we often spend too much time in our inbox. Sometimes probably the most valuable thing you can do is just shut down your email for small increments at a time. I'm not asking people to turn off their smartphone or turn off their email clients for an entire day, but could you do it for an hour? Right? Could you do it for two full hours and focus all of your attention, all of your focus on your most important task. And you know, another statistic that I like to share with people is that on average it takes us about 15 minutes to get back on task after a distraction. You know, so you think about that, you know, you pull yourself away from your most important work and you just, you just want to check on your email or you just want to check on something.
SF: 10:21 On average, it takes us as much as 15 minutes to get back on task and that adds up pretty quickly, right through the course of your day. Those distraction times can really have a negative effect on your outcome. Oh, absolutely. It's, it's a mind-boggling. And Eh, you know, in your talking and working with bookkeepers, let's say bookkeepers w you know, what would be your recommendation to them? Like it's one of the things that it isn't an addiction, so what would you recommend to get away from it? Well, one of my recommendations is, is to see if you can get yourself to a point where you can interact or deal with email as few as three or maybe four times a day. You know, uh, a statistic that was released just last year stated that the average worker, the average professional spends 6.3 hours dealing with email a day.
SF: 11:23 I mean, I think that's just a ridiculous number that that equates to about one-third of our waking hours that we're spending either reading, reply and reviewing with email. And I often show a diagram to a lot of the people that I'm working with is what would it look like if you took those 6.3 hours? And if you could break them down into just three or four times during the day, maybe once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening. Now you might need to spend a little bit more with your email in those intervals instead of just spending two minutes here or five minutes there. Maybe you spend a solid half hour with your email to start your day or a solid 45 minutes after lunch to deal with email. But the key thing to remember here and whether we're talking about email, whether we're talking about making phone calls, whether we're talking about writing, such as writing a report, is the more concentrated effort, the more time you can spend on a single activity, you are going to accomplish it in a much quicker amount of time.
SF: 12:27 So I've seen people who are spending, you know, six, maybe seven hours a day with their email and again, they're checking it just before a meeting just after, just in between, in between phone calls, et Cetera, et cetera. And then they reserve some time or they make some time to check email three or four times a day and they're amazed at how much less time they've spent with their email. They haven't received fewer messages, they haven't necessarily sent fewer messages either, but they have just spent less time with their inbox, with their email because they've been able to sort of batch that process. They've been able to batch those tasks and those emails into those single sessions.
MP: 13:14 Okay. I like it and I, it makes perfect sense, right? Are you spending less time doing that? More time doing things. Other things. What about things like urgent? I, I've heard the objection to this around being bold about my clients
MP: 13:30 need me to respond quickly. What do they do in those circumstances?
SF: 13:45 Yeah, that's, that's a very, very great question. And Yeah, especially when it's a, a, you know, a client or a customer relationship, um, of course, they feel as if they're the most important people. We all do, right? As, as consumers or as customers of someone, we all tend to feel that, that we're the most important people on the planet or we should be getting our concerns heard, uh, immediately. Uh, I think for any business, I mean, you probably have a relatively good feel of the differences between your customer base, between those who need perhaps some more timely responses or some more timely, uh, information. And sometimes that, you know, that takes a bit of time to, to figure out that relationship and to figure out their, uh, their background. You know, I find time and time again as I have coached people to not be so responsive or not be so immediately responsive to email is that they're surprised at how few or less urgent or crisis or fires that they have to fight than they initially thought.
SF: 14:37 And let me share a personal story of my own. You know, when I first started this practice, roughly 10 years ago, of going from having my inbox open in front of me the entire day, and that's what I used to do, right? Day In, day out, I'm sure there's many, many of our listeners today that probably follow a similar practice. You've got that inbox open and you can see everything coming in. If you have dual monitors of you have two screens, maybe one of your screens is dedicated solely to email. And that used to be my day as well. Well eventually, I said, you know what, I'm going to try and reduce my email interaction, my email usage to just two or three times a day. And I remember the night before, I remember specifically thinking, Scott, this is risky, right? You work for a global organization, you have customers all over the world, you've got coworkers and teammates and different time zones and different moving pieces.
SF: 15:32 Is this going to be career suicide that you know or are you literally just get a shutdown or ignore email for a two or three-hour window and the first day went by and nothing happened, nothing exploded. The second day went by and nothing happened yet and you know what, as more days and weeks and months went by, I was very surprised but, but again it was very sort of humbling to think that wow, there weren't as many urgencies or at or emergencies as I initially thought that there would be. And maybe one last thing I would add to that point is that you know if you are someone who is known to reply immediately to emails, you sort of set that precedent for others, right? If I'm conversing with you via email and for the first three emails I send to you, you are replying to me within minutes.
SF: 16:27 Well, suddenly I've got that expectation right? And suddenly when I need to contact you again next week or maybe even a month from now, I'm almost going to expect you to reply immediately to me. So sometimes we need to be careful about, you know, what president we're setting for ourselves by replying. So immediately, regardless of the importance of that, the importance of that message. Of course, depending on the application you're using, uh, such as Microsoft Outlook, you can set up some special notifications. And that's often what I will recommend or, or coach many of my clients on. Is there a particular customer that you need to know when they contact you immediately? Uh, it could be your manager or your boss. Uh, maybe it could be your spouse. It's quite easy to set up these types of, uh, alerts and notifications so that if something like that from a particular sender or maybe if there's a particular word in the subject line, you will receive a notification or you will get alerted immediately and often. That alleviates a lot of the concerns that many of my clients have. I think it's, you know, I think it's great advice to people to stay, to just actually have that, that thinking and, and not become the person who is always on for your customers and you're really training them. So that's great. And I think this, uh,
SF: 17:50 this is a good foundation cause I think email's probably the one that all of us could probably learn from and do less of and focus on other things. But let's get into a few other areas around your expertise. In terms of productivity, what would you say the next big gain that people can get? What area would that be in? Well another trap
SF: 18:15 I think a lot of people find themselves in when it comes to productivity, you know when it comes to trying to improve their time management is that we spend a lot of time prioritizing and reprioritizing our work. And I know a lot of us, tend to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with our to-do list. You know, one day or one week. It's great and we're, we're on top of it and we're following it and we're crossing things off. And then we might go several weeks without working from a, from a tangible a to-do list. We're sort of letting maybe our email or something else dictate where we put our attention. But I think sometimes we fool ourselves that we're being productive because we've spent the last half hour reprioritizing all of our tasks or reprioritizing all of our projects and we're spending too much time strategizing about what we want to do or what we need to do and not enough time actually doing right.
SF: 19:13 And I try to coach people to be more in the execution mode. Give them some simple techniques, give them some simple methods so that they can spend less time deciding on what to do next and actually spend more time doing. So you know, in our day and age, whether you're using something like outlook to manage your tasks, maybe you have your own to-do list manager, you've got something on your smartphone or something on your iPad. Perhaps you use Evernote for example. Or I know Trello is becoming much more popular to manage your to do's and your task. There is no shortage of flags, of colors, of shapes, of Emojis, of things that we can tag on to those tasks. And I suggest a much, much simpler way of prioritizing your work. Instead of using a traffic light system, you know, red, yellow, green, despite using a stack ranking.
SF: 20:10 I've seen too many teams and too many individuals, you know, waste so much effort. Let's stack rank all 12 of our projects are all 12 of our tasks. Well, you know, by the end of tomorrow you're going to have to restack that again because priorities tend to change rather quickly. So I usually suggest a much simpler method. Um, I have a method that I've created called the to-do list method and that too is actually in the number two, uh, or as referring to the number two. And a part of that method is encouraging people the night before or the day before to select the two things that, two tasks that are more important than anything else. I don't want them to stack rank everything on their list. I don't want them to color code or underline or asterisks or whatever they want to use for everything on that list, however long it is.
SF: 21:03 However short it is, just identify your two most important tasks, you know, and sometimes it can be helpful to ask that question. If you could only get two things done tomorrow, what would they be? And then I encourage those people to do everything in their power to work on those two tasks before anything else. Accomplish those two before anything else on your list. And if possible, even before you open your inbox or even before you have to attend that first meeting. Again, I want people to spend more of their day, more of their time doing instead of thinking of doing. And that's another reason why I encourage people to do this the day before or the night before because when you start your day, whether you work at home or whether you work out of an office, when you start your day thinking about doing, sometimes you can waste as much of a half hour or 45 minutes in that strategy mode when you start your workday, I would much rather that you start doing, you start executing right away rather than just thinking about doing
MP: 22:16 I really like this to-do concept and play some sitting, you're listening and I was actually taking some notes and I actually felt a little bit of sense of relief because I know the power of just getting those important things done. How much better I feel when I've been able to accomplish those things early in the day. So I think right away I was feeling like this is going to be really great for everyone to take on after listening to this podcast is just to start doing that as a number one takeaway from listening to this podcast. Wouldn't you agree?
SF: 22:51 Yeah, it would be a fantastic first step. And if there are listeners who would like to learn more, understand the, uh, the full to-do list method, you can download the free guide at Simpletivity.com. It'll show you the three steps in following that process. And yes, selecting the two the day before a key part of the to-do list method.
MP: 23:13 Excellent. Now let's wrap up by with any other examples that you would give. Like if there was, I mean, I think that's one great takeaway for people to go to your website and of course, we'll have the link on our website that they can get to it. If they, if they, uh, have any challenges, they can find it there. But is there anything you'd like to promote about, you know, if you've, you've mentioned a book, talk about your book or any other events that you're doing or things that you'd like people to go and check out that you're doing, we'd love to hear that as well.
SF: 23:41 Well, you know, a great place to start, uh, for people who would like to more and get new tips on a weekly basis would be the Simpletivity YouTube channel. I release a new video each and every week. And often it's just a few minutes in length to help you be more productive. So type in Simpletivity on YouTube, I would love to have you subscribe and you get new tips and techniques each and every week to be more productive. Uh, the last thing I would, uh, I would mention we started a lot of our conversation today about email. Uh, that seems to be one of my most requested workshops. Some of my most frequent questions are Scott, how can I tame my inbox? How can I get my email out of control? And later this month, uh, later in November, I'm going to be releasing a brand new online course entitled Own Your Inbox. And it is all about reducing the amount of time, the amount of effort and energy you spend with your email. I don't want you to spend 6.3 hours with your email. Uh, I would much rather you spend just a few hours each and every day and yet have you feeling confident that you haven't missed anything important that you've been able to address everything that is coming at you through the world of emails. So a watch out for that. You can find out more information at Thesimpletivity.com website but a brand new course all about managing your email.
MP: 25:12 That's fantastic. Thank you, Scott. And I think it's lots of resources there and really this conversation's an important one because if, if the mindset of an owner of their own firm is put together and clear, great things can happen. And I think what you've started to talk about and giving people a hint to what's possible for them in terms of their own productivity will bring that clarity and give them a little bit of peace of mind and, and the energy that they're going to need to grow their business and be more successful at it. So this has been really great. Of course, all of the resources that we spoke about in this episode are available at Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com and please let us know what you think. Subscribe on iTunes,
MP: 25:58 and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you and until we speak again, that's another episode of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. Goodbye.