Caleb Agee: 0:00
When you have to remember the 100 tasks on your list, you have no space in your brain for thinking of anything else. If you could allow yourself just to think about today, the time block you’ve set up, and focus on those things, you will have so much more processing power to solve problems and be creative, rather than thinking about the things you got to do for the next three weeks. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host today, caleb Agee, and I am in the wrong seat, but hopefully you enjoy what’s going on. Today I’m joined with Kyle DeVries. You know, I was just telling him for the longest time. I was just telling him for the longest time. You spell it it’s a big D, little E, capital V, right R-I-E-S, and I had your name wrong in my head. You know how you read a book and you mispronounce their name for a long time and then you see the movie and you’re like ooh, missed it.

Kyle DeVries: 0:57
Yeah well, it’s hard to pronounce and a lot of people say DeVries which is understandable. That’s what it looks like, so I forgive you.

Caleb Agee: 1:04
Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, this is the place where we help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream, kyle. What are we talking about today?

Kyle DeVries: 1:14
Caleb, marketers and entrepreneurs have a lot on their plate. Did you know that?

Caleb Agee: 1:18
I am at least one of those things and, yes, I have a lot on my plate.

Kyle DeVries: 1:21
We’re busy people and there’s a lot to keep track of. And we’ve got tasks and we’re managing people and we’re trying to just make it in the world and go about our daily lives and be there for our families and our friends and all that stuff. And so we want to help you kind of rein it all in figure out how do I be more productive with my day.

Kyle DeVries: 1:43
So, we’re going to give you three tips and we’re going to talk through them, but those three tips are time blocking, a four minute feedback and use a second brain. Okay, sounds exciting.

Caleb Agee: 1:54
Sounds so exciting. All right, time blocking. Now this is we have.

Caleb Agee: 1:59
For the history of Frank and Maven, we’ve always made daily lists, which I think which was very valuable.

Caleb Agee: 2:06
I have notebooks from more than 10 years ago where I was making my list for the day, and I think it’s really good to declare what you’re going to do each day. But we found a limitation with that in that, especially in creative work, you can spend an infinite amount of time on something creative because you can never stop being done, right, and so, um, sometimes we find that tasks that should be really quick take longer, and tasks that we thought were fast are supposed to take longer, right, and so, um, we started doing what we call time blocking. Um, because we can. We can structure our day around how long things should take, or we hope for them to take. So one of the most dangerous things for us to do um with our day is just to make a list without understanding what that list takes, and so each and everything on our day not only has has an assignment, but it also I know when I’m going to do those things, and that’s kind of how we build out our time blocking each day. So tell us how we build that.

Kyle DeVries: 3:14
Yeah, so I’m a little bit old school and in the past, before I came to Frank and Maven, I would do like sticky notes and stuff like that, which I still do a little bit. I kind of like to do that, but have a physical cross off the list moment.

Kyle DeVries: 3:27
But I also would like just keep everything in my mind and I feel like I would trust myself a little bit more than I probably could be able to trust myself. So after coming to FrankenMaven I’ve learned the art of time blocking. I’ve learned the benefits of really getting your day down on paper and kind of learning how to plan those things out. So to me time blocking is a little bit of like a cross between a to-do list and a calendar and kind of an organizational tool for your day.

Kyle DeVries: 3:52
So the first thing you should do whenever you’re making your time block is kind of like find those things that like you, those things that already demand your time in that day that might be like a meeting or something that you’re already feeling like you have to do that day and kind of build it around those and then after that you’re going to gather your tasks that you need to complete to make progress for that day and then you’re going to assign a realistic amount of time to those tasks and meetings. You’ll schedule out your tasks by blocking your time throughout the day and then leaving small gaps, like where you need them, if you’re going to take a break or take a lunch or whatever.

Kyle DeVries: 4:23
Yeah, yeah leaving small gaps, like where you need them if you’re going to take a break or take a lunch or whatever.

Caleb Agee: 4:31
Yeah, um, yeah, and then a bonus tip is to share your list, uh, to your co-workers or your colleagues and kind of keep yourself accountable that way. Yeah, we, everybody in our office, should, um, do this and it’s not some weird uh. I think it sounds really micromanaging actually. Uh, you, you can ask anybody around here. We’re very much the opposite of that. We have a lot of we have talented, you know, hardworking people that we don’t. We don’t like watch what everybody does, but everybody shares their list every day Now, with time blocks, so at about 8.30, you’ll start seeing them.

Caleb Agee: 5:00
We have a channel in Slack and everybody starts trickling them in. You’ll see it from 8.30 to nine. I’m going to do this from nine to 10. I’m going to do this from 10 to 11. I’m doing this and it’s really important, because giving yourself like a timeframe for a specific task will force you to acknowledge how long it should take to complete. And so there are different personality types. Some people are naturally going to just mark it off, get it done, mark it off, get it done. Other personality types and I’m not throwing any shade at either one of these will wander in the task for a while and just enjoy being creative inside of that.

Caleb Agee: 5:40
And so instead of getting stuck wandering for two hours, you say I’m going to spend one hour writing this thing or designing this piece or working on this project or whatever it is, and then I’ll get as far as I can today Hopefully it’s not due today and you’ve planned your time out well enough, but I’m going to get as far as I can today and I’m going to cut myself off and tomorrow I’ll pick it up again. But that forces you to kind of have this crunch time. That puts the urgency and it puts the pressure on it in a good way and it makes you work hard.

Kyle DeVries: 6:10
Yeah, and it’s not always going to be like perfectly to the minute, every single time but it is kind of an art form and you kind of learn what normally you should be, what amount of time you should be spending here or there, and I always kind of like come back to it throughout the day. Like sometimes I’ll kind of finish up a task or I’ll get to the end of that time block and I’m like I don’t even remember what I was supposed to do next. And so that just tells me, if I hadn’t time block, I’d be, I’d be lost.

Kyle DeVries: 6:34
So, referencing my list back throughout the day. I’m at it retroactively. There are a lot of tasks we do.

Caleb Agee: 6:48
Obviously, not everything’s exactly the same, but very repeatable tasks that happen every week or something like that. So you could acknowledge like, ooh, I budgeted 30 minutes but that only took me 15. Or I budgeted 30 and it really needs to take an hour. So next time you’re going to give yourself an hour, you know, and so, um, it just helps you understand what time takes. Um, even from a business level, that’s important, uh, for pricing things and setting up your resources and making sure that you don’t over-promise, uh, your time more than you actually have, and so that’s really helpful.

Caleb Agee: 7:26
A couple of extra thoughts Be realistic about how long your meetings will actually last. So I will say there’s a lot of one hour calendar things on my calendar that last more than one hour. And so me looking ahead and saying that says one hour, says it’s going to end at two, but is it really going to? It’s, I’m going to. I’m going to mark my next thing to start at two, 30, because I know that one’s going to trail over and that’s great, that’s fine, Um, yeah and so, uh.

Caleb Agee: 7:56
also, it’s easy to get caught between things and kind of uh meander. Instead. Now, because you’ve made your list, just like you said, I know exactly what I’m going to do next. So super pro level. If you want to be crazy, put those in like event blocks on your calendar and then my calendar set to notify me at 10 minutes before each event, so I get a 10 minute warning. I don’t do this every day. I’m. I’m not going to pretend like I am at the pro level but sometimes I do, and when I do, I get these notifications.

Caleb Agee: 8:30
It’s like, hey, in 10 minutes you’re going to go to this meeting, or in 10 minutes you need to switch to this other task. And that gives me that. Okay, I’m about done with this, I need to be putting a bow on it. So, um, and then sometimes I like to challenge myself. Put a little extra on the on the day, like one extra task. See how many things you can fit. Can I get to 110% of a perfect day? You know what I’m saying. So yeah, any further thoughts on that.

Kyle DeVries: 8:56
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that’s a good point, and even if you, if you put a couple of extra things on there or whatever and maybe you don’t get to them because who knows what can come up in the middle of the day, yes, it’s always like a great place to start for the next day, like here’s. You know one or two things that I didn’t get done yesterday. That’s kind of maybe where I’ll first thing I’ll start the next day, or something like that.

Caleb Agee: 9:13
Yeah, and don’t get anxious. When you put this in writing, you’re like I have to switch at 11. Like, no, that you were just. You know, you were just setting it up, you’re? You have a budget of time. It’s an outline, but things come up and you have to be flexible and be willing to do it. You know who does really good with this time blocking.

Kyle DeVries: 9:39
Nate, the camera guy, oh yeah.

Caleb Agee: 9:40
He rocks it.

Kyle DeVries: 9:41
What can’t Nate do?

Caleb Agee: 9:45
I haven’t found a thing yet. So we’re going to try him out at juggling after this and see if he can pull it off. So oh, he’s giving us thumbs up. He can do it already. All right, the next tip we have for you is four minute feedback. I think Carter was talking about Gary Vee, as a quote says that there is such a thing as a seven minute meeting. We’re proposing there’s such a thing as four minute feedback.

Caleb Agee: 10:10
So we have we make a lot of creative products. If you’re in, if you’re in-house marketing or you’re at an agency, or you’re just an entrepreneur and you’re working on things an entrepreneur and you’re working on things the reality is, everything you make should cross somebody else’s desk before it goes out, especially if it’s advertising, if it’s written, if it’s going to be seen by more than one other person. I would propose that you should get some other eyes on it and collaborate. Every song you ever hear, every book you ever read, has been touched by probably five to 10 people every single time. And that’s what makes it great, because we know that alone we can go really far, but together we can go even further.

Caleb Agee: 10:54
And so, um, what we’ve found is that when you do have something finished and you say, hey, you student email or you send a message, hey, can you take a look at this? When you get a chance, you’re going to get crickets. That will happen every single time. Nobody’s going to get a chance. So what we do is we call a four minute review meeting. Um, nate the camera guys, once again great at this. Let’s say, we just made a TV TV commercial. Um, so 30 second ad is a standard TV commercial. Maybe we’ve got two of them. We’ve got a minute of screen time. Um, he calls everybody involved in that account to the room, put it up on the screen and we watch it together and reviews it. So it’s, it’s been. That’s been really, really powerful.

Kyle DeVries: 11:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really great way to kind of get everybody in the same room and just kind of spout off some things that you see right off the bat or whatever. Sometimes they’re already aware of what you’re going to say, but it’s still good to just get it out there so that collaboration get in the same room, watch it all at the same time and get back to your day. Another way we do that and so we use Slack as kind of our organizational system. You might use Microsoft Teams or Discord or something like that, but we use Slack and so sometimes we’ll call a Slack attack. If we need some quick feedback on, maybe, a website we’re editing or some copy we’re writing, like that, so we’ll call a Slack attack. Everybody that is available will like stop what they’re doing and just everybody will just look at it.

Kyle DeVries: 12:24
At the same time and so again, it’s kind of that collaboration of everybody just kind of spewing out some thoughts and just kind of moving forward together. In that way, it’s kind of a fun thing to do.

Caleb Agee: 12:34
Yeah For printed pieces I love. In that way it’s kind of a fun thing to do. Yeah For printed pieces I love. We don’t do, obviously, as much print these days as we used to in the olden days, but I’ll print it off on our crappy printer here in the office. Even if it’s supposed to be a postcard on like cardstock, I still print it off, trim it down to size and like staple you know, staple front and back together line it up and then I’ll drop it on Kyle’s desk and be like, hey, how’s that feel? You just got that in the mail. What do you see? And he’ll be like oh well, I noticed this first and then I noticed this and I get live feedback and I get to hear exactly his first impression of it, which is beautiful.

Caleb Agee: 13:12
So find those ways to get that live feedback as quickly as possible. If you have a new idea, get a couple of people in the room, throw it out, see if it sticks. If it doesn’t, okay, that’s fine, but you got to make sure. The cool thing about this is you get to see their faces most of the time, which is really, really helpful. Maybe not in the Slack attack version, um so, and you usually don’t just get critical feedback.

Caleb Agee: 13:40
It’s like oh, I like this yeah, here we go um well, we found the dark side of maybe the slack attack or just a digital review is all you get is the critique and none of the validation right and so it’s just kind of like all you just get a bunch of darts thrown at it instead of like a hey, this is really good. But yeah and sometimes you need to hear the. This is really good.

Kyle DeVries: 14:00
Right, no, that’s true, I think that’s. I think that’s one of the most important parts of the feedback is being able to like kind of read body language or like see their eyes, see their, their facial expressions, like whenever they’re presented with an idea or a concept or a video. And I think that if you’re in marketing, you can use this when you’re presenting something to a client too. I think it’s really, you know, really important to see their very first reaction, where maybe they’re not even aware of, like, the feelings that they’re putting out, and you’re being able to just perceive that exactly as it’s happening. And I think that there’s a lot of people out there that are maybe afraid to give their like full thoughts if they’re like, if they’re a little bit negative. I think you can kind of like see those reactions and kind of pry a little bit like okay, I kind of perceived yeah that you know this and this.

Kyle DeVries: 14:48
At that part, like can you, you know, elaborate, and so just getting those, those first reactions and emotions can be really key for feedback.

Caleb Agee: 14:56
Yeah, and you’ll pick up on those nonverbal cues, which is really powerful. So what you’re going to do, you need to. Next time you have something you need some people to look over, you’re not going to just send an email, you’re not going to. Or if you have a client that needs to look over something, you’re not going to just send an email, you’re going to call a four minute meeting and you’re going to tell them hey, we’re going to spend four minutes, we’re going to look at this.

Caleb Agee: 15:21
I want your feedback as quick as possible, cause I know you’re busy. We’re going to get right back to it, show it to them, get the feedback, ask any more questions. It might last a little bit more than four minutes, but that’s okay. But, um, if let’s say worst case scenario, you’re way off the mark, like you just totally missed it and you’re going to definitely need to go back to zero. Call an actual meeting not right then, because that’s not the time they had allotted for it, because they’re time blocking too. Right, right, call a meeting for tomorrow or the next day and circle back up and figure out what you needed to get to make it right.

Kyle DeVries: 15:58
So yeah, and I’ll. I’ll add in one more thing, and that I have to always remind myself too is don’t get offended. I think we all want the same thing, like whether it’s the marketer and the client or the whoever it’s involved, whether it’s just your coworkers, like, we all want to get to the same place. We want to make something that’s great and it’s not going to be, it’s not gonna be perfect the first time you do it so don’t get offended, just take it in stride and keep moving.

Caleb Agee: 16:21
Hopefully, you’re asking for feedback because you genuinely want it and you want the thing to be better than it was just when it was in your hands, and so make sure you, if you’re the one who calls that meeting, you set it up in a way like hey guys, this I’ve I’ve worked hard on this, but I know it can be better. I know there are probably things that I’m not seeing cause I’ve stared at it for an hour. Help me see it. And, uh, hopefully that you have this culture of like, kind and clear and strong feedback and then, um, just have thick skin If it gets a little, a little dicey if, if you’re way off, yeah, it can hurt a little bit your heart’s in that product.

Kyle DeVries: 16:57
Yeah, so, and at the very, very bare, like bare minimum, like if you want to even try to avoid further edits even more, like just read it out loud before you send it, like I’ll catch so many mistakes, and an email or a copy or whatever before I send it off to review by just reading it out loud and something maybe like Whoa. That sounded kind of dumb when I read it out loud or whatever you know you can.

Kyle DeVries: 17:18
you can fix so many problems before you even get to the point where you’re sending it off. So just another, just a little tip in there, yeah.

Caleb Agee: 17:23
All right, so that’s the four minute feedback meeting. Now, third thing we’re going to talk about today is using a second brain. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean another human. Actually, that’s not what we’re talking about at all. It’s not me using Kyle’s brain. Uh, although I do use it sometimes, I don’t know that’s risky.

Caleb Agee: 17:43
We are using it right now. So, um, fun fact for the day um, your brain, there’s a. There’s a principle called the forgetting curve, which says that your brain loses new information at a rate of 50% per day. So, not learned information or repeated information, but you heard it one time there’s no really recall. Your brain is losing that, uh, at a rate of 50% per day, each day, 50%, and then 50% of that 50%, and then 50% of that 50%, and it just goes down. I feel that I’m sure you’ve seen it.

Caleb Agee: 18:22
Um, so the the thing about a second brain is that we want to make sure we’re taking what we learned, that short-term information that really we don’t need for long, long, long-term recall, and we get it out of our human brain and into a digital brain of some sort as quickly as possible.

Caleb Agee: 18:45
So Tiago Forte that’s a great name coined the term using a second brain, which is really the goal, is to create an extension of your own memory so you can free up your mind to focus on creativity and problem solving instead of remembering details, and that is such a beautiful thing, and if you’re in, if you’re a marketer, you have to have that, because there are a million details. But there are a lot of moments that you need to be very creative and you need to be very in a strategic and problem-solving mind and when you’re bogged down with like you know how, you have those days where you’re like I have a thousand little paper cut tasks that are going to kill me today and those detail tasks are just crushing your spirit. You could never create anything of value creatively.

Caleb Agee: 19:33
I feel like on that day you know, what I’m saying, because it’s all stuck inside of you and so we’re going to quickly try to get that out and captured somewhere else so that we have the freedom. So yeah, tell us how we do that here.

Kyle DeVries: 19:48
Yeah, I think we’re in meetings all the time and there’s so much information that’s changing hands and all this stuff and things that a lot of people need to know, and so as soon as I receive something to do or I receive some information, I’m putting it somewhere else. Whether that’s like we use Asana kind of a project management tool, or just even in a Word document, or like a Google Doc or something like that, I’m getting it somewhere else because we’ve already talked about the fallacies of trying to remember everything that your brain’s going to start playing tricks on you If you’re starting to try to just remember all these random facts.

Kyle DeVries: 20:21
it’s going to slow down your processing power and all that stuff. So get it out somewhere else where you know exactly what that information was when you received it. And if it’s a task for someone else, get it out of your brain and into that shared brain for them as well.

Caleb Agee: 20:37
Yeah. So there are tons of tools for this. You could use Google Docs and Word Docs I don’t really care what it is. You could just use the Notes app on your phone. It doesn’t really matter what exactly it is. I think if you’re in an office environment something like Asana or Monday or or something like that where you can, um, create these tasks and have them organized, we’re not getting into the weeds of how to organize all those Um. Trello is another one that I’ve thought of. Um, what you want to make sure is that you’ve given yourself essentially the permission to forget about that task. Not that you’re forgetting about it, but you know there’s a mechanism that will. Not that you’re forgetting about it, but you know there’s a mechanism that will remind me that this is due on Thursday and therefore I don’t have to worry about it until I need to be working on it. And so when you have to remember the 100 tasks on your list, you have no space in your brain for thinking of anything else, just working on those tasks.

Kyle DeVries: 21:35
Yeah.

Caleb Agee: 21:36
But if you could allow yourself just to think about today, the time block you’ve set up, and focus on those things, you will have so much more processing power to solve problems and be creative, rather than thinking about the things you got to do for the next three weeks.

Kyle DeVries: 21:50
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this has helped me realize I need to let go of some of those random sports facts that are up in my brain. I can probably, you know, forget Mark McGuire’s batting average from 1999, or something like that, I can move on from all those sports facts so I can have some processing power come back to my brain.

Caleb Agee: 22:04
What was his batting average? I don’t know, that was just a random thing, but I thought you were. I shouldn’t have what was his home run count in 99? I don’t know.

Kyle DeVries: 22:11
But a lot of home runs, probably in the sixties.

Caleb Agee: 22:14
Yeah, uh, that was, that was a good, good time 98, 99. Everybody’s taking steroids and just hitting home runs over and over again Good day to be a baseball fan.

Caleb Agee: 22:24
Yeah, All right. So, um, what’s beautiful about using that tool like Asana is that you can come back to it. Um, when you’re building your time blocking, these kind of this comes full circle when you’re building your time blocking. That helps you. Um, you look at the calendar, you look at, we look at Asana what’s been assigned to me by myself or somebody else, and then we build our day around those things.

Caleb Agee: 22:47
And it’s really, really powerful to see, um, what you have on your plate today. So, um, three things. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to start time blocking. You’re going to tell your time where to go. That looks like a structured day, a budget for your day, I think it’s.

Caleb Agee: 23:04
Dave Ramsey says tell your money where to go, so you don’t wonder where it went. Tell your time where to go, so you don’t wonder where it went. We’re going to you’re going to call four minute feedback meetings. You can. You can make a meeting happen. Maybe if you’re reviewing a five minute video, it might not be a four minute feedback meeting, but make them quick, make it clear that it’s going to be quick and get everybody out of there as quick as you can. Um, and you’re going to use a second brain. Release the details of, uh, all the little minute details and the deadlines and all those things. Release those to your second brain. Make sure you catch everything you need in there and then allow yourself to focus on what you really have on your plate today. So I hope that helps you be more productive this week and next week and the next week.

Caleb Agee: 23:50
If you can’t jump onto all three of these things all at once. Take one and and work on it and uh love it. If you leave us a comment, let us know, um how, how that’s working for you, which of these principles you’re going to apply. Um, that always helps us.

Kyle DeVries: 24:06
And make sure you like, like and subscribe to the maven uh marketing podcast absolutely, and if you need help or if you have any business related questions, you can email us at mavenmonday, at frankenmavencom. We’d love to answer any questions and maybe even feature your business on a future episode.

Caleb Agee: 24:24
Yeah, we’ve alluded to it a lot and it is coming. We’ve been building this actually for years, but especially in the last few months, we’ve been building the Maven Marketing Mastermind and this is something we’ve actually been talking about a lot today. We’re super excited about it. It will be a way to join, essentially, a community of marketers and small business owners who want to help see their marketing problems solved. We’ll have regular calls with Frank and Maven team members and we’ll have a community of people who can help you sharpen your marketing skills and grow and solve those problems that you see every day. So we’re going to be releasing details on that.

Caleb Agee: 25:08
There’s going to be some special deals for founding members of of that mastermind, so keep your eyes out. Um, if you aren’t already subscribed, go to our website, frankandmavencom. Um, there should be a subscription to our newsletter. You’ll get Maven Monday sent to you and, frankly, fridays, but then also, as we launched this mastermind, it’ll be the way to keep. Keep in touch there so you don’t miss a chance to get an early entry discount and get access to what I think will be the best bang for your buck for some marketing training.

Caleb Agee: 25:42
Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome, it’s gonna be really good. So we’ll be here every single Monday answering your real life marketing questions. Because marketers who can’t teach you why Just a fancy lie, thanks guys.