Andrew Lawless - Your Workload Tripled, What Do You Do?

 
 

Your workload just tripled, what do you do? How do you handle it? We tackled more than 41 tips you can apply right away!

Perhaps someone on your team leaves for another job, or someone gets pulled for another project, or maybe a new initiative starts. All the sudden you find yourself with two to three times the work you had before. How does your life balance not take a hit? 

Even a 10% increase in workload will warrant looking at some of these tactics. Often people pick up “a little more work” and do things like skip lunch or stay an hour late. It’s the approach of absorbing the extra and continuing to do the same thing you’ve always done, just more of it. Don’t! I urge you to use these tactics for all situations where workload increases over 10% to help maintain your sanity.

Today’s Guest

Andrew Lawless

High Performance Coach
Founder - The Consultant Profit System

Website: teamlawless.com
IG:  @andrewlawlessdc
LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/leadership-and-business-coach

On the show, I speak with Andrew Lawless, a high performance coach, and the founder of The Consultant Profit System. As I was thinking about this show topic, Andrew came to mind because Andrew coaches people to go from $100K to $1Mil a year. That’s a 10x increase in work. Clearly in those circumstances, “What got you here won’t get you there” and you need to change your processes during that much growth, so I thought he would have some great insights as well. I was right!

 

41 Tips & Tactics To Handle The Overwhelm

We started out looking at this through the lens of an employee. What can you do for yourself to handle a 3x increase in your workload? Here are some recommendations we shared.

For Employees

  • Most people do not have clarity in terms of what they absolutely have to do right now in order to move a project forward. 

    • Andrew’s Personal Example: My wife and I built a house in Ireland, we’re reviewing the plans and had a two hour discussion about the kitchen. The problem was we didn't even have a building permit at the time, so if we had spent ten minutes on the building permit we would have made more progress than spending two hours discussing the kitchen. 

    • Focus on “the one next thing”. Gary Keller wrote a book called “The One Thing” which is really helpful on this topic. For each project or effort you’ve now added to your plate, “what’s the one thing that I need to do next to move this effort forward” 

  • Have the discipline to be focused on the work at hand, don’t let yourself get distracted by shiny objects.  

    • Andrew’s Personal Example: I started doing research on the topic on YouTube but ‌I ended up watching Bruce Springsteen videos for half an hour. 

  • You can use tools to help with focus 

  • Mark your calendar for “Focus Blocks” - 25 to 50 minute periods. They’ve sometimes called these “tomato” or “pomodoro” timers. These are windows of time for total focus with the brain breaks in between.

  • Avoid getting stuck in email. Batch process it at certain points during your day, but don’t get stuck in your inbox. Most job descriptions do not include statements like “respond to all emails within 1 hour”.  Handling your email is a part of your job, but prioritize it accordingly.

  • If you are not imperative to a meeting, ask for it to be recorded. Listen to the recording at 2x or even 3x speed. 60 minutes turns into just 20-30, and you can skip through the roll call and other less pertinent parts.

  • Collaborate with your boss on prioritization. You’ll want their agreement on which/what you should do first and what drops.

    • Remember, everything is not an emergency. If there’s no blood, and someone isn’t dying, it’s not a genuine emergency, so make sure you and everyone take a breath and keep perspective.

    • Start asking about deadlines. Are those dates “nice to have it by” dates or “need to have it by dates”.  Don’t add stress working under the “nice to haves”.  

  • Volunteer to write Guides and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on some of the work that you’re doing. 

    • If your boss can get help, maybe a temp, maybe a part-time employee, they’re going to need to ‌do the work, so having that SOP or instruction will mean they can get started right away with little training.  

  • Self-Check Tactic from Andrew: “The first question I ask my clients is to open your calendar for me so I can look at it. If I cannot extract what exactly their priorities are by looking at their calendar, then there's a problem.”

 

For Front-Line Supervisors & Managers

Now for front-line supervisors and managers, besides all the above recommendations, we added on these specifically for those who are managing others.  

  • Remove yourself from the production of the team underneath you. Your job is to work on improving the boat, not rowing it. You want to ‌support and pitch in, but if you maintain some of the work AND have to be the manager, then you will not have time to help develop and improve the team. In the long run, this will keep you and your team stagnant instead of‌ continuing to get better.

  • Andrew: “The number one reason that I'm seeing is that individual team members are assigned tasks that require them to work ‘against their grain’. For example, I am a “short cutter” so if you want me to find a shortcut to get things done, I'm your guy. If you want me to follow a procedure and be meticulous about it, I am not your guy. I will be your biggest nightmare or it will take me longer.”

  • Play to your team member’s strengths more than trying to develop their weaknesses.

  • Kolbe-a and Kolbe-B tests are a great resource (the best one in Andrew’s opinion) to find the overlap of skills and strengths between employees and managers and help with team dynamics. 

  • Remember to manage the energy of your team. Most managers spend all their time policing and chasing after the low performers and the low energy portion of the team. Instead, support the high-performers and bring the same energy to them that they’re producing.

  • If it’s an internal promotion that brought you to your current management position, don’t bring your old job with you. Make sure you prioritize your transition of your roles. Sticking around doing your old job AND your new job at the same time isn’t going to do anyone any favors. Both jobs and both teams will ultimately suffer. That’s a lose-lose and isn’t sustainable. Make that as short as possible. Be clear on that with supervisors and management.

  • Immediately notice all the places where you’re the bottleneck in a project or process.  What are all the places your team is “waiting on you”? Prioritize those as the first places to improve processes. Make sure you “get out of the way” of the work that needs to be done.  

  • Don’t get stuck thinking you either need a new full-time employee or nothing. There are many in-between solutions that can work. Whatever the most low-level and redundant work is that your team is performing, have them write SOPs for that first, and ask for contract or temp support. You can even hire virtual support ‌inexpensively for all work that’s not in person. For virtual temporary help, no hiring process is required. Virtual help can start right away, as long as the work you need them to do is clearly defined.

 

What about personally, not just work?

We also discussed what you need to remember for yourself personally, outside of work. When the volume of work picks up, what do you need to do?

  • You need to remember to defend your personal life. That means when you sign off, even if you stayed two hours later, you're off. Don’t go back and do more later. Engage with your kids, your family, your friends, and you’re still taking care of your health. You need to “turn off” and just “be you”. 

  • Andrew shared an exercise that he says has saved marriages is to take a moment to mark your transitions throughout the day. In between each meeting, or before you walk in the door at the end of the day, take several slow deep breaths and then ask yourself “ how do i need to show up as the best [partner, parent, boss, etc] in the history of the universe.” Reflect for a moment, then proceed. 

  • If things are so crazy that you’re buying lunch for everyone to work through, spend the money to buy a GOOD HEALTHY lunch.  Don’t take “the easy way” and buy everyone pizza.  Pizza or other heavy carbs will kill the productivity of your team.  Order good nutritious stuff, with vegetables and proteins and good food

  • Fitness is going to be super important, all that stress gets released through fitness.  Make it your JOB to get your 3 workouts in a week. Even if the only mental bandwidth you have is to just show up to fitness classes, or take an aggressive 30 minute walk, mark your calendar for those and make sure you go. 

  • Sleep! Mark your bedtime on the calendar if you need to. You need your rest if you’re going to operate under these busy times at work.  

  • Drink a lot of water. Dehydration shows itself as tiredness. Especially if you are over fifty.

  • The Eisenhower Matrix - If there’s too many tasks, for you or your team, visually organizing them on this matrix is really helpful to know where to target your effort.  Here’s a Youtube video which helps explain the Eisenhower matrix and how to use it.  

Andrew’s Offer

Andrew also offered all followers of the show free access to his “Influence Booster” and a free session to chat with him. I’d encourage you to check it out!  

Download: Influence Booster Training and worksheet (Be instantly more influential with your client teams and project stakeholders): https://accelerate.teamlawless.com/the-influencebooster

Video

The Audio/Podcast

About The Creator/Host: I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that my life was going to be 10-20 years shorter than everyone else. As a kid I took time for granted, but now as an adult, time is the most precious thing that I have. I created Productivity Gladiator because I saw what a difference it made for employees to improve their productivity, improve their life balance, and live their best life right now, today, not wait until retirement. Thanks for checking out Productivity Gladiator! Time is the currency of your life, spend it wisely.

 

Episode Transcript

00:00

Productivity Gladiator

00:06

Hey, I'm Brian Nelson Palmer. This productivity gladiator is about work-life balance and personal productivity. Today, I want to talk about what do you do when your workload triples? You may have experienced this maybe as an employee or a manager. Someone leaves for a job, another job or a job assignment, or maybe some new initiative starts, and all of a sudden you find yourself with two to three times the work you had before. So I want to talk about what you can do to help manage that overwhelm.

00:35

in the scheme of work-life balance. That's our topic for today. And with me on the show today is Andrew Lawless. He's a high-performance coach and the founder of the Consultant Profit System. The thing that connected, that I really thought about Andrew as I was thinking about the show topic, because one of Andrew's topics that I've learned over the years is he's really, he's about taking people from $100,000 a year to a million dollars a year. And it's that 10x the performance. And so,

01:05

I wanted to, I thought, man, Andrew would be the perfect guy to talk about this topic, because this is what it's about, is if you're going to go from 100,000 to a million, well, that's going to require double, triple, 10 times the workload too. So I thought, man, Andrew would be great for this. So with me is Andrew's on the show here with me today. Thanks for being here, Andrew. Hey, super. You know, thank you very much and thank you for that generous introduction. And it's my honor to be here. Absolutely. So let's talk about it. I want to kind of start with.

01:33

the lens of an employee, right? You've got an employee and you're going to work, you're doing your job and all of a sudden your workload doubles or even triples really. What do you do? Andrew, what comes to mind for you when that happens? What would you say? When that number one, I mean the reason why you feel that overwhelmed in general is because most people do not have clarity. Clarity in terms of what do we absolutely have to do right now?

02:03

in order to move a project forward versus what do we want to do or what is cool to be doing or where's our pet project, right? So, give an example with my wife and me when we bought a, we built a house in Ireland, right? So, once you get from the architect, you get the architecture blueprints and we looked at it and then eventually found the kitchen. And she and I had a...

02:28

really good conversation about like two hours or two hours, like what do you want the kitchen to look like? Yes. And which is meaningful, like where was the oven and the stove and this sink and the fridge and so on. The problem was we didn't even have a building permission at the time. Right. So if we only had spent 10 minutes on the building permission, we would have made more progress in that two hour conversation. So now look at your meetings, look at all the activities that you're doing.

02:56

And please hear what is it that I must do no matter what to move a project? Andrew, it's so funny you say that because one of the notes that I had to myself that I that I had for myself that I wanted to share is focusing on. I call it the one thing. And it seems kind of similar to what you're saying. There's actually a book. I think it's by Gary Keller called The One Thing. I read that book and the book is all about it's kind of like clarity, but is what is the one thing that I need to do next? So if you've got double or triple the amount of things you need to do, if you're clear on what is the one thing.

03:26

that you've got to do next on each of these projects or initiatives or whatever the workload that allows that focus right all right what is happening it's the one thing for this and the one thing in this one and the one thing in that one and say like i love it we're almost speaking the same language i call it the one thing you call it clarity perfect i love i like it cool yeah what else uh anything else comes to mind for for this well the first is the absolute clarity on what

03:56

to be focused and blend out every distraction, including shiny objects. Yes. And it's hard right now, especially when you work from home and you have kids around and now they're off school or you have ailing parents or you have other things going on. But most people get distracted by shiny objects. Okay. Right.

04:20

Yeah, so like, hey, I would like to do this or no, I did research. I started researching the topic on on YouTube. Yes. And then I found myself watching Springsteen videos for like half an hour. So, so that's to blend out all the distractions, including shiny objects. Uh, it's super important. Absolutely. There's some people talk about, they call it the, uh, like focus mode or something, or you can.

04:45

There's even, I know there's actually, I'll try to, I'll put a, I'll drop a link in the, in the episode for this, but I did a write-up on some of the, there's tools to like block out social media or I love it. YouTube, especially they have a browser extension that will eliminate all those recommended videos on the side so that you will search for something and you only watch that. And then there's no recommended videos to get lost in. Just exactly what you were saying. That's so funny. But the app is called Freedom that I'm using.

05:15

and you have no opportunity whatsoever to to to disable it. But it's but it's active or go online and go to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or wherever you go. Absolutely. Cool clarity that. Yep, exactly. That focus time is good. And actually, you know, speaking to the focus time, one of the other things I wanted to share with folks was was about the it's called. Well, focus time, really, it has to do with they call it's focused.

05:44

for 25 minutes or 50 minutes at a time. Sometimes they call it a tomato timer. They have different names for this that I've heard, but the essential idea is that you focus in for a certain amount of time. So you lock in your calendar for 25 minutes or 50 minutes. And my favorite one is I have specific focus playlists that I put on too. So I close all the other windows, the phones closed. And then I also have, especially like at work, if there's big projects or something, your job is an email.

06:11

your job when they hired you, your job description wasn't to respond to email. It was to do something else or so having that focus time. I have specific playlists that are actually folk that are designed to help you focus. So there's no words. It's very much like a certain music or something that and the music changes after a certain amount of time, which goes with I'll share a link to this in the in the show notes for this, too, but it's awesome.

06:37

Yeah, I have that on Spotify. If you go on Spotify and look for ESM, electronic study music. ESM. Oh, I like that. ESM, electronic study music. Yeah, that's awesome. And you said the right thing. Email. If there's one, there are two productivity suckers, right? One is email. If you want to kill your productivity, just go to an email inbox. Right. Yes. Yep.

07:06

A, you find most of the emails in there, you are on somebody's CC list or BCC list, you don't even know why you're on it. You are on somebody's mailing list that is not relevant to what you have to do right now. All of that takes time and it drags you down. My suggestion for everyone is just have two slots, one in the morning, one in the late afternoon where you check emails.

07:36

Right. And if it's really important, they find you anyway. Right. Absolutely. That that's exactly how it works. Call you the drive by your house, right? They come to your office, whatever. They find you anyway. So stop email. Number two, meetings. So if every meeting that look at have you ever wondered why meetings take exactly an hour? Because that's how much time you give them. Right. There's no reason. Yeah. That's the whole reason for it.

08:04

And most meetings that we are in are either not relevant to us. Have you ever, like when you're in the corporate world, have you ever sat in a meeting and you realized, I have no need to contribute. Nothing to say, nothing to learn. What am I doing here? So leave. All you got to do is get up, take your stuff and say, we've got to be somewhere.

08:26

And you've got to be somewhere even if it's a bathroom. Exactly. You just leave. Oh, or tagging on. I love that we're like, yes. And in each other right now, like this is, oh yes. And one of my other favorite ones to do is, you know, there it's, it's funny. They say that you, they invite you to this meeting and you need to be in this meeting, but there are people who are out on vacation. And so oftentimes they will record the meeting. And if there is a recording and you're like,

08:53

you have two meetings that you need to be to, or maybe you don't, but you've got so much going on and they'll record that meeting. One of my favorite things to do is take that recording and then watch it. You can watch it or listen to it on two times or even three times speed because you know, they, they just sometimes in the meetings, they wish they could go faster or something like that. And so in this case, if you have two meetings the afternoon, you get the recording and then you play it on two times speed.

09:19

and you get all the information from an hour meeting in 30 minutes. Like that's one of my, oh my gosh, I love it when they record meetings because then, oh my gosh, if the meeting's being recorded, I can do something else. I can listen to it on two times speed or I can get one of those other projects that I need to do done and then tune into this in half the time, which, oh my God, that's my own little hack here that I love that one. We could just ask for minutes, right? Or if you actually have either for one portion of it, ask the meeting organizer.

09:48

if they can move that up so that you can be the first speaker when you're done. Exactly, yeah. If you kill meetings and if you kill emails, you already have one half a week back. That's gonna help you for sure. Yeah, one of the other, I was making notes for myself on, oh, what would I wanna share on this from a productivity gladiator perspective? A couple of things, one, if you got two times or three times the workload, you're gonna need to work with your boss.

10:18

on priorities because the answer, one of the, one of the things that I, I, I, that came to mind is, you know, if you get a 10% increase in work, like let's say you have 10 projects and now you've got 11, one of the things, especially with COVID or with virtual or whatever it is, like things that came up, people's habit is to tend to do the same thing they were doing and just do an extra hour.

10:43

because it's 10% more. So you don't change anything, you just add that little bit more to the top of all the stuff you were doing. And one of the lines that I hope people recognize is if the workload changes by more than 10%, oftentimes it's time to reshuffle, or it's time to change, or it's time to delegate something, or it's time, you might need to work some things around, because oftentimes businesses will look at it and they'll go, all right, well, they're just gonna keep loading until something breaks.

11:13

And so that's where I want to make sure that people recognize that like, hey, you need to prioritize the prioritization or pardon me, the prioritization on on this stuff is super important. So and that works with your boss. You're going to want your boss to delegate, because one of the other things that I can share is if if that happens, sometimes it's possible to write an SOP or something that you're doing. Some of the work that you're doing could be done by other people.

11:43

And so if you take the time to write an SOP document, maybe there's bandwidth to hire a temp or hire a person to come in. And when that person comes in, they're gonna need that SOP so that they can pick up. You're not gonna need to train them for days and days on something that's going on. And so that, but all of that will be collaboration with the boss and that piece. So make sure that you're prioritizing, right? That's a big one. 100% of that collaboration. I think what was very important that you said is that

12:12

We are all good and eager to pick up new work. We are not so good at letting go. Yes. So we pile on, we pile on, we will pile on. And then we wonder that we have too much to do. So when that happens, what you can always do is like go to your superior and say, boss or manager and say, you know what? Look, I have these tasks that I'm already doing. You're adding like these five to it.

12:41

I only have so many hours in a day, help me prioritize one here, right? So which ones are the, which one is the more, which are precious and which projects are expendable and let them make the decision, you know? That collaboration is such an important piece to it, right? And the other thing that I was thinking about is, oh my gosh, everything is not an emergency. If somebody's not bleeding,

13:09

where nobody's going to die, there's no life threatening situations. If there's 10 projects, then you have to make the decision on it's that prioritization and figuring out what happens if there's too much. And so that collaboration with your boss. Deadlines, deadlines are all arbitrary. There's very often no rhyme or reason, you know, why there is a deadline. Somebody made that up and most deadlines can be negotiated and, you know,

13:38

I would always ask, what is the reason for the deadline? And sometimes, let's say marketing campaign that you're managing, they don't need all of the material on the deadline, right? So they need some of them on the deadline, and then the majority of the other work can be staggered afterwards. But we just take a deadline for granted, even if there's consultants, yes, when clients come to us and say, hey, now we have a deadline.

14:08

Why is that? Tell me about that, right? There's there's some like I know in the government, there is one deadline that doesn't change and that's the end of the fiscal year that September 30th. That's it. Yes. The money runs out. Appropriations are done. Like I know that that one is true. However, on most other projects, there is an opportunity to change some of those deadlines or what? What is the reason behind the deadline? Is it just because the boss's boss said, Hey, I need this by this date or is there a, you know, that

14:35

The critical path for project managers is something, all right, is this a critical path? And then what is that critical path? Or if this is just, you know, Tari, you're exactly right. Deadlines are asked about those. So. I would say all of that can happen. And there are always legitimate reasons for stress. And sometimes we just got to grow all of our sleeves and go into military mode. So, you know, it's like there's no solution. We cannot delegate, we cannot dump it. You know, we have no other resources. We got to do it. And we may have even.

15:04

pull an all-nighter, which I'm not recommending, but then you do what you said earlier. What's the next step? Exactly. Yes, when you're military mode for me is like, let's go that one step, and then we'll see what's next and you get through it. But in most of the cases, I mean, just extreme cases, in most of the cases, for example, my clients, the first question I ask them when I start working with them, they say,

15:31

Open your calendar as either Google Calendar or online or written in a hard paper format. Guide me through your calendar. And if I cannot extract what exactly they're working on, what their priorities are, there's a problem. Yes. And that's true for most of us when we're starting out. Look at your calendar. If a third person cannot extract what's important to you right now, then you have a lot of stuff in there that can be...

16:00

that can be thrown out. And the other thing that I wanted to build up on that you said is the constant re-energizing, right? So what we're doing is we are waking up in the morning, go to the office, switch off the computer, right? And then we look at emails and energy fucked up, right? Then we sit in front of our monitors all day.

16:25

Every 50 minutes, get up, do some exercise, do some vinyasa, breathe, and get energy back into your body so that you're refreshed. Sleep eight hours a day. We know that if you haven't slept enough, your productivity the next day, you're basically going through the day half drunk and your productivity will decrease by 30%. You do yourself a disservice by saying, I've got to plow through here.

16:55

without taking a break. We're not at war, right? So we can take a break. So take every 10 minutes, take a break, walk around the block and drink a lot of water. Right here. Yeah, water. It's important. Yes. So true. And you and I, we both have type 1 diabetes. And as you know, when you have type 1 diabetes, you think about your blood sugar levels like every minute.

17:24

Right. So when other people say, Hey, let's go to this and go that we go like, Okay, I need to first I need to get my insulin and I get my blood sugar, I need to have sugar pills with me. And you know, I need to make sure that it's not that my insulin doesn't heat up and plan all of that. Yes. And still get things done this at the same pace and everybody else. So people like you and I, I'm not surprised that you are a productivity gladiator, because people like you and I, without that ability, we would not

17:54

be where we are right now because we are a little bit disadvantaged. It's thinking about those extra pieces, right? Those extra steps. You're exactly right. And the world doesn't stop just because you have something going on and vice versa. You know, I'd even flip that on its head and say that the work is not going to stop because you have something going on. So one of the things that's important, you know, one of I want to flip the script now. Andrew, let's talk about we were talking about employees, and I think we had a lot of really good.

18:23

nuggets that we shared there that employees can do offer to write that SOP, all those ideas that you had, those were good. I let's flip it now. Managers, if the workload now you're in charge of a team or a group or something and the workload for your group doubles or triples, what thoughts come to mind for you? Like, what do you share coaching and stuff with your clients? Now you've gone from 100 to 300 or 400 K. And what what thoughts?

18:53

come to mind? So there's a lot of reasons, there are a lot of reasons for burnout, right? So the number one reason that I'm seeing is that team, individual team members have been assigned tasks that requires them to work against their grade, right? So for example, I am a shortcutter, right? So if you want me, if you need to find a shortcut to get things done, I'm your guy, yes?

19:21

If you want me to follow procedure and be meticulous about it, I'm not the guy you want to work with. I would be your biggest nightmare. Or it will take me longer. I would struggle. I'm more mistake prone and it drains me out. So a lot of productivity issues derive from...

19:48

not understanding your team members' unique ability. That's what we call it. We all have a unique ability in how we work. So either the task that's been assigned is not working or the strength match between the manager and the employee is out of sync. I would highly recommend and I've made no money with that. There's an assessment called Call BA.

20:15

and the first thing I would do, I would go to colby.com, k-o-l-b-e.com, and have my team take, it costs like $55 per team members, have my team take a Colby A assessment, and then you can have, after that you can call Colby, and they will provide a Colby profile for you that will tell you exactly where the burnout in the team happens and which team members are.

20:44

at stake, there's an entire process there. And there's no better process than do that. If you want to invest in your team, that's the one exercise. I have rolled it out in Fortune 10 companies actually, entire vice presidencies that made like a huge difference in people. It's not that expensive. Yeah, Kolbe, K-O-L-B-E you said, right? Okay. I'll drop a link in the notes. And what it does is that...

21:11

There are three reasons why your team members are burning out and are not operating at the highest level that they could, because you drain them out with tasks. A, you give them tasks for which they do not have sufficient knowledge. Yeah, it's easy to fix. Yes. That's like one training and so on. But the second is that I hate the task. And third is, it's on a cognitive level. They, their natural talents, or the task requires them against to work against their grain.

21:41

And that's when they're not, when they're not, that's the, the best advice that I can give you. And most teams, when I work with them, they will tell me that the day they took the call BA index was the most liberating day in their life. Interesting. Okay. All right. Let's go put one out. Yeah. Number two, as a manager, there's, there's two things that you, that you're responsible for. A, you've got to co-create the work with your team.

22:10

Most managers, they try to figure it out themselves, and then they're dumping it over the team. But when the team co-creates, they own it with you. But yeah, and second is, and it's so often forgotten, your job outside of that, it's not measuring KPI, it's not measuring how many hours have somebody worked. That is not measuring output. It is managing the quality of the energy in your team.

22:39

that you need in order to perform. And if the energy is low, right? If the energy is low, you can do whatever you want, then the team is just not gonna perform. And most managers do not manage deliberately the energy of the teams. They let underperformers underperform, right? They spend most of their time with underperformers rather than with the overperformers. And the overperformers go there, huh?

23:09

I'm busting my butt here, but my boss is spending all of his time with these guys. Right? So managing your energy is so important. Learn how to manage your team. Infuse energy in your team that the team needs to perform. And everybody who does not contribute to the energy and is an energy sucker either needs to be called out or go if you have the ability. That makes a lot of sense.

23:38

Let them go. The energy. I love what you said there about energy, because that's you're right. There it oftentimes you find yourself dealing with the under performers or the your energy goes to trying to push along the slowest piece and making sure that you're giving the energy where the energy is coming from is different. That's a different paradigm. I like that a lot. I also.

24:05

I very much think, as I was thinking about this, I was like, okay, well, a couple of things that I would say, one for managers, you can't do it all. One of the things that I've seen managers tend to do, and this goes to that, even if the workload ups 10%, if a manager gets a new position, you get promoted inside the company, now you're taking on another role, you've stepped up and out of this one, but people will then still help out the other.

24:32

team or they were helping with this and you can't that's not. That's not healthy for you because now you're doing two jobs and it's just like we were talking about where all just do two jobs like people solution. If there's one extra project or you're taking on that as just, oh, well I'll work, you know, I'll work over my lunch break and I'll work, you know, a little bit, an extra at the end of the day. And at the end of the week, that's 10, 15 hours.

25:01

that you're doing, but the work's never going to end. So you looking at the idea is, all right, if the work was going to, if the work, instead of just one project, what if it was 10 projects? How would I treat this differently? And thinking about that will help keep your head on straight for like all the things we talked about before, but for managers, especially now you're managing to your team. Well, you've got to keep your team performing too. So delegation.

25:31

is key, empowering the people that you know that can do it. If you have a lot of single, uh, single bodies on the team. And when I say single bodies, what I'm driving at is if you have people where they're the only person who does that one thing, then you create situations where they have to be there. If they go on vacation, everything stops and that doesn't work. So you want to create delegation. It's that we talked about, I talked about outlining or SOPs earlier.

25:59

working with your team to have that outlined so that if someone wants to go on vacation, you gotta support your team and their vacations and their life, right? They wanna go do something that's important. So make sure that you're doing a good job of documenting the work and the processes and what needs to happen, where are we, so that you're not reliant on one person. It's not those single, the bottleneck.

26:27

avoid those bottlenecks if you can, and standardize the work so that, you know, get another person involved if you can. And I know sometimes that's not possible, but also as a manager, you've got to be going up, looking up above you going, we need resources. Like you can't, you, you as the manager are the one that's going to find the resources. And maybe if it's private sector or wherever you are, if you're in a for-profit or a nonprofit or something, you don't necessarily have to hire, you don't need a new full-time person.

26:57

Often times you go and you ask for that and they're just like, well, no, we can't afford to hire anybody right now. Well, if you have an SOP or some kind of standard operating procedure or some kind of document that here is the project that I need done and let me go hire a temp and I've done a good job, I need help with this part of all the work that we've got going on right now. And it's written down, so give me a temporary person. You gave me two to three times more work.

27:25

So when you give me resources, here's what I need them for. I need this for this person. I need this person to do this. And even if they're not permanent full-time employees, you can hire part-times, you can hire temps, you can hire virtual teams from other parts of the world. There are resources out there to help you if you can standardize that work and you know exactly what they need to do. Make sure you're delegating some of that stuff down and writing that down. There's power there. So look for those solutions, even if it's not another full-time employee. And...

27:54

And I would say, as any manager, especially when you get promoted or you have a new job, the first question that you ask yourself is, how can I make myself redundant? So true. Right? So that means you need to be focused on building a self-running team. And that means to empower them, that means that you infuse the energy into the team and you remove yourself as much as you can.

28:24

SPS and all of that is all good. But everybody who has children knows that children, let me say it, your team members are like your five-year-old children. And I mean that with respect, yes? Because if you have your children, never ever listen to you. They don't remember what you said, yes? But they always observe you.

28:52

Right. You can say, you can say, never ever touch, never ever put that part in here. And they see you do that all the time. You know, so they're like, OK, you know, so he does. Or they you tell your kids, if you don't, if you do that, here's the consequence. They never get the consequence. They learn nothing happens. They always they kids are so great. They observe your energy.

29:18

and they learn because they're also in a hypnotic learning states, right? So they observe and they learn by observing. Your team is the same. If you tell them don't work overtime and you work 14 hours every day, you know, there's a discrepancy and they see that. When you say, you know, when you as a boss want to manage by data and your team member comes to a meeting,

29:46

without the updated report and you still have a meeting, what are you telling the team? You're telling them, you know what, it's okay, you know, not to have your work prepared before you get up with me, you know? So I had one example with a PM of mine and she came from Ohio to DC, yes, to for, we had like a team meeting, we got all the team together with a party at night and so on, and I said, like, when you fly in from other areas, just...

30:13

you know, use their time for like a one-on-one meeting, right? And so she comes in and I said, okay, so they have to, we have, what do we call like a project prompter where they need to prepare everything in advance and so that we can quickly go quickly to the meeting. And I said, so where's your, where's your prompter? And she says, you know what, I was flying and so I didn't do it. So I'm like, okay, great. Then meeting over. She's like, what do you mean? Well, you know, the rules, you know,

30:41

We're not going to meet without the prompter. We said, but I flew all the way here. That's great that we can party tonight and everything, but we're not going to need now to waste all my time. And what do you think? She was upset. But what do you think the chances were that she came ever again to meeting without that cheat of the PR first? That's true. Yeah. Roll modeling is important when you man. And I would say that. And I just flashed back on I was in a meeting today earlier where somebody came in late.

31:10

and the person who started had started the meeting because they were five minutes late. And then they went back and repeated for that person, the five minutes again. Oh my God, please don't do that. It's their job to catch up. You're late. Oh, you need to get the most important information in the first five minutes of the meeting. Oh, goodness. So Andrew, talk about it for you personally now. Like, all right, outside of work, what...

31:34

It's because we're all human beings too. So we can certainly come up with all these tactics for while you're at work and the workload comes in. But what about for you as a person, when at work it doubles or triples and now you've got more going on, what about personally? What recommendations do you have? Like for example, one of the things that I have a note for myself on, if stuff kicks in, even if it doubles or triples, it is even more important for you to defend your personal time.

32:04

or you're, you are still a human being. You're still a dad. You're still a mom. You're still a family member. You're still, all of those things didn't go away. So you need to defend those. And when I say defend, that means when you sign off, even if you stayed two hours late, when you sign off, you're off, you're not going back and doing more. You're engaging with your kids and your family and your friends. You're still going out and doing that healthy stuff. So defending your.

32:30

life, your personal time outside of work, you've got to find a place to turn it off. Even if you worked a little more, make sure you turn it off and you turn it off completely so that you can just be a human and recharge so you can come back tomorrow and do some more. That's one of my thoughts. Any ideas? Yeah. Okay. So there are multiple aspects in there. One is like how to not bring the stress and the negative energy from a stressful work back home. Right?

33:00

And number one exercise that has actually saved marriages from amongst my clients is, so when you look at your day as a series of transitions, so when you leave the house, you get into the car, you drive to the work, you arrive at work, that's a transition. You go to your computer, you switch it on, that's a transition. You read your emails and then you go to the next meeting, that is a transition.

33:27

You're done with the next meeting, you go to the next meeting, that's a transition, and so on. So at one point, you leave work and you arrive at home, and you meet your family. That's a transition. And before every transition, so instead of scheduling an hour of everything, schedule 50 minutes, and then you have five minutes to recharge, and then...

33:55

you can make a mental reset. And the way that works is this. You just close your eyes and you relax and you think, release, release, release. And you feel like the tension in the brain, the forehead, that all melts away and the neck, release, release, release. That's all you gotta do, right, for a minute or two. And then...

34:25

at the end you just ask yourself one question which is how do I need to show up as the best husband and father or mother whatever you are a significant other in the history of the universe yeah right and um yeah well and I give you that not for my by my own life uh what's that two and a half years ago about two hundred years ago

34:52

We lived in Ireland, my wife and I, we have property there, and in Galway, which is the West Coast. It rains, it was the worst day, blustery, rainy day, and nobody goes out when it rains that much on a Monday night. But we had the opportunity to find a babysitter, one of our nieces was available for babysitting, and we said, let's go on a date. Yes. So we rushed on the date, we parked the car, we couldn't park it right in front of the restaurant, so we just

35:21

rushed around the building. And as we go and get into the restaurant, we were soaking wet from the rain. It was cold. It was soaked with cold rain. Soaking wet. We go into the restaurant. We were just one out of two couples. And the restaurant was cold. The server was slow. The wine was... It sucked. But before we left the house, I went through that exercise and I said, okay, so release, release, release, release. And then I said, how do I need to show up?

35:51

as the best husband in the history of the universe at that date, for that date. And when you go on a date, then it's always about the other person. Yes, it's never about you. And so all of it, all of the circumstances were less than perfect. It was just me and her. And I was like, totally tuned in. You know, what about you? And in old days, I would have.

36:17

called the waiter and said, the food is cold, the wine is less, bring it back to the chef. But I would have dragged my wife to another restaurant and so on. But none of that mattered. And we had the best date that we had in such a long time. And we were so glad that we did, because little did we know that would have been the last date we will have in the next two and a half years, because like a month later, we went into lockdown. Oh, yeah. Okay.

36:45

Every moment matters. You never know when you meet somebody for the last time. You never know when you have a chance to do this again. Yes. And every matter matters. So, set an attention. How do I show up as the best husband, best father, best friend, best son, best daughter, whatever, in the history of the universe when I go there? That's powerful.

37:14

That's also true for like sometimes you have problems at home. Yes. So when you enter the door, do you already know what the problems are? Most of the time. Yep. So set an attention. How will I as a father or mother, my father or husband, handle that situation as the best version of myself? And that setting that intention is that makes such a big difference. I like that a lot. How can I how do I need to show up?

37:42

Say release four times, big four deep breaths. How do I need to show up? That would only take 20 seconds, but man that would be powerful. Between meetings, but ooh that's a good one. Just take a break, release, release, release, okay. Here's my next encounter. I'm going, so yeah. So when I go out with friends, you go show up, you know, ask the question. Ah, Andrew I love it. I got.

38:08

The one of the other things that came to mind for me was defending your, your, your fitness, your sleep and what you eat. Right. One of the things that happens if the workload doubles or triples or something, some businesses will buy lunch for employees, but if the lunch is to get everybody pizza, you just killed it. So as the manager, you know, remember that you're getting something that good nutritious food, make sure you're ordering.

38:38

good stuff, you're going for vegetables and proteins and good, you know, what a good food, not just get them some pizza and make sure for you personally, managers and employees and everybody, your fitness is going to be super important. All that stress gets released. Fitness is a big thing. So even if you don't have time, some people are gym fanatics. They plan their own workouts. If you get into a bind where you're just busy fitness classes are even an option because all you have to do is show up.

39:07

the instructor plans the whole, I'm a fitness instructor. When I show up in a class and I teach one of my classes, I know what's happening, all you have to do is get there. And so when time is crunched, make sure you're working out, like do it like it's your job. Like you got three times a week, you gotta make it, do something, even if it's running around the block or whatever it is, set aside that time, put it on your calendar, plan it. Even if you have to do it with the kids because you don't have time because of the work, make sure that there's fitness, you're eating well.

39:36

and you're sleeping too. You gotta give yourself a bedtime because otherwise you just keep running and keep running. But if you eat, sleep and fitness, make sure don't lose track of those. So. I whole lot agree with that. I would add to it, drink a lot of water because dehydration shows itself as tiredness first. Fun fact. Yep, exactly. Yeah, dehydration shows up as.

40:04

as exhaustion. Absolutely. Especially over 50, by the way, when you're over 50, your body loses the ability to detect dehydration. Really? Okay. And so that's why in Europe, when it's so hot and people die, most of them die of dehydration. That's a fair point.

40:28

You know, it's so funny you're there and I just subconsciously without thinking, I took my hand over and I was going to grab, you're talking like this, and I was going to grab my water bottle and take a drink. Oh, dehydration. Oh, let me get some of that. I didn't even think about it. Like, oh, I caught myself. Oh, don't put that on camera. Anyway. And you know, like a movement is so important. And even if you're out of shape, I'm out of shape a little. I always used to be on top.

40:56

but with all everything that was going on. So I let that go a little and I feel that you get sluggish and so on. And we know that the moment people start moving their bodies, yeah, stands while you're working. Yes. But even just half our block walk around the block makes like such a significant difference in level of energy. It doesn't have to be an exercise. Just a brisk walk half an hour on the block.

41:22

or the neighborhood. So one last one for you, Andrew. What's the any resources that you would recommend if people want to go further into this rabbit hole or they're in the middle of a double or triple workload situation for themselves? Anything that you would recommend? Slow down. I would always slow down and review your priorities. Look at what is what you actually must do versus what is what is wanted. Yes.

41:50

Make sure that you're from the very beginning, put a built in to your point, the re-energizing, rejuvenating exercises and time, which means don't by the way, check your emails first thing in the morning, never ever. The more you're in the email inbox, the better. Exactly. Plan your day. That's what I would do. Yoga is great. Meditation is wonderful.

42:20

And I've always underestimated the... Yeah, there's the... Well, a couple of things that came to mind for me. If you haven't, I've got the book that I mentioned earlier called The One Thing by Gary Keller. I'll put the link to that in the app. If you wanna, that's a good read if you're in the middle of overwhelm or you got a lot going on, it helps with that focus. And then the other thing, of course, the Eisenhower matrix is something that a lot of people have talked about over time. You've got the important and urgent scale.

42:47

If you have that many tasks and you're feeling the overwhelm or it's tripled, doubled or tripled, then you've got to start making decisions. That's, it's sometimes helpful to get it on that matrix. And you can go on YouTube and look up Eisenhower Matrix. And there's people who will help you with that if you've never heard of that. But many people have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix. And I'll make sure that I also share in here, you know, we talked, you talked about the Colby assessments. I'll drop that link in the notes for this episode. Yeah.

43:14

That was my other thing. I have a Colby A, Colby B. And then you compare Colby B is how you perceive the work and Colby A is how you measure what your strengths are. And then you can have a boss as well. And it's not so expensive. It's a very good, very, very good investment. The other thing that I want you to know is you can always reframe issues, right? So when you're on the receiving end and your boss says, you know what, we, I,

43:44

and the boss wants you to take on a task and you don't want, you can always say, I agree with you, that is a very important task. Therefore, I suggest that we give it to somebody who can give the undivided attention. So there are ways to reframe things more elegantly. Or when you're the boss, because I can agree that you overworked, but the issue is not that you have

44:12

too much work, the real issue is prioritization. So why don't we set an hour aside and we prioritize your work? Right. So for that, like, if you want to know how to do those reframes, from a behavior science point of view, I'm offering everybody here influence, prompter influence

44:40

And there's a training, 10 minutes training, and you can reframe any issue that you have so that you can give back work, refuse work, or change the nature of work in any way, shape, or form. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, the influence booster. I'll include that in the link for the episode here too, so you guys can check that out. It'll be on the page as well with Andrew. So here's what I love. Andrew, thank you so much for being on the show. Here's what I love that you, I love that.

45:06

You are taking what it's interesting how your work with individuals and high performance coaching really applies to this topic area too. But I love that you really, it's a, it's a personal thing for you too. You're talking about some of the stories you shared were, you know, your the situation with your wife or your kids or so what we're talking about is not just about being the best of the best at work, but this stuff applies.

45:32

outside too. And so I love that you bring that dynamic because it's about the person. It's not just about the job. So thank you very much for joining me on the show today. And if they want to read more about you or they want to connect with you later, where would they, where's the best place to go? First of all, thank you very much for having me. I have allergies here right now because we have cedar wood everywhere here in the hexes right now.

45:57

But it was an absolute honor to be here. If you want to get in touch with me, very easy, go to meetandrewlawless.com. Meetandrewlawless.com. You will get access to my calendar right away. If you went there today, you would see that you probably will not have to go to next month in order to find an appointment. So don't wait for too long. But yeah, so go there and...

46:26

I'd be absolutely. And that's a pretty conversation. So I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to Andrew over the years, and we've kept in touch about these different things and productivity and diabetes and all the different things. But so I love chatting with him. So if that's something that you're interested in, please do look him up. And for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in today. And we'll see you next time on Productivity Gladiator.

SUBSCRIBE For UPDATES

I’ll send you three of my favorite time hacks!