Today, we are talking about productivity hacks for 2025. We are going to go to our community and get their top productivity hacks first, and then I'll share some of my thoughts because I've renewed my focus on productivity as I do regularly throughout the year, but the flip of a calendar page is as good a reason as any to renew my focus on productivity. All right, who would like to kick us off with a great productivity hack that they're using that's working really well for them? Who shall go first? Eamon Walsh, please.

All right, I'm actually gonna steal one from my partner in this because he obviously is a very good coach. So he's recording the calls, he's telling clients when they're doing the call or people they're doing the calls, and then he puts the whole text into a chat GPT and asks the chat, give me the five most powerful ideas or items that came out of that whole list, and then he takes that summary and sends it to the client as a follow-up on the call, which I thought is where I'd like to get to. I was bragging about him using Plod AI for recording calls, but he's obviously taking it about three steps further, so I was pretty impressed with that.

That and he's getting up at five o'clock in the morning. That's fantastic, I love that. I think that's a great idea.

I just took our phones, so we have the 305-692 number, which is our quote-unquote main number which Exit Success Lab inherited from my old company, and that's on the Inside BS Show website. I took that and forwarded it to our phone system that we're using now. I took my cell phone number and forwarded it to our phone system, and I did the same thing.

Our phone system now makes an announcement, press zero or press any key. It says press any key to speak to a live person. The reason I did that is for the future when we do have someone who's answering the phones, but then it's forwarded to my phone, and while it's being forwarded, it says this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.

So anyone who calls in now on my cell phone or on my work phone, it gets recorded, and it's automatically transcribed, and the transcript goes into a file, and then I can take that if I want, export it, and have action items from the call sent out. And what I've found for me is with client calls, the clients now know that their calls are being recorded. I can give them a copy if they want, but for me, saving that in a client folder that's in Evernote, I'm using Evernote, has been fantastic.

Then I will Google. So for example, I'm meeting with Bill on Wednesday, so I have the notes. The last time Bill and I met was in person.

What I did was I took notes by hand, scanned those notes into Evernote, and Evernote has optical character recognition, so I'm gonna go back and look at my last notes from Bill, and we're gonna sit down, and actually, we talked on the phone last week about something that we were talking about last time, so I have notes from that as well. So it can be one seamless conversation, which is far better for me as I'm getting older than relying on my memory. So the phone call thing is great.

I applaud you guys for doing that. Shondell just put in the chat that Fathom Notetaker is good. The challenge with Fathom Notetaker and with, so what I've found is I tried this whole Notetaker thing online.

It's impossible to get rid of it. Once you opt into it, like you can't have a, like for me to get rid of it in a meeting, it's easier to have the other meeting person boot it out than it is for me to turn it off. And the other thing is it embeds itself in everything, so then it can scan your emails and everything else.

I just want the meeting notes from the phone calls so that I can listen and I don't have to write. That's my main concern because I have this thing where I can't listen audibly and take notes. I miss, while I'm writing, I miss what the person is saying.

So if the person is doing like a stream of consciousness with me, I'm missing stuff while I'm writing down, so I don't have to write down. I can just listen, which is better for me. That was my main concern in doing that.

That's a good way to kick us off. Thank you, Eamon. Anybody else got something as good as that? Raise your hand.

A productivity hack for 2025? Nobody's gonna be more productive? I'll share a couple of things with you that I've done that are working for me. And again, your mileage may vary. First and foremost, so I was taught way, way back when everything should go on your calendar.

So if you're going to do something during the workday, you put it on your calendar, even if it takes five minutes or 10 minutes. For whatever reason, and I think in my mind it was guilt, I started and stopped doing it, I started and stopped doing it, so what I've decided to do, and I decided to do this back in the fourth quarter, and it's working really, really well, and I've done it now for over 90 days, so I think it's stuck. I put everything on my calendar in one color as a scheduled meeting, and then I put everything that I actually do in another color, and not like lawyers blocking it off in 0.1 six-minute increments to drive everybody absolutely nuts, but I do it in like half-hour increments.

So this is what I did for this last half hour, or this is what I did for this last hour, and at the end of the day, I can match up what I was supposed to do with what I actually did, and for my own purposes, it teaches me how to adjust my day, and I've learned not to schedule certain things at certain times. So for example, I am really, really good for whatever reason, the way my mind is, I'm really good at writing first thing in the morning. So for me, I schedule all my, like I get up, you guys famously know I get up really early, so 4.30, so 4.30 to five, I do my list for what I'm gonna do for the rest of the day.

I review what I did yesterday and make sure that there's nothing pending that I didn't do. I focus my calendar to make sure it's completely ready to go, and that's usually when I drink my first cup of coffee, and then from like 4.45 or five o'clock on, from five until seven, I spend those two hours just creating content, either writing or scripting out content that I'm going to deliver somehow, and I learned to do it at that time because that's when I found it was the easiest for whatever reason, I'm most awake, my brain works the best. Your mileage may vary.

If that doesn't work for you, then figure out a different time, but that's what the calendar thing has taught me. So the calendar process, the way I view it is it was a learning process for self-awareness more than for personal accountability. If things go off the rails and I need to adjust, I recognize that part of my ability to be effective is my ability to adjust to things as they come up or change on the fly.

The second thing about this that I will tell you, and then I think Ken has something that he wants to say, so I'm going to go to Ken after this. The second thing I will tell you about this is I've completely eliminated the guilt from requiring to respond to people. And this is something that you can all do a better job at.

Just because somebody texts you and you didn't ask them to text you, that doesn't mean that you owe them a response. I don't care who they are. If you didn't ask them to text you, you don't owe them a response.

If someone emails you and you didn't ask for that email, you don't owe them a response. Now, there is a common sense factor or filter that needs to be applied to this. Someone's a client of yours and they email you with an urgent question, makes sense that you would want to respond to them quickly.

If someone is a friend of yours and they text you in jail, please come, you might want to respond to that quickly, okay? But the thing to remember is no matter who it is, you choose whether or not to respond to people. So you don't have the right to get angry with someone for messaging you because it's your choice as to whether to respond to them or not. And I want you to think about that for a moment, okay? Because this is a huge thing for me personally, I'm sharing my own baggage, my own head trash now with you, right? I found myself getting angry with people for texting me.

And then I took a step back and I'm like, why am I angry with them? This is on me, I don't need to, I don't have to respond to these people, I could just ignore the text. So guess what? When I started giving myself permission to only respond to the people that I wanted to respond to, life got a lot better. I don't need to get mad at them, I should get mad at me because it's my response that I can't control what you guys do, I can't control what other people do, I can control what I do.

So I'm not gonna get mad. And if somebody texts me and I miss the text, I mean, honestly, that might not be the best way to send critical, important information. You might wanna just pick up the phone and give a phone call.

Because last time I checked, I answer, if I'm not on the phone and a client calls me, I answer the phone. I always, if my kids call, if Nicola calls, I always answer the phone if I'm not on the phone. If I'm on the phone, I can't answer the phone, but I call people back right away because they demonstrated urgency in calling me.

So for me, that's my preferred method of communication. A text, I might not see until the end of the day because of the way I have them set up now. So Sheldon, please enlighten us.

As a proud, high-functioning quasi-Luddite, my technological act is non, my productivity act is non-technological, but let me speak for the whole group here, be presumptuous, I shouldn't, but I know I'm right. Every one of us has aspects to our practice that distinguish us from the crowd, but it's become second nature to us. We're so used to doing it.

We no longer see it as a mark of distinction, separation. I think it's worthwhile spending as much time as you need to identify some aspect of your practice that makes you a best-in-class service provider and I just fell on it serendipitously this year. Cline pointed out some aspects of my practice that I've been doing forever that I just assumed everyone else is doing.

And in fact, they're not. So I think it's worth the time and effort to look at your practice and identify one or two things. There's certainly at least one that all of you do that others are not doing, and they're not doing as well as you.

They can separate you from the crowd. So I'm gonna point out to everyone, do you see what Sheldon just did there? Sheldon created what's called an open loop. So now most of you are probably thinking in your mind, well, Sheldon has something that differentiates him from everyone else.

And he just said that, he said three times that he has something that differentiates him from everyone else. I think I know what it is because I've been in many meetings with Sheldon. Sheldon, I need you to close the loop because I will not be able to continue moving forward until you tell us what is your competitive advantage that differentiates you from everyone else? What were you doing that the client pointed out that you didn't realize you were doing? This has to do with the, not my representing landlords, but representing tenants, retailers and restaurateurs.

I've always insisted on any deal that I do, that I have a pre-nup agreement on lease termination clauses for every one of my merchants and restaurant clients. And others either don't think about it, other brokers or attorneys don't think about it or think it's not achievable. You know, what landlord is gonna agree to a pre-nup, you know, fixed amount of termination, you haven't even opened up the goddamn store and now you're talking about the, well, of course, because I know my client has never closed the store.

I don't know you, Mr. Landlord, you've told me you have wonderful real estate. You don't need two years to release that store. And I don't know that you might not sell the property to some schmageggy who's gonna screw up the tenant mix and adversely impact my client.

So of course I wanna cover my downside. And then you kind of go from there. Anyway, I'm saying it's out there, it's achievable and what tenant wouldn't wanna have a pre-negotiated number that they know that they can walk away if they get in trouble? That's great.

I love it. Thank you, Sheldon, for sharing that with us. I love that you know what your competitive advantage is.

That's fantastic. Ken, did you have a productivity hack for us? Yeah, it's kind of building on what Eamon and Shondell or what they referenced here. I am now using Read.

I just started using it. And this is for note-taking on Teams calls and Zoom calls. I was on a conference call late last year.

Someone had it and they sent me the call transcript, the notes, and it was fantastic. It summarized the high points and action items and what have you. And so I just recently implemented it and I'm getting used to it.

I'm trying to get better at using it, but it's just tremendous because now I can be on calls, on my team's calls, on prospecting calls, and I don't have to take notes. And I know that the summary is gonna be fantastic and it connects with our HubSpot and it's a fantastic artificial intelligence tool. It's a great, great, great tool.

Yeah, I think it's read.ai. And I think that's the one that I use that followed me around everywhere. But it is highly effective. So, okay.

Read.ai. Let me give you a couple other things to think about, okay? One of the things that I've started doing and it's made me more productive overall is, and this is, so I used to take a book with me when I traveled and I would, like I would read during the time when I didn't have internet access on the plane or when I didn't fall asleep. And that would be really the only time that I've read. I started budgeting time in my daily schedule, like an hour a day, either split up into two 30-minute increments or one full hour a day, just for reading.

And two things that it's done is it forces me to grab information from a source that's not online that I wouldn't normally use. And the other thing it does is it's really made me, it's got me re-interested or reinvigorated for reading. And I started doing this in November and the way I found the time is I just replaced the time I would spend going through the news, okay? So I would spend like an hour in the morning going through Bloomberg and then the various news outlets with CNBC or Bloomberg TV on in the office.

I shut that off and now what I do is I just have a news aggregator. So Apple News aggregates the news from those sites and it gives me the top three stories and I skim them in 10 minutes and I dig into the stories I wanna read but I take that time and I've just gone through the business book list, like the best-selling business books and just picked one that interests me and gone through it and read it. And it's completely, it has improved my creativity and it's given me great insight into what people are reading.

And the more that I spend time with middle market CEOs and Harry, you can tell me if you found this too, they read the books that are on the business like bestseller lists. They will regularly read those and if you ask them how they find out about them, a lot of times they find out about them through podcasts or they find out about them through other people recommending them. So having spent time in Vistage with Vistage CEOs as a member and as a speaker now, I find that those folks are constantly reading and the books are being recommended by the people who are their Vistage chairs or by other speakers.

And there's many reasons to do this. I gave you a few already but the biggest one is because if your clients are reading these books, you should be able to at least know the title and what the book is about so that if a discussion comes up, you can ask a couple of questions about it. Harry, your thoughts on this.

Well, I completely agree with you, Dave. I have two things. One is our clients will ask us about books and ask us about the details.

So we do have to stay on our toes with respect to that. But if we can initiate a conversation about a new book and make a recommendation to them, it gets the same point across that we're actually interested in new things and we're interested in what might be good for them. So it's a win-win type situation.

But if you're not reading and not doing what you're doing and what we're doing, you're just not gonna be seen in the same light. Yeah, final point that I'll make related to productivity is, and this is a work in progress for me. I'm terrible at this.

I'm just admitting. I constantly overschedule myself. So there's just two, I got too much and then I fall victim to not being able to do appropriate follow-up from the meetings that I'm in.

And I'm saying this so that when I listen to it back, right? When I send this out to you and I listen to it back a month from now, I nod my head and I go, yeah, doofus, you're right. You are overscheduling yourself. It's better to have four meetings and be able to invest 35 minutes in the follow-up from each of those four meetings so that those relationships with those four people are better relationships than it is to have eight meetings and push the follow-up to the weekend and then the dog gets pancreatitis and you spend the weekend in the vets and you can't do the follow-up on the weekend.

So now you're a week behind in your follow-up, which means you're a week behind in your business development efforts or you're a week behind in getting that work product that you promised to the client because that week becomes a month really, really quickly. So note to self and everybody else is just a fly on the wall. Half the number of meetings with double the amount of follow-up is a great productivity hack for 2025.

Half the meetings, double the follow-up. That sounds like a pretty good podcast episode if I do say so myself. All right, that's it for our productivity portion of the meeting.

Thank you, folks.