Would you like to completely eliminate the nuisance distractions that are keeping you from operating at maximum productivity? If you are, you've got to join us for this edition of The Daily Dose of Dave on the Inside BS Channel. Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth and today I'm sharing with you a controversial experiment that I am conducting right now as we speak.

In fact, I've been doing this for over a month and it's working so well that I felt like I had to share it with you in case you wanted to implement it in your day-to-day practices as far as work and communications goes. I know this is going to be controversial and I know you're going to tell me that you could never do this in your business or in your professional practice, but I am 100% certain that if you open your mind, you can come up with a way of implementing this system to change the way you work. Here's the problem I was facing.

My clients, my family members, my friends, and annoying pests had all been trained by me to reach out to me and expect a response almost instantaneously. Over the years, I have prided myself on being able to respond to people quickly, effectively, and efficiently, which means if I'm in the middle of writing, like I'm writing a book or I'm writing a blog post or I'm writing something that has to do with content creation for my community, and I get a text, I stop what I'm doing, I answer the text, and then I go back to writing. If I'm in a meeting and my phone is silenced and I get a text and the phone buzzes, I move away from the meeting and I respond to the text.

Even if it's a nuisance text or a text from a family member asking me to meet them later for dinner. These distractions are not only bad for your productivity, they're absolutely rude to the people who are in front of you and they are something that has come up in our lives, our work lives, over the last 15 years. Previously, text messages weren't pervasive and there was no way for you to get interrupted if you were in your office with the door closed, silently working.

If there wasn't email and there wasn't text messages, you wouldn't be interrupted if you didn't want to be interrupted. Now, we've conditioned our clients, our friends, our family members that they can interrupt us whenever they want and they can do that with three specific things, text messages, email, and phone calls. Well, I found a way to eliminate all three of those and I've been practicing it for a month and it has tripled my productivity and given me back my sanity in my work day.

Here's what I've done. I use an iPhone for my day-to-day telephone and mobile communications activities and this is part of the problem. Having easy access to information comes at a price and the price is text messages, email on my phone, everything that goes along with that.

I decided that I was going to eliminate email from my phone. So, that was the first step. I eliminated email from my phone except when I'm traveling on the road and I'll tell you how I handle those scenarios later.

But when I'm home and I'm not on the road, I don't have the email apps on my phone so I cannot get email on my phone. Step number two was to take my phone calls that were going into my cell phone and forward them to my main office line. My main office line rings to a number that has an AI assistant and it says press any key to speak to a live human.

They press a key, it's transferred to me and it announces that it's recording the call. Now this serves two purposes. I no longer get inbound phone calls on my cell phone.

All my cell phone calls go to my office AI assistant and when those calls are transferred to me they're immediately recorded and the recording announcement goes off so I don't have to take notes on phone calls that I receive anymore. And I got a second cell phone with a number that only my family members have and my business partner. My family members and my business partner are the only ones that have that phone, that cell phone number.

Otherwise my cell phone calls are forwarded to this second cell phone. This second cell phone is an old school flip phone and it does not have text on it, it does not have web access, it's only for phone calls. And that's how the calls are routed to me.

If someone calls my old cell phone number, my main cell phone number, goes through our AI switchboard if you will, an old-fashioned term, goes through our AI switchboard, there's an announcement made, the calls are recorded, it comes to me. If I want to be left alone, I turn off the flip phone. If I will accept the calls I turn on the flip phone and the calls come to me and they're automatically recorded so I have the AI automatically take notes.

It's a system that is working phenomenally well because all of my client calls are recorded now and the clients are notified that they're recorded. All my sales calls that come inbound are recorded and they're notified that they're recorded. This has been a life-changing alteration for me because I no longer get unsolicited text messages.

If I want text messages I can open up my Apple phone, my iPhone and see the text messages. But normally I don't even carry that with me so I don't get the text messages and I just delete them when I read them a week later. It's been great.

I don't get email on my phone, it's amazing. So I'm not interrupted in the office when I'm recording this show, when I'm doing my work, it's fantastic. Step two in this process after I removed email from my phone, step two is deleting the email apps from my computer.

Now this happened for me in a natural way. I had a computer crash and I had to get a new computer and when I re-established my new computer I just decided not to put the email apps on there. I can use the web portal to access all of my emails if I want to but I've created friction for doing that.

So in creating the friction for doing that I check my email less. In fact what I found is because my email is still on my laptop I will open my laptop and fire it up and use it just for email purposes. So I've decided to keep my laptop in a completely different room outside of my office and what I do is I check my laptop email once or twice a day and there's never anything in there that needs an urgent response.

I've just trained people that I will respond to them urgently. So when people ask something about what's going on, I sent you a text, didn't you get it? Or what's going on, I sent you an email, didn't you get it? Why did you wait three days to respond? I tell them that I'm streamlining my life, I'm simplifying things and I'm only checking email once or twice a day and I'm not checking text messages at all so never text message me again and all of my calls are now routed through my office so that everything is recorded and it has really cut down on the volume of nuisance text. I get no nuisance text now it's cut down on the volume of email because anything older than 24 hours I just go in and delete and I can skim everything else and there's never anything that's really urgent in there.

This has been a life-altering activity for me. So it's been going on for a month and all the people who would email me five or six times a day, all the people who would text message me five or six times a day, all the people who are calling me five or six times a day, they're just sending me one email now with an entire list of things they want to talk to me about and we schedule time to have one conversation instead of 30 email back and forths. The people who used to text me they don't even care anymore.

They stopped texting me. If I want to talk to them I call them and I can reach out and talk to them but nobody paid any attention to it after the first couple of times when they texted me and I didn't respond. The biggest reaction was from my kids who like to text me for everything.

Now they have to call me and they call my new cell phone. They don't call the old cell phone anymore. So when my phone rings, my cell phone rings, it's either somebody coming through the office line or it's something that came up as a result of someone having that number.

My family, my friends or my business partner. Well my friends don't even have it. My business partner and my family are the only people who have that number.

So this has been a dramatic shift in how we do business. Removing texts from my phone, forwarding my calls to a phone number that nobody knows and routing them through a call recording system so I don't have to take notes. I can just read the transcript of the calls, have AI summarize it if I want.

It's been amazing and then checking my email once or twice a day. Now you're thinking to yourself, okay Dave when do you check your email? Well I check my email at lunchtime. I check my email in the afternoon toward the end of the day.

Occasionally I'll check my email in the evening if I happen to be working late. I want to see if there's anything in there or if I'm expecting something from someone. I'll check my email.

Here's the bottom line on all this. When it comes to communication with you, you set the rules. The person who's trying to communicate with you doesn't set the rules.

Even if the client is paying you, you don't owe them anything other than what they're paying for. And if it specifically spells out that you're going to give them a 24-hour response in your contracts, I would change that verbiage because that's probably screwing up your work. There are clients out there that will work with you on your terms.

You just need to go find them. If you want to improve your productivity, get rid of your email. Check it once or twice a day.

Get it off of your main computer. And if you really want to improve your productivity, get rid of your text messages. Route all your phone calls through a central number that has a recording service attached to it.

And only take phone calls on your cell phone. No text messages, no whatsapp, no insta chat, nothing. Only phone calls.

It's been a godsend for me. I hope it works for you. Thanks for listening to the Daily Dose of Dave on the Inside BS channel.

We'll be back here again tomorrow. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.