← Mondays with Matt
Mondays with Matt
When Important Becomes Urgent: How to Prioritize What Actually Matters
00:28:32
As a business owner, it's easy to push off the things that really matter—your family, your health, your strategic thinking—because they're not screaming for attention. But eventually, they will become urgent. In this episode, Matt Reynolds shares...
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:02]
Matt Reynolds
You're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds. Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together.
- [00:28]
Dan Schell
Hi, I'm Dan Schell, Director of content at Barbell Logic, and you're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast. Matt's still in Mexico celebrating 25 years of marriage with his bride, Rachel. Chris had planned to interview Andrew Jackson, COO of Barbelogic and co host of the Beast Over Burden podcast, but sick kids and business travel got in the way. Last week, Matt talked about the importance of taking time off. This week, Matt's reflecting on the importance of prioritizing your family while still being a driven CEO who creates an excellent company. So it's what some people call the work life balance, although I don't think he'd like that term. We really hope you enjoy and get something out of this. Matt and Chris will be back soon with some new episodes.
- [01:12]
Matt Reynolds
I want to talk about something that we've experienced a few times or I experienced probably more than a few times in business and life and that is when the urgent becomes important. And so if we think about the quadrants of things that are not urgent, not important, we try to purge those from our life as much as we can. There are times in our life, like on vacation or just downtimes that some of that's fine. I would even move that out of the non important side. So my wife and I have watched some good TV shows while we were on vacation. Things like that that ultimately I would say are not urgent, not important. In my normal day to day sphere, we got the things that are urgent but not important. I try to delegate and automate those out as much as I can. We have things that are constantly going on in the business and in life that are urgent and important and you try to handle those with a ton of efficiency. So let me start there. Most of you know my schedule. You don't have to keep my schedule. You know, I wake up early in the morning, even earlier than I want to, and I dedicate the first couple hours of my day, every day to the urgent and important things. And there's a couple reasons for that. I think it works well for most people. For me specifically, things that are urgent and important when you're the CEO of the company means like if there are decisions and there always are, there's a handful of decisions I have to make Every single day that that piece of the business stops unless I make that decision. And so if I make that decision at 4 in the morning, by the time my employees wake up, they've had a decision from the CEO and they know we're okay, they're off to the races. If they're waiting on me for a few days for something, then that work stops. And so I really try to focus my day around. First thing in the morning, I do the urgent and important work. And then from there I train. And I've moved my training schedule up significantly to 5:30 in the morning. Somewhere in that ballpark, 5:30, 6 in the morning. And then after I train, I eat, eat some breakfast and then walk with my wife. And then I focus on the important stuff and less urgent. I'm pretty good about following, I think, practicing what I preach and kind of having divisions in those quadrants of the tasks and the items that I have to do on my task list. But one of the things that I was thinking about even while on vacation was there are times in our lives when the important things that are not urgent get put off enough that they become urgent. Now, I think I've talked about this before, so let's actually tackle one of the other sides of the equation first. There are times on your task list where there are things that seem important that again, I've told you guys before I used my notes on my iPhone, that the bottom of the list just continues to be the bottom of the list. It gets copied over every day from Wednesday to Thursday and Thursday to Friday and Friday to Monday and whatnot. And sometimes you look at those things and you go, are they really important or they just need to be dropped off the list and start a new list. So every few weeks or month at the most, I start a completely new list. I just get rid of the old list and start a new list. And if there are things that have to be carried over, I will, for the most part, I kind of start afresh. Because you recognize that some of the things that you thought were important were maybe not that important, and so they get pushed off the list. But there are other things in your life, and this is both in personal life and business and fitness, that are important but not urgent. But if you put them off long enough, they become urgent. And so, because it's fresh in my mind here, most of you know, or I've talked about in the past couple weeks, I had been on 10 weeks of business travel, mostly business travel, no fun travel, business travel, a little bit of Church, travel, no vacations or anything like that. That was just like downtime. And so 10 weeks of that. I had wrapped up the series a just a couple months ago. I had finished writing the book, which was obviously very urgent, very important. That was number one on my list, is finishing writing the book, which is done, and off to Forbes. And there were things over the last several months, or really even since the beginning of the year, since, say, January, that got just kind of sat down at the bottom of the list, like, I need to do this, but it's not urgent. And when I got back from the last week of travel, I had about two weeks off or 11 days off, something like that, before we were going on family vacation, which I'll get into the vacation piece in a minute because I think this applies here as well, where I was able for the first time in like three months to actually sit down and have a normal schedule in my home and do the things I needed to do. And I just really hunkered down and did pomodoros and efficient work to knock out the things that were important but not urgent had become important and urgent. And so as you find yourself in these things. So this is not. I want to be clear, because there are other times I think I'm going to talk about this next week. There are things that you don't know are coming and you all know the story, the lawsuit and things like when something like that gets dropped in your lap, that immediately you have to be singularly focused on that thing and that becomes urgent and important. And I think there are times when urgency is a galvanizing experience for you and your team. So that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about things that have been on the list for a while are considered important, are important, but because of other things, other obligations. And maybe you're like me and you're an overworker and you work a ton, but there are just things you can't get to, or maybe you're somebody who's a little ADHD or ADD and you just decide not to get to those things. At some point, some of those important things become urgent. And so when that happens, that is a great time to clear your schedule. So what I did when I got back from my business travels is I reached out to Dan Schill, my executive assistant, who again, does so much more than that in our business, and I had him completely clear the schedule. No calls, not going to do meetings. I'm not going to do zoom calls, just unless they Absolutely have to be done with mission control or the leadership team or whatever. And I'm going to just focus on knocking out the urgent and important work. And so I couldn't believe it had been so long since I had had nearly two straight weeks of just working from home in an environment where I could hammer out the urgent and important work. I couldn't believe how much I got accomplished. But that takes a real dedication to that thing. So you can't be distracted. The distractions have to be off workstation has to be in a private place. You've got to give yourself those pomodoros and focus on things and just knock them out. That's what I did before I went on vacation. And I couldn't believe the number of things. I had probably 35 or 40 things on my list that were important but not urgent, that had started to become urgent because they'd been put off long enough. And in the business there were a handful of things that won't make sense to you as for me as a CEO, but things that had just been like, I need to deal with this and I just don't have time to deal with this yet. Had the opportunity to deal with that thing. And for me, if your personality is like mine, and some of your certainly are not, things like that take up bandwidth in my brain. It reminds me a lot of the feeling I had both in undergrad and postgraduate school where I had a paper due or a master's thesis due. It just hangs over your head. And if you don't do it, I mean, you cannot do it, but it's still taking up bandwidth in your brain and so it needs to get out. And so I had the opportunity to just clear my calendar, push everybody all those calls and meetings and whatnot to act after vacation and hammer out the things that needed to be hammered out. And by the time I went on vacation, I had like three things on my list left. And the three things seemed completely manageable. I mean, it's the smallest the list has been in years. And so the effect of that is when I went on vacation, went down to Destin, Florida. We've got a small airport here in Springfield, Missouri. We can do a direct flight straight to Destin, Florida. And you have to fly allegiant in one of the cheaper airlines, but it's an hour and 20 minutes in the air and you're there and took the family down and had a great vacation. And it had probably the best first day of vacation I've ever had. One that wasn't like where I didn't feel this impending sense of there are things you need to be doing, but you're not doing it because you're sitting on the beach. That required 10 or 12 days of intense focus on the important work that had become urgent. Stuff that was important but not urgent is now important and urgent. And so the longer you put off those important things, and the goal here is to never actually do that. Right. Is to. The goal of the book of Undoing Urgency is to focus primarily on the things that actually are urgent and important. So we knock that stuff out. We automate the stuff that's urgent but not important. We work hard on the things that are urgent and important, and we free up our time to do the stuff that's most important to us. But over time, there are things that are important but not urgent, but they just continue to pile up on the list. It starts to take up bandwidth in your brain and you're like, I've got to get this stuff done at some point because those important things become urgent. And so I want to address a couple different issues here. So one is the business, which I really focused on because I wanted to be able to go on vacation and enjoy my family and have a great time with my family. That's the most important thing in my life. But the family time was also. It's always important, but never urgent. And because I'd been gone for 10 weeks, at least, say 80% of the time, we weren't really clicking as a family. And I know I'm always kind of overly transparent, maybe to a fault, but my wife and I, we don't argue very much. We've been married for 25 years. We've been together for, I think, 28. It was just like, the house is a little more chaotic than it is when I'm home because my wife is a little more relaxed about those things. The schoolwork, the housework, the things like that. One of the most important things in my life, or the most important thing in my life, is to make sure that I foster a great relationship with my family. And so I wanted to be able to go on vacation and enjoy my family because they were extremely important. But it had gotten to the point after being gone and busy for three months, let's say that even the relationship with my family became more urgent, that I needed to be able to stop doing work and focus on the thing that really mattered. That's going to last. Playing the long game of my family, not just my kids, but my future grandkids and My relationship with my wife. I noticed. We noticed. Even during the two weeks that I was home doing the urgent and important work for business, we bickered a little more. And that's because we just hadn't been together as much. We've been together for a quarter of a century. And yet there is some of this, okay, kind of getting to know each other again and getting on the same page and what are the standards that we keep in the home? All those sorts of things. And so even the family stuff became it's always important, but it went from non urgent important to urgent important. And so I had a great vacation. It was fantastic. I had the best first day of vacation I've ever had. I made a post in basecamp to mission Control. I was like, this is the best first day of vacation I've ever had. I've had some hard vacations. I've probably talked about those in long since past previous episodes where things got dropped in my lap on vacation from previous relationships and lawsuits and things, things like that. That really sort of put a. What I remember about the vacation is the thing that got dropped in my lap, not the vacation. I didn't want that this time. I got up every morning. I worked early. I still got up typically at like 3 or 3:30. And I would do some work. And then the gym at the resort that we were at opened at 5. And by 5 or 5:30, I was always in the gym training. I would get a quick training session in. I would walk a little bit. I would make sure, you know, my training would always be half an hour, 25 minutes, not that long. It's a hotel workout. It's dumbbells. But I got work in and then I'd walk around the beach and hit my kind of move goals for the day and my exercise goals for the day and whatnot. And then I'd come back and be able to do a little bit of important work. Family wakes up, make some breakfast at the condo. Usually that's eggs or protein shake and Greek yogurt and berries and whatnot. And then go out to the beach, hang out with the family all morning, come back, eat lunch back at the condo, take a nap with my wife and get up and start to focus on where we going for dinner. We got reservations for dinner and just have really good time with my family. And so one is the business piece, which was I took the two weeks or 10, 11, 12 days before vacation and focused on those things that were important that had become urgent and important. Two was that allowed me to free up my time to focus on my family, which is the most important thing in my life when barbologic is long since forgotten, and I hope it's not, but even if it is, the family stays and so that's who I'm invested in for the rest of my life. And then the other thing is the fitness stuff, like my own fitness, my eating habits, traveling for 10 straight weeks is not hotel workouts and doordashes and eating out and that kind of stuff is just I I felt like that was moving from importance and non urgent to urgency. And so I think Nikki and Andrew are going to do a podcast on this soon, which is that if your own personal fitness is starting to decline because of you're inundated with the work that you have to do, then there's an opportunity to really focus on that thing. And for me I recognized even on vacation I'd been training about 7 to 8am somewhere in that ballpark at home that by that time it was almost too late that I needed to train at 5:30 or 6 at the latest. And so that's what I've done as I've come back Are you a personal trainer or strength coach struggling to find new clients? Turnkey Coach has the free resource for you. The Business of Coaching Workshop provides marketing strategies, client retention techniques and methods of leveraging social media from experts coaches to help you focus on creating and scaling a thriving coaching practice. Our next series, running in March and April, covers client acquisition. Go to Turnkey Coach BOC to register for the workshop that is Turnkey Coach BOC to learn practical actions you can take to grow your business today. Register now. Foreign hey everyone, it's Matt Reynolds and I've got exciting news. The audiobook version of my new book, Undoing Urgency is officially live. If you're a business owner who's tired of hustle culture and wants to build something sustainable, this book is absolutely for you. But also we've had scores of five star reviews from non business owners, normal everyday people who receive tremendous value from this book because it helped them stop drowning in urgency and focus on the things that really matter in their life. I share in the book the mindset, shifts and practical tools that help me escape the constant pressure of urgency and create a business that actually supports my life, not the other way around. You can grab the audiobook now@ undoingurgency.com or just search Undoing Urgency on Amazon or your favorite audiobook platform. Go check it out and let's keep building better. And so sometimes the important things that are not urgent become the important things that are urgent. Whether that's a lack of fitness and health. And I didn't feel very good and I was eating a lot of out or doordashing. Again, not getting drunk, but a little too much alcohol, not enough training, certainly a little bit of exercise in the hotel gyms. But to be really consistent, I trained every single day for 10 straight days on vacation, never missed a day, got out in the sun, got some vitamin D, spent good quality time with family, watched some good shows and some documentaries with the family, which is the kind of stuff we like to do, great dinners every night. And it made that the priority. And so I would plead with you and beseech you to word that's not used enough by the way, bseech to think about the things are really important and if you have let them go too long, family, faith, fitness, even the top level business stuff that you're doing is to make those urgent. And when you make those urgent, you set up a schedule for those things and you do absolutely head down, no distraction time and knock out the work because you clear your schedule of everything else. I did no meetings, I didn't do zoom calls, I didn't meet with people here in town, which I do all the time. As a matter of fact, here, in just a few minutes I'm going to go meet the guy from church and do a meeting with him. But that put me in a really good place. So on vacation I regained that. And so there are times when the important things that are not urgent become urgent. And when that happens, you have to learn how to clear your schedule of all the things that are less important but still often urgent. Definitely the things that are urgent but not important. And you must completely purge your life from the things that are non urgent, non important. Like for the two weeks before I went on vacation, I didn't watch one minute of tv. I didn't do one minute of anything that wasn't important. It was, it was only important things so that I could clear my plate for vacation, to actually enjoy my family. And so I just wanted you to think about that this week. What are the important things in your life you're trying to accomplish? We still have, man, we're doing tons of stuff in the business. It's been a great year so far. Lots of growth, lots of change in a good way. Again, almost no turnover from staff. Our churn is the lowest it's ever been. January was a little bit higher and then February was low and then March April, May, June has just been like 1.4% churn, which has been fantastic. So those things are sort of a. Not a set it and forget it, but like these things are going incredibly well. I don't have to focus my energies on churn. I can focus my energies on the important things that matter. Right. You know, another thing that happened was we're in the process of refinancing the house. Not a great time, by the way. Refinance your house. And a long story there, but five years ago when we bought our house, we had moved from a Missouri LLC or Missouri S Corp. To. To a Delaware C corp. And when we did that, we only had one year of W2s. And so we got preapproved for the loan for our house. That's always a super stressful project. Obviously moving it was incredibly stressful. We were in the middle of the lawsuit at the time, but because of that, the bank couldn't sell our loan to one of the bigger investment banks. And so here all of a sudden we got a letter, I don't know, six weeks ago, and we saw what our mortgage was going to go up over $1,000 a month because interest rates have changed dramatically. It wasn't a balloon rate, it was just like, it's gonna go whatever the prevailing rate is right now. And so instantly, the refinancing the home on a 15 year mortgage at a better interest rate, we got good income, we got way better. We had good credit then, we have great credit now became urgent. And so that's a bunch of work that we had to do. And it became urgent to try to close. Matter of fact, we close today on the house at the end of June. And that became urgent. So that created kind of a stop point, like, hey, this is the thing that must be dealt with. The taxes, all must be done. We gotta make sure the taxes are paid. We gotta make sure the bank has all the information you need. Not just our personal taxes, but the business taxes and any tax liabilities have to be paid. And all that kind of stuff has to be in place. We've got, most of our assets are in a protected trust. They've got to have access to the trust. All that sort of stuff, like all that stuff is important. And now it's urgent because we're closing in a week and trying to get it done before the end of the month and before the end of the quarter. And so that all becomes really important. And so there are times when the important things, when you put them off, they become urgent. And I would start at the very top, which for many of you listening is going to be family. There are times when you've neglected your family and sometimes that's your fault and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just the nature of the beast, right? So for me, I really try to spend tons of good quality time with my family. There are times where I don't travel a ton for business and there are times where I have to travel for six, eight, lately, 10 weeks in a row for business basically. And no matter what you do and how many phone calls you make home and how much time you spend in the few days between the trips that you're home, the family gets neglected. And for me that was an important thing that went from non urgent to urgent. And so the family vacation was extremely important. The vacation was important. And to go on the vacation and enjoy the vacation and be the husband and father that I needed to be, I had to get the urgent and important work of the business off my shoulders. So I wasn't sitting there with it taking up bandwidth and sort of the pressure of there are things you need to be addressing, you're not addressing because now you're addressing your family, which is still more important. But there are other things that are still important. And so I just hammered all that stuff out. So I went on vacation and enjoyed it. And then fitness is the third part, which is again what I think Nikki and Andrew will cover, where there are times where if you put off your fitness, like your real fitness, like maybe you're somebody that listens to this and you're a barbalogic client or follow what we do and you're kind of training but you're kind of half assing it and you're not eating very well and you're not keeping up with your diet and you recognize like I just don't feel as healthy as I normally do, which I realize is subjective, but I know I can tell my body weight's up a little bit, my waist is up a little bit, my blood pressure's up a little bit, like I'm eating more processed food and eating out and doordashing or three, four drinks a day, those sort of things that go like, okay, this has now gone from just a slow decline to an urgency of if I continue in this process I'm going to weigh 300 pounds again and I'm going to have a 48 inch waist and that's not okay with me. And so it's a put a stop to those things and focus on the stuff that really matters. It's not a bad thing. We want to avoid it when we can. We want to tackle the urgent and important work as it comes. We want to try to keep the list short. Like it's a short list of accounts or accounts payable so that we can constantly focus on the things that are or consistently focus on the things that are important but not urgent. But there will be times in your life where other things pop up and the important stuff gets pushed to the side, especially the non urgent important stuff gets pushed to the side. And at some point you have to call a stop. You have to clear your schedule. No more calls, no more emails, no more zoom calls, no more meetings. I have to get this stuff done because it's now taking up too much bandwidth and too much stress for me to do the things and focus on the things that are truly important but not urgent. And then sometimes those things that are truly important and not urgent also become urgent. Like family relationships, like marital relationships, like, you know, like your fitness and your faith and the things that matter to you the most. If you put those off long enough, there becomes a time when you're like, I'm deficient in this thing and I have to do it. And so that's the focus this week. So if there are things in your life that important list has built up, the important, what feels like non urgent list has built up and that stuff has become urgent. I would urge you to take a week or so. You'll be amazed at like, look, I realize that almost nobody listening to this podcast has the number of employees and coaches and clients and staff and size that I have. The amount of work that I got done in 10 days, being completely undistracted and just knocking out that work was unbelievable. So if I can do it, you can do it, right? It's nothing special about me. I'm not overly intelligent. I'm not overly fast. Yep, I get up early. Maybe that's my superpower, is the getting up early. I have also. I've started taking naps every single day. I did that on vacation. I'm sleeping five hours, six hours at night, which is not enough for good quality recovery and hormonal, you know, milieu and whatnot. Taking an hour, hour and a half nap in the afternoon has been great for me. Again, I'm not telling you that works for you, but for me, by the time I get to the end of the day and I'm ready to go to bed next night, if I've got seven and a half or eight hours of legit sleep. Not eight hours in bed, but on the sleep app, it actually says you've slept eight hours. It's incredible how much better I feel, how much better my recovery is. Even stuff like how I look in the morning when I wake up and get dressed, the reduction in bloat and things like that for me, the reduction in blood pressure, the resting heart rate is down almost 20 beats a minute at nighttime. And that's because I've offloaded those things. Not offloaded, but I got rid of them. I did them. I cross them off the list. And so sometimes the important things become urgent when they do. Clear your schedule. Focus on the important things that are now urgent. Knock them off your list. Get them out of the bandwidth of your head. Don't feel like they're weighing you down. Everything you do, you're constantly thinking about those things. It's a very important lesson to learn in life. And then next week, what I'd like to talk about is when urgency gets just sort of dropped on you, get caught off guard. There are times that urgency, in spite of the book being called Undoing Urgency, and there is a section, a short section in the book about this, is like, when urgency is good, when it can be galvanizing. Like when it's a life or death situation, or not life or death, literally, like you're going to die, but often life or death situation for the business, or life or death for a relationship, or life or death, like, whatever that is. There is a time when that can be the most galvanizing thing. I look back at some of the hardest marital times we've had, and they've been the most galvanizing in our marriage. I've looked back at the most galvanizing times we've had in the business and the lawsuit and things like that. Those are the most galvanizing things that ever happened to us was the intense urgency of having to work together as a team for survival. And so those things are not always bad. You'd never want to live in those very long. They're unsustainable. And there are companies that do that all the time. Like, they're constantly barely trying to make payroll, or they're trying to. Like, they're just burning the candle at both ends. And of course, one of the things we try to solve at Turnkey Coach is that very thing to help organize and clean and clear your schedule so that you can do things on your own schedule, on your own time, from anywhere in the world. And making a very healthy wage per hour. And so those things are all super important. But there are times when urgency can be good. And I still look back with extreme nostalgia, even though there are times that we're still the hardest times in the business or the hardest times in my marriage or my family life or whatever the thing is. And I think to myself, I actually look back with nostalgia, with relative positive thinking about what that did for our company or for my relationships or my marriage or whatever. And so we'll talk about that next week when urgency can be good because it's not always bad. There are times when that stuff is actually healthy or at least galvanizing. So unsustainable, but galvanizing and will often bring your team together. Will often. There's something about being hyper focused about the stuff that matters right now. And that applies both to this week and what will apply to next week's podcast. It's like a superpower. You can do things that you didn't think you could do. So there you go. There's another episode of the Barbell Logic podcast Coaching Success series. Hope you got value from this. If you did, we'd love a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Super excited. I hope you guys have a great weekend. It's getting hot. It's almost July. I'm excited for the summer. It's going to be a good summer. Hope you have a great one. Summer, by the way, is a great time to do this because it's a little bit lower on the level of work that you have to do in the fitness industry because people take vacation, they don't tend to train as much in July and August. We always see that Q1 is we have a lot of signups, but there's often sales and the revenue is not great. Q2 is fantastic. Q3 is like, that's the low compliance is that start of Q3. So you get July and August are awful. People go back to school. You get into late August and early September. Post Labor Day, you get this huge spike in September, October that usually carries through, through the holidays. And so we're kind of in the low season right now here at the end of June. And so it's a great time to take your schedule if you need to clear a week, even if you have to go stay at a hotel, even if you have to go, like whatever you have to do to get the work done that needs to be done and get it off your plate so you can focus on the stuff that is important and not urgent. As those important things become urgent. There you go. We'll see you guys next Friday. Hope you have a good weekend, Sam.