Podcast 34: Productivity Insights After Six Months on the Road

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Nerd Marketing Ecommerce Podcast

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In this episode, Drew talks about the five different observations he had while working and growing his business during 7 months of travel with his family, and the people and tools that made it possible.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Five different observations I had working and growing my business while travelling How the 80/20 rule saved my life (because airport wifi is shady) If you're making more than $100,000 a year, hire an assistant yesterday through Worldwide101 How you can use Sanebox to triage your emails (and an assistant to triage your Sanebox) When you should start swinging for the fences Links / Resources Growth Engines Worldwide101 (mention Drew sent you and get 20% off your first month) Sanebox Checklist of 12 online apps and tools to use for work while traveling  Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey, everybody. This is Drew Sanocki of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today I want to talk about the five things I learned while I was traveling and working. It's kind of funny that the number one question I get is not about, like, "What was the coolest thing you saw?" or "Where were the nicest people?" or "Where was the best food?" The number one question I get from entrepreneurs is, number one, "Did you work?" and number two, "How did you work?" To answer those questions, I put this podcast together. Yes, I did work, in short. I have a couple of different businesses I'm involved in. The primary one I'd like to talk about here is growthengines.io. That is an agency catering to direct-to-consumer brands and to private equity funds that often buy or sell those brands. That business today is bigger than when I left. I think a big reason is because I embraced these five things I'm going to talk about today. Without further ado, the number one observation that I have after six months abroad or seven months abroad is that, really, the 80/20 rule reigns supreme. I know I beat that dead horse all the time on this podcast, but you don't fully understand it, you're not forced to comprehend it until you are on some remote island in the Caribbean, and there's no WiFi, except for the one hour when you're going through the airport on the way in and on the way out. I mean, talk about a constraint. What that forced me to do is, you can't be online all the time. What you really need to do is think through what are the most important things you need to do that week, such that when you hit a WiFi connection or can get cell phone coverage, then you can log back on and accomplish those things. So, what didn't I do during those times? I mean, really, the 80% of my work that doesn't give me any results, and those were things like this podcast, for one. Actually, the podcast gives me results, but I dropped it. I stopped doing the podcast. Bookkeeping. Tinkering on my blog. I mean, how much time do I spend, do you spend, messing around, moving fonts on your blog or configuring colors or something, just so it looks nice? Really, there was no time for that at all. So, drop that. Coffees and calls. These two things are a huge time suck, especially when you're in a city like I am, where there are a lot of people, and everybody wants to meet, and "Hey, Drew, you want to grab coffee?" or "You want to hop on a call here?" If you add that time up, those are hours every week I would spend at coffees or on phone calls. So, I really could not do those at all. Those got dropped. Calls to my mother, for example, also got dropped. I mean, completely unessential, right? I mean, I don't need to call my mom. So, I would go months without calling her. No, I didn't, but reduced amount of time calling my mother. You'll block out so much non-essential stuff.