Staying Focused Through Constant Interruptions with Amanda Natividad — Part 1

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You have so much to do at any given time, but always seem to do the things that are making an impact. How do you decide what gets your attention and what you prioritize?
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I do think a little bit of that. I think it's the Eisenhower matrix of like what's important and urgent or what's urgent but not important and what's important but not urgent. I think about that. So if I'm in a some kind of time crunch where I need to prioritize things.
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Hey there, billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire. Not in money, but in the real measure of wealth, time. That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments. The 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
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You are and as an outsider I can say that sometimes I think it's easier to see as an outsider than as the person in it. But truly the amount of content you like, even just the context shifting alone that I've seen the content you produce for yourself for SparkToro, for your book, for your podcast, like I don't know how you do all of that and it has to be both hyper efficiency in the task, but also I think how you keep things organized or why. And I did just hit record because I feel like sometimes we are more authentic before we think we're starting.
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I like that.
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Yeah, I'm into it.
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Yeah.
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I mean, let's unpack it all. I. I don't know if, if you're releasing video of this podcast, which you know, cool people will see behind me it's chaos. There is behind my one my shoulders you can see a Nintendo Switch charging barely notice. I will note it is my Nintendo Switch. So somehow I for you.
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Yeah. And to me it does not look like chaos at all. Actually this looks like a background people might choose to have it look fake and real because it looks like a tidy desk on one end, a tidy couch with just the Nintendo Switch I didn't notice and a tidy bookshelf and tidy closet without stuff strewn on the floor, which is what my daughter's room looks like and like what half of my room looks like. And so I think part of what you Just hit on is the standards you set for yourselves and what is non negotiable for a lot of us. I think the expectation, oh, I can't get that done. There's things that are implicit in that assumption that I can't get that done and clean the house and cook dinner and do things that feel non negotiable. But if you can let that go and say it doesn't have to be super tidy for me to do the more important things, I think that's a big part of decision making. But you also do a lot in a given day. And so how you stay focused, any systems or tools you swear by, I would like to know very personally.
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Yeah. So I'm happy, I'm excited to get into this. So following on to that thread of my background. Right. You also see there is a teal box on the other side that is a catch all box of all the toys that were strewn on the ground behind me. I just scoop them up and put them in the box.
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Yeah, you're meeting parking lot of real life. Yeah, that's great.
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Oh, exactly. And because this isn't really the kids playroom, it's just kind of like where they go. Yeah, because the Legos are here. Because the Legos are more, you know, breakable or whatever. So these kind of hide in here. So when the kids eventually do come in, they usually mess everything up. So I've decided to be like, you know, I'm not going to clean up the Legos, I'm just going to scoop them up into this box and just throw them in and like they break. I don't care. It's not my problem. So that's one. I think this is a little bit of like figuring out the things that you want to let that you're willing to let go of.
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Yeah, willing to let go of. And the work equivalent I would call it as an acceptable miss. So for I have a almost one year old and she will often I'll put all the books away, she'll tear them out, I'll pull them. And I just thought, you know what? Yeah, that's right. They do live here. These books live in this pile on the floor now they don't live in the bookshelf. And that's okay because what looks to me like the aesthetic home for things is not how she interacts with what is really hers. So letting that go has been helpful in work. Right. The acceptable myth that I use in go to market is if we're trying to launch something quickly, we could Be okay with compromising on the thoroughness of the research or how many assets are launching. And I think you have the best calibration of what'll move the needle. So you have so much to do at any given time, but always seem to do the things that are making an impact of building a personal brand with which a lot of people put a lot of stake into building a marketing function, which is a lot smaller than I realized. How do you decide what gets your attention and what you prioritize?
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Oh, that's interesting. So, you know, I do think a little bit of that. I think it's the Eisenhower matrix, right, of like what's important and urgent or what's urgent but not important and what's important but not urgent. I think about that. So if I'm in a some kind of time crunch where I need to prioritize things, then I think about, okay, what is important and urgent? What is the order in which all these things need to get done? And if it takes having to look at my calendar and seeing, okay, this like tomorrow, I am leading a webinar for zero Click Summer School, which is a webinar series that my co author of our forthcoming book zero Click Marketing, my co author Ran Fishkin and I are putting together. So tomorrow, that is at 11am I know that today the most important urgent thing for me to do is to finish building that deck. So if nothing else gets done, that's the one thing that has to get done.
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And that's brilliant. And that's just in time marketing in this capacity. But I think there's a lot of pre planning. I just talked to Fran Hauser who wrote the myth of a nice girl that you might know, and she has a new book coming out that we'll talk about in a future episode. But she talks about padding, how much padding goes into what feels like a responsible amount of time. And I'd say most webinars I've ever worked on, if the deck wasn't finalized two weeks out, we would say we're behind. But often it changes the last minute anyway. We have that focus or pressure or new information that makes it more relevant. So the fact that you've figured out what time it actually takes you to get things done I think is already a productivity tip. But even the transitions and the context shifting, I'd love to hear how you think about that. So you're going from your job to this podcast recording to building that deck in the transitions in the context shifting is where we lose a lot of Focus and attention. And our minds are wired to be especially creative. So how do you think about keeping your attention where it belongs?
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You know, sometimes I have to just force it. And by that I mean, like, my mind starts to wander. Maybe I'm thinking about, oh, my older kid is starting school on Wednesday. I have to make sure he has what he needs instead of, this is hard. So this is also a little bit easier said than done. My instinct would be, oh, let me open up Amazon in another tab and search for the thing he needs. But I, I really, really tried. I fight that urge by instead just writing down like, nope, we're parking that for later. Whether that means writing. I have the keyboard mat on my desk is like a dry erase thing. So I might grab a marker and just like write it on my desk or a pen on my notebook or a note, sticky note on my computer. Like, whatever is most accessible in that moment, I write it there. And I'm like, nope, we're not doing that. We are doing that after I finish this thing. And then if my mind keeps wandering, I just, I keep dumping it into this, into this file, so to speak, and being like, nope, nope, we're not doing that. We're not doing that. And then if I have to, I'll even give myself a reward for, for doing the task. So actually today my good friend Sarah Stockdale sent me a dozen Bundt little Bundt cakes. And so after this recording, I'm gonna go downstairs and have a bunt cake.
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That's awesome. Yeah, that's similar to my approach too. I have a note on my computer just called admin. And I do find that when I'm not thinking about things is when the admin tasks creep up. And often they are quick, they take less than two minutes. So they feel like I should do them right now to not think about it twice. And so there's a little bit of this paradox of deciding, is it a one touch task that is so small or does it group in and in that admin note Doc, sometimes it'll carry for three days. It rarely goes over four. But certain things like phone calls, call back the pediatrician, things that have to be a physical phone call, call the gardener, do something like that. Those will group together because then I can do that in a single shift. Or if it's an admin, like respond to this person, thank this person for the bundt cakes that can go in the online shopping bucket. But I do find that so especially when you have a few minutes between meetings, it's really Tempting to just check it off and say, yep, I'm done with that, with the Costco order, etc. But if it is going to be that context shift, it really is probably a better way to focus between the next meeting, summarizing the last one with a single word, thinking about what's coming ahead, just even just looking out the window for 20 seconds. It's good for your eyes. Yeah, yeah.
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This, this is reminding me of like best practices for how we're supposed to or how we should process email. I think there are, you know, there are a lot of, I mean you would know better than anyone. There are lots of different schools of thought for how to manage your inbox. Right? There's like trying to bucket them by topic or by task or by duration of time that you'll spend answering it. But then one thing my husband told me, and he was citing something else that I can't remember was he was like, I think he's like, I think it's a waste of time to try to navigate all that. He's like, it's fastest to just go top to bottom, like just, just do each one. And I think there's something to that because if you're trying to do that cognitive task first of essentially pre qualifying each email for the task at hand, then you end up using a lot of your mental energy on thinking about email versus processing the email. So the rule that I have for myself is if it's immediately obvious what kind of email it is, then fine, cool. Like I will, I'll star those or drop them into a folder and go back to those later. In one go I will. But if not, if it's just, oh, I have 30 emails to get to, I don't know where to start. I do. Just start, well, we're starting at the top and we're just going to work our way down. And that, yeah, that for me is just, that's what helps. Right now I have a talk. I spoke at a, at a conference called Microconf earlier this year and they released my session on YouTube, which is great. So recently I've been getting a lot of emails about that talk. Like, hey, can you share your slides? But. And for all of those, like in the subject line or somewhere in the preview in the Gmail summary, it says microcom. Right. So that for me is like, okay, that's obvious what that is. So I'm going to star all of those, get to those, you know, at 3 o' clock today or whatever time it is. And then before that I'm going to do the other emails first. So that is an example of like, if it's really easy for you to file away certain types of emails, cool. If not, just get through it.
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Yeah, yeah. Because very few emails actually require the thought to think out and reply. If you have a dedicated admin block. 230 to 3 is my 1 of my dedicated admin blocks. Tackling email top to bottom would work. Occasionally one needs more thought or more detail, etc. And we can come back to it. But how do you think about what to do yourself manually like that and what to use AI or another tool for? Oh, interesting.
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If I don't know if it's a cold email, that it's a cold email that someone is asking me to do something or consider something and I have no connection to the person, I'm more likely to use AI just in the
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sense that like I've even been sorting it. So like MicroCon seemed like you could have a Gmail plugin with Claude, for example, to group anything with that keyword and then maybe, maybe you don't get enough to justify it. But it seems like if there's these recurring boring tasks, you could potentially automate some of that bucketing if it seems worth your while.
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Yeah, I probably could. That is a good idea. I mean, what I had been doing was I type out just a quick, quick two lines of text of like, here's a link to the slides and something else. But then for each one I do, I copy and paste that. But then for each one I do have like my own actual message, just depending on what the person has said. But for me it's more of that doesn't take a lot of time and effort to me to reply to a, to a person about a thing that I'm already working on. For me, what is more the. What. What is more of the. The bottleneck is when I get requests for things I don't want to do. So maybe it's. And that usually is in some kind of bucket of someone, a real person writing to me to basically ask me to do free work for them. If I feel like I need to reply to it, then I will draft, I'll. I'll give my reaction to chat GPT like I don't want to do this thing for these reasons. What should I say? And then it gives me a response to use that that's professional, that draws the boundary that I then don't have to worry about like, oh, did I phrase that right? You know, or what I Hate about this, right. Is when I have this cognitive difficulty and like, oh, how do I say no to this without seeming like a jerk? That bothers me because I often then go back to, why am I the one worried about seeming like a jerk when this person asked me to overextend myself in their request? But why do I. Why do I feel bad? So that's where I delegate some of that to AI Because I'm like, no, I shouldn't have to feel badly about anything. And I want to just respond, close this loop and move on forever.
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Yeah, no, it is interesting. And there's this societal pressure if you think you'll bump into somebody again. There's a lot here. Like, there's the tools and systems you use, which are awesome. The efficiency of how you decide what to say yes and no to. But my mom used to say, a rude question doesn't warrant a polite response. We somehow feel like, I don't know, we owe a certain level of decorum, but maybe not.
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So something I'm trying to get better at is voice to text or just speaking. You know, extemporating is speaking, doing audio, doing recorded video. I want to get better at all of that just because it's a good skill to have, you know, and as someone who is hitting the public speaking circuit, it makes sense to hone that skill. So that makes sense to do. But it's also, I think, good advice for anybody. Like, we should. We would all be wise to improve our speaking skills, our communication skills. Right. So one way I do that. Oh, and the other thing is I kind of deal with carpal tunnel on and off. And so when it's flaring up, I try not to type so much. And that's when I try to do more voice to text, voice to text work. And there's an app called Whisper Flow that is really, really good. Do you use it?
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I love it. Yeah, it's fantastic.
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It's so good, right? It's excellent. It is the only voice to text tool I've used that consistently gets it right. And even just based on your tone, it'll know to put things in bullet points because it can tell you're listing something out. It's incredible. So I'm doing a lot more work in, like, responding to emails in this way where I'll do the voice to text thing and then I'll go back and quickly edit it just to, you know, clean it up a little bit. Or I'm doing this for my LinkedIn posts pretty often now.
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And I think never thought of that. Yeah, that's great.
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Yeah.
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And I think the big reason too, though, is because, you know, we're seeing so much AI generated content and, you know, at least for now. Right. One of the biggest differentiators is your own lived experience, your unique perspective, you as a human. Right. So I figure if I'm the one saying it and turning it into text, that has to sound like a real person, because I am a real person. And I did say that.
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Part two of this two part episode is coming to you next week.
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Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me. Rebecca Shadix on LinkedIn. See you next time.