Episode Transcript
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Carly Ries (00:00):
Ever sit down on a
Monday morning ready to crush
(00:02):
it, only to spend two hoursanswering emails and Slack
messages with nothing to showfor it? You're not alone. And in
this episode, we're breakingdown a simple mindset shift that
changed how we run our business,which is stop managing
communication and start managingcommitments. We'll walk you
through the three part structureevery commitment needs, why no
task should ever have twoowners, and how a sixty second
(00:25):
habit at the end of every callor email can save you hours of
follow-up. Whether you use afancy app or a stack of index
cards, this one's going tochange how you get things done.
You're listening to The AspiringSolopreneur, the podcast for
those in pursuit of a life firstbusiness. I'm Carly Ries, and my
cohost, Joe Rando, and I spendevery episode with solopreneurs
(00:47):
who are proving there's a betterway to run a one person business
and experts who are helping makeit happen. We like to say life
first, then business. So let'sget right to it. Okay, Joe.
So I know I am preaching to thechoir here. I'm going to paint
you a little picture. It'sMonday morning. You open your
(01:08):
laptop or you have a bigcomputer. You get a look at your
computer. You have thirty thirtyunread emails, eight Slack
messages, which to you is justlike the worst thing in the
world.
A couple of texts from people,and you start reading, and then
two hours later you've repliedto everything and you've
(01:28):
accomplished nothing. And maybeyou felt busy, but you can't
name a single thing that movedLifestarr or The Aspiring
Solopreneur podcast forward. Andwe've talked about this a lot,
and the real problem isn'treally volume because that can't
just be there. But let's sayyou're treating every message as
equally important because theyall live in the same stream. so
(01:52):
how many times have you rereadthe same email thread three or
four times just to remember whatyou agreed to do?
Joe Rando (01:58):
I mean, this is a
problem everybody has. and I
wanna say, I know we've beentalking about this for a while,
but I don't have this problemnow because I'm using the beta
version of the Lifestarr app,which has solved that problem.
Carly Ries (02:12):
Shameless plug.
Joe Rando (02:13):
Shameless plug. I'm
not even trying to plug, but I'm
just saying, but the scenarioyou just described of the eight
Slack messages and I mean, howmany unread emails? That was a
good day back in the day. Imean, my story is I got to work
on I think it was a Monday, gotin about 08:30, all these plans,
(02:34):
and I opened up my email, and Iwas responding and, going back
through it and getting repliesto my replies. And next thing,
it was 01:00 in the afternoonand nothing had moved.
And I said, never again. Andthat's when I went on a quest to
not have this be how my lifegoes. So, yeah, I get it. And
(02:56):
it's painful. I have done allthese things, way too many
times. And I just won't do itanymore. I have a a new way that
I like a lot better.
Carly Ries (03:06):
Well, so you
mentioned the app. And one of
the things that we've beentrying to figure out is what
really does make it different,that makes it so streamlined as
opposed to opening up. Andagain, is not an episode
promoting the app. It's a niceadd on to the episode. But we've
identified
Joe Rando (03:22):
Yeah. No. I mean, you
can do this other ways. And we
can talk about ways that anybodycan do this using their email
clients. But anyway, I didn'twant to interrupt you, I just
wanna say that, we don't have totalk about the app.
Carly Ries (03:37):
No, fair. But I
think it's one of the things
we've identified throughLifeStarr and through the app
and everything is the differencebetween communication versus
commitments. And we've reallystarted leaning into
commitments. So can you sharewith our audience the real
difference there and why it'ssuch a game changer to focus on
commitments versuscommunication?
Joe Rando (03:59):
I think what we do is
we use communication to make
commitments, but it's prettysoft. I mean, we send an email.
We send a Slack message. Yeah.I'll get that to you by Friday.
But where does it live?
You know, it lives in your head.It lives in a Slack thread that
by the time Friday comes istwo hundred forty lines above
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any place you're gonna scrollto. So, the problem is that, and
this is especially true. A lotof people use to do lists,
right? And that's great. Youmight say, I'll get that to you
by Friday. Goes on my to dolist.
Maybe you put it on yourcalendar. I don't love that
because I don't like usingcalendars for to do lists. But
when somebody says, Gee, I'mgonna get that to you by Friday.
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Where does that live? Well, thatlives in a commitment that they
made that's in an email, in aSlack message, in a text
message, that you are nowrelying on your memory and
pretty much trusting them tofollow through on that. And I
had the experience way too manytimes of that trust being
misplaced. people get busy. Iuse a to do list, they don't use
(05:03):
a to do list.
And the next thing, it was dueon Friday and Tuesday afternoon
I realized, hey, where is that?And now I've got a problem
because I needed that and twodays of work after it to do what
I was supposed to do forWednesday. And now I'm nudging
somebody saying, where is it?And just, everything falls
apart. So this idea of trackingcommitments is kind of saying,
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if somebody says they're gonnado something, well that thing
should live in a place that canbe tracked and accessed and
remembered and reminded. So youcan be reminded or they can be
reminded of it so that it's nota situation where somebody makes
a promise, forgets, and the nextthing you know, the project or
(05:47):
whatever it is you're working onis off the rails.
Carly Ries (05:49):
Joe, let's kind of
introduce what we think a
commitment is. it's like a threepart structure. You have the
what, which is the specificdeliverable or action. The who,
who owns it, you or your client.And the when, the deadline or
the time frame. Those are thethree parts, right?
Joe Rando (06:05):
And really, I'm glad
you brought that up. So the
issue here is when you talkabout making a commitment, don't
just say marketing project,Don't just say, new bike, say,
create a new marketing plan orfind a new bike that I can use
for my pan mass challenge. Youwanna be very specific when you
(06:31):
start talking about, trackingand recording commitments,
because if you aren't, if itisn't clear what is being
committed to, then they can beup for interpretation. And
that's another place wherethings can fall apart.
So I was expecting x. Somebodyelse thought it was y. They give
me y on time, but I'm stillnowhere because it's not what I
needed.
Carly Ries (06:52):
and I think to some
people that might sound really
formal, but you and I, we talkall the time, all day, every
day. we can kinda read eachother's minds to an extent at
some point. And so you think inthe terms of our situation, it
could be really easy for me tojust write something and I just
assume that you know what I'mtalking about. But we have blog
(07:13):
posts. We have the podcast. Wehave everything going on with
LifeStarr.
I mean, just so many balls aremoving at all times. so if I
want you to write a blog postand I just put life first
business, you'd be like, what amI doing? And in my mind I'm
like, well, he totallyunderstands what I'm saying
(07:33):
because we talked about it inour last status. But no, you
need that context becausethere's just always so much
going on.
It helps to narrow things downto help you remember what you're
supposed to be doing.
Joe Rando (07:43):
Right. So that's very
specific. And the next thing you
said is right on the money, andthis is something that I take
issue with some tools that areout there for helping people
manage their commitments ortheir to dos or the projects and
that kind of thing. That is thatevery commitment needs an owner.
And this ability to assign,usually it's a task in some kind
(08:06):
of a task management system, andto be able to assign it to more
than one person, That's justasking for failure because
nobody is on the hook for it. sothe way we do it is that, if I
come back and I assign somethingto you and say, Carly, I need
you to review this blog byWednesday. And then you say, I
(08:28):
need the link. I mean, that's alittle silly, but you know,
let's say that you said, well,you review it and say, I need
you to make these changes. Youcould then create a task back to
me, review the changes that Isuggested for your blog. And
that's on me, right?
And so you're really kind ofsaying somebody owns each
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commitment and it feels a littleformal, as you said, but it's
the only way that things don'tfall apart. so this idea of
being able to assign, to agreeon a commitment and have it be
in the hands of one person isreally crucial to successfully
running a business on commitmentmanagements.
Carly Ries (09:11):
Anyways, the more
and more you do this, it really
does become a habit. Again, itmight not be second nature at
first because you're not used toviewing things as commitments.
But every time you finish acall, close an email, wrap up a
meeting, whatever, just thinkwhat did I just commit to? And
then write it down immediately.And the thing is we haven't
talked about your commitments toyourself. It's not just
(09:33):
commitments to other people,it's commitments to yourself
too. So if you have to even goto the grocery store or
whatever, doesn't have to bework related, write it down
immediately in whatever systemyou're using. I mean, our
audience at this point, nobodyhas access to the LifeStarr app,
so you're not gonna be usingthat at the time of this
recording, and even the time ofthis release. But whatever
(09:55):
system you trust, whether it's anotebook, a spreadsheet,
whatever, the tool doesn'tmatter, but the habit does.
And if it is a commitment toyour clients, not just yourself,
train them to do it too. Becauseevery interaction with a short
recap, so here's what we agreedon, I'm doing x y and z, and
you're getting me z by Friday.Does that sound right? Getting
(10:19):
that verbal confirmation. Itjust takes sixty seconds to add
that into your conversation oryour email or whatever, but it
will reduce the overall timethat you allocate to this
commitment or to the task withinthe commitment by so much.
Joe Rando (10:34):
Yeah. And you as you
said, track those commitments
you're making to other people,track the ones that you're
making to yourself, but trackthe ones that other people are
making to you because those arethe ones where I usually saw the
most failure, Where all of asudden it was like somebody
promised to do something andthen didn't do it on time. And
then you're stuck, with theleftover of being, three days
(10:59):
late on what you were expectingto do your part of things. So it
just really is helpful.
And then, another aspect is thatyou really want to try to
classify these things in thecontext of what aspect your
business or your life. We usewhat we call tags, We just tag
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things and we all have our ownsystem of tags that we like to
use. But the concept of addingthat can help you to filter when
you're working on X, can be onlylooking at the items that match
X. You're not looking at buytoothpicks at the grocery store,
which might be something youwould be looking at when you
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were going grocery shopping.
So just having that concept ofseparating, and maybe even
keeping separate lists fordifferent aspects of your life
so that the grocery shoppingstuff isn't mixed in with your
work stuff, have those listsseparate. That can be a helpful
approach. I did all of this onpaper. I have this whole paper
thing that I used for a fewyears actually as I figured out
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how I wanted to be able to tomanage commitments, and I had
this my to do list. I had a listof things that I was waiting for
from other people.
This is all David Allen'sgetting things done, by the way.
And then I had a list ofprojects I was working on, and
I've had at one point, I usedthese cards that went inside of
(12:22):
a book, and each card was aproject. And I would write the
name of the project. I could seethat tucked into this thing,
it's like a bunch of cards. Ihave it somewhere here.
I'll find it sometime. And itwould say the name, and then I
could pull the card out and thenwrite what was the status of the
project was. You run out of roomsometimes, and then you'd have
to add another card. Some ofthem, were four thick in the
(12:42):
little pocket, but it was atleast organized, and I was
keeping track of these thingsand what I was expecting and
from other people and what I wascommitting to do. And then all
of that also my stuff went on ato do list or waiting for list,
etcetera.
So a little manual, ittle alittle time consuming, but way
better than the alternative.
Carly Ries (13:04):
Yeah. Of just
tracking every single
conversation communication you
Joe Rando (13:08):
In email threads, and
then text messages, Slack
messages, whoever, whatever elsemessaging app you're using, and
then really just try to keepkeep in your head and remember
it. And if you can do that,you're a genius. I am not. I
couldn't remember them.
Carly Ries (13:24):
You're a genius in
your own right.
Joe Rando (13:28):
In my own mind. treat
us in my own mind.
Carly Ries (13:30):
Exactly. Well,
listeners, thank you so much for
tuning in. As always, leave thatfive star review. It helps us
spread the word to othersolopreneurs who are trying to
lay lead a life first businessand get organized like we're
talking about today. Subscribeto our show on your favorite
podcast platform, includingYouTube.
And oh, and pause. I have apause from Joe.
Joe Rando (13:52):
I just wanna mention
one thing because it's official.
We are now in the top 2% of allpodcasts globally, and I'm very
excited for that. And thank youall for making that a reality
by, listening to the show.Please keep doing it. I just
wanted to throw that out therebecause I'm excited.
Carly Ries (14:12):
Thank you. Yes. I am
so excited, too. So glad you
said that. Share this episodewith friends, and we can get to
the top 1%, you guys. we willsee you next time on the
Aspiring Solopreneur. You may begoing solo in business, but that
doesn't mean you're alone. Infact, millions of people are in
your shoes, running a one personbusiness and figuring it out as
(14:33):
they go. So why not connect withthem and learn from each other's
successes and failures? AtLifeStarr, we're creating a one
person business community whereyou can go to meet and get
advice from other solopreneurs.
Be sure to join in onconversations at
community.lifestarr.com