Consistent Purposeful Action – Part 3

15 Mar Consistent Purposeful Action – Part 3

What Elements Do You Need To Block?

Christopher Hart here from Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting, coming to you from extra sunny Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  Welcome, thanks for joining us guys. We’re continuing our Lead Strong series that’s focusing on helping individuals be better leaders in their businesses, their organizations, and even in their lives.

We have been talking about how to get people and ourselves into consistent and purposeful action.  We started transitioning into understanding how to focus on the purposeful action and what to focus on; we looked at our priorities and how to prioritize our priorities; and then from there we nudged it down to creating a focus and awareness around the critical and the vital tasks, so we talked about that in the last video.

Let’s Talk X’s And O’s

Today we’re talking, what I say, we’re talking Xs and the Os, who to block and what to block.  And so why do I put it that way?  Well for one it’s Sunday morning right, in the spirit of the NFL I’m sitting here drinking my bulletproof coffee in my Cowboys mug, and I know that bothers a few of you so I apologize, but we’ve got a big game tonight against the Eagles and so.  Let’s talk Xs and Os, who to block and what to block.

When we look at being consistent and purposeful you have to understand there are some elements of the who and the what that needs to be blocked, and how does that relate to Sunday NFL?  Well you know you guys going to turn the games on today, it’s going to be half time and Howie and the crew and whoever else you watch they’re going to dissect every little play and they’re going to talk about how the offensive line blocked this person and created a hole for the running back and you know… or why the quarterback got sacked because he didn’t pick up the who, the outside linebacker, and whatever else.  So the same fundamental elements apply in your business.

When you’re going through your day, your weeks, your months, et cetera, and you’re trying to be consistent and purposeful and you’re identifying what your priorities are and you’ve identified what your critical tasks are and your priorities…or excuse me, your critical and your vital tasks, you have to block out your time.  Remember we said the other day that time management is a lie, you cannot manage time, the only thing you can do is manage yourself through time.  So what you literally have to do is you have to take the time that you’re going to allocate to your either life, so I gave you my six priorities that’s part of my life and how I prioritize it; and then I have to take those priorities, those critical and vital tasks sub elements and block them in the amount of time that I’m going to allocate.  If this is just about your business or one particular area of your life then what’s the block of time that you’re going to allocate to achieve those goals that you set for yourself?  Remember we also talked about after you prioritize you have to create a vision and goals and then your critical and vital tasks.

So you have to create a block of time to allocate to that, that’s kind of like the first step.  And so how I work through this with some of my clients I either coach or consult is I tell them “Look just take a blank schedule for the week,”  I usually like to work on the week, the days it fluctuates it’s too volatile for people, so take a week calendar and just take a blank one, and what I do is once I have my six priorities and then I identify my vision and my goals and then what are the critical tasks that I must do and then what’s vital, like that’s an absolute must, non-negotiable, and I identify those critical and vital tasks for each one of those priorities what I then do is I look at the vital tasks, because those are an absolute must, they’re non-negotiable, and I take that vital task and that critical task and then I have to assign it a amount of time and frequency.  So how much time is it going to take me to do this and how frequent do I need to do it?  Sometimes it’s 30 minutes daily, for some things it could be maybe like lead generation, three hours every day or two hours every day that’s the time and frequency element.  Maybe, I talked about my fitness goals, maybe the fitness goals are three times a week for one hour.  Well what three days a week?  This week maybe it’s Monday-Wednesday-Friday, or Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, whatever you feel like you want to allocate you have to give it a time and frequency for each one of those critical and vital tasks.

Once you allocate then you can take that blank schedule, calendar, whatever you want to call it, and then start implementing, blocking your time.  So for instance if I’m taking a schedule Monday through Friday or let’s say Monday through Sunday, what I’m going to look at is I’m going to look at all my six vital tasks and the first one is I told you is God then health and then family then business, fun and wealth, so I’m going to go one by one.   I’m going to take the vital task for God and I’m going to say “Okay what’s the frequency?”  Let’s say that’s a 30 minute daily Bible study, okay when am I going to do that?  From the very first thing because it’s my vital task for my first priority and so that’s the first thing that goes on my schedule.

Then I go to my health room and I say “What’s the vital task there?  What’s the time and frequency?”  And then I put that on my schedule, and I go through all six of them.  And here’s why, because if it’s blank there’s nothing competing.  So once I put my six vital tasks and their time and frequency on my calendar then I know nothing can compete with it because there’s nothing else on my calendar.

Then what I do is after my vital tasks make it onto my calendar I then go to my critical tasks, and then I take my critical tasks and I have my time and frequency and I start placing those on my calendar, and before long you know what I have?  I have a schedule for the week that has my critical tasks and my vital tasks that are blocked and there’s no competition, there’s nothing competing with it.

But here’s the problem, there’s elements to our life, that whirlwind that must be attended to, those are the things that have to happen in life.  It’s kind of like they are a must but they’re not critical, they’re not vital, but they are a must, and those are our to-do stuff.

We HAVE to be purposeful first, we have to create a block of time for the week, for the day, whatever, where we’re identifying that these critical and vital tasks must happen.  So what happens if I give something a …something that’s a critical task at 5:00 o’clock on Tuesday and I know at 5:00 o’clock on Tuesday I have to take my daughter to dance and it’s 25 minutes away and whatever?

What I start doing as I start finding  well can I take this critical task and put it in a different block of time?  Where can I reallocate that?  So it’s not going to be an exact science, understand you’re going to have to do some shifting, understand some things are going to… life is going to show up, you have to do the whole erase and replace element as well.  But at least foundationally you can block your time to appropriate it to the areas that you consider to be priorities that have your goals in mind and you’re now aware of your critical and vital tasks and when they’re going to happen.

What Is The Whitespace?

Then what happens is you look at your calendar and there’s all this other space, and I call it “whitespace,” and here’s what I believe about whitespace, that if you don’t take care of the whitespace, the whitespace is going to kill you, not physically but what I mean by killing you is that’s the outside linebacker that unblocked is going to come in and crush you on your blind side. Meaning the quarterback is checking down to a second and third option receivers and from your back you get crushed by this big 240 pound linebacker and you wonder how did that happen.  They went unblocked, a critical element that needs to be blocked went unblocked and the quarterback didn’t see it and neither are you.  So I say they’re going to kill you, they’re going to crush you, that white space on your calendar is going to crush you.

So what I say is you have to give that white space something, you can’t just leave it out there, here’s why:  Because let’s just say that for instance my calendar says from 8:00 to 12:00 o’clock I’m doing XY and Z critical and vital tasks, and then 12:00 to 1:00 is lunch, and then I have this white space from like 1:00 to 3:00, and on there I say “Appointments,” and maybe I don’t have appointments today.  Now I have this two-hour block of time that I go “Hmm what do I do?”  So what do we start thinking, like what’s top of mind?  Not what actually absolutely must happen, we just start thinking, “What are all the things I need to…oh I need to return these voice mails and I need to do these e-mails, and oh yeah, I need to respond to those Facebook messages about next week’s party…oh I need to run to the store… maybe I should stop at Starbucks and …oh wait I need to go get money out of the ATM…”and you start doing all that stuff and next thing you know it’s 5:00 o’clock and you go “Man I was busy today.”

And that same person gets on a coaching call and I ask them, “Hey how was your week?”  And they go “Busy.” Was it busy or productive?  You see busy shows up when you’re not prioritizing your time, productive shows up when you’re prioritizing your time in accordance with the priorities and the goals and the critical… and the vital tasks that you have allocated.

So what do we do?  Like that whitespace needs to be filled.  Again no exact science here but guys I’m telling you, you can’t leave whitespace on your calendar, you have to block that, whether it’s you’re starting to fill that white space in with all the to-do stuff, that’s fine nothing wrong with that because you do need to attend to it.  But here’s the thing, if you give the to-do list stuff 30 minutes on your calendar then you have to hold that accountable, and that’s where self accountability comes into play.

Once I create my calendar, my calendar now becomes my boss, it tells me what to do all day and I’m self accountable to that.  If my calendar says 30 minutes to return voice mails and emails, well guess what?  I don’t take 45 minutes, I take 30 minutes because once that block of time is over then I stop what I’m doing and I move on to the next thing.  Why?  Because it has a purpose, that’s how we become purposeful.  And when your calendar day in and day out looks like that, week in and week out, month in and month out, that’s how you start to become consistent and purposeful.

Consistent and purposeful isn’t “Hmm, what I need to do today?  Oh maybe I’ll do this.”  And then we start doing all this, remember that zig…Having a block, having a calendar where your time is actually organized in accordance with critical and vital tasks that meet your goals, that serve your priorities, allow you the life and the business that you desire, that’s where we talk about having a life on purpose.  See if you’re not doing that what’s happening is your business and your life are on accident and I’ve never seen or heard of someone get on a stage, write a book, preach to me, coach to me, whatever, that said “You know what, I achieved success on accident.”  See successful people are very purposeful, and this is how you can be purposeful.  And that’s the what behind what we need to block.

Now here’s the who.  This is difficult people because we all have this in our life.  We have those people that I like to call “our energy sucks,” they just suck the energy out of you. They may be the person in your office that says “Hey Chris you got a couple minutes?  I can’t figure this out of my own and Google won’t tell me so I’m just going to come to you and waste your time because it’s easier to do that because I know you can get it done, or I know you have the answer and I’m just lazy.  I’m a lazy thinker so I’m going to suck your time and suck your energy from you so I can just go be average. ”  See we got to block those people, we got to give them what we called the Heisman.  You got to say “Hey look I’m sorry I’m in this block of time that’s very important.  Maybe I have some time at 4:30 to 5:00 o’clock or I have some open time on my calendar,”  maybe some of that white space that you just leave open to tend to stuff, whirlwind stuff.  “I can help out at 4:30.”

Or maybe you’re a team leader like Keller Williams and you always have agents coming to your office that say you know “Hey TL … I have a question TL … I have a question TL,” and you can’t get anything done.  Or maybe you’re the leader of a team and you can’t get your lead generation done because your people are always coming into your office.  Well you have to block time for that, you need to block them during the time.  It doesn’t mean they’re any less important, it just means you have to have a block of time to where you tend to that stuff if that stuff tends to show up in your life, and there are just some people that need to be blocked period. And I’m going to talk about this in a future video of understanding, this was a radical shift for me once I realized this that there are some people that add value to your life, there are some people that multiply value to your life, there are some people that subtract value from your life, and there are some people that divide value from your life.

What I’ve come to learn is once you identify the people that add and multiply value to your life those are the people you want to spend more time with; and the people that subtract and divide value from your life, yeah those are the people need to give the Heisman too, because if you don’t I can promise you one thing, they’re going to suck your energy, and people that suck your energy cause you to turn around and suck, and if you want to be great you can’t have energy sucks in your life, it’s just the way it is. I don’t make this stuff up, it’s just the way it is okay.

What we’ve come to understand is becoming successful requires us to be consistent and purposeful day in and day out, week in week out, month in month out, et cetera, et cetera, you get the point.  And in that there’s people and time that we need to block, the whos and the whats.

The What’s And The Who’s

What needs to be blocked and who needs to be blocked? Because if you don’t take those two things into account you’re going to do the same thing you’ve always done and you’re going to expect a different result and you’re just going to go insane, not because I say you are but because Albert Einstein says that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.

So here’s what I can tell you, if you don’t want to go insane these are some great fundamental practices that you can put into play that will put you on the path to being consistent and purposeful, and I promise you if you walk that path, going straight, being consistent and purposeful, and it’s going to have its deviations and it’s obstacles, but as long as you have that path that you can get back on to a need when you need to; maybe there’s an obstacle you can go around it; maybe you just lost track or control of your day or your week, but you get back on to it because you understand that you have a plan and a path.  That path is going to take you to living the life that you desire, not living the life that other people desire for you, because I can promise you one thing, the world doesn’t want you to succeed because when they do they start … when you do they start criticizing you and they start pulling you down.

I’m going to tell you something it’s very eye opening, and the problem is some you guys are going to realize that the people that subtract and divide value in your life are the F word, family.  Yeah we all have that.  What you’re going to realize is sometimes the people that add and multiply value in your life, the other F word, friends, but they’re more than friends, you’re going to realize that you don’t spend enough time with.

Maybe you take some time today when you just write, you take your critical and vital tasks, cause I already know you did that yesterday, and now you start planning your week so you know that once football is over, you watch the late game tonight, you’re going to go to bed, you’re going to wake up tomorrow knowing exactly how to manage yourself through time.  And then your week’s going to be uber productive and not busy because you have a path to follow. And then you’re going to say “I love that man, I was so productive this week.  I’m going to do it again next week.”  And then you just do it week in and week out and  you just find yourself being more consistent and more purposeful and you’re living out your goals, your vision starts to become more clear because the Bible says with vision the people shall perish, and that’s exactly what they’re talking about.

So guys thanks for joining me today I hope we brought value to your business and your life, and just remember one thing God loves you and so do I.  Have a blessed rest of your day and have an amazing week this week.  Take care, thanks for joining. 

About the author:

Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!

To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Chris@TransformingLivesCoaching.com