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Effective Task Management
In this final episode of this season, Gemma Parker had a brief coaching with Zivi on what to do to manage her tasks effectively, including multitasking and task switching.
Zivi’s suggestion could be applicable for your business too, listen now!
Zivi and Gemma share important things about Search Engine Optimization that can help get more traffic to your website.
In this Episode we discuss:
- For some, task switching is not good but it depends on your mindset
- Multitasking is okay as long as you get the job done
- The problems with multitasking
- The book “The Gift of Done”
- From multitasking to single focus
- Some important pointers like pausing your inbox
- How to effectively use the scheduler or calendar
- How to be efficient while having family and business
- When to start hiring help
- There’s a TON of VALUE here so make sure you listen to this final episode!!
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Resources mentioned:
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Transcript:
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Open transcript
Take a pot full of magic at a pinch of business, a dash of marketing, and you get the nourishing and highly addictive magician business podcast. Here is your host Zivi Kivi,
Hello, magician business podcast. And today I’m going to talk with Gemma. Gemma is the CEO and owner and operator of crazy beans, a business that actually sells in the kid’s entertainment niche with a lot of events every month, constantly going, and you are operating from Horsham west Sussex in the UK. Hello, Gemma. It’s so nice to meet here in this interview slash coaching session slash hot seat hearing magician business podcast. And just wanted to start by saying that I really love the focus of your work on one hand, which you could see the details easily by going to your website and going through your Facebook. But at the same time, you are very lighthearted with the kids. You can see that on the videos and you are very regional. Like it’s not something that, you know, there’s other companies that are doing crazy beans, right?
Yes. It’s my creation and my crazy imagination.
And I love it. And it’s wonderful. And you are growing, which is a sign of your hard work and your dedication, and you are a mom of all in what would be the topic that we will try to tackle today.
I want to look at task switching. So time is very, very precious to me, obviously raising the two year olds on my own. So my office hours tend to happen on the couple of days. He’s a nursery when he’s gone to bed. So really like to look at improving my productivity. And I’m just exploring the difference for finding my differences between multitasking and task switching and that fine line between the two and whether or not multitasking is very productive. And it dilutes into task switching, which again, dilutes the tasks.
Cool. I want to ask a few questions first to try and understand some of the situations that you actually experience the task switching. And I also want to find out what type of an experience is it for you in terms of your emotions? Is it something that is frustrating? Is it something that is just, uh, losing track and losing focus? Where are you tell me, you know, what is the actual situation with task switching either by giving me an example or giving more details? Yeah.
So I think an example would be an evening when I’ve put our in down, I probably have about three or four hours to myself for my brain switches off. And it would be the first time that I’ve really sat down at my computer that day. It may be a mummy or in day when I’ve been full-time mum. So I have lots of things on my list to do I have my emails to respond to. I have inquiries that come through and then I have my business objectives that I want to achieve. And I have, I have a time table for each week and I populate that as I go along for each evening, but there are, there are many evenings where the inquiries and the conversations are coming from so many different places that I just feel like I have so many windows open on my computer and then I have a WhatsApp and a text conversation going, and then my phone rings and I will have lots of well useful conversations and bookings that come out of it.
But I have that sense of have I really done what I set out to achieve today? Have I really got everything done? Okay. I’ve got a couple of party bookings, but that took a couple of hours. And then this, this document here that I was working on still isn’t finished and that’s being sidelined again. And am I cramming too much into my evening? Do I need to accept that? I need to just focus on one thing at a time. Do I need to change the way that I communicate with my clients in the evening? Maybe I need to set a window aside, but yeah, there’ll be times when I have about four different conversations going on with clients because they’ll have WhatsApp, the text, the phone, and then the Facebook messenger and yeah. And those conversations can go on, um, with my, my team as well. My stuff would be texts me three questions and I’ll be talking about costume drops and schedules for the next week and ideas that they’ve got and where they are on their development. So just everything, everything seems to happen within those three to four hours. And I feel like at the end, have I, how much have I actually got done and how much of it was money tasks and just task switching as opposed to multitasking.
Got it. You’ve painted a very good picture. And I know you Jim, from the many meetings we had in the past. So I know that when you’re talking with those customers, you get results from doing that. You actually can portray the values of your company just by being authentic. And that is huge because you have very clear values. Just the reason. If you want to listen more to some of gems values, you can listen to her interview with the kids, with the podcast guys, because it’s actually quite interesting. I feed a picture of how you’re talking with like four customers in one in WhatsApp, in one on Facebook chat and one on maybe sending them a reply on emails. And then some of your subcontractors are contacting you with questions and everything in parallel. And, uh, I think, uh, many of us listening right now, we’ve been there.
I personally remember situations where I had six Facebook chats open at the same time. And you could actually see the little marking of someone is typing all in parallel and black, not sure where to go next. And how many books about, uh, this topic of productivity and multitasking and task switching. And one of those books is a book called getting things done. And the getting things done method is like very famous for a few dozens of years. The book was launched about two years ago with a vision that is a little bit up to date, because back on the original version, they will talking about stuff like the filing cabinets. There was an entire episode about how to manage your filing cabinet in a more efficient way. These days you can have the directory on your computer for that, but there’s all sorts of methods about task switching and multitasking that are universal.
And you can study that for sure. If you want to. Now, I want to save you some time and give you some, some pointers. And I want to just acknowledge that the official ward out Adele about task switching is that it’s a negative experience for you, and that is a negative experience for your productivity. And at the same time, I think multitasking is great. And this is something that if I can generalize for a few minutes, they do say, and I think it’s true that most of the men, most of the time are single focused and it’s hard for them to multitask. And that is something that we can argue about that, but I don’t want to. So just let’s assume that most of them and most of the time are single focus and most of the women, most of the time, um, with the ability to multitask and the ability to be open for opportunities, the ability to be open for details and without one goal or outcome that you’re trying to achieve.
And when you’re in that mindset of being open and being multitasking, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just the way that your brain is wired at a certain time. And sometimes it’s wired to hunt to get one results, to be productive. And sometimes it’s wired for being open for options. We all have that in certain, uh, degrees. And it’s actually wonderful to notice in what situation are you, what are you trying to do right now, as you kind of like walking in the meadow, looking for the berries for the best berries there in the middle and being very open to whisks and being very open to opportunities, or are you going on a specific task in mind, which is to finish the document for, I don’t know what, like a new show that you’re writing. So I think a new show has bits in it that you are open for, for things, but at a certain point, once you already finished with the brainstorming and you really want to sit down and write it, then it’s more of a hunting experience potentially where you just try to produce the result.
So the first thing I wanted to notice that although people are telling us that task switching takes a lot of time, they ask them certain points in your day or even certain tasks that you do where it’s totally okay. It’s totally okay to multitask. And it’s totally okay to be in the mindset of, I don’t know what this conversation will lead to. I don’t know yet, like a lot of time when I negotiate with my customers, the, I sometimes do it while in a meeting with a friend that is a performance so that they can watch and learn. And they tell me like, why are you even trying? They meet, they obviously are looking for the cheapest of the cheapest. They, they said, you know, what is the price on the first before saying, hello? What is the bias? So you know that they’re not like there’s not a good chance, but I will go into the full Monte of the negotiation without really, uh, trying to close the deal.
But just being open for opportunities, opportunities, like learning about my customer needs opportunities, like being able to create a course sale opportunities like booking being booked next year, or even just opportunities like walking on my muscles, like let’s totally create a situation where they went from thinking inside the head. I can afford X to thinking inside their head. I can forge two X or three X, even though I charge five X. So I’m not going to serve them. But I want to know that I can bring them to three X. I want to know what is the, the novels that I can bring them too, because that way I can build a better offering for my customers. I will sometimes be in a mode for multitasking, for like just big open for opportunities and just being open to ideas. But when there is a problem, the way I see those two problems in the situation, one of them is that if you feel bad about yourself, our brain generates feelings of shame.
When we look into the open document at the end of the day that didn’t get the job done, we didn’t get focused on staffing. This was important for us and we can, we feel fascinated and we actually feed ourselves with shame. That is one problem of the situation. So if you actually need something to be done and you can’t find the other time slots for that, when you’re focused, when you can decide that are no distractions and you’re focused on one thing, then let’s find some solution. And in general stop feeling shame because it’s starts to doubt. If you don’t feel shame and you are getting important stuff done, then really, I don’t mind task switching. You don’t need to worry about task switching only in two cases, either you feel shame about it, or if you are not getting the important stuff done in your business. So now let us use, like, do you have one of those problems? I think it’s probably the shame. So that’s a very interesting healing. Shame is different than healing. The problem of I’m not getting things done, honestly, sometimes
I think it’s just the attachment to wanting to do it all and to having done it all. But I also think it’s a combination. There probably are some evenings where it is a case of sewing down productivity. So it’s an amalgamation of
The voice inside our head that creates the shame is the voice of perfectionism. And by the way, the book finish is really good about that. How to fight perfectionism. And, uh, the book finish is, let me just fetch the name for my audible account. This is such a good book. I got to the recommendation about this book formula, Gina Martinez finish, give yourself the gift of done by a guy called John ACU, ACU F F a Q a goof UFF finish. It’s easy. You will find the book. It’s really easy. That book talks a lot about perfectionism and how it goes with us. Like it really messes us up and makes us be fascinated and feel shame. I find it that a lot of time healing shame is something that, uh, is related to being connected with people, talking with people about things that really heals them and being vulnerable heal shame.
And what I’m trying to create is a situation where there will not be a need to heal shame because we’ll just avoid it altogether. And to do that, just to have a good excuse for you to tell the voice of perfectionism, Hey, I got it covered. I have this system. So let’s talk about a few things that you can do to create a system where you will know that you, if you took action to increase your productivity and you give yourself permission to be multitasking, basically, whatever you need to heal yourself from shame, do that. If you need a big, a four piece of paper that says it’s okay to multitask, and you can either write my name underneath or write your own name underneath, and really it’s okay to multitask in what you’re doing is amazing. Like the results are for the fact that you are getting the results you are doing, the important stuff.
Let’s try and equip you with a few tools to tell the voice of perfectionism like, Hey, I actually not just okay, but I actually took action to make the most out of my two brains. Cause we all have those two brains, the multitasking plane at certain percentage of the time and the hunter brain. It’s certain percentage of the time, the single focus. So I want you to get the most out of each situation that you have. And by the way, it might be that you can synthesize the situation. So you might actually be creating all the conditions for you to go into single focus and going back form it for some people is not stuffing. They can actually do actively the, they need to go through a lot of transitioning time. And it’s almost like a real substance where if you find the moment that you are multitasking, then use it.
I think multitasking is great. I love running and listening to podcasts or audio books. And I love whenever I see him and put 24, they call it in many books about productivity, how to multiply. So multiplying the efficiency of stuffing by doing stuffing that is important for a few things. This is like the situation where your daily tasks help you with your weekly tasks or help you with your roles and stuff like that as we’ve discussed before. So here’s a few pointers point. Number one is to pause your inbox and pausing your inbox. Even if it’s just for 20 minutes, 20 or 30 minutes for, you know, the term Pomo doll in productivity, it means, uh, starting the 30 minutes clock to one thing, basically, and to be efficient. And then you can measure, you can take a break and pick another Pomodoro and stuff like that.
So just for one board or posing, and even if it’s just for 10 minutes, honestly, if you pause your inbox slash just turn your phone to airplane mode for 10 minutes, for 20 minutes during an evening like that, this gives you extra permission to tell your perfectionism voice. Look, I did my 20 minutes of single focus. Now I’m done with my 20 minutes and then going back to being who I am, and that is a person that can actually multitask today and efficiently. So that’s one really simple trick to help you fight shame and bit voice. I want though to also improve your productivity and not just help you fight those natural voices. So I’m going to give you a few additional options. The next one that is easy to do, and I love it so much. It’s so efficient personally for me is putting things into my schedule.
Let’s say I just right now realized I wanted to finish something and I was multitasking and I didn’t do that. Well, I’m going to take this task and choose the schedule where I’m going to walk on it. And you can decide if it’s on a day where you are in an office or in is taken care of for, or you can decide if it’s in a specific evening that you know, that you can walk on, you can decide in advanced event, if this is going to be a pause inbox type of meeting. So you can even mark it 9:30 PM, pause inbox for working on that specific thing that you needed to do. So, but just by putting that into your schedule by kind of forcing yourself to fast yourself, that you will do whatever it says in your schedule, but actually do it like practice.
Like if you don’t have the ability to do, I know you have that ability, but if you’re listening right now and you don’t have the ability to do something in your schedule, unless people are paying you for it, then Euston, we have a problem. Like literally this is one really important muscle to grow and to master the ability of, Hey, at this point in this date, in this time, I’m going to do this. And I’m not saying that it’s works 100% of the time, even if it works on the 80% of the time, or even if it works 50% of the time, it’s way, way better than not having any ability to schedule. So even if scheduling will sometimes not work and create more shame, don’t worry about it. Just again, I’ll give yourself permission to, because sometimes you put something into a schedule and you don’t do it again.
And you use another scheduling thingy. Another way to do the scheduling is specifically within your inbox. So if the task is an email, that is, you know, it’s a little bit complicated, you know, you need some focus, time to handle that email. And you know that this is not the time right now. There are ways to kind of remind yourself with that email specifically. And today you can actually do that for free in Gmail. I used to, you know, you walk with, uh, tools like boomerang Mixmax. Both of them have remind me feature, which is really easy, but these days g-mail just came out when we’re recording this not so long ago, they came out with the feature of sent an email later. So when you’re opening up an email and you go into, instead of sending it, you have three dots on the app.
There’s an actual option for schedule sent schedules and that’s how they call it. So I might find an email of a big task finish up the day faster. I did, I didn’t do that email. And instead of keeping it there, adding shame to my life in my inbox, I will schedule Sandy so that it’s gone from my inbox and go back to my inbox on the day that I choose to confront that email. So scheduling either from within the inbox or forum, just, you know, with your calendar is another tool for you on top of pausing the inbox to increase the feeling of control and to actually increase the control.
I want to give you one, one additional idea. This one is a little bit more ballsy, a little bit more harder to implement. It will require some, some money too, but I think what your going to in your journey, Gemma, I think you should think about that additional layer very seriously. And I think you’re ready for this one. I think you definitely need to be efficient. You, my idea of actively needs to be efficient. Why, well, you have a kid that’s you organizing and you have a business that you’re going, and that business is feeding families, not just the own. So you just have to just have to be very efficient. And that is why I think it’s time for you to consider some personal help in the level of like what is known as a virtual assistant. And I want to portray a picture for you.
Tell me if that makes any sense, because maybe it doesn’t because of the details and the details matter. So I want to try, according to the information that I have to paint your picture, you mentioned this it’s 9:30 PM and only is by now, way asleep. And your schedule tells you that it’s time to do the inquiries and you open up your inbox and there’s an email waiting for you in your inbox. And the email sent to you by your personal visual assistants, let’s call her Jane. So Jane actually prior to 9:30 PM, your time just a few minutes ago, finished on mapping, going through all of your Facebook chats, all of your emails that are of a certain type in summarized for you with all the links inside here, out of the open leads of today’s inquiries. And if there’s anything there that is totally easy, you already have a link for the, for the water document that you need, or the extra link for like she already tried to save you even a little bit more time. And everything is in one clear email that tells you here’s what’s open right now about inquiries. Will that help you? Yeah,
Just that just feels like such a light evening compared to usual, that sounds glorious.
He’s basically trying to put some order into the craziness of running a business because you need to go through the chats and then you need to go through your emails and then you need to remember that one person that was texting you instead of WhatsApp. And these days, you know, with technology like 99% of those inputs are easily accessible for a virtual assistant that actually leaves in a different country. And that actually costs very little amount of money. This is something that is the future of your life would be to get some help in a level that is totally tailored to your needs. And it can be someone that you start where you pay them by the hour at the beginning through a website called it her fiverr or upwork.com Fiverr, you will find people that you will be a little bit fascinated with the communication levels with them Upwork. I think you will find more easily.
Some of that is a little bit better level of English and stuff like that. But as this will go up a bit, so if you can start with five bucks an hour on five, you can go up to up walk to anything between 10 to 15 bucks an hour, and you might go to something like hire your mum.com AU hire my mom.com. I don’t remember if it’s hire my mom or hire your, and it’s a website in America. Well, it’s basically all the freelancers are moms and that is cute. I did find on some occasions, people there are higher quality in terms of understanding the English language, but in terms of really wanting to serve you for a very, very reasonable buys. I love, uh, working with, uh, virtual assistants that are from the Philippines.
I would just say this it’s time to read the book, the visual stuff, find out that’s the website for actually hiring people through them, which I use the service. The book is virtual freedom. It’s by Chris Docker, virtual freedom. In that book, it goes through the differences between filtering assistants. That’s does, you know, what can he do for you? It really does help you build a list of things that they might do, because what I created for you, this, this, uh, wonderful, uh, picture of someone is helping you manage your life a bit. Well, they can do lots of stuff like that. Sometimes I will be in a mode where I will not want to think about something specific, even though it will take me two minutes to do it two minutes. Usually I try to go for start. It will take me more than two minutes, but even if it’s just two minutes, but right now I don’t want to stop what I’m doing.
I don’t want to remember just to go through the first station of remembering, where do they put the password? They put the thinking, and just those two minutes, I know that my assistant already knows how to do that for me. And I think on the forward button takes only six seconds, even if it’s just to keep me mentally in productiveness mode so that I know I didn’t deal with all the same repetitive tasks that I can teach. And I already thought someone I can focus on the stuff that matters most now, actually my experience with my virtual assistant is, is that they can actually do complicated stuff too. Like you would be amazed at how those people can totally understand where you’re coming from. They understand they need to save you time and you can literally get to the point where you’re telling them, okay, send Jenny the email about the show and they thought and understand everything you they need to do.
And you tell them, okay, then contact the support of the hosting company and walk with them to fix this. They can literally take something off your plate, off your table and run with it. And sometimes even while you sleep, if you go through the full nine yards of getting hiring a virtual assistant, we’re talking about the person that will be paid for like a full-time job, anything between 500 to 600, usually 600 us dollars for a full-time virtual assistant in the Philippines. Now can you afford it or not? And all those questions that people listen to these sites now might have in their mind, well, you don’t need to start with a full timer. You can start with someone that is a part-timer and you can start with someone that is just an hour a day. And the bigger picture is that once you start, you will see growth in your business and you will have the ability to say, well, I can afford two hours a day.
I can afford four hours a day. I can afford the full line time just by noticing how productive you become by letting go of the low end tasks that anyone can do for you. And it’s just a matter of trusting your business and doubling down on your ability to grow. And I think you’re the definitely, I, I just hired two additional visual assistants that have the skills of graphic design through a, that, um, agency, virtual staff finder.com. And that is on top of my full-time from them. So I can tell you that, uh, it’s a wonderful experience, please. All those fields about how will I find it, this they disappear. Once you start to actually get the results.
If you don’t want to go into like 300 bucks a month, 600 bucks a month, you want to start careful. You can start with one hour here. One hour there. When I really started delegation, I actually started with a personal assistant, physically from my village that will work for four hours a week just for hours. I think that honestly, anyone can afford four hours a week. If you cannot afford four hours a week, let me tell you, what is your problem? You’re not a member of the kids at attain academy. That’s your popper go and be available for the kids in the day. And I got to me, you will learn so much and grow your business, and you will be able to afford four hours every week of a personal system. For example, through hire your mom, it will cost you 80 bucks a week, and those four hours will change your life.
They will change your productivity. They will change what you focus on. It will force you to give that person more tasks, because you want them to be busy in those four hours. So no matter where you start, and I know, you know, you have support doctors, you might be already getting some help, but specifically with the multitasking question is where we started this. I think that, um, it can help you go into your scheduled time for inquiries or scheduled time for some of those multitasking tasks like inquiries. Um, you go into it in a more focused way. You will say, okay, I have one hour and that’s it. Because after that one hour, I already scheduled my paused inbox topic or for the day, which is writing a new show and stuff like that. Like you do such painting stuff. Even if you just create costumes or choose costumes, I don’t know how you do that magic trick of just every single costume of your crazy beans is wonderful.
It’s just amazing. That’s magical. So instead of focusing on two hours with inquiries, I really hope that you can, maybe if people were helping you maybe only do one hour and maybe, you know, and give yourself permission to make that one hour into 90 minutes, because you’re also awesome with that. And you’re closing deals with that. You didn’t finish staffing that day. Fine. You will use data tactics like scheduling or pause your inbox again, or whatnot, or even delegation of certain of the tasks that you was hoping to do by yourself. And eventually decided to give it to your visual system. Either way you could, uh, enjoy the help. And if you need some help with like actually doing the first app work form and tying that as a starting point or interviewing and all that, I know you have experience with, uh, HR and hiring, but if you want some help with that, just let me know. We’ll we’ll tackle that in another meeting. Any questions?
No, I don’t think so. I think that’s three, you know, I ha the word virtual assistant has been ringing around my head for a little while anyway. Nice to hear someone else say it. And the, to just really explain all of the benefits and the perks, and it really resonated you talking about the costume as well. Cause there’s so much I want to do with my costumes. There’s so much they need to do with my costumes. And I love doing them. That’s where, because I am a creative, that’s why I’m really happy when I’m glittering a new pair of wings and I’m styling in the way it gets, it would be so lovely to have the time to invest more into that and possibly create a couple more characters. What it is is because I’ve got so much to do. I probably feel like I’m not getting it done, but really I just probably just have too much to get done. And it can just feel a little bit noisy when I’m trying to put bubbles in the air.
If you read the book, the virtual freedom book, it will help you mind map all the things that can be outsourced in your specific business. Before I hired my first full-time helper, visual assistant, I had such a big list already made of projects that I didn’t get to and knew that I can delegate ongoing tasks and so on and so forth. The list was so big that eventually through experience, I found out that it was bigger than a full-timer and that I need to prioritize some of them. And that literally some of the tasks there these days, I don’t think I need them anymore, but it made me feel safe to make the decision.
So reading the book is a good first step at the mature thing. We’re being responsible reading, doing some research first and then from there on, uh, there’s all those other resources in that book, everything is mentioned as well, like the option for fiber or the option for Upwork. Everything is mentioned as well, just in case in the show notes here in magician business.com. We’ll put all the links when this session slash interview goes live. And that way, if you’re watching, if you’re listening to this driving on your way to your corporate gig, then you can take a look later on magician business.com. I have to ask you, Gemma, what is your number one takeaway from the, and I mean specifically, what will be the action item that you do in the next 48 hours?
I’m going to get that book. I’m going to come over to that book. That’s going to be the first thing I do.
Awesome. And I’m going to make
Things that I can delegate.
You cannot delegate the creative stuff, unfortunately yet. And you also enjoy it so much. If you try to delegate the costumes, it won’t work honestly, but therapy
As well. I love, I love doing my questions
And there’s so many other things that you can delegate. Cool. I think this was really valuable. I thank you for, uh, being here and sharing this dilemma with me. I really want to like read for everyone listening. Now. There’s nothing wrong with multitasking, as long as that’s what the state of what you’re trying to accomplish at the moment. If you are trying to accomplish a specific task, then multitasking is going to create a diversion for you. And then you might use one of the tactics. We talked today about pausing your inbox. It does a lot of calm extensions for that. We talked about scheduling your tasks to feel better about them sending an email in, into the future for yourself, which is a free feature on Gmail. And we talked about virtual assistance. Thank you so much for listening for yet another episode of the magician business podcast and see you next week. Thank you so much, Gemma. Thanks for having me.
Thanks again, Zivi Kivi
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