Trevor Lohrbeer is a serial entrepreneur and Founder of Day Optimizer, a time management web app that helps you convert your daily to-do's into a daily schedule through a 3-step process so you can get more of the important stuff done.
Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:
The concept of grit
How to manage a remote workforce
How mergers and acquisitions work
Why is it harder to sell a company than to start one?
Some things you need to know when you’re thinking of acquiring or selling a business
The concept of done today vs. done forever
The difference between task management and time management
Day Optimizer’s 3-step process
Grit is perseverance through difficulty. A lot of people view failure as a stopping point, rather than a waypoint. And if you view failure as a stopping point, you give up because you're at the end. But if you view failure as a waypoint, where you just stop to rest and then keep living past it, it changes your perspective around failure. It's no longer this devastating thing. It's a learning opportunity.
Managing a Remote Workforce
When managing a remote team, you don't manage their time, you manage their output. Focus on what your team is producing. By shifting the mindset of how you approach managing employees in a remote work scenario, you're shifting into a more productive way to manage your employees.
Selling a Company vs. Starting a Company
It's easy when you're a visionary and you can start to build and create something. It’s fun! On the other hand, oftentimes, when people sell a company they're focused on their top-line revenue. They aren't thinking through the fact that it's your net revenue.
Done Today vs. Done Forever
If you're using a task list and you've got a bunch of tasks that you're going to do today, and you work on it, but you don't finish it, you can't actually click the checkmark on that task list. Because if you do, it disappears. So you just leave it on your task list. And whenever you go back and look at that task list, there's the item that you already worked on today that's still unchecked. And this keeps distracting you.
By clicking on Done Today, it gives you that dopamine hit by checking it off. It's not on your list anymore so it's no longer distracting. But it doesn't get lost because it appears as an option again the next day. Once you mark it Done Forever, it disappears from your task flow.
The Difference Between Task Management and Time Management
Task management is figuring out what you need to do. Time management is figuring out when to do it and how long to spend on it.
Day Optimizer’s 3-Step Process
Create your daily commitment list. Take the entire tasklist and copy over only the things that you're committing to do today. And if you want to subtest those out, you can do that too.
Allocate time to each of those. Include not just your tasks, but also all your appointments for the day – anything that takes up time, like eating lunch, exercise, meditation, etc. Just total everything up and find out how many hours you're allocating for each.
Go through your prioritization process. Now, you have to decide which of the two things do you need to do because you know you don't have enough time for both. This is where time management comes in.
