← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
Redefining Productivity: How to Stop Being Busy with Morgan DeBaun
00:24:31
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Hi friends, it's Morgan DeBaun and I have some exciting news. My book, Rewrite youe the Journey to Success in Less Time With More Freedom is now available for pre order. Pre orders are so important, not just for me as a first time author, but for the message of this book. Ordering this book helps amplify the message that more people can break free from the grind, rewrite their own rules in life, and live a rich, juicy life full of joy and empathy. So if you resonate with any of the content that I put out over this last few years, this podcast, any of the stories I share on social and you've been inspired by my work at Blavity or Afrotech, pre ordering is the best way to show your support and your gratitude for any of the.
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Work that I have done. Plus, you'll be the first to get.
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Your hands on the book when it launches next spring. And that will mean literally the world to me. So make sure you check out morgandebond.com to secure your copy and join me in this movement to create a life of freedom, abundance, and more importantly, to have the tools and the frameworks that you need to take control of your life.
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. It's Morgan Devon here and it has been quite the busy week. For me, I'm sure for you it is also quite busy. So if you are anything like me, you know the feeling of still sharing at an endless to do list, dozens of unread emails, slack messages or team messages going off, basically drowning in a quote unquote sea of busy work. I don't really like the term busy because to me busy is relative. But I would just say that my life at the moment is feeling quite full, okay? And it's a reality that I know far too well, especially with being an entrepreneur who runs multiple businesses, being a mom and attempting to be a wife. But Lord knows who has time to plan a wedding because it's certainly not me. Today we're going to flip the script on productivity. It's something that I really want to talk to you guys about and we've been taught that, you know, productivity means being more, cramming more into every possible hour. I feel like I've even been guilty of teaching you guys some of these things, but I really just want to ground you in the framework that I use because I believe that real productivity is not about doing more, but actually doing more of what matters and then doing what matters more effectively. So stick with me today because in today's episode, we're going to unpack exactly how you can use your time more wisely. We'll uncover practical strategies like goal setting, mastering time management, email hacks, and all of these things that have changed the game for me. And more importantly, why? Prioritizing your balance and making sure that you have time to do other things besides just work is actually critical for sustained success. So let's dive straight in.
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Hey, everyone. I'm Morgan debont, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've.
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Taken control of their lives.
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Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success with permission from no one else.
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So let's start by addressing the elephant in the room. The constant influx of emails, texts, slack messages, alerts that make us feel like we are always on and we're always quote, unquote, busy. It's kind of like you're running on a treadmill and it's set on full speed, but you're really not getting anywhere because you're in fact just on a treadmill. And that is what I'm trying to get you all off of. The problem is that busyness creates this illusion of productivity. Having a calendar that's back to back to back for many people is a sign of success, is a sign of I am making it. I am maximizing my time. And what I want you to keep in mind throughout this podcast and throughout this time that we have together is that just because you're in emotion, just because you are active, doesn't mean that you're actually making any progress. It can be easy and feel easy, but there aren't enough hours in the day. So especially for those of you all who are juggling big, ambitious and huge responsibilities, the reality is that packing more into your schedule doesn't make you productive. So let's first start by redefining what productivity even means. I need you to have a new definition. Productivity is about doing what's most important and then doing that effectively. It's about being laser focused on your core goals and maximizing your impact in those areas. I want you to imagine shifting your mindset from how much can I get done today? To what are the top three things that will move the needle forward and how do I focus on those? That small shift if you change, nothing else will change everything for you. So how do we actually make this shift in your life? Okay, so let's break down the how And I want to talk about some of the time management strategies that have worked wonders for me and that I share often in my Work Smart community, which if you're not a part of Work smart, make sure you join. It's on all of my links. We have a monthly call where every month we go through live examples. I do a teaching and then also I answer any questions that you have. So if you've been like, you're my mentor, in my head, you're coaching me in my head, I'm like, I don't need to be in your head. I could be with you in real life. Just join. So the first thing is getting a clear goal. And your goal is not in like the traditional sense of a goal, I mean really a priority, like what is the thing that must get done? What is your intended outcome? So every morning I want you to just take a few moments to get clear on what you actually need to get done and accomplish. And some people are old school, they want to write it down. I just meditated at this point in my morning. Like, I literally just like wake up, close my eyes and I say, okay, like, what are the things that like, must get done today and what are the things that must get done this week? And for me it's specific. It can be really simple. So for example, when I was starting Blabberty, some of the things that were like, we have to get 100,000 monthly unique visitors today. We have to send out 10 emails to new clients today. Right? Like, some of them were very, very tactical. It wasn't always this big, like, oh, I need to make $1 million this week or $1 million this month. Those are you kind of like bullshit goals, guys. Like, what is the work that has to be done to make the million dollars? Okay, well, I have to have website traffic, I have to have clients, and to get clients, I have to do outreach. I don't know these people. I have to get meetings. So ignore your goal for a second and break down the actual priority of the actions that need to happen and then start to create a daily schedule. That's step two. So create a daily schedule that is a structured daily schedule that's not about having literally every minute mapped out, but creating space for the work that needs to get done. And I want you to schedule your high priority task in the morning or when you're the most productive. So part of your schedule is the self awareness of when are you the most productive. So for me, I'm a morning person, I know that those first, like Four hours. I can get a lot of work done and by 2 or 3 o'clock I'm kind of over it. Like I need a break, I need to do something else. But it's highly unlikely that my best work is going to happen at 2 or 3 o'clock. I might schedule meetings during that time where I'm just talking to people, but if I'm like working on a business strategy, updated plan for Afrotech, doing performance reviews, if I'm doing any sort of like mindful deep work, that's mentally a load for me, it's got to happen in the morning or it's not going to happen at all. And everyone around me knows this. So the people who work closely with me know that if you don't have something in my inbox by the night, then I'm not going to like read it in the middle of the day. Like that's just not a thing. So if you need something from me, you need to send it to me in the night so that it's in my inbox by the morning, by the time I wake up and that's when it's going to get done. Vice versa. My chief of staff, Kate, she's a night owl. So I know for Kate, hitting her up in the morning and expecting a response or asking her to do something, expecting her to do it in the middle of the day, like that's not a thing, like it would be better off. But before she signs off, Kate and I actually have a debrief at the end of the day. So at the end of the day when I'm like, I'm over it, I'm done. I've done everything that I can today. It's time for family time, it's time for rest. Kate and I have like a debrief for the last 30 minutes of my day. Because of the time zone, that's about 4:30 my time, but that's only 2:30 her time. So then she gets to take a break, do whatever she needs to do in her personal life, but then she'll get back online in the evening and she'll jam it out. So if you looked at her calendar, you'd be like, why is this girl going to Pilates in the middle of the afternoon? You know, why is she taking her dog to go for a walk at 2:00? And I'm like, please don't manage Kate. Let Kate manage herself, okay? Because you don't see my girl at 10:30 at night jamming, okay? And if you have a good work relationship with the people around you. You should be able to create space for people to be their best version of themselves, which means for them to work in their highly productive time. Because what happens when you try to conform to this like really strict nine to five is that you're forcing everybody around you to operate in a world in which they may not be their most productive self. So instead of getting, you know, eight hours of solid work, you're really only getting five or four, right? However, for me I'm like, all right, cool, you guys are going to get eight hours worth of work from me, but it's really going to be like 10 or 12 because I'm only working at times in which I'm more productive. And here's the thing about being excellent, here's the thing about how I want each and every single one of you listening to this to operate. You don't have to conform to everybody else's rules. You guys, it's literally why I named my book rewrite your rules. Okay? Because who says that's how it's got to work? You might have to negotiate with somebody else to set up a system that makes the most sense for you. But if that is a good manager or that's a good company or that's a good organization, then they're going to want you to be the most productive person as well. All right, so these are the kind of things that I want you to start to get more comfortable with asking for what you need. But that requires self awareness. The next thing that I think is really important is notification management. How many of you listening to this sit here with all of your notifications on. You've got the Apple Watch that's pinging you every 45 seconds. You've got the Slack notifications going in bold. Every time somebody sends a message in a channel that you don't even need to be in anymore, you've got email pop up notifications, reminders for events that you need to go to. You've got all of these different things constantly notifying you. It's time to stand up, it's time to sit down. You have a meeting in 10 seconds. Your meeting is now. Reminder, reminder, reminder. I need you to turn off all the frickin reminders. Please turn them off. Because here's why. Every single time you have a reminder, you are absorbing a piece of information, a notification. And if you're in the middle of doing something, you are going to look at your phone, you are going to look at your Apple Watch, you are going to Be distracted. And that's going to take you out of getting done, whatever you're supposed to be getting done in that moment that you already committed to getting done in that moment. Sometimes that's just a way to procrastinate, right? Like all these reminders, opening your email. Some of you all open your email so much. You don't even have that many emails. But you're just addicted to opening your email to see if there's anything there. So get control of that. That's going to free up your brain so much more. And there's all different ways. Just Google it, put it in Google, put it in YouTube. How to turn off all your notifications on your iPhone, on your Apple Watch, on your Instagram. Like, literally, I want you to have like a clarity of mind that's going to help you be able to absorb more of the most important information instead of holding on to all these things that literally, like, it doesn't matter if you have 17 missed calls. It doesn't matter if your Apple Watch is reminding you that you just got an email notification like, let all of that stuff go. These tools, these systems, this technology is designed to pull you in. And there are people paid millions and millions of dollars to figure out new ways to keep you locked into their system. To keep you on Slack, to keep you on Salesforce, to keep you on TikTok, to keep you on Instagram, to keep you opening your app. There are somebody whose job is defined by how long can the average user stay on our platform? How long will the average user stay on our site? There are people at Blavity that I say, what is the average session time for somebody on 2001zero.com? What is the average session time for somebody on our. Watching the watch time on our videos on YouTube. It is literally our job. So know that you need to work against that behavior because there's a lot of systems and a lot of resources that are designed to pull you away into their universe instead of you staying at the center of yours as a CEO of your life. And last but not least, you guys already know how I feel about this, but you have to delegate. Okay? So I'm going to give you this example in this framework that I use. It's in my book rewrite your rules, which you need to pre order if you haven't already. Anywhere you buy books, rewrite your rules. Okay? It's called your CEO task and your operating tasks. You make a list of all the things that you have to do in any given week. All of Your responsibilities in your personal life, whether that's for your family, for your relationship, for yourself. Then your work life. Your work life as an employee, but then also your work life as somebody who's trying to get to the next level. Write it all out. It's a really long list. I'm talking literally everything. I'm talking pick up your kids. I'm talking grocery shopping. I'm talking go to therapy. I'm talking change the oil in the car, anything that's even maintenance. I'm talking deposit. Deposit, the random check from your client that you never deposited from three weeks ago. All of those things are absolutely important. They need to be on this list. Then you separate the list into two categories. Your CEO task and your operating tasks. You are the CEO of your life. There is nobody else responsible for you. You are solely responsible for yourself. You are responsible for deciding everything about yourself. The thoughts that are in your head, the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat, the people you allow in your life, how you respond to the actions and the behavior of the people around you. You are the boss. You are the CEO. You may not feel this way, but it is in fact true. If you don't feel this way, you got some work to do. But you're listening to this podcast, so it's okay. I'm going to give you some grace. Those are the CEO things, CEO tasks. Then there's operating tasks. This is a really long list of all the things that you have to do because there's nobody else to give them to. When I first started this company, I had a really long list of everything. Figure out our logo, figure out our pitch, make the pitch deck for the VCs, meet with the VCs, manage our financial projections, open up the bank accounts, convince these other guys to join us as co founders, hire our first intern class, review their applications, onboard them. The list goes on and on and on and on and on because there's nobody else to delegate to. Those were all operating tasks, but some of them were CEO tasks. So, for example, fundraising for me was a CEO task. I didn't want to outsource that to anybody else. I didn't let my other co founders do it for all these reasons. I wanted to do it for myself. Okay, so that was a CEO task for me. Building the deck, that was an operating task. Somebody else technically could have built my deck that I used to go and fundraise. So you have to constantly think about what am I doing because there's nobody else to do them and what are the things that I'm doing because I'm the best person for them or it's something I want to do. A CEO task for me now as mom is like feeding my kid dinner. I like it. I think it's so cute when he eats his little food. I think it's just the most precious little thing I enjoy every day between 6 and 6:30, making his little meal and sitting and having dinner with them. That is a CEO task for me. For somebody else, they're like my kids fed. I don't care. I don't need to sit down and eat dinner with them. What's big for me is dropping my kid off for school because I really want to be in dialogue with them and I want to hear what they're going to do today. I want to be there to drop them off to school. That's great. There's no judgment zone here. Okay, so remove whatever societal pressures, what you think you're supposed to be doing, what your mom told you you're supposed to be doing, what your boss told you you're supposed to be doing. Remove all of those judgments, all of those things that are forcing you into one bucket or the other, and decide for yourself what's in your CEO task list and what's in your delegation task list. And then I would need you to. When you, when you make that list, then you start to give things away. There's this thing called the 8020 rule. It's pretty straightforward. If somebody else can do 80% of the thing, you should let them. Okay? And also, 80% of the benefit is usually coming from 20% of the things that are happening. So the 8020 rule applies in a variety of different ways. In other words, there's a lot of things that you do that don't matter. That's the 80%. 20% of what you do matters the most. The faster you can identify that 20%, the better. Okay. So for me, I know when I spend more time talking about blavity, being in front of different people, meeting clients, sitting with them, we make more money. I also know the more time I sit and think and strategize. Like, I have a very strategic brain. So the more I have time to sit and think and be strategic and solve problems, the better for everybody else around me. I could be in Asana all day. I could be reading RFPs and responding to them. I could be doing helping my senior leaders with performance management challenges. I could be doing those things. But there's actually somebody else better at them than me. Or it's not a good use of my time. So your CEO task and your operating tasks are constantly going to be evolving at every level. You've got to redo this exercise. I do this exercise every six months because every six months something new is going on. And then you build your team and the people around you, from your partner to your family members to your neighbors to your teachers to your nanny to your whatever, virtual assistant, and you start to offload these different things. It's a skill that I want you to really practice, and I want you to, in fact, send me an email. Write in the comments. I read everything. You guys know I'm nuts. I read all the reviews. I read all the comments. I read all the emails that you write back. I read all the LinkedIn messages. I may not respond, but I read it. And I want to hear. What are the things that you delegated that you offloaded? Do you have a housekeeper? Are you getting somebody to pick up your laundry? Are you using Instacart to deliver something that you needed from CVS or Target? Did you know that Instacart can literally go to Costco for you? Okay, I will never go to Costco again. Unless I just want the pizza. We'll never go. I don't need it. Okay? I do not need to go in a store unless the store brings me joy, which it doesn't. Some people love stores. They love shopping, discovering new things. I'm not that girl. It's not for me. Therefore, it falls in the operating bucket. So you just have to decide for yourself what makes you like, yeah, I want to do this. I would do this for free. This makes me so happy. And what makes you say, I literally don't ever want to do this. If I could pay somebody else to do it, I would. And those are your CEO tasks and your operating task. All of these things combined, my friends, are going to help you be more effective and to be able to spend more time doing the thing that is the most important and not necessarily having you just stay being busy. Okay? Again, productivity is about doing what's most important and doing it effectively. Instead of how much I can get done today, I want you to focus on what are the priorities that I need to do, what are the outcomes. I need to have that move me closer to the place that I'm trying to go. And with that, my friends, I shall end this solo episode. I feel like this was a lot of information in a very short period of time. So if you need to listen to this episode again, I would encourage you to do that. But more importantly, spend some time today applying some of the things that you're learning in this show. I really, really want what's best for you, and I thank you so much for being a Journey listener. Until next week. See you later. Bye.
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Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.