354: The Checklist Mindset for Productivity, Focus, Momentum, and Consistency

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert and plank Show, episode 354, the checklist, mindset for productivity, focus, momentum and consistency. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. I hope you're having a wonderful day today. I know that I am, and I want to talk to you today about being more productive, getting more things done, because a lot of people sort of psych themselves out, and they tell themselves that if they work the extra hours, or put in the extra time, or they want it more than anyone else, that they'll succeed. And then another problem that I see a lot of people do is they they hear that they need to delegate stuff, right? They say, well, I need to make a business, and I need to make a website. I'll hire someone to make the website. Ooh, I want to have a book. I'll hire someone to make a book. And the next thing you know, they've spent a lot of money on a lot of stuff. And I think, at least from my personal experience, I don't know about you, but many times in this whole, you know, building a business thing, especially building an online business, things change so quickly that we have to do a lot of things ourselves, at least at first, right? At least to figure out what works and what doesn't, and at least to figure out how to, like, debug the system, right? And so I'll give you an example this podcast. It took me a while to figure out, first of all, what to name the show. And by the way, a name change is coming, and it took me a while to figure out, basically, to build my skill of talking extemporaneously and to get over that awkwardness, that fear of calling someone on the phone. So here's something I like that just now I realized, and like literally the last three seconds as I was talking to you, is that, you know, in this show, we we talk to people five days a week, and I used it used to be when it came time to call someone, I'd get nervous, right? I'd get the butterflies in the stomach, and I go, and when what I do is I call someone on a service called Skype. We have a course called podcast crusher.com that explains our podcasting system. And I called someone on Skype, and as it was ringing, and Skype rings like a regular phone, as it was ringing, I would be kind of in the back of my head thinking, Oh, geez, I hope they don't pick up. I hope that it just goes to voicemail, or that keeps on ringing. And I'll say, cool, I've got half an hour off. I don't have to talk to that person today. And thinking back, that seems really sort of like I'm fighting myself, right? And you can call that cognitive dissonance. You can call that not being in consistency or not being in alignment, and that's really a scary place to be. And I think that the solution is just that the only way out is through, and that you need to do those things that you are afraid to do. If it doesn't challenge you, it won't change you, and all that sort of fun stuff. And so I want to talk today about, first of all, I have a book called The Checklist mindset, where I lay out just a handful of tools that can make you ultra, ultra productive, and just by using these tools, if you're a solopreneur, if you're a one person business, and you don't really have the resources or even the money or the leverage, or you haven't done put in the time or done the research to vet The right virtual assistant, I want to show you how you can get a heck of a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time. Likewise, if you feel like you're stretched thin and you're making money, but the time in your business just is just filling up, and you say, You know what, I need to delegate some things. Well, maybe a few of the tools they talk about today will save you from hiring a full time employee, or, even better, maybe you'll start to use one of these time saving tools. You'll get really good at it. You'll figure out your checklist, your system, your process, your formula, whatever buzzword you feel like using, and you'll get really good at cranking out a lot of podcast episodes, cranking out a lot of videos, blog posts, you know, books, whatever it is. And then you can figure out how to get a lot done using this tool, and then hire one of those virtual assistant employees and get them to use your system, to get them to use these automating, time saving tools. And then that way, when you hire someone to do something, or you send them a quick message to say, oh, yeah, can you knock out a book graphic for me? Or can you, you know, contact 10 people today for guests on my podcast, whatever it is you're up to. Well, then maybe they can use these time saving tools, and they can save you money because they work less hours, and they can do these things faster, right? Because, I mean, if it took someone a whole day took them eight hours to make a book cover graphic for you, and you can shortcut down into 2030 minutes, and that way you don't have to wait a whole day to get something back from your outsourcer. That would be pretty cool. So you know, when you're building your business and when you're being an entrepreneur, I think that it's it takes a while to get over the employee mindset. Employees want to fill time. Employees want to run out that clock. And business owners, they want more time, which means that they want to hire people or work more hours, or buy a course to shortcut 10 years learning a skill into 10 days, something like that. And all saying. All this brings. To minds, something that I found years ago, just like, you know, browsing around Facebook, and it turns out that there's somebody made like a piece of art in a museum, and it was a crank, right? And so you'd go to this museum, and anyone can walk up and sort of crank this crank and going, like, you know, move this crank along with their hand. And then after cranking along for minutes and minutes, a few pennies would drop out, a little bit of pocket change would drop out, and they'd have to keep cranking, cranking, cranking, and then a few more pennies would drop out. And the point of this display was to show how much people were paid for minimum wage. So whatever minimum I don't even know what minimum wage is right now. Is it seven, nine, $11 who knows what. And if you're outside the United States, basically we have this thing called minimum wage, where we say, you know, this is the lowest amount of money per hour that you can pay someone. You hire someone at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's. And if minimum wage is $11 $15 whatever, then we can't pay anyone less than that. And so that that sort of hourly wage is super, super low, when you look at, well, gee, someone could work all day long and still be below the poverty line. And so I bring all this up because, for whatever reason, this example of, like the minimum wage crank and crank and crank and a few pennies kind of spit out it sort of, it shows you life on a very simplified level to maybe you understand things a little bit better. Because what does the average person do? What does the employee do? They go to that crank, they crank and crank and crank, and they do it for the bare minimum number of hours to get a little bit of pocket change, and then walk away at the end of the day saying, well, great, I cranked this, this thing for eight hours straight, and I got, you know, a few, a few dollars enough to put in my pocket, enough to go home and pay for my food, my clothing, my water, my shelter, and then that's about it. And then fall asleep, wake him and do the very next day. So if you were in that situation, how would you get out of that monotony of crank and crank and crank and crank it? And this also brings to mind, there's a TV show called Black Mirror, which is kind of like a, like a futuristic version of that, if you if you have Netflix. But anyway, so you cranking a crank, and maybe, if you were sort of an aspiring entrepreneur, what would you do? Maybe you'd come in an hour earlier and stay an hour later and crank two hours a day more than anyone else, and then you'd have, you know, a lot more money in your pocket. Maybe you'd, you'd find ways to cut costs and find ways to save up money in that in your pocket there. So that way, when everyone else is at zero at the end of the day or the end of the month, maybe you're 10 bucks ahead, 20 bucks ahead. And then maybe you crank and crank and crank long enough that maybe you can hire someone else to crank that for you, right? Maybe you can say, Okay, well, I will, you know, I'll buy enough money, or save enough money where I can buy a cranking machine of my own, and then what I'll do is I'll pay someone to crank it, and I'll soup up that cranking machine that way. If they crank for, you know, five minutes and it spits out 10 cents. Maybe it'll save two cents for me, and then that way someone can just do the work for me, and then that way the money kind of comes in passively. And then once I wait long enough for that, maybe I can go back and go back to my own cranking while someone else is doing cranking for me. And now we're multiplying. I can buy more cranking machines, hire more people. And that's sort of a silly, simplified example, but think about that. That is the goal. Everyone else is clocking in, clocking out, barely making ends meet, falling behind, not thinking in the future, and just sort of thinking about today. And what you should be doing is thinking about how you can get ahead of the game, how to get ahead of the calendar. So let me give you some since we gave you like a silly example, let me give you some concrete examples here. Okay, so the, probably the best thing that I did in my business ever was to send out an email to my list every day, right? I would say, here's the offer I'm promoting this week. If I'm promoting paper template at paper template.com on Monday, I'll find an interesting blog post to send people to, or an interesting YouTube video or an interesting quick demo video, or I'll ask my list a question, or I'll send them to a sales letter or something like that, but everybody, I'll shoot out just a quick message. But then here's the problem is sometimes and I say, Well, you know, I might wake up on Tuesday or Wednesday morning and not really know what to say to my list, or I might wake up on Tuesday morning and not want to waste time in the morning sending out that email. And so maybe what I'll do is, on Monday, I'll I'll send out an email that morning, and then I'll send, I'll crank out an email, and I'll schedule it to go out on Tuesday morning. That way on Tuesday, I won't even have to think about it. Or maybe I'll schedule out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I'm I'm good till Thursday. Maybe I'll schedule out the whole week so many, many times I'll look at what's ahead of me, and I'll say, well, instead of me having to scramble every single day for a new podcast episode to put out or a new blog post, maybe I'll write a bunch of stuff and then I'll schedule it later. Right? And so, I mean, if you've ever tried to outsource, Delegate whatever word you want to use, I just for me. You know, there's always those growing pains, and there are some things that you can't outsource, right? Like, maybe you said, Well, you know, I want to outsource my writing. I want to pay someone to write some blog posts for me. And then you hire someone, and you just come out like crap. And then maybe you say, Well, you know, I want to hire someone to be my, my, the spokesperson of my company, but maybe you would be the best person to be the spokesperson of your company. So everyone talks about, oh, let me just delegate the whole thing out. But there are some things that you can't delegate and some things that maybe you're not quite ready to delegate. So just, uh, just as we're getting started this whole idea of getting things scheduled into the future, podcasts, social media, blog posts, emails, this is a thing that many people don't do, and it's a thing that you can do if you're just kind of in the groove one day and you want to chunk or batch a bunch of things together, a bunch of emails together, and then You say, I'm gonna, instead of every day, kind of, I think that I only spend 10 or 20 minutes writing an email, but there's time to ramp up and get excited and then kind of have the writer's block. What if I wrote five emails in a row back to back in an hour chunk, or even in a half an hour chunk, and that way I save all that trouble of having to ramp up and get myself excited every single day, and that means I can take a vacation, and the money still comes in passive income, even though I'm not around, and my list doesn't even know that I'm not around. So do those things. So that way you can build that momentum, and that way you can see the proof, right? You can see the evidence that you know how to make money. Even if you only made $1 online, you're ahead of all those people who either aren't trying or are just wishing, or who have any are still stuck at zero because if you made $1 100 bucks, 1000 bucks, 10 grand, ten million online. Now you have the proof that it worked. You look back and you say, Oh yeah, I did those things in the past. I made some money. Now I have that confidence to keep going, because I I've I've shown that it works. I've shown that I'm not crazy and and you've gotten and you know what to if you've made money online, even a single dollar, can you shoot me an email at Robert, at Robert plank.com, and just say in the subject line, I've made $1 online. I'm really eager to hear from you, because you've made a huge achievement. And you might not even know, but a lot of people kind of have the like, the buyer's remorse, almost, right? Because if someone is just starting, they have all these big goals and dreams, but they're not making any money, and they say, Great, I'm in the research stage, right? I'm trying things out. And then a lot of people, and I've seen this so many times, when they have their first big the first little break, don't even say a big break. Let's say they they've been trying, they've been trying, they've been trying, and then they finally put out something. Let's say that you spent some time putting out your first book or your first product, you made 500 bucks. Here's the mind game that a lot of people fall into. Maybe they they took five years before they made their first 500 bucks online, right? Well, the problem is that if they're at year one, year two, year three, they're four, they're happy. They say, $0 $0 cool. I'm just in the the incubator stage, right? But then by year five, they finally make $500 and they want to tell everyone, and they go, hey, great, I just made some money. And you know what? If you tell me you made $500 i Robert Plank will be super duper supportive and proud of you, because that is quite an achievement. I mean, heck, even my I've gotten my girlfriend to make that amount of money on five or $500 online, so anyone can do it. No, no offense to her, or anything like that. But so a lot of people, they get to $500 online, and they want to tell people, but then they're shy, because, oh, you've only made $500 so they say, I made some money. How much? A million dollars? No, 500 bucks. How long have you been doing this? Five years? Oh, so you've only made $100 per year. That's what, 30 cents a day. You might as well be cranking that machine at the museum. But here, here's the thing is that all that time in the past leading up to you making money doesn't doesn't matter. You know what I'm saying? Like, those are all the the mistake periods, and it should be your goal to shortcut or leapfrog over all those mistakes so that you can get to the the fun part, which is making money. So don't psych yourself out. And I didn't even know this was a thing, but I've seen it time and time again with with friends, coaching clients, just like kind of people that I kind of sort of know, like, right? Like other marketing peers, if they're not making money, they're happy, because they say, I'm, I'm, you know, a day away from winning the lottery, and they finally win what they call the lottery, $500 and they say, oh geez, I've got so much work ahead of me, because now I've got to put 10 times, 100 times to get $5,000 $50,000 and I'm thinking, Well, no, you finally broken through. So it's up to you to decide, or think about, how. Things play out for you. And anyway, enough of the the mindset stuff. I just want to say real quick, um, you know, if you're procrastinating, it's because you're delaying making a decision, but if you wait too long to make that decision or take that action, well, now the decision is made for you, and you've lost control. And so what you need to do is be honest with yourself and make the time to do those things that you know you need to do, like we said, if in that cranking scenario, wake up early or stay up late, find car out that focused time not just to wait around, but to do the things that you know you need to do. So be present, be curious, and don't just go through the motions. Use this thing called the checklist, which we'll talk about today, to free up your brain and have fun again. So I just want to kind of throw out something practical, and then we'll kind of get back kind of get back into we'll ramp back up, and for the theoretical stuff, back to practical stuff, Google Sheets. If you haven't used Google Sheets, I think you can go to, I'm assuming google.com/drive and Google allows you to store files up in what's called the cloud, right? And if you haven't done this, oh, you are in for such a treat, because the old way of going about things is you'd store things on your computer, and then if someone needed a file, you'd have to shoot it over or email yourself, or any of this silly stuff. But Google says, Hey, we've got this thing called Google Drive where you can upload a file and get to it anywhere, and they have all these online versions of basically Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. If you don't know what those things are, Microsoft Word or Google Documents, is a word processor, which means that you can see a blank piece of paper, and you can write a essay, term paper, you know, book reports, you know anything like that, white paper. And you can write this right there in your web browser, from any computer, from your phone or tablet, nothing to install, and then you can save it. And then you can grant anyone else access to view it as you're typing it. They can type on it as you're typing it. So it's sort of like the word perfect, if you ever use that or Microsoft Word for the current century. And then there's a thing called Microsoft Excel, and the up to date version of that, and the Google version is called Google Sheets, and that allows you to make what's called a spreadsheet. What's a spreadsheet, rows and columns, a grid. And so what you can do is you can sort of build these, these, these ways to track things, right? So I have a spreadsheet that tracks my podcast episodes. If I have a podcast interview, I know that I won't be able to keep everything straight. So I have a spreadsheet where there's these different rows, and then each row has these different columns or cells that say, Well, look, let's look at this podcast episode number Podcast, episode number 360, or something. And then I say, here's the title of my Podcast, episode the date it's going out, the URL it will be at that way I can track these things and sort of make these kinds of decisions. I use a spreadsheet to contact people to be on my show. And I say, you know, if I find someone interesting that I want to find on the show, I'll fill up a spreadsheet with their name, their website, their topic, and then what I call a check column to record whether or not I've contacted that person. And so this is a really useful tool, because you can sort of build up this, you know, I guess, this kind of database, right this list of things you want to do, and you can say, you know, if I see someone interesting, I'll add them to that spreadsheet. And then when I when I'm running low on future guests, I can just batch it up, and I can contact 10 people at a time. So this is what will get you to be consistent, and this is what will get you to be productive. This is what will get you to crank out lots of stuff and get ahead of time, because in this episode that we're doing right now, at the moment, we're doing a five day week podcast, and that means that I need to fill 23 slots for speakers. And there are some months when I only fill 18 or 20. What do I do? Then I fill in the gaps with what I'm doing right now. I just kind of sit down and talk about what's on my mind. And so by having a checklist for those things you do, it's really super duper powerful, because when you have a checklist, you can do things quickly, and when you do things quickly, you don't get bored and make sure that you finish those things and you have fun doing them, and it ensures that you do them the same way every time, and that you don't miss steps and that you don't do different things out of order, right? So just even as an example, think about posting a blog post, right? Do you use WordPress? It's a really great tool. My WordPress blog is at Robert plank.com that's what hosts the podcast. And so if you ever used WordPress, or any kind of blogging tool to journal online. What do you need to do? Well, you need to add a post. You need to decide on what the title of the post is. You need to decide on the categories, the date, the content of the post, the link, and then maybe you'll add like a cover or a graphic, but if you just kind of winged it. You might forget to add the graphic right, you might forget to put the post in a category. And so by having a checklist of just a handful of items, it makes sure that you just, every time you do it, it's done the right way every time. And as we're saying, even if you're the kind of person that says, Oh, I'm too good for that, I want to delegate. Well, do it yourself, get the system figured out, and then when you hand it off to someone, then it ensures that the person you're handing things off to does it right, and, most importantly, does it the way that you tell them to do it right. Because if you're if you give somebody instructions and you're vague about it, you say, oh, yeah, here's this blog post just, you know, put it on there. What they might just look at your instructions and and technically perform your instructions correctly, right? Because you didn't fill in all the gaps, you weren't detailed, you didn't tell them exactly what to click. You just said, here's some stuff, post it. So even though you might say, here's some stuff, post it, and then if you weren't happy with the results that came back, well, that's on you, because you didn't give accurate enough instruction. Just imagine if you said, you know, I want to cover from my book, and you went to a designer, and you said, Okay, here's the title. Go nuts. Have fun. And you came back and it was like a bright green color with, like, you know, someone else's picture on it, and you hated the font. You said, this sucks. What's wrong with the person? Well, you were not detailed enough. Likewise, imagine if you said, I have a book called The Checklist mindset, and I want it to be orange and white color, and I want it to have a picture of a clock. So here's a picture of a clock I found to either use that or find something similar. And then here's this other cover that I like. I like the font that this cover used. So make sure that you make this cover with a similar, similar font in the text and similar size of text, and then when it comes back, it might not be exactly what you had pictured in your head, but it might be good enough, or might be 90% on the way there, we just say, let me just make a little a few little tweaks. So think about this, the fat if you become faster at it yourself, or you hand it off to an employee, or you can fill in for that employee if need be. Or maybe you you hand it off to an employee and that employee leaves, or you have to fire them, someone else can pick right back off where you left off. So a really excellent book that I read years ago that has always sticks in my head is called the E Myth, which talks about the power of having a checklist. And he tells interesting stories about how he goes to a barber shop, and the first time, it's a great experience. Second time, not so great. Third time, it's okay. And he's like, sometimes they remember to refill my coffee, sometimes they remember to greet me, but sometimes they don't. And then, and then, later on, he goes to a hotel, and the hotel is fantastic. The hotel is the it the place is cleaned exactly the same, and the towels are in the same spot. Why? Because the barber shop did not use a checklist. They just winged it. So things were inconsistent, and then customers expectations were all over the place, and compared to the hotel where the housekeeping service used the same checklist to turn the bed, to empty the trash, to clean the toilet, to replace the towels, all those things. So every time it was reset to the exact same way before. So there's real power in having that checklist, and then there's also power in using this tool called Google sheets that we mentioned to have a spreadsheet to kind of fill up your pipeline and then track where you're at, and especially use these check mark columns. Because, like I said, I have a list of my the episodes of my podcast. You might be thinking, Well, hey, Robert Plank, are you an idiot? Why are you tracking your podcast episodes in a spreadsheet? Because you can just go to your your blog and you can see the episodes that you have on there, or you can schedule future episodes, like you just mentioned a few minutes ago, into the future, and you can just kind of see the past post, the scheduled post. Why would you waste your time with a spreadsheet? Well, here's why. Because, first of all, when people schedule for to interview on my podcast. I need to know some details about them, right? I need to know what time and date I need to call them. I need to know their Skype username so that when I it is time, I know who to call. I need to know their twitter handle that way, after I post the the podcast episode, I can go ahead and tweet them. And then there are these check columns where I need to know if I've interviewed the person or not. I need to know if we've posted that podcast episode or not. I need to know if I've emailed the person to say, thank you. Our episodes live. Here's the link. I need to know if I've tweeted them in addition and so all those different things. And if you try to track all that yourself, it would just be a huge hassle. But now you use Google Sheets. And Google Sheets again, it's a thing that you can build on your own and debug the system, and then when it comes time to hand it off to an employee or a virtual assistant, whatever you want to call it, combining a spreadsheet. Plus a checklist is super powerful, right? Because now you can say, Okay, well, what I want you to do is contact 10 people to to be on my show. And by the way, one thing I sort of skipped over as well as a template. So spreadsheet plus checklist plus template. So here's what I'm saying, is you say, All right, here's the checklist. Contact 10 people to be guests on my show. What I want you to do is do this research on them, and search around, check their LinkedIn, check their other appearances, and figure out the these four things to fill in the spreadsheet for outreach, to contact them, figure out their name, their website. What it is that their skill is where I saw them, like, what other show I saw them on? And then maybe find their email address or contact form, so you can say, All right, go and find 10 of those people. And then after you've done that, what I want you to do is, then I want you to send an email to each one of those 10 people, and I want you to use my template saying, hey, such and such. I saw you on this show, and you were talking about this topic, and I was hoping that you'd be on my show. And here's the the you know, the link for my show can This is, are you interested? Does this work? And then what I want you to do is, after you've plugged in that initial thing in the spreadsheet to the template, I want you to go back to the spreadsheet and and put an X in the table, cell, in the in the grid to show that you've reached out and contacted that person, maybe even put the date that you reached out to that person. So that way we are not contacting the same person multiple times. And then maybe even in the future, we can say, Oh yeah, this person we reached out to, they never responded. Let's reach out again, because it's been a couple of months. So just think about that. That is even though, I mean, it sounds almost like a kind of like really dumbed down, and it's a little more detail than just, hey, contact 10 people, but this way you'll know exactly what you're getting. And then, because that virtual assistant is going back to your spreadsheet, which, by the way, you shared with them. So you can make these spreadsheets online. And then you can say, I want to share this with this other person's email address. And then they can log in, and they can edit your your spreadsheet, so you can check their work. And you can say, I told them today to contact 10 people. Let me go and check, and I can see who they contacted. I can see they contacted them all today, and I can see even what their response was. And then when people respond, then you say, Well, let me reply with the link to schedule on my show. And then that is just sort of a machine that gets going. And when you're trying to scale your business, this is necessary, right? So if we have a five day a week podcast, I need 23 episodes per month, more or less, like I said. And so there's no way I'd be able to scale because sometimes if I want to plan a month or two ahead. Now we're talking, you know, 50, maybe even 100 guests are scheduled ahead into the future, months in advance and the and I like that because the pipeline is full. I still set my own hours, right? I don't, I don't let anyone schedule just any time I can get. And we get to that in the checklist mindset book about you can use an online appointment scheduler again to save yourself hiring a full time person. Use this sort of online calendar where you can say my office hours so to speak, or Monday and Friday for podcast interviews. So then, then those are just the days where I do those things. So that way all you have to worry about is to show up do your one little part, and the rest is either done by the tool or by the person that you delegated to. So this is the dream that a lot of people talk about, but But many people, they outsource the wrong things, or they don't know how to do it, because they don't use these sorts of efficiency tools like Google Sheets. Another great one is Gmail, because Gmail is, is the best email program out there. Again, it's web based, and you can, you can see all the emails right there, on there, and there are these things called conversations, so you can see the entire message thread, and I unpack a lot of that in the book checklist mindset.com but Gmail is a great tool. Google Calendar is a great tool, because your schedule is all up and running and online and and if you think about the sort of professions out there that make the most money, doctors, lawyers, etc. They I mean, therapists, any kind of sort of thing. They work based on that calendar, right? They say I have appointments to go to all store, but they are those appointments. And then I can just if I, if I outsource enough stuff, all I really have to worry about is this showing up to my to those appointments, and I just do the thing that I do best that I enjoy, and everyone else around me just does the things that I don't want to do, or things that just are not worth my time. So I'm telling you, there are so many cool possibilities in this day and age, if only you'd know that they exist. So Google Sheets, you can work on them from anywhere, including on an iPad or. Computer and let others fill these things in at the same time, so that way you can instead of dabbling, instead of just, you know, putting out one product a year or sending out one email a month, or putting out one podcast episode a week, I love the fact that a lot of people are just, they're concerned for me, if they're afraid that I have a podcast at this scale, because I'm not the only one who has a podcast that comes out every day, but it's it's very few people do this right? A lot of people have just a couple of podcast episodes and they give up, or they do it a little bit and then they don't take it seriously. If you want consistent money, consistent traffic, consistent customers, you have to be consistent as well. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you put in consistent hours, but your output, your marketing, your business, that part needs to be consistent. And you might be saying, oh, yeah, but you know, you say that, you know, you batch things up and you you show up and knock out five interviews on Monday and five interviews on Friday. How do you even do that? Well, the secret is the muscle, right? And so remember the first time you tied your shoes? It was a lot of work. Remember the first time you sent and remember the first time you discovered email? Because everyone has gone through that, whether it was in the late 90s or early 2000s or whenever at first email seemed super weird and it was awkward. And you were like, Huh, what is this? The first time you used Facebook? You were like, I don't even know what this thing is. How do you work this thing? As the song goes. So the first time, it was awkward. But the more you use it, you're like, Oh yeah, I know Facebook. And next thing you know, you're thumbing around your phone. You've been playing around Facebook for hours. Didn't even realize it. So you get your brain adapts very quickly over time, and so you build up that muscle, and it really is a muscle. And if you ever played any kind of sports or been in the bands, you know about this, right? If you take off, if, like I used to do, like Little League Baseball, I used to be in school bands, I used to be in Boy Scouts. I hated all that stuff. But if I didn't play all summer for the school band and I came back after summer, I would be terrible. My skill would have actually dropped when we had a baseball game coming up. We'd make sure to, you know, do all our like practices leading up to it. We do a practice game, so a full on game right before the real game. But imagine if we practice, practice practice, then took a month off, and next thing you know, it's time to play the other team, and now we're a month rusty, so you need that that muscle. And if you ever like, you know, written stuff consistently, you know that if you just do something over time, even a little bit a day, it becomes easier and easier and easier. Next thing you know, you look back and you say, whoa. I used to think that one podcast episode was tough. I used to think that talking for five minutes was tough. I just knocked out a 90 minute webinar, no sweat. So if you work that muscle, then you get better and better and faster, if things become more automatic, and then you don't have the time to remember how tired you are, right? And so this is what I want from you. I want I want you to use these tools, use a checklist, a spreadsheet, a template, and I go into details about all these things in the book. Again, checklist, mindset.com, so that way you can have all these cool tools working together. So another couple of examples is, one is a help desk. So this is something we learned the hard way. So you know what? What I did early on to make money was first I freelanced, right? So I'd get a clients, and they'd say, I want you to make a piece of software to do this. I'd come back and say, it costs you this much, it will take this number of days. I'd go ahead and do it. We'd go through the process that was very labor intensive. I was basically a glorified employee. But still, again, any amount of money is good, especially if you're trying to make ends meet, making extra money, if you have extra time in the day, I'm never against you making more money. All right? I'll never make fun of you making $10 never, ever, ever again. Robert at Robert plank.com so that's what happened at first. And then I realized, well, I need some of this passive income leverage, right? Because just working for this is not really paying the bills too much. So then I said, Okay, well, I have, I had now, I have these skills, right? And Think and Grow Rich. You'd call this specialized knowledge. I know how to program stuff. So I started experimenting with creating products on teaching people how to program stuff, or I take some of these software plugins I make and sell them just as is for $7 $47 you know, $97 197, higher and higher ticket stuff. And and this way I did the work once, and got paid over and over again, and then that that was okay to build a list. And then, and then I started doing higher ticket stuff. I started getting into more marketing things and teaching copywriting, time management selling classes. I partnered up with Mr. Lance thomashiro. His website is LT dot show great podcast over there, by the way. And then we kind of got to the point where we said, you know, we're making these high ticket sales. We're making this money, but we really want to scale that business. We really want to build that list. Yes. And then what we did one month was we said, Let's take one of our product, a new product that we were thinking about charging over $100 for, and let's make it $7 and let's put in an affiliate program on it. That way, when people buy from us, we say, okay, you just bought backup creator. And how would you like to turn around and promote backup creator? Because you're an internet marketer and and we want, you know, we want to give you something to promote and make money from with your list. So then those buyers of ours would then promote. And the result was, man, this is, this is going, thinking back in my memory, don't quote me on this, but it was, I believe, 1000 sales at $7 in 11 hours. And then we hit the 2000 sale mark after about 24 hours. And then we hit the 3000 sale mark after about, I think, 11 days or so. Don't quote me on that, but that's roughly the numbers. And again, those numbers might be crazy big or crazy small for you. And this was, I mean, 567, years ago. Now that we're that we're talking but this was a way that we built our list, right? And again, it all depends on your your mindset, your attitude. Because somebody might say, Oh, very funny. You had 3000 people buying, but then what? Well, that that's we've still made sales since then, but that was like the big initial push. And then someone else might say, oh, $3,000 times $7 minus PayPal fees, minus money you paid to affiliates. Well, haha, you didn't really make that much money. Well, yeah, yeah, we grew the business. And then someone else might say, Oh, well, you made 3000 sales. But you know what, if 10% of those buyers couldn't remember their password after paying. Now you have 300 people to emailing you asking for access. What if another 10% later on down the road want a refund? Now you have 300 refunds to give. What if 10% more people say but what if your software did this? Now you have 300 replies. Can you see that once you you start building a list, and every business needs a list, including yours. But can you see that once your list grows to a certain size, you say, well, now I can't really handle the customer support, right? If someone has a pre sale question, a post sale question, a refund request, a lost password request, or some kind of special case, how can we even handle that. Well, the answer, and I explained this in chapter five of the checklist, mindset, is have a help desk. And a help desk is basically a way where someone, instead of emailing you, they can open a ticket with your system. Actually they can go and open a ticket, or they can send a message to an email address and that will open a ticket and reply to them and say, Thanks for emailing us. We just automatically open a ticket for you. Here's the link where you can click and see all of our back and forth correspondence. And so you, I'm sure you've dealt with the help desk, desk ticket system if you dealt with a large company before, right? And like, if you ever, like, ordered something with E commerce, especially like, if you, you know, if you bought, like, you know, close online, or anything online, if you had to do with a return, you might have dealt with a help desk. Here's why a help desk is awesome, because it doesn't require you, because you can, again, at first, be the only operator of this help desk, and then as that help desk, you know, grows and scales, you can say, well, first of all, if all these people are opening tickets with me, I can respond to them, and then it will shoot a reply back to them via email and tell them what I said, and also give them the link back to our entire correspondence, so that way people aren't wondering if you got the message. They aren't saying, Oh, I sent that email. You never got it. And then, and now, you can also see, sort of the metrics, the stats, right? You can have a handle on it if you say, Oh, I'm so overworked. There's 300 people emailing me. If you look at that help desk, you say, oh, it's only really 10. So now you have that evidence to overcome the doubts. And then you can hire someone to jump in and answer some questions, and you can say, well, if they're if their question is this, here's a template to plug in to respond to them, and that might cut down drastically, drastically, the amount of replies that you have to do. And you might say, well, you know, I can give them the low hanging fruit. I can say, if they lost their password, what you're applying with if they want a refund. I can have a checklist to the Help Desk worker and tell them the steps to go about granting someone a refund, things like that. But what if someone wants to talk to me directly? What if someone has a special case? Well, I tell you in the book how someone can kick that request up the ladder to you. So a help desk is a really helpful tool to get this done. And then in the sixth chapter of the book, we talk about an appointment scheduler. So I said that, you know all these high paid professions, they value their time very well, right? Because the average person trades time for money, and they're completely happy with that, even though the person that's paying them is probably making more money than they're paying so basically, the employer is having passive income from this employee, and the employee is basically. Being paid for less than what they're worth. So sort of a scarier place to be, although everyone has to start somewhere. But then, if you're an entrepreneur, you should value your time more, and you should be looking into paying money for time, for added time, because if you you only have 24 hours in a day. But if you put, you know, 10 hours a day into your business at the maximum that maybe, if you think you can do and you hire someone else to put in another 10 hours now you're getting a 20 hours out of a day. If you have two employees, now you're getting 30 hours out of a day and so on. And so you need to have this sort of leverage. And by by just being able to show up to appointments, is so super duper powerful. And by using an online scheduler, you can say, well, if I want to have a coaching call. So we have some coaching clients where we meet them once a week. What do we do? We have what's called a and this might be sort of geeky, that's okay, though, a recurring meeting set in our webinar software, and then a recurring meeting set in our calendar that way, on every, you know, Tuesday of every week, at the certain arrange time to meet with a certain person. Then A pop up appears on my my computer. If I'm on it, I get an email message. I get a pop up my phone and my tablets, and I even can I look earlier in the day to see. Okay, what are my appointments today? So I use Google Calendar for that, and that's useful. But then sometimes people want need to schedule those office hours, right? Let's say you sold a product and you offered a coaching bonus with it. If you said, All right, I'm gonna sell a time management course. And as a bonus, you can meet with me for 30 minutes and we can chit chat about about you and your time management and stuff like that. And you might think that's scary, but again, always do what you are afraid to do. That's a quote by the author Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don't want to take credit for that. So anyway, you might say, well, I want to people to be able to schedule time with me, right coaching calls, but I don't want to have to do the back and forth. I don't want to have to say, All right, I can meet with you for 30 minutes and you say, oh, what day is good for you? Oh, sure, Wednesday. Okay, great. Wednesday. When 3pm Okay, is that Eastern time or is that Pacific time? Oh no, that's Central time. Okay, 3pm does that work for you? Oh no, it doesn't work for me. Okay, how about 5pm and so next thing you know, you've gone back and forth 10 different times and again. That doesn't scale, because, as I said, this show 23 guests per month. So imagine if I had to do 10 back and forth emails times 23 guests. Now that's 230 emails before I even got started, before I even met with with people. And then you might say, oh, we'll just hire someone full time to do that. Well, I don't want to hire someone full time if there's a tool that can do it more reliably and more consistently than a person who just kind of has to do all this back and forth hassle. So there's a tool that we use called Calendly that hooks into your Google Calendar, where you can basically have these office hours and people can schedule time blocks with you. And if you use Google Calendar for your appointments. Calendly will and all these online schedulers, they will adjust based on what appointments you already have, right? So if you say, I'm free on you know, Monday, from 9am to 1pm for interviews, and then you have an appointment at 10, then it will schedule around that, right? If you got to take the dog to the vet at 11, it will schedule around that sort of stuff. So that's a very useful tool. And then finally, in the last chapter of the checklist mindset, we show you how to combine all these things. And this is where it gets a little geeky, a little advanced, but if you can just kind of bear with me when I talk about it in the book, and by the way, it's a super inexpensive book. It's on Kindle, there's a print version, there's an audio book version on Audible. So all those different formats for the book, again, checklist, mindset.com, but when you combine those things, it ends up being super duper cool, because what we can do is we can use some of this, this free service. If you want to start out with it, it's free. If you want to kind of be more of a power user and have extra features, it's, I think, $15 a month. And what you can do is you can set you can send emails to people, or do it yourself at first, and then outsource it. And then you can say to people with if they say yes, you say, here's the link for you to choose a slot with me, and it'll list all these time. And they can kind of poke around in your account. Calendar, and they can schedule a time slot with you, and they can say, all right, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna schedule a slot with Robert Plank on January 5 at 11:30am and it shows the time slots available in their time zone, and then it keeps you seeing things in your time zone, so you kind of avoid that miscommunication. They schedule a time slot, and in the scheduler, you can basically survey them and ask them any, collect any information you need to know from them, get their name, their email address, and then, in my case, if I need their Skype username to call them for a podcast interview, if I need their bio to read, because, I mean, you've heard. Cast interviews. Right when you meet with someone, I like to introduce the person and say, Oh, here's such and such. They've written this book, they have this website, they've done this cool things. And then I kind of introduce them and then let them start talking, and that way we know right off the bat who we're talking to. So instead of me having to get all that information, I just have them fill it in for me. So that fills it in my calendar. But because this, this tool also schedules to my Google Calendar. They schedule an appointment, but I see it on my phone, laptop, computer, it adds them to my schedule for me, right? And then it also fills in a new row in this spreadsheet thing I was talking about, right? Remember how I said that I have a spreadsheet that lists the past interviews I've published and the future interviews coming up, and everyone's Skype username and everyone's bio and stuff like that. Well, it just adds it to the spreadsheet for me, and that saves me kind of copy and pasting. And then even after we meet record the interview, I publish it. I schedule it. It goes live. I post it to my podcast, my WordPress blog, I post this on my blog, and then it also goes out, and it puts it on all these different social media channels, without me having to do anything, and also without me having to hire an employee and make sure I paid them and ask them if they've done everything and double check their work. It just gets done because the machine do it. I'm telling you, I've rolled my eyes so many times when someone has outsourced something, so to speak, they've hired a virtual assistant. And I say, but you could have just used Google Calendar for that, or you could have just used an autoresponder for that, and it would have been more reliable than a person that you kind of had to double check their work and train them and get them up to speed and all that sort of sort of stuff. So with all these tools working together, I know that I kind of threw a lot in there, but with all these tools working together, you can have this whole crazy business. You can have this whole other, you know, stream of income without you having to do all the extra work of another stream of income. When we're talking about podcast outreach or podcast production, we can just kind of knock those things out, and then, you know, there's lots of just interesting things throughout the checklist, mindset book, because I hate whiteboards. It's just a reminder of things that you'll never get to I hate to do lists. I mean same thing. I prefer a thing called for daily tasks. And we explain that in the book, I prefer to use templates, and then we I can just knock things out quickly. I prefer to use a tool called contact monkey. I want to give that to you at in today's talk as a bonus, not give it to you, but tell you about it, contact monkey. And this is a browser plug, and I guess you'd call it for Google Chrome, and it allows you to see who's read the emails you sent. So if you find someone interesting for a podcast show, you shoot them an email. You say, Oh, I'd love to have you on the show. And maybe they open the the email, but they don't reply to you. You can see that maybe they open the email and they've opened it 10 times this week, still didn't reply to you. It'll show you how many times they've opened it. Maybe they've opened the email and they've clicked the link to go to your site and they still haven't responded. You can see that as well. So that's like some very interesting stuff. And by kind of knowing that, I mean knowing that all these tools are available for you is the first step, and you don't have to use them all right away. And, in fact, don't just do one at a time. That's why, in a checklist mindset, every chapter kind of builds upon the previous. So you can ramp up as you want. And I mean, heck, even if you're not technically inclined. I mean, I am, so I like doing this stuff, and I'd rather outsource the things that I'm not good at first, right? And then, if that's all filled up, then I'll outsource the things that I can do. But at first I'll just be like, there are things that I'm not good at all. I mean, I would love to, I've been looking for so long to hire someone to make some phone calls, and I was thinking about having my girlfriend do it, but I'm like, you know, maybe I'll hire someone who, like, knows what they're doing. No offense there, but just that, so that there's no, like, learning curve, there's no Growing Pains there and then, and then just look at what to streamline as well. So an example of that is with all this podcasting stuff at first, I used to transcribe each and every episode, and now I do it occasionally, but it just became a thing where it was part of my my checklist at first, and part of my spreadsheet as well. But then I started, after I did it, it was like, Ah, this is like a lot of work to like, even to hand it off to someone. And I would, actually, I would outsource that part, right? I would say, Here you go. I'll pay you 20 bucks for this 20 minute audio episode. Come back to me with the transcript, but then I have to clean it up, format it, post it. And again, you might say, Oh, well, hire someone to do it, yeah, but then I have to send it off to them and double check that and all that sort of stuff. And it was easier to just take that out, because what was that really adding? It wasn't making me a lot of extra money. It would allow me to, you know, throughout all this, I would tweak the templates. So for example, when somebody. Uh, schedules an appointment with me for a podcast episode. It sends out a thank you message when the appointments coming up. It sends reminder messages. And I would tweak things to tell them so that way, because, because when I met with people, they would say, like, oh, how long is this interview going to go for? Or is this like an audio or a video interview, or what are you going to talk about? So what I did over time was I just sort of refined that template. So once again, just to be clear, people would go to me, and they would schedule time to meet with me, and then as that appointment came closer and closer, say, like a day before, an hour before, 10 minutes before this system would email them saying, hey, remember, Robert Plank is going to call you. And I would just put these things. I would sort of tweak the template. I didn't want to give them pages and pages of information, but I would just say in that reminder, hey, we're going to meet in 10 minutes. I'll call you from this Skype username. Make sure to have Skype on, and it's 25 minutes more or less, and it's audio only, so don't worry about that, and that would save so much time, and it's gotten to the point now, remember how I said that I used to call people and have the sort of butterflies in the stomach? Well I would, and I don't, I don't think I have that anymore. I haven't really even noticed it, so maybe I have to look out for that next time. But I don't think I'm nervous anymore. But I'd meet with them, and we'd kind of have chit chat, and it takes like 10 minutes to get started. And I realized that first of all, I'd answer the common questions in the reminder email. And then I also sort of experimented in my head with different ways to get them to hop on. So I'm even trying to think of what I say, like, I call someone, and then we kind of say, hey, and we might kind of chit chat for like 10 seconds about me with the weather or something, but I said, I then I say, ready to jump in. And they're almost always ready to jump in. And then we just start going. And then that saves so much time on, like, just a kind of chit chat stuff. And if you want to chit chat afterwards, we can, but usually, I mean, if we chit chat for like a 30 seconds afterwards, I'm like, I usually say, okay, great, you know, I'll have this online on such and such date. I'll email you, I'll tweet you that way. You know what's on there? And then it's almost impossible for someone to carry on conversation with me after that point, off to the next call. And then, you know, there's even a lot of things about the podcast that don't really fit into what we're talking about here, like we use a tool to basically load up a queue of tweets and then we schedule those and we tag those. And I mean, in the future, I want to hire a graphics person to make a cover for each podcast episode. In the future, I want to hire someone to listen to or look at the blog posts I have and make these things called tweetables. So those are areas where that's really worthwhile hiring someone, but I don't not gonna hire someone to schedule people for me when a tool can do that right? And so, you know, there are things that make sense to outsource and things that are just plain stupid. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but I want you to have fun with your online business. I want you to look at, you know, don't just maintain look at how you can just knock things out of the park and even do something that scares you, whether that's a daily podcast, daily YouTube videos, webinars, but play around with what to do daily or weekly, and play around with, you know, what are those small tasks that maybe you'll do consistently, like, maybe you'll send out 10 quick feeler emails to future guests. Or maybe, if you get tired of that, go ahead and outsource that. And then think about, well, what are some things that you can batch up so maybe once a week, then you can go in and look at all those podcast interviews you recorded, and then, you know, put the music in, upload them all, schedule the blog post. And again, do that yourself at first, to get the bugs figured out of the system. And have that checklist where you say, Okay, you take this recording here, and you you drag the music in here, and you trim the signs there, and you add the commercial looking in there, and you save it in this way, and you upload it, and then you take that and here's how you make the blog post, and that way you're not stuck with those vague instructions. That way you don't just say, Oh, here you go. Here's the show. Just put it online somewhere. You say, No, click this, do that. That way you're happy with the result that comes back because you were detailed and they had clear, easy to follow instructions. So I mean a lot of stuff, but if any of this sounds good, even if, like, one little chunk sounds good, if you say, You know what, that spreadsheet thing, that sounds like a really good idea, that online scheduler thing, I want to do that, ramping up time management. It's all covered in checklist mindset.com, and at the moment, going to that URL, that website address, will take you right to the Amazon page. You're going to be shocked at the price, at how low it is for what you get. It's a great book, I think, and I recommend you get it in Kindle version paperback and audible version audio, but that's up to you anyway. Go to checklist. Mindset, calm, have fun in what you're doing. Do your best. Do your most, because you don't know how much time is left, and you don't know, you know what, what sort of things, unexpected things, are going to happen in the future. But I think that your future is right, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to be an average person, a mediocre person. You don't want to be worrying about, about, you know what could go wrong? I saw something the other day that said, Nothing beats anxiety better than inaction. So if you have that doubt, look back at the evidence of what you've done in the past. If you don't have a lot of evidence, create that evidence. Don't fall into the usual traps of procrastinating and then you're used to procrastinating. Don't fall under the traps of having a bad sort of circle of friends who drag you down. Have people that challenge you. Don't fall into the trap of just putting in the hours increase your output. That way you get more value out of the hour. And then you can start looking at big picture things such as what to outsource, or how far ahead in the timeline can I get? How far ahead Can I get in my emails, podcasts, blog posts, social media, content marketing, whatever it is. And let me know how that's going by emailing me at Robert, at Robert plank.com, and heck, if you have anything to talk about, even just say I bought your checklist mindset.com book, be in touch. I'll talk to you soon. I'm Robert Plank. Buy now and have yourself a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you very much. You.