Andrew:	This course is about how to increase your productivity. We're going to be covering all these big topics one at time and the session is led by Jason Womack, founder of, let's bring up your website, The Womack Company and author of "Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, and Make More." I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com were proven founders, like Jason, teach

Jason, you got a phone call one time at 6:00 from your wife, can you tell the audience about that cause I think we'll all identify with the problem that you experienced with that call.

Jason:	Andrew, first of all thank you for allowing me to share some of this with your community.

Andrew:	Thank you. This is a topic I personally need. I feel like I just get everything in order and then I go backwards and I end up needing this help and I'm really glad that you're doing this today. 

Jason:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	The experience that you're about to talk about is one that I'm experiencing and have in the last week.

Jason:	I started my career in education. Early, early on, one of my most significant mentors, my dad, he had told me, he said Jason if you can teach, you'll always have job. He was right, yet again, and so I went into education. I actually became a high school teacher, I was teaching Spanish language, I was teaching World History and US History for a high school here in California and, like you mentioned, I got a call, it was about 6:00 on a late winter night here and it was my wife, Jody, and she was saying "Hey Jason, do you think you're going to be coming for dinner tonight?" She was used to me working until late and about four or maybe three nights a week I'd actually make it home and I looked at my watch and I said "Yeah, I've got to finish up a few things. I should be home by dinner." And then the last thing she said it really changed my life, she said "Jason, it's Saturday night." And essentially I put myself into this corner of giving myself a job that I felt was never done. I could always be doing more.

Andrew:	And you know what? I used to think that meant that I was a super star entrepreneur, someone who's really commented and harder working then everyone else who took time away from the office and then what I realized was by constantly going through my to-do's by constantly being in the office trying to work off a workload that's never going to go away, I didn't give myself time to just step back and just think about where's the business going, think back about what got me started and where are those next ones that are going to get my business to grow and it was just stifling my creativity and my purpose and the business suffered for it in the long run. And of course, famously, I've talked about how Bradford and Reed basically had to sell it because I was burning out. I didn't know that guys like me could burn out. I thought we could go on forever but it happened.

Jason:	I talk and hopefully we'll have some time to talk about this later today Andrew, but I talk about the three main influencers to productivity. One of them is what I call homeostasis, meaning we'll continue doing what we've done to get us to this level of success. I've got good news and bad news, the good news is that's what got us to this level of success. The bad news is it will keep us at this level of success. So often times to break to that next level, I just watched the Mixergy class that you Ari did and what a wealth of information there about doing things differently, so ideally we'll get to talk today about how do you start doing that on the individual side to step into many of the recommendations your other folks have suggested here. 

Andrew:	And we've going a lot of really actionable tactics that were going to be covering here but before we do, you use all these ideas that you're about to teach us and as a result what happened? Can you tell us about that trip to Alaska? Just one example of what happened to your life.

Jason:	This is probably most favorite example, back in 2007, actually late 2006, both my wife and I left a job, we were working for the same company actually, a consulting firm here in California, and she left in 2005 and it was late in 2006 and I was getting ready to leave to start our own thing and one of the activities I did, and I'm going to talk about this later today, was I went to breakfast with a mentor, Jim, and over breakfast he had me write down, he said, "What are the three indicators that you will have been successful?"

And one of the things that we both wrote down, Jodie and I, was life style, that we wanted a particular lifestyle. Well, within two years we got a gig, we got a consulting event up in Anchorage, Alaska. We went up for the two days, I did the seminar, I did the coaching work. We had half a day off in between, when were done with the work and were flying back to Los Angeles. So we visited this little town called, Homer, Alaska. I'd never heard of it. The only thing I knew about it was there was this lady down there. She was called the eagle lady. And for almost three decades she has single handedly decided to bring back the bald eagle population into Homer, Alaska. Well, I heard about this, and thought, I've got to go see this thing. Well, she had already passed on, and her one of her family members every morning, over 30 cases of fish and he fed the eagles by hand.

Andrew:	Wow.

Jason:	So, Jody and I went down there and I can go on and on about this story, but there we were, only four feet away from these bald eagles, Andrew, that were three, three and a half feet tall. We get back from that trip, and about a month later we were doing our normal meeting. Jody and I run two companies together, so if I can ever talk about businesses and spouses running businesses, and we were sitting there . . . did I lose you?

Andrew:	No, go ahead. I'm still here. Is the video going on? No. 

Jason:	There we go. And we were looking at the schedule for the next few months, and all of a sudden I realized that we had the month of August without any work planned, without any delivery work planned. And I turned to Jody and I said, 'Let's block it and go back to Homer.' We wound up renting a house. We left everything here. We had a friend of ours stay at our house, and all I brought was a case of books that I'd been waiting until I had time to read, and I brought an empty journal, and we went up. And for 30 days I let my clients know I was going to inaccessible. I didn't do very much blogging. I did bunch of creative thinking, development, idea aiding. And one of the things that came out of that, Andrew, again was I've got to stop saying yes to the things that are even a bit off course from where I'm going. 

Andrew:	Yeah, and you don't hatch those things until you get a little, I know I don't, until I get a little bit of space. And just like you, what I do is take a pen; I take a journal, sometimes a keyboard and my little iPhone. But something that's going to constrain me so that I can't do too much, and I just write. What am I here to do? What am I trying to do? How do I get whatever the next vision is? How do I come up with that next vision? How do I implement it? Who do I hire to help me get there? And I don't come up with those things when I'm sitting in my office answering emails eight hours a day, and then dealing with all the different issues that come on top of email, and just suck up the mission--suck up my energy. All right, so, I understand the purpose here. I want everyone who is listening to us to be able to see this kind of impact, just like you took a month off. I want them to be able to take a month off, even if they're not yet ready to. I want them to have their business that organized that they can do it. 

Jason:	Andrew, I just want to jump in. That was our third trip away. Our first one was ten days.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	So we built up to it, we built up to it and we've taken 10 days, 21 days, and 30 days. It looks like the next one we do this summer we're gonna back it up again to 14 days. And we're testing it to see what the maximum I can get away. So, for those of you watching this, it might not be one month out of the gate. It might be a weekend where you put your IPhone in the glove box and you get on the plane to wherever.

Andrew:	Well, I'm up for doing it. Yeah, a weekend. What a small start, but yeah, to some people that's big. For you it would have been.

Jason:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	Let's go on to the big board here. These are the different tactics that we are going to teach people to get them there. And the first one is to identify the big impact tasks. Tell us about that.

Jason:	I remember I was working with a client in Chicago, Illinois. It was April 10th, 2003, and please, it's not a big deal, but that's my birthday. And that night I had to fly to Canada. So, I remember that. But there I was, doing the seminar, and during the program this one participant had mentioned the fact that he had this 'to do' that was on his list for a long time. It turns out the 'to do' is on his list for over ten years, and the task that he had finish was his living will.

Andrew:	So, for ten years he'd wanted to do a living will, and just hadn't gotten to it.

Jason:	He said he didn't have the time. And you know me, I'm sitting there going, "Come on, man. That's 120 months. There was at some point where you had a little bit of downtime." And that was my first foray into, and I journal a lot, Andrew. I get things out of my head. I write on whiteboards. I write on mirrors. I write in notebooks. And I first started managing and maneuvering with this concept of there being two different orientations people have to the workplace. And there are noun oriented people, and verb oriented people. My noun oriented clients tend to be visionaries; they tend to be interested in the process. They tend to be interested in the outcomes they are achieving. My verb oriented people are more interested in the tasks, the to dos; they're great at delegation, and they are clean at follow-up. I always like to say my noun oriented people love working out of the inbox. My verb oriented people love working out of [incent] items. So those two approaching, when I was working with this guy back then I was realizing the reason that he had put things off is he had put noun as his most important task. When in reality the noun, 'living will', was his most important thing. He had not yet identified the to do, or the action, or the task.

Andrew:	I see, so we're not trying to identify things like living wills, things like blog posts, things like new ads, new Google ads, new Facebook ads. We're trying to put up verbs, and what would a verb equivalent here be? 

Jason:	For some people it can be writing. For me it's draft. So, I'll give you a perfect example. This morning I was working on my next column for Entrepreneur Magazine. My action on my 'to do' list for today was 'draft concluding paragraph to Entrepreneur Magazine article.' Now, Jason, why would you draft the concluding article? Well, I have a mentor of mine, Steven Covey, who said 'Begin with the end in mind.' When I sit down to write something and I don't know, Andrew, if you can hold yourself to that, but when I sit down to write something I usually start to freak myself out about how good it should be, how long it needs to be, how perfect it should be on the first cut. When I start with that lowest common denominator, verb, it turns the task into momentum. And again, back to that thing that I shared a little bit earlier about homeostasis, a body will stay in motion as long as it's moving. but once it stops, God it's hard to get going again. And I think that the big thing about productivity, especially the people that I imagine watching your Mixergy interviews, it's they have so many ideas about what to fix, what to build, what to have, what to do, that at the end of the day unless they've got a very clear sense of what was the most important task relative to those nouns of engagement they won't have for which to assess.

Andrew:	So what you're saying is that draft the concluding section. That's what's important to write on a 'to do' list as opposed to just having 'concluding section'. And if we make that distinction then we're ahead?

Jason:	Then what happens is for the action or the momentum to begin it's easier for me to dive into, let me chip away at something small, and then see how far I can get. I'll give you this one, if there's a to do on your to do list that's been there for awhile, or have you ever rewritten a to do on a different piece of paper? 

Andrew:	Yes.

Jason:	You know, it gets to the end and you rewrite it over, or in the email inbox, right? It starts to fall down, so you forward it to yourself to kick it back to the top? What I'll have my clients do is actually change the verb, so instead of 'call Barbara' and then they write 'Call Barbara' and then they write Call Barbara, I'll just say, email Barbara, because something is getting in the way of just starting. I think time management is less an idea of managing the time we have, it's managing the starting we haven't done.

Andrew:	Okay. All right, let's see if I understand this. Let's suppose that one thing that I wanted to do is, and I'm trying to think of what the audience might want to do, is have an IPhone App created for my business.

Jason:	There you go.

Andrew:	That would be on my to do list; it would be 'have an IPhone App for the business' and that might be on top of or below 'have someone do taxes,' or 'Look for a bookkeeper,' and all those things that are important to business. Are you saying just having that on the list and writing it the right way is what's going to help me get it done?

Jason:	I would test it.

Andrew:	Okay. 

Jason:	I've had enough people say that when they start going, and by the way, those verbs that you gave me, I just call those Big Verbs.

Andrew:	Okay.

Jason:	So, complete, install, handle, produce, present, those are the big verbs, and then I look at my day and say, all right today's whatever day, say it's Tuesday, and I know that I've got 15 hours before I need to be at the diner date with my girlfriend, or boyfriend or whatever, what is it that I'm going to physically visibly do about those three things you just listed. 

Andrew:	I want to make sure that I'm getting this right, and I know that we have a whole lot to get to here, but do I write down the small step that I need to take in order to get to this big goal, of having this app created, or you're just saying it's about the way that I phrase that to do of having the app created that's going to help me get there?

Jason:	Personally I would want them both. The flag that I'm marching toward is publishing the app. In between there and where I'm going, and where I am right here, what is A, a step that I can take that's the smallest common denominator that to me when I look back on the end of today. I'll say I moved toward that instead of I didn't have time to create the app.

Andrew:	I see, put both of them on my list. The big goal of having this mobile app finished and published, and the smaller step of maybe sketching out my first design or putting together a list of everything that the app needs to do. So both on the list. 
Jason:	Then which one can I check off, and then how does that resonate with can you bring that list of nouns and verbs back. Which one resonates with the way that I focus the most. Those of us who are time start starved we get to the end of the day, and there's still more to be done, I want to look over on that right hand side and go, OK. Tomorrow what are the actions that I'm need to take, what are the physical to do's that going to work toward, and then on the left hand side that acts kind of like as am arbiter of priorities. If building that iPhone a is the highest priority item that we can take, that we can move on then I made need two, and this is where your other Mixergy classes come in so powerfully. I may need to outsource I may need to sources my errands, I may need to put off some of those other decisions. I may need to get someone to help me in on a VA temporary basis. So that I could move furthest on that most important tasks.

Andrew:	Let's go on to the next big idea here. Which is to uncover what's filling up the first six hours of your day. Why the first six hours? 

Jason:	The first six hours, and I'm totally going assumptions here about who's tuning in to this program. But with 24 hours, we've got four quarters. And If look at my day and I say, all right, what am I going to break my day into quarters on? From that first wake up, through those first six hours it pretty much dictates at least how I am for the next series of 18. So for example take a look at, I always talk about the first screen. So if your alarm clock is your smart phone, and you wake up in the morning and you reach over to turn off, or hit snooze there's always a first screen. What is it is it email, your calendar, Twitter, FaceBook, is it LinkedIn, it could be Evernote, remember the milk. But from the moment our eyes open in the morning, for some of us even before that. We start falling back into the routine of the day. I just wrote a blog post today on someone was saying if the first thing I'm doing when I wake up is consuming information before I start getting into my job, what I read was, if the first thing I'm consuming then I'm taking on other peoples ideas, which will influence mine. If the first thing is, I take a look, I wake up, I've got six hours to make a difference today. What can I chip away on to move toward that thing. So the tactic that I've got here that I use and that coach people with all over the world is literally I give them a little three by five note card, from the first time they wake up what takes energy time and focus, and if you will simply give yourself that gift of your own attention, and you just start writing down the big things, the little things, anything in between. 

Andrew:	What do you mean, what should I do today that takes up energy, time, and focus? 

Jason:	What do I already do? Let me give you an example. I take two newspapers where ever I go. So the Wall Street Journal, the financial times, then when I'm traveling USA Today. One of the things I noticed when I did this a couple years ago was I was going through those three newspapers looking for specific journalists. Sue Shellenburger, Walt Mossberg and the journal I was looking for Martin Wolf and Martin in the Financial Times and Craig Wilson and Gary Stoler in the USA Today. I was spending time, energy and focus flipping through 60, 80 pages of newspapers just to see if any of those six authors had written anything. When I realized that I was spending that time every day I went over to Google Alerts and I just set up Google Alerts for those six authors. So now if they write anything I get one email in my inbox, here's everything that Gary wrote, here's everything that Martin wrote, here's everything that Sue wrote. If I want to go through the newspapers I can do that creative intellectual grazing but I've gotten rid of the have to look through everything just to find out what it is. Those who are doing research on competitors app, those of you doing research on other peoples whatever there working on, Google Alerts is one that I talk about all the time just because that's running in the background for me for free. 

Andrew:	So what I'm supposed to be doing here is looking what's filling the first six hours of my day, I guess I write it down?

Jason:	Write it down, I've had some people dictate that. Siri can take voice notes; I've used a serviced called Reqall.com, R-E-Q-A-L-L. When I was doing a food log, for example, I hired in nutrition, I race triathlon and I've been doing that for about 12 years, and every second or third season I've been hiring a nutritionist just to help me out and going on the road about 220 night a year, I took 142 airplanes flights last year so for me keeping the physical vessel in line was important. Anyway, when I was keeping the food log, I did that by phone, I called my Recall number, I could dictate what I had eaten, I had a filter on my email so that if it recognized the words food log it automatically diverted that to a special folder that I can share with my nutritionist. Again, what's taken me time, energy and focus, when we identify what that is over those first six hours, because if I can combine a couple things, if I can delete....

Andrew:	I'm trying to go through and really just put together a list on a notecard that says what's taking me time, energy and focus and then look for ways to do what with it?

Jason:	Delete, delegate, pretty much that's it.

Andrew:	Delete or delegate. 

Jason:	Some people want to combine them but for me it's like, let me get rid of this or let me hand it hand it off to someone who can do better.

Andrew:	So if the first half of this period, the six hour period, the first three hours of my day are spend on email, I think what I can do to delete it, maybe it's auto-delete by just forwarding to unsubscribe.com so that my stuff gets unsubscribed or may it's delegating by having my team of customer service people start handling more of my email or virtual assistant doing it. That's what I'm trying to do with everything. What' can delete, what can I delegate and you literally will have people put out a list of the things that take up down. Just sit down and write a list of everything?

Jason:	When I'm working with you we do it for two full days. 

Andrew:	Two full days. Where you watch them, make sure that everything gets written down.

Jason:	Yeah. I published part of a list for one client in my book and we had written down from the time he got up all the way through there were, I think I printed in there 18 different things, and that was from when he woke up at 6:00 am, that was from zero to 7:45.

Andrew:	Have we got that here? I think we might even have it here, let's take a look. This is it, so here are the questions to ask yourself, what do I do from the time I wake up in the morning until about 10:30 am. Here's a sample of what one client identified, Wake up with alarm, press snooze twice. So you want us to get down to that specific kind of detail. Check email on Blackberry in bed, check calendar on Blackberry in bed, let dog outside, turn on television to news channel, and shower. That's the kind of list that you want people to make.

Jason:	At that point, we can then go back and what can we delete, what we can delegate. Now I'm not going to be able to delegate letting the dog outside or showering but in this particular case we were able to address the email, because if you take a look at his entire list, he was checking email three times. It was the fourth time that he actually did anything about it.

Andrew:	I see, yeah.

Jason:	So by looking at that and just showing him I said "Hey, you're using anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes a day where all you're doing is cycling the same thoughts." One of the things that I talk about, Andrew is that our day is made up of 96 15 minute blocks. I've heard you over talk about you do your meetings 15 minutes at a time and you and I both know there's very few things that if we had an half an hour to talk about , we couldn't finish in 15 minutes, if we were planning for that discussion. So with this particular client we were able to eke out about 2% of his day back, meaning one half an hour, If I can save about a half hour a day that's about 2% of my day. Now I'm at 10 a month, that's 120 hours a year. Just to cycle back to the example that I gave the guy in Chicago who had put his will off for 10 years, one of the reasons that he and I came up with up that he put his will off is that he kept thinking about the now. Will, will, will, what we got it down to, I got to call my neighbor to set up time for an appointment to make sure that we get the paperwork written out. When I did follow up with him, it was within a week he had the whole thing done.

Andrew:	And that's a different stair. Instead of having this big thing on the list that's just get your living will done, it became meet with neighbor and that's a much easier thing to do and when you do that it builds up momentum and help you get it all done. 

Jason:	When we talk later on about the social network, not my social media, but my social network, one of things that people can stay comfortable talking about how things could be, one of the things that we need to do is that we need to hang out with people who are very busy doing what is.

Andrew:	Before we move on to the next one, do you want to talk real quick about Greg from London or is this Greg from London?

Jason:	That was Greg.

Andrew:	That was Greg from London. This is guy who used to check his email on the toilet and after the shower.

Jason:	And I wish I could say that this isn't happening and for anybody, whatever gender, you both do it. 

Andrew:	I got to get away from email.

Jason:	The statistics show...

Andrew:	And I also have this before we move on.

Jason:	So that's the main activity in my seminars when I do this in the seminar, you'll notice I just left room for 12 lines there. The reason I only put 12 there is because when I introduce this for the first time, especially in a large group, people tend to get a little self-conscious because sometimes they don't want to admit or write down in front of somebody else exactly what does take their time and energy and focus in a morning. I get a lot of my coaching from reading biographies and who did they write biographies about, well it tends to be people who've been highly successful. And so as I read through Steve Jobs biography, as I read through Thomas Edison's biography, as I read through Helen Keller's biography, one of the things that I realized is that they would work very diligently to get rid of the extraneous time, energy and focus taking things throughout the day.

Andrew:	Alright, and so we want to identify them, they way is to have it listed out and then start to delete, to delegate. Let's go on to the next big idea then, there it is, map out your ideal day.

Jason:	So this comes from way back when I was a student teacher. I was learning to become a high school teacher and I had coach, a mentor, at the university and I was complaining about how hard the day was and how nothing was going my way and he looked at me square in my eye Andrew and he said "Would you know a good day if you saw one?" And it was like a smack in the face because unfortunately I had chosen a career back then that kind of pulled people together around the campfire to complain. I hate to say it but public education the way it's working it's easy to complain about it and what I did was I went home, I pulled out the proverbial piece of paper and I wrote out actually from the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep what and ideal day would look like. I've done this multiple times over the year. 

Andrew:	Do we have that to show people?

Jason:	You have one that I actually printed in the book and what I did here, what you'll see that I circled in red, not that these were the important aspects of it but what I wanted people to see is, whenever I've done this with a client, your ideal day is filled with elements, multiple elements across industries, across the field of the horizon. What I mean by that is, very few people that I work with, their ideal day is to sit on the beach with a beer. I mean, they could do that once, but after the 48th day of sitting on the same beach drinking the same beer, I'd be tired.

Andrew:	Right.

Jason:	So, what I do with people is I say, 'Look, this is not vacation day once a year where you're getting away to relax. This is, what is your ideal day? And if your ideal day incorporates launching your new app, if your idea incorporates wooing a new client, if your ideal incorporates having time with your spouse or roommates or best friend, you've got to put that into that. So, you've got here just the first part of a morning of mine. Now the reason I printed this one, Andrew, was this is one that I had written in the late 1990s, and I keep these. I keep them in a little folder behind me in my desk. This is one that I'd written, and in 2009 my wife and I had taken our month-long vacation at Lake Tahoe. And at the end of the day we're sitting on the patio, looking over Lake Tahoe, and I just started laughing. And Joy looked at me, 'What's going on?' And I said, 'I think I did it.' And I had to wait to get back to [Ohigh] to pull it out, but I mean, I was 90% of the way there. We had closed a deal with an agent, a client in Asia; I'd gone for a bike ride. It wasn't a run, but it was a bike ride through the mountains there. And it just went on and on. And so, I guess, the takeaway here is for those of you watching this, if we get so busy in what is, and if we get so busy in what we can anticipate coming, what if we sat down and kind of gave ourselves that gift of 'what would the ideal day look, sound, and feel like?' And I always talk about those three learning styles, by the way, because once I understand that I need to see it, I need to hear, and I need to feel it, then I kind of set myself up for moving in that direction.

Andrew:	And so, I want to read this, just the first sentence or two to people, just to emphasize what you did here. It starts off with, 'I wake up before the alarm goes off again--different from my office in the city, it is serenely quiet outside, no noisy cars, airplanes, or sirens.' So, you got down to that level of specificity, waking up in the morning before or after the alarm, where you are working. You want that kind of specificity from the person who is listening to us right now when they're designing what that ideal day is, because if they're going to get to the ideal day they have to understand what that is before they can get there.

Jason:	There's a ton of research going on, and over the next ten, twenty years, I can't wait, because we are understanding our brains at a whole new level. But the way that the [omigdala] part of the memory works is it's so emotional, and it's so responsive that we can start to program down to the detail what we'd like to have remembered. And I get a lot of coaching on this from athletes. I've been able to spend a few days out at the Olympic Training Center, and I've worked with some--I've coached some Olympic athletes. One was a gold metal swimmer. She swam in Sydney for us and won the gold metal. And one of the things that BJ told me, she says, 'Jason, when we got in the water one of the things we were trained to do was at any stroke or even stroke we knew what the clock looked like if we were going to be on a world record-breaking pace.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	They had so practiced what it would look like, what it would feel like, what it would sound like. And one more quick example if I can [inaudible?]

Andrew:	Yeah, I love it.

Jason:	She told me about a training exercise, and like I was telling you, I raced triathlon, and we had these swim drills, where they actually tie a belt around our waist and there's a bungee cord. And they attach the bungee cord behind us to the wall; we swim against the bungee cord to try to reach the opposite wall. So, it's kind of a strength exercise, if you can imagine that. 

Andrew:	Okay.

Jason:	Anyway, at the Olympic Training Center I was watching one day and they were doing a drill where they put the belt around, and they tied something to it, but it was actually tied to the opposite end of the pool, the end they were swimming toward. It pulls them across the water, on a pulley system, right? 

Andrew:	Right, so it makes it easier for them to get to the other side.

Jason:	And I'm sitting there, and it's like, come on, man. That's cheating, right? But someone told me, 'Jason, until an athlete swims at a world record pace they don't know how it feels to swim at a world record pace. 

Andrew:	I see. 

Jason:	To me, it was this bulb epiphany. So for example, those of you who are about to pitch your business to a BC or any kind of investor, how many times have you run that through on video? How many times have your run that through Skype? How many times have you stated the pitch and have your buddy pull the lamp so that the projector goes down and you have to go without slides. Because all of that stuff is a way to practice so that when it's time to perform you say Oh, I've been here before. I was doing this seminar at the University of Memphis just a couple of weeks ago and they helped me set up and I don't know if you've ever done a presentation where someone helped you, they weren't helpful, they plugged in my computer and we forgot to plug in the power. It happens right? So there I am, I've got about 150 people in the audience and I'm going and then next thing I know, I read that that the audience focus is gone, I can read that, and I glace back and sure enough it say your batter is about done, 1% remaining. I just kept talking to them, I didn't spin around, and I just kept talking to them. I broke into a quick activity where they can turn to their neighbor and share a quick dialog, reach back, plugged in the computer, came back, and bought them back. I had the guy at the end who hired me said "Jason, how on Earth did you do that?' I just told him, I said "Practice makes comfortable." And if I've practiced this in the past, then I'm comfortable when it happens under pressure.

Andrew:	And it seems like it's even just practicing in your mind. When we're looking at this, this is you essentially practicing where you want to be. And the other thing that is interesting to me about this is, it's a two do list that you accomplish but you weren't walking around with this to-do list in your hand all your time saying I've got to wake up before the alarm goes off. You've prepared your mind to be there and just having that as a desire sometimes helps even more then having this piece of paper in your hand that feels like an obligation full of get ready to, I mean tasks like wake up before the alarm today, I've got to live one day in a serine place with no noisy cars, airplanes or sirens. True, have you experienced that?

Jason:	100%. I'm looking at this stack of books behind you, do you have the book Change the Way You See Everything yet? 

Andrew:	I don't think I do. I'm afraid to lift anything up off of that pile or else it's all going to fall apart.

Jason:	Anyway, in this book called Change the Way You See Everything, they talk about ABT, asset based thinking, and they compare, contrast that to deficit based thinking and I always want to be on the ABT side. So my assets are time, waking up in the morning, energy, getting outside for exercise, closing a deal with a client and focus, looking around and realizing how things are moving forward in a good direction. 

Andrew:	Speaking of moving forward, let's go back to the big board. The next big idea is map out your high impact influencers. Who are these people?

Jason:	These are the folks that have been around for a little while. They, I'm just pulling up the same picture that you're going to see, they've been around for a little while but more importantly then that, they are the five that you spend the most time in communication with. And by the way, nowadays communication is face to face, voice to voice, Skype to Skype and email to email. If there's any doubt about who the five people are that you spend the most time in communication with just go over to your sent items and look for the 80% of the emails from the 20% of your group. The five people, this is a little activity if you can bring that one up for me, this one was life changing and a mentor of mine showed me this years ago and what she did is she went to a white board and she drew this matrix. On the left hand side and then she had a couple of different of columns and the matrix was, and she asked me, she said "Jason, who do spend most of your time with?" so I wrote down five people's names and then she asked me, the three questions were, how much money do you think they make a year, how many days of vacation do you think they make per year and how many books do you think they read per year? Notice here I've changed it for this audience to conferences attended; I'll get to that in just a second. So I did this exercise and it took me a few weeks because there was some people where I couldn't just walk up to them and say "Hey, how much money do you make every year, how many days of vacation" but over a couple of weeks I was able to collect what I though was pretty close to where they were.

Now it's easy because as a high school teacher I knew what every high school teacher made. There were a couple of other people who are entrepreneurs in the town, the woman who owned our local coffee shop, etc. I added up their annual salary, I added up their days of vacation, I added up what the books that I could imagine them reading per year, and when I divided all that by five, Andrew, it was like, oh, my God. They are living my average. And it was like this huge epiphany of my network absolutely impacts my viewpoint of how much money I can make, my viewpoint of how many days off I can take, and in this case my viewpoint of how many days of conferences I'm going to attend. Just last year I started spending time with someone via social media, where we haven't met, but we kinda connect via email, and watch each other's Twitter feed, etc. Because of that I've committed doing 20 days of conferences this year. We're recording this in the beginning of March. I've already attended seven days of conferences. I've already made two contacts, and I've already signed one deal for work based on just those seven days.

Andrew:	Why conferences? Why is that an important column here?

Jason:	I think for this community, I'm paying my $25 a month to be a member of Mixergy, I want to learn. A secondary part of that is if learning were only in watching these interviews we'd be set--but it's not. Now, I'm going to South by next week, and I know, I'll guarantee you, I'll make just as much contact, and actually, I might make even more contacts meeting people in the hallway of conferences than I will the people speaking from panels at conferences.

Andrew:	So the conferences attended, that's your way of saying, how connected are they? How much are they learning? 

Jason:	Are they expanding the world view that has gotten them to this level of success right now.

Andrew:	Got it. I see. All right, and you found that for yourself you were the average of the five people who you were spending the most time with, whether it's in your inbox or on the phone. Is that right?

Jason:	And then, as soon as I started changing now.

Andrew:	What did you do?

Jason:	And by the way, I don't suddenly cut people out. You know, what do they say? The best way to build a new habit is not to break the old one, but to replace it with something better. So what I started doing was I looked around and said, all right. My first goal, about eight years ago, I told Jody, 'I want to hang out with a millionaire.' I realized that I had never spent time with someone who makes $85,000 a month. I didn't know anybody that did that. As a high school teacher at the time I was making $33,000 a year. So the idea of meeting someone whose revenue was $85,000 a month, that was just astronomical. So we went on a little quest and sure enough, I met this guy down in Woodland Hills. He was an author, a speaker, was doing kind of what I'm doing now. And he was willing to meet me. We met for I think three dinners in a year. And then he would take my phone calls from time to time. And I was just trying to learn as much as I could about how this guy saw the world, how he engaged in the world, what he was seeing and doing and hearing that I wasn't. And then, what can I learn from that.

Andrew:	This was David?

Jason:	This is actually a guy named Steven Snyder.

Andrew:	Another. So Steven Snyder became one of the five--actually he wasn't one of the five people you spent the most time with. 

Jason:	No, he was one I started spending more time with, and what went away was actually a colleague of the school that I was teaching at. 

Andrew:	I see. All right, and you were trying to go to another world. It's not like you were cutting a person out and saying I'm never going to talk to you again. It's just that you were starting to spend more time with the people you wanted to be like, instead of spending more time where the average of who you are right now?

Jason:	You know, I had me down. I had my average down, so I've got this; I'm comfortable. If I'm going to go here I might need to be uncomfortable.

Andrew:	So, what happened when you brought in David and other people to be one of the five people you spend the most time with?

Jason:	For me it was getting their library or their bibliography. And there were years where, and I continue to read about one book a week to this day, but I went through a real transformation in the mid 1990s and early 2000s where if someone who was at any level higher than me would even breathe a book, I was going to get that book and used book stores were my best friends. Generally they were about $.10 on the dollar and I'd go in, I remember picking up the book by Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. I was traveling a ton at the time and so literally I bought this paperback for $1.00 or whatever is was, and I ripped out the first few chapters, not little sections what I bought with me on one trip and then I came back and I ripped out the next section and I bought that with me on that trip and this was the way I was getting through anywhere from three to five to ten books a month because I would read four chapter of this, three chapters of that, three chapters of that, four chapters of this, So the biggest thing was gaining that influence. This leads into the next tactic that I want to talk about but just let me really quick wrap up with that one, through this activity game pull out a piece of paper go to a whiteboard, identify the five people that you spend the most time with and run through some matrix, and by the way, what I wrote might not be yours. Yours might be how many apps did they launch a year. It might be how many new clients do they close a year.

Andrew:	How much money did they raise to grow their business and if you're looking around and saying....

Jason:	How many pitches did they do? If I'm going to start a new round and if going to start a pitching series I want to hang out with someone who's done 30 of those a month for the past year because they're going to be able to give me information. Lean by experience except when you can learn by example.

Andrew:	Yeah, it does have a big impact on you. Wondering if I should give my own example or move on but why don't we move on.

Jason:	Let's hear it, come on. 

Andrew:	The one that I wanted to give you is this, I never saw myself as a runner and just a few weeks ago I did four days of nothing but running. Yesterday, as tired of was, I did a twenty mile run and I still don't see myself as a runner so I 'm shocked and I say how did I get here and I realized one of the thing that I did, I started reading books about people who did long distance runs. I was reading on Saturday a book called Carved by God, Cursed by the Devil, about this guy, you know the book, this guy who did a seven day run through the Sahara where he is doing essentially a marathon a day in temperatures that are 110 degrees, 120 degrees. He has to pack everything he's going eat for the week on his back, limited water and he's doing this. And as I read him do it I start to imagine myself doing longer runs. Running at all doesn't at all seem like a crazy thing anymore. In fact, not running seems a little bit odd when you're reading all these stories off people who are runners and to me that's what gets me to go out and run. Before that what I used to is, I used to actually on a calendar I'd put down I'm going to run on this day, that, and that day or I would in my mind say I need to run more and it never worked but just reading about these guys and it's pleasurable, just getting lost in their stories, makes me become more of a runner and it's amazing. That's what I was thinking of it really does have more impact on you than what you're determine to do. The people and the environment you're in to me has more of an impact then what I hope to do and what I'd like to do.

Jason:	If I can I'll just give my understanding of it is action, thought, belief and if anybody wants to change what they do the first thing is we need to attack this bottom layer. The book that I can recommend is Phyco Cybernetics by Maxwell Malt and when I read that book it shifted everything, Andrew. When I realized that I do what I think based on my belief pattern, quick how I change that belief pattern. Mine was I am a triathlete and this started in 2000 when I was not a triathlete and just getting myself to imagine what that would look, sound and feel like. Can I give a tactic we didn't write down? 

Andrew:	Yeah, yeah.

Jason:	It goes with this. Whiteboard pen and those of you who stay home or live in an apartment or a flat, if you're at home every single day, for those of us who travel on the road, expo pen works on mirrors and what I've been doing, and I'm kind of letting out all my secrets but I think that Mixer G universe deserves it, I travel about 230, 240 nights a year. A 140, 150 airplanes flight, when I check into a hotel one of the first things I do is I write on the mirror of the bathroom why I'm working for that client tomorrow--what I hope they get, what I hope I can provide. And I'll longhand that up on the mirror. It'll be anywhere from one to two sentences, because the last thing I do before I got to bed, after I brush my teeth, is to read that thing. The first thing I do in the morning after I shower is shave, so I have to read that thing. But then, the most important one, when I come home from work when I get back to the hotel, I have to look at that mirror and ask myself in my eye, 'Did you do what you had planned to do today?' Right? There are three kinds of goals that people have. They have goals they think about, goals they write on a piece of paper, and goals they can see themselves in. And ask any athlete at the Olympic level which one is the most powerful, and they will tell you, 'When I see myself on the video achieving the goal it's much more powerful.'

Andrew:	All right. And then, how do you wipe it off, by the way, before you turn over the hotel keys?

Jason:	Paper towel.

Andrew:	Just a paper towel will take that right off?

Jason:	Yeah, that's why I say; don't do this with a Sharpie.

Andrew:	Okay. All right. The next big idea. So, map out your high-impact influencers, now get feedback from a mentor.

Jason:	So, I was working with an organization in Minneapolis, and one of the senior-level executives, though I'd never worked for him, he hired the company that I was coming in to consult. Somehow we wound up meeting, because we're both runners. That's probably a whole other story. When people connect with you it's often on personal and professional interests, not just how good your product is going to be. So, let me come back to that if we have time.

Anyway, this guy, Kevin, and I actually started a five-week mentor program. And what we did is the first week we emailed back and forth a couple of times, and I would come up with the three questions--and we kept it to three--the three questions that I wanted him to ask me once a week for five weeks. And then he would during the week randomly, and we did this on purpose, he would randomly call me, 'Jason, do you have about two minutes?' And in those two minutes he would ask me my three questions. I had to give myself a number score, one through five, and I had to give a little bit of dialogue that he keyed into on an Excel sheet. At the end of those five weeks he took that Excel sheet, forwarded it over to me, and then we did a one brief-out call. And what we got to see was over the five weeks where I was high, where I was low, and what were my comments about that. And I could remember one of the times we did this it was all about a big decision I was making regarding the direction that I was going to take one certain product in, one of my services. And over those five weeks it became so abundantly clear that I did not need to go in that direction, that it was going to--what is that called when you separate out--it was going to dilute the work that I was doing. But in my mind I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it, but by having him ask me these questions, write down the answers and then feed that back to me was absolutely critical, I think, in making the decision that was right for me.

Andrew:	So, how do you get a mentor like that?

Jason:	So, here's the tactic. I'll ask you to pull up the first one that has the people's names around it. So, the first thing you'll see is I've got a lot of people on what I call 'Team Jason'. So, here's where you start. Go to a white board, a piece of paper, or pull up a Mind Jet, Mind Manager software, and in the middle of that thing just write your name. So, Team Andrew. Team Jeremy. And around that all these it's going to be is those five people that you're spending a lot of time with. But then there's going to be just a few more. And then, underneath that or associated with it, if you go to that next picture there, is what I did. I just went through and said, 'Okay, what I get from these ten people? What is it that they are great at, that if I were to speak with them more often than not I would pull in some ideas?' Now, just hang out there for a minute. That middle one, Irene, it's amazing that you're on that one. A great story. So, we went to Paris. My wife got accepted to speak at the Women's International Network Conference in Paris. One of the other speakers was a CEO of an investment bank, Irene. And she was on stage and talking about some things that she was talking about. I went up after her speech, I shook her hand, and I gave her my business card. I said, 'There were some things you shared from the stage I'd love to speak with you more about. I get too New York a week a month, could I buy you coffee one time?' N

Now again, she's a CEO of an investment bank there in New York City; I mean, one of the busiest people of the planet. I followed up a week later with a handwritten thank you card, 'Dear Irene. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed your presentation.' I wrote specifically what I enjoyed about it, Andrew, and put it in the mail. Within two weeks her assistant called me to find out when I could meet Irene for a cup of coffee. We made the arrangements and the week before the meeting I sent her this five-meeting request. And I upped it little bit; I said, ' I want to meet with you five times in person within one year.' 

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	And here it is, here's Jason. He's asking for the moon, you know, or star, whatever that saying is, and I'm here to tell you we've had four meetings. It has been about ten months. I don't know if we'll get the fifth one in within a year, but here's a person who now is in my fold, my environment, because I took a risk, let her know what I appreciated, and let her know what I could learn from that. Oh, and I share one more tactic about mentors and mentoring that is so absolutely critical. People love to help; they don't so much love being asked to help. 

Andrew:	Okay.

Jason:	So, that's a weird line. But what I found is if I can get someone to share their expertise, their experience, their conversation with me, within twelve or fifteen days I've done a follow-up letter either email or handwritten of what I got from our meeting and how I'm already implementing the ideas they shared.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	I found this has been one of the most important things for me to do my own de-brief and assessment, but also it's the least that I can do for someone who has given me 15 or 30 minutes of their time.

Andrew:	All right. So, that answers my question about how you get a mentor. And by the way, did we say that as a result of it, this is how you ended up writing your book, and how this book came up because of this tactic? 

Jason:	Throughout the book you'll hear me write about my mentors, my coaches, the people on my team. I reached out to Dan Pink, the author of Drive. He wrote a book about left right brain stuff. I started following on Twitter. I added him a couple of times. He followed me; he came across the sandbox. I [DMd] him a couple of times. I got his email address, and in one of his emails he left his signature with his phone number, so I just called him. 

Andrew:	Okay.

Jason:	Well, long long story short, he wound up doing a 17-minute class via Skype just like this, for my Your Best Just Got Better class online. And he's a guy, you know, I won't call him every week, but he's someone out there that by reaching out, and hopefully I feel contributing, to that balance back and forth. The book showed up because I went to South by Southwest a couple of years ago.

Andrew:	I see. And so, was it related at all to this conversation with Dan Pink?

Jason:	No. 

Andrew:	It just changed your approach to writing?

Jason:	Yes.

Andrew:	Got it--to ask him why he writes and to open yourself to thinking about it.

Jason:	I'll share that story really fast. I was in the middle of writing the book. The publisher, we signed the deal in March of last year, and they gave me four and a half months to write it. The publisher said, you know, 'We need you to do this within four and a half months. And I was a couple of months in and I was really, man, it was a lot, as you can imagine.

Andrew:	Yeah.

Jason:	In a conversation with Dan I asked him the question, I said, 'Dan, why do you write? What do you get from writing your books?' And he quickly said, 'Jason, I write to figure things out.' And that was where, as I was writing Your Best Just Got Better, it did take a little turn. The people who are reading the drafts early on, and the people who read the finished product could tell that something had happened. And that's where, in my mind, and it's why I still promote, Andrew. I still promote the handwritten process. And I might be showing my age a little bit, but there's something about putting pen to paper for me that when I get to see the thought stream that comes through my mind I think about things deeper, bigger, and then more specific.

Andrew:	I notice you say that a few times; that that's the way that you think--to think by writing your ideas out. 

Jason:	And there are people, you know, I'm a strong kinesthetic, visual learner. Of the three learning styles, I'm strongest in kinesthetic. If I can do something once, I've got it. Visual, if I see you do it, chances are I'll be able to mimic it. If you only tell me what you're doing, I know me. I'm going to have a struggle with that. When I'm working with a client, one of the first things I'm doing, because I work with people for two days at a time. And one of the first things, early in that first morning or even on the phone beforehand, I'm building my own psycho graphic of that person. Of how they are, who they are, how they work, how they engage. And can I do real quick how to read someone?

Andrew:	Oh, yeah.

Jason:	So, for those of you who are doing phone stuff, if you're receiving phone calls, making phone calls. If you're doing pitches, if you're receiving pitches. All meet someone at their learning preference and then we'll grow from there instead of trying to get them to understand mine or me understand theirs.

So, real, quick. If I'm in a meeting and someone says, "That sounds good. I hear what you're saying. I like the sound of that. Will you tell me a story of something you did in the past related to this?" All of those are indicators that they are auditory people. f I'm on the phone with someone, if I'm pitching a client on the phone and I find out they're auditory, I'll overnight them one of my CDs.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	Alright. Number two. I'm in a meeting, I'm on the phone, and someone says, "Oh, I see what you're saying." Or, "I can picture that." Or, "Will you show me what you mean?" Visual. So, I'll overnight them a DVD, by the way.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	Now real quick, let me pause there. Because those are the two prominent ones that I see, especially in the business world. Here's where there's a problem. Auditory, visual. Auditory person is not understanding what the visual person is saying. And the auditory person will say, "That, just doesn't sound right." And the response is, "Let me show you what I mean."

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	You've got Grand Canyon going now.

Andrew:	Yeah.

Jason:	It doesn't sound right. Let me tell you about it from this angle. I'm not hearing you. What is it that you've heard so far? So, that way I'm meeting them where they are.

Oh, and then the third one is the kinesthetic learner, right. The kinesthetic learner in a meeting, on the phone, while they're talking, they'll say things like, "Oh, I get it. That makes sense." Or, "Just give it to me straight." And they always do this. Whatever that means.

Oh, but kinesthetic, of course, I'll overnight them a copy of my book.

Andrew:	I see. Because kinesthetic people are going to want to flip through the book. They're going to want to experience it. I see. And you know what? Doing Mixergy I can see the difference. For example, the person who is listening to us right now, or watching us, has one mode that he prefers to take all of this content in. For some people, even though we're showing visuals, even though there are things that they have to see, they don't care. They just want the mp3. They're going to absorb it so much better that way.

For other people I see, no matter what we say, even though this whole program is visual and audio and that's the way we create it and we have transcribers who I don't know what part of the world they're transcribing, they prefer the transcript.

I know my mentor, Bob Hyler, he helps program this, this whole thing of Mixergy. He will only read the transcripts. And he'll zip through it and that's his way of doing it.

Jason:	Yes

Andrew:	And for him, to think that there's someone who's watching it sounds, I think, must sound crazy.

Jason:	How do they have time?

Andrew:	So, you're right. And for Bob, if I were to explain something to him and say, "Let me talk to you. Let me talk it through over the phone," it probably would drive him nuts. He doesn't want to hear me talk for ten minutes. If I could just write it out for him in an email, he'll probably absorb it all in five seconds.

Jason:	Yeah. I mean, the real thing here and I've seen, meetings can go from 45 or 30 minutes down to 20 or 15, just by recognizing that in a room of four people, there's these three competing learnings.

Now, real quick. We all do all three, okay? I don't want anybody to leave this and go, "Oh, I'm only visual. If you tell me, I'm not responsible." That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is when I walk into a room, if I'm looking at 150 people, if I stand behind the lectern and drone on verbally, I'll get 20 percent of the room. I will.  Now, here's the kicker. I might get the 20 percent of the room. The only 20 percent who are going to fill out the feedback form. And so what's the coordinator going to read? "Great seminar, loved his style." Where someone else in the room is going, "Oh, my gosh. Show me something."

Andrew:	All right. Let's go back to the big board and we've got two more big ideas.  One more you need to tackle now is "Practice small repeatable steps every day."

Jason:	So, what I wanted to do here, and I . . .

Andrew:	I love the visual you've got for this, by the way.

Jason:	I wanted to combine some of the things that we talked about earlier and pick that up as people are getting ready to leave this class. So, we talked about the noun-verb thing. We talked about the projects, those big verbs. And the lowest common denominator, the actions. So, the software, the tools, the gear out there. Let's pull up the email one first.

Andrew:	You want me to show this email? It's okay to show it to the audience?

Jason:	It's okay to show it. I went through and I cleaned up what I needed to there. So, on the left hand side is Gmail. So, that's just kind of the active whatever. And then over on the right hand side . . . and I've used things over the years. I mean I've used everything from a Ramola Skin Journal [SP] to Palm Desktop to Outlook Tasks. Currently, I'm in this Remember The Milk. And what I'll do as I'm going through my email inbox, when I read something that's a task, call, buy, print, draft, I'll forward that email to my Remember The Milk account.

And then on the right hand side of the screen, if you see these blue tabs. I don't know if you can zoom in just a little bit if people can read those. You might get too much blur.

Andrew:	I've got the original here and I'm having a hard time reading it.

Jason:	Yeah. Okay.

Andrew:	But, these blue things at the top.

Jason:	These blue tabs, what I did is I programmed Remember The Milk so that if the word "call" is in the subject line that I email Remember The Milk, it automatically filters into my call inventory.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	If the acronym EM is in the subject line of that email that I forward out of Gmail to Remember The Milk, it goes into my category called "at computer." So, what I've done is made it so that when I drop in, I could be on an airplane, I could be at a hotel, I could be at home. When I drop into my next work session, I'm going to look at doing 30 or 45 minutes of work in 15 or 30 minutes.

And, in this case, I'm going to go into the mode of whatever category that is. Because I know what this says, I can read this. But, underneath the little cow, it says "Inbox." And then it says, "Computer." And then right next to that it says, "Internet."

Andrew:	Okay.

Jason:	I actually separate my inventories based on internet connection speed.

Andrew:	What would you do if the internet was really powerful and what would you do if it wasn't?

Jason:	By the way, if the internet wasn't powerful, that's as if there is no internet to me. So, if I'm at some . . . I remember I was in a hotel in the Midwest a couple years ago. And they had the slowest connection. And I just pulled off. I said, "You know what? I'm not going to work on the internet tonight."

Andrew:	And I'll go to my to do list and look at things that have no internet requirement.

Jason:	Exactly.

Andrew:	I see.

Jason:	So, that's how I'm looking for . . . this tip is how can I do incremental tasks? How can I find small blocks of time? In the book I write about a period that I worked with a client. I actually got to the client's site on time, as usual. The assistant came out, brought me up to her office, outside her office. And they quickly told me that the client that I was supposed to work with was going to be about 10, 15 minutes late.

I turned to this little system with me. And I write it all out in the book. I don't remember exactly what it was, I write it all out in the book. But, I made hotel reservations. I made car reservations. I confirmed a couple of flights. I wrote a thank you card. I sent a couple of emails. I mean, I was so productive in those 15 minutes. 

And I actually turned it into a teachable moment for the client. When she walked in, I just launched. The first thing I said to her, I said, "Tell me how many times a day do people show up late to the meetings that you're in?" And she rolls her eyes. "Oh, Jason. All the time." I said, "Well, you were, " and I looked at my watch, "about 15 minutes late. And this is what I did." And I showed her on my little notebook. So, her jaw hit. She's like, "You did all of that?"

And that was where I came up with this concept I call "bonus time." We're going to receive extra minutes every day. The sudden question is, in those extra minutes, do I look through, kind of like that guy who was scanning his email multiple times in the morning before he did anything about it, or am I going to move one some of those things that I said were the tasks to move on today.

Now, where do the tasks come from and where do the emails come from? If you wouldn't mind bringing up the Evernote slide. So, I know that Evernote's popular with the community, I've seen a couple of your classes.

Andrew:	I'm using Evernote. I think, more then anyone that I know of, I am addicted to it. Everyone in the company here would rather that I use Google Docs for everything but Evernote is so much more convenient, easy to get data into, easy to get data out of. I'm sliding all these images in here and it's Evernote that's making it easy for me to pop this in here and pop that in there and anyway. 

Jason:	I heard you earlier in another class, Andrew, you said that you can email things to your Evernote, I'll get to that in just a second, and the other one for me is the offline capabilities of this. So I'm on my iPhone, my iPod or my iPad, I can pull up my Evernote right then and then add, subtract or edit. Anyway, what you're looking at here, this is just one of my buckets, and I've got two project inventories. I've got projected between now and the next eighteen months and then I've got projects that I've already committed to for the next one and a half to three years. And so what you got here is, I took this picture you can tell, I took this back on 2/28, there were by the way the highlighted one, so just a running list here. Inventory of what I said yes to that when I look at this list I'm going to start to pick those smaller verbs. So, today I've got to submit the article to Laura that was the conclusion that I wrote earlier today that I'll finish up tonight. We've got a design and produce the better coffee mugs, present the seminar for IMS. For each one of these, I'll think to myself, what is the move I need to make when I get one of these block of time and then again, like you, I can email that task straight into my remember the milk. I know that sometime in the 24 hours I'm going to get these blocks of 15, 30 or 45 minutes, sit down, pull up what is my list of work that I know I can move through right now. I know I mentioned it, Andrew, but the significance of these 15 minute blocks, three of them, number one, we only have 96 a day. For most entrepreneurs who are sleeping five, six hours a night, you can just start subtracting. If I sleep five hours a night I'm now down to 76 15 minutes blocks. I know you and I both exercise, why don't we subtract another 4, one hour, so now I'm down 74 blocks. One we start subtracting all of these out, were going to get real selfish about when someone walks in a says "Do you have a minute?" 

Andrew:	I get more "Can I take you out for coffee?" Which will be two hours, a minute would be nice. 

Jason:	And you just got to know, the person's asking you for that coffee, that's going to be eight of your 15 minutes, 8 % of your day. 

Andrew:	That's huge.

Jason:	I've got to start thinking about what's the return on investment if I invest 8% of my day in y you, what am I getting back? And it's weird; I know there's a lot of folks out there who they've gone to starting to charge people for lunches and charge people for coffees and those kinds of things. I don't know exactly where I am on that side of the fence because I'm a people a person and I love hanging out with people but when I started looking at the percentages, if I can guarantee you a 4% return on your money you'd give me everything you got especially in today's market but if I can guarantee a 4% return on your time what would you backfill that saved time with?

Andrew:	I know an entrepreneur who charges for his time but never accepts payment for it. He just puts that charge out there so that when people ask him for time they understand that there is some value to what he's giving them and it's better to come prepared and it's better to be appreciative that's he's giving you time and not bitch that you're not getting more time then you've got or wish that you had a half day because this guy should be able to help you. 

Jason:	I did one month; I did 15 minutes quick calls over the phone for anybody who funded a Kiva loan.

Andrew:	That's a great idea. 

Jason:	That was fun. People would go to Kiva, they'd fund a loan, they'd send me the little screen shot and then it' like OK, now I'm in. You're helping the planet, OK, let's talk.

Andrew:	It shows us some value here to. Measure results.

Jason:	Please, please, please. I've done something like a weekly debrief, a weekly assessment for years now but Thursdays, sometime in the mid-morning, I just look back over my calendar. That's the first place I start. And the second place I go to is my [incent] items. Those two, I can't get more objective than my incent items and my in box. I can get a little bit objective with my calendar, because I can still fudge it, I can still add things and subtract things, right? But just those two measures, if I look back, who did I sent that to, and who did I meet with, connect with, where was I, where did I go, all build from myself a, Oh, WOW! It's Thursday morning, before the week is over, I need to reconnect with that person; I need to follow up with that program, I need to reconnect with that group. And so, that little review, I mean, take as long as you want. I usually plan for about 30 minutes for that. But what it does is give me a real solid sense of where my time went. And again, to try to pick up all the bread crumbs from this class, Andrew, is you start with what are those most important tasks. You're surrounding yourself by the people who are heavily influencing. We're looking at the homeostatic response, right? If I always do what I've always done, and if those are the people that I've been emailing and those are the people that I've been meeting with, do I need to anything different so that when that new app launches, or when that new pitch round starts, I'm ready for what's next.

Andrew:	We have a visual here; should I bring it up now?

Jason:	Please.

Andrew:	All right, let's take a look at it. 

Jason:	So these are two of my favorite websites when it comes to assessing where my time has gone. On the left-hand side it's this e.ggtimer.com. And you can actually go in and set this for a countdown timer. It fills up my entire screen. So, next time I plan a 45-minute work session, the most important time that I've set this up for clients is right after a meeting has been cancelled at the last minute. And I don't know if this happens to you, Andrew, but from time to time I'll set something up for 10 a.m., and 9:51 I'll get an email, 'Sorry, Jason. Something came up. I can't make our meeting at 10:00. We'll reschedule.' Well, I had planned to be away from my desk. I'd planned to be away from the world, and I'd planned to be away from email and my phone from 10:00 to 11:00. So, as hard as it is, I actually hold myself back from going to email or picking up my phone. I set that little timer off to the side for 59 minutes. It fills up my second monitor, and I work on something with that countdown timer ticking. Someone walks into my office, 'Jason, do you have a minute?' Well, no, because I supposed to be in a meeting, and I've only got 43 minutes until my timer is done. So, to me it's a real good way to hold my focus to that.

Andrew:	Let me check that out. This seems like a really simple thing to use. Let me click over. 

Jason:	Click it twice.

Andrew:	Is it egg timer, no period?

Jason:	e.ggtimer.com.

Andrew:	Oh, I got the period in the wrong place. 

Jason:	Yeah, there you go. Just hit 'go'. 

Andrew:	So, it'll be five minutes.

Jason:	And you'll see that, and I just put that over on the other monitor.

Andrew:	And just keep that running, and I could even see myself just in a corner of the screen just keep thing running, and I guess it's an egg timer. That's all it is. 

Jason:	All right. Here's the deal. This is my experience, Andrew. If I look at the clock and I know that I have another hour before I need to be somewhere I'll kind of work. If I look at the timer and realize I have 36 minutes until I'm done with this time, I'm going to refocus. 

Andrew:	I notice how the top and bottom are growing, those bars on the top and bottom to fill up the screen. Yeah, dead simple. And then the other site that you were talking about is the stop the bleeding?

Jason:	This one is stop the bleeding. Actually, do a Google search for this, because that's not it. That's the name of the program, stop the bleeding, and it's this little . . . put timer.

Andrew:	Okay. 

Jason:	Put timer, stop the bleeding meeting timer, or something--meeting ticker.

Andrew:	And you do have a screen shot of it up there.

Jason:	I did. 

Andrew:	Where is it? 

Jason:	Click that top one and see what happens. 

Andrew:	It's a get hub, so it's going to take us to a program that will allow us to do it. Oh, you know, it is Get Hub. Actually, I see it in your screen shot.

Jason:	There you go. All right. So let's say you've got three people in the room. Type in three, and let's say the average hourly wage is $250, put $250 in there. And you click start, and all of a sudden . . .

Andrew:	That's what it's costing us to have this meeting and spend all this time together.

Jason:	Now imagine when I do this, Andrew, and I show it because there are 150 people in the room. They're all bankers so put $450 in the hourly cost. All of the sudden everyone leans forward and they want to know, Jason, what's the secret. So this one here in a group setting... Oh, by the way, here's another thing. I'll start this, if I have a class that starts at 9:00 in the morning, I'll start that with the attendee list. Say there's 16 people in the class. Most seminars that I do, we don't get to start on time, because someone's late. So we start at what, 9:12, 9:13. I flip to that and I say, just so you know, this is already gone by. 

Andrew:	That's how much money we just burned through while we're waiting. 

Jason:	It doesn't always make me the most popular consultant that comes in. But I figure, I'm too young not to tell the truth. When it comes to assessment there's really that macro sense. Where have we gone over the past several days. In seven days, that's when a psychologist will debate, is it five days, is it nine days. But within seven days we start losing the details of what happened. So in seven days I want to stop. I like Thursdays, because if I do this on Thursday that gives me about 36 hours before the weekend. 

I used to try to do this on Friday, I had a lot of clients who wanted to do theirs on Friday but the problem was if they caught something on Friday afternoon, New York was closed, and Asia was gone. By doing this on Thursday, we could send something out there and we might get that response before the weekend comes. Then on the micro sense is being acutely aware of where the time is going in that focus period that we have. 

Andrew:	Can you tell the story of Nick, your client? Do you remember the one I'm talking about? He's a financial adviser. 

Jason:	I love this story, I love this story. I got hired by a bank in New York, and that was the really nice tie client. Anyway, they brought me in, they gave me two hours of this guy. Now normally I work with someone for two days. But they said, Jason, he's busy, two hours. So we sit down, and he's got his six monitors up, he's got two phones and he turns to me and he says, OK. What do you got? And I could tell, one eye is still on Bloomberg, right. I did my homework and I've worked in the financial industries for about a decade now and I just asked him point blank. I said, how many phone calls did you make yesterday? He said, I don't know, about 20 or 25. I just looked at him and I said, "Bull. No you didn't." And at this point, I'm like one minute into the consulting. He's like oh, god, what just happened. And he looks at me, then with a big smile on his face he says, how did you know? I said, Nick, no one makes 20 outbound phone calls. If you made 20 outbound phone calls you'd be partner by now. 

Long story short, the tactic I gave this guy, and I'm looking around my desk. I gave him five quarters, you know $0.25. We put them on this side of his monitor. And I said, look your job today is to move those five quarters to the other side of your desk. Every quarter equals one outbound call, that's it. And goes, Jason, five phone calls that's not a big deal. I said, I know, I know, that's just this week. Five day, I talk about the five day experiment, five days. 

It turns out that he started moving quarters and he was moving the piles, one two, thee times a day. And by the way, why quarters? Because for a living this guy was moving money. They could've been $100 bills that he was moving he wouldn't have known the difference. But we got it down to a game. If I could leave the audience with something today , it would be, work is a game. There's rules, there's laws, there's fouls, there's a cheering squad, there's all kind of things that to me, mean engagement. And whether it's putting quarters on the side of your desk, whether it's writing it down on a note card the big accomplishments you made today. Make it a game you can win. 

Andrew:	If people want to get more, this is the book right here. "Your Best Just Got Better". We just touched on some of the ideas of the book, but if you want to get the full book, it's available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Nook, iBook, everywhere. "Your Best Just Got Better'. You're giving a way a free chapter on your site so people can experiment and see if it really is everything that we've been talking about here.

Jason:	They can start reading that right now with chapter 1. It actually includes the foreword, the prologue, the table of contents, and chapter 1. So it's about 40 pages of the book. And then anything I can do Andrew, this community has been so good to me, I've learned so much from the other classes. I'm a member and will continue to be, and I really appreciate the opportunity to share with the audience. They can email, text message. 

Andrew:	Yes, I keep telling the audience that it starts out with these little conversations, they just say thank you, and then I find that incredible things happen as a result of them. 

Jason:	Twitter, Jason Womack.

Andrew:	That's the way you and I connected today. You're on Twitter. Jason Womack, and the website is Womackcompany.com. Thank you for doing this session with us. 

Jason:	Absolute pleasure Andrew.

Andrew:	Thank you. And you guys have a bunch of ideas, useable tactics from this session. If you just take one idea and use it, it will make this whole time and investment that you've made into this program worthwhile. Even if it's just saying you know what, what's my equivalent of making phone calls today, and you stack four quarters on one side of your monitor and every time you get that thing done, you move the stack over one at a time to the other side of the monitor. You're going to start seeing real progress, real productivity. Real results in your life, and when you do, I hope that you'll come back and tell me. I hope you'll tell Jason about it, because we want to celebrate in your wins and we want to be a part of your success. So thank you for watching, we're looking forward to seeing your results.