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Transcript:
If you’re in the January hype of goal setting, all the things you want to achieve this year, my episode this week is about what are you going to train yourself to do differently than the previous year so you actually achieve them? Hello and welcome to episode two, five, six of my tv.
My name is Emma, Mills, and I help business owners go from that messy middle of solopreneur through to getting some help around them, leveraging their tasks, getting their time back with a thriving, ambitious team. And today’s episode is inspired by all of the January social posts, emails coming your way of what everybody’s going to achieve in 2020 form goal setting and my habit setting.
What am I going to do differently in my fitness, my wealth, my lifestyle? And my question to you in today’s episode is, what habits are you going to train yourself to do differently this year? And I’m talking here to anyone that if you made a list of goals in 2023 and you either didn’t achieve any of them, or you forgot about them, or you didn’t even remember what you’d written at the end of the year, or you achieved maybe just a tiny bit of it, something has to change this year.
And for me, that is training yourself into the habits you do on a daily basis. And I saw a great post the other day, which was about just concentrating on the 20, like, planning your goals, but then concentrating on the 24 hours ahead of you and, what you can get done in that time period, because all of the 24 hours with the right habits inside them, done rhythmically, consistently, persistently, the year takes care of itself.
If every day you’re doing the congruent stuff. And I use the word train because like anything, there’ll be lots of people now who on the 1 January, like, I’m doing dry January, I’m back into the gym, and we all know the story that so many people have this energy, it feels like a new chapter, like they’re hyped for all this stuff they’re going to do, and life gets in the way.
Their days become overwhelmed. They don’t schedule time in to achieve what they wanted to, and by February, they won’t even remember what they’ve written on the 1 January. And so the habits every day, are most important for me to achieve what you want to achieve.
And today’s episode, I’ve got my top three habits that I would train yourself and anything new in life, you have to train yourself into doing. I think there’s a study which takes around 21 days to form a new habit. So you have to train yourself into this being a new way of life, like just part of what you do, not something that you try today and then you forget about tomorrow.
These are my top three habits I would train yourself to do to achieve whatever you want to achieve in 2024. And none of these are groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
They are things I’ve probably said lots of times and things you’ve heard from other people. But are you doing them? And if you’re not, please, please, just after watching this episode, just try them for the next seven days. 14 days. 21 days.
Give it 21 days to see the impact they make. So number one is to start every single morning with your phone on, do not disturb or like, on focus mode. Honestly, most of us, like 99% of the population, our lives are, dictated by what pops up on here. And while some of it, okay, some of it might be like an urgent team message or something that needs solving, like some of it, like a very small percentage of it. But most of what we’re driven by on here is simply notifications.
The scroll on social media, the likes and comments on posts, the phone calls from customers who want to talk to you or sort of pick your brain about something and it’s something on their agenda but not yours. The messages from team members who could actually be answered. At the end of the day, it’s not an urgent thing for now.
Like, most of our lives are dictated by what pops up on it and we let it happen to ourselves. And so, habit number one, please just try 90 minutes. I mean, I do it until 12:00 nowadays from getting up and getting ready and sitting down to do my top three priorities. I put my phone on do not disturb until I finish them.
Most often it’s like eleven or twelve when I turn it off because I want to protect my time. And honestly, once you try it for a few days, it might feel weird and it might feel like I need to turn do not disturb off, see if any is contacting, if there’s anything urgent.
Like you think there’s going to be loads of urgent stuff. And when I first started it, most often what happens is you look at it all and you’re actually way more productive by, okay, well, I’ve got some stuff to reply to here, but I’m going to do it all in one go.
That comment that’s just come up on my instagram wasn’t important at all. It wasn’t worth interrupting what I just did this morning and focus time having distraction. Most of us will know, it takes us about 25 minutes to get back into what we were doing. So whether you do it for an hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours, the whole morning, please, please start your day on, do not disturb mode on your phone, because notifications are the complete death of creativity and moving all of the good stuff forward. And the cherry on the cake for the do not disturb is having an assistant who can just gatekeep, direct manage, move off flow around you.
Any requests that come through in that morning, I mean, it’s very few and far between that, ah, something really, really urgent comes through that has to be dealt with there and then. So, for example, my pa bec, she knows that in the morning, I’m getting on with the good stuff. So she’s messaging me if she sends anything. I’m going to see it around eleven or twelve and then reply. And she can do the same for the outside world. If anybody’s trying to get hold of me, she can either reply, respond, or just give me a list when
I’ve finished doing that stuff of people that I need to get back to. And having that gatekeeping, that assistant isn’t difficult to get in place. It’s what we do. There are millions of virtual assistants out there. There are people in your team, probably that could already do it for you. But having your morning in do not disturb focus mode for you to move forward is a habit that I think would be just like if you did that one thing alone. Your 2024 will be considerably different to any other year you’ve ever had. Habit number two to train yourself on for this year. And, if you’re an avid. My tv watcher, I’ve mentioned it quite a few times now, but it’s because it’s so important. And the one thing I’ve learned from running my team at my IPA is that when somebody says something, this applies to everybody.
When you say something once, people like, they absorb it. When you say it twice, like, it goes a little bit more. It’s only when you are absolutely sick of hearing yourself saying something that it starts to drop with the people in your team, with people around you, with people you’re trying to give advice to, because everybody tries stuff and learns in their own way. But my habit number two, that I would absolutely train yourself now, is that every single day, you don’t have a never ending to do list anymore.
That is like self defeating, unmotivating, quite frankly depressing to look at. And, you download our productivity planner, which, again, make sure the links in the episode, use, like, a notepad, use your own, whatever you use, whether it’s notion or Asana or Trello. And you have your top three things every single day. Whether you have a top one thing.
I’m down for that. A top two thing, top three. But just having the most important thing that you tick off and then everything else is a nice to have again, is going to push your momentum so much quicker in having some real do not disturb time. And then my top one, two or three things that I get done and imagine, like, I mean, how many working days are there in the year? 280. Is there? Maybe if you had like six weeks holiday. Imagine that every single working day of, ah, some uninterrupted time with my top one, two or three things inside it done and boxed off.
Like momentum is going to be like never before. And this is my second thing I would train yourself on. Don’t have a to do list, which quite frankly would like, send the most productive person in the world under. Just have your top one, two, three things to work on every day. And number three, it is simple. It is probably you’re going to go like, oh, yeah, well, obviously. But I just think it really, really misses in most people’s calendars. I want you to schedule in every single week.
Once a week I go for Friday, because Friday for me is a day where I don’t have any calls or meetings scheduled in, and I just work on the most, like, it’s a day for me to do good stuff. so on a Friday, I have scheduled in every week to check in on my goals. And you might go, okay, well, this is really simple stuff. But the amount of people that spend so much time on the 1 January, like, all hyped up, ready to go, and then they might look at them the following week, they might have them in their mind.
And then honestly, come December, I do feel like the majority of business owners, they don’t even remember what they wrote back in January. Like, things have changed since then. Oh, well, we’re doing this now. We’re doing that.
So if you don’t check in with your goals on a weekly basis, how on earth can you profess to know what the top three things are that are most important to moving these forward? And how can you know when you have your do not disturb time and your focus time, what the most important things are to be working on in it? And, while this is very simple, and it is simple and basic, but most often the simple and basic stuff most of us just don’t do every day because you feel like you should be working on the new shiny thing or you should be busy in your inbox replying to people, or you should be just doing because that makes you feel good and busy and productive.
But it’s not the top two or three things that are actually going to move your goals forward. So you must retrain yourself and please just try it. For 21 days, start the Morning with your phone on do not disturb. And inside that, focus time.
Work on your top one, two, three things. And to be able to know what those are and what’s most important and also feel motivated by what you’re working towards is to check in with your goals at least once a week and have that scheduled in the calendar. Because as we know, what gets scheduled in your calendar gets done. If it’s not in there, you’re not doing it. Having that check in with your goals is a reminder of, oh, yeah.
Do you know this week has been tough. It’s been difficult. Like, oh, God, this happened. She said that at work or we had to get rid of this person. HR got involved. But when you check in with your goals, it’s that light at the end of what might feel like a short or a long tunnel to go. Yeah, but this is why I’m doing it.
This is where I’m going. It’s like a shot in the arm m of relief. I know the week’s tough, but this is where we’re going. This is what I’m doing. And I’m going to make sure that on Monday morning, I’ve, got 90 minutes spent on moving that forward. Even if everything else feels tough. Do you know, like it gives you that kind of flash in the week of off. But I’m connecting my goals.
This is where I’m going. These are the top three things I would train on. M I really, really hope you give it a try for at least 21 days. And I hope it helps you to get ahead out of the dirt and into the clouds because most often, and if you feel like this, most people are in the dirt, in their inbox, in their phone, scrolling, doing like in the middle of problems, situations, answering questions, just being busy. And the clouds is where all of the good stuff gets done. So I hope this helps and I will see you next week.
