208 – The Power 10

John Over the last two decades, I’ve been on a quest to learn everything I can about leadership obsessed with what makes the best leaders so good after running companies small and large for the last 20 years. Today I speak on stages all across the world to audiences who are interested in that same question. My name’s John Laurito and I’m your host. I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this topic. What makes the best leader so good? 

John Welcome to tomorrow’s leader! All right. Welcome to today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader, where we dove deep on all things leader-related related to leading yourself and the leading others, I am John Thomas Laurito Junior. Your host today, yesterday, tomorrow, and the day after that, I wanted to recognize a contributor to this episode. Actually, this episode is entirely brought to you from Teresa Roberts. Thank you, Teresa, for your idea and suggestion. I love learning new stuff from other people. 

John Teresa and I have known each other for about the last year and done some work together, and I got a great idea from her and I said, You know what? I’m going to do a podcast on this because I took an idea from her and implemented it, and it worked magically. So this episode is courtesy of Terry. So here was the idea. So and I’m going to preface this with the fact that I know we all deal with this where we have days where we have a list of stuff to do that’s much longer than the time in which we have to do it. And I used to do this thing called the Focus Day, where I would take my day and I would put out, look at my schedule. I’d literally list out all my to-dos. 

John I’d estimate how tight, how much time each one of my thirty-two things on my to-do list we’re going to take some would be five minutes, some would be 15 minutes, some would be twenty-five minutes, some 45 an hour, or whatever. And I would add up that time and then I would look at my open time. And there were times, many days where my to-do list was significantly more than the open time ahead of my schedule, which means that was good because at least they knew ahead of time that I was going to be short on time and too long on two years, in which case I could chop some stuff off. I could move some stuff on my to-do list, and the next day I could rearrange my schedule, whatever, prioritize all kinds of stuff. But the point is, sometimes when you are in that situation, you get just overwhelmed. 

John I know we all have, and many times it’s every day we faced this point where it’s like just overwhelming how much stuff we have to do. There are different ideas that I have used before that have been very helpful. One is called the mind dump, which is where when you have just so much stuff and I do this when I’ve got a lot of personal stuff as well as business stuff that’s floating around on my head and my brain’s working overtime. A lot of times, especially at night, I can’t sleep. So I will just do a mind dump, which is writing down everything I can think of. That’s a to-do or an action step that’s floating around in my head because a lot of times you’re you’re sitting there trying to sleep, you’re almost asleep, and all of a sudden you’re like, Oh my gosh, I just I totally forgot to get a follow up as so and so I just I got to call them back. 

John Whatever, as I’m doing this, I’m literally just realizing true that I’ve got to call my good buddy Dave back. Wow, Dave, my wow. I just remembered I owe him a call from like a week ago. So there you go. See, that stuff happens and it interrupts your thoughts. And all of a sudden you start feeling overwhelmed. It’s crazy, blah blah blah. And when that happens, a lot of times we get everybody does in paralysis mode. You just can’t even take action because you get so much stuff. Well, Teresa’s idea was what she started to do was take these 10-minute intervals so she would look at something and say, You know what? Forget about trying to think about it. Can I do this whole thing or not? 

John Because if I started and I only had a ten minute, I think this idea was born out of the fact that she had a ten-minute interval of time and she wanted to do and had to clean the kitchen. I think it was, and she felt like there was no way she could get it done in time. So she wasn’t giving up this started. And then she said, You know what? Let me just see how much I can get done. And she actually was amazed at how much she got done in that 10-minute segment of time. And we oftentimes can get a lot more done in 10 minutes of really focused effort on something. We can get a lot of stuff done much more than we think we ever could do in 10 minutes. So as she was telling me this and I’m like, You know what? I’m going to give this a try because that’s actually true. 

John Like a lot of times, you don’t realize sometimes we’re hard at work, at something, and we look we got so much done and it was a much shorter time than we ever thought was the case. So I implemented that. I tried that. I said, You know what? I’m going to do something for ten minutes. You know, I’ve done many podcasts in less than 10 minutes. And I think about what is, how can you do a how can you do something that’s maximum output in a minimum amount of time? If I can generate a podcast and less than 10 minutes that I have thousands of people listen to and influences them to change something or do something different in their life? Wow, that’s amazing. That’s great. That’s perfect for me and what I’m trying to do in a small amount of time, massive amount of output and impact. 

John That’s fantastic, but it’s amazing sometimes you would think, OK, well, it’s going to take hours and hours now if it’s truly a 10-minute podcast and I’m not editing and cutting and pasting, I got somebody else who does that then great my production time, maybe a little bit more to get the camera and all that set up, but I can do it as long as my thoughts are prepared in 10 minutes. You know, I had a 10-minute segment of time and I’m like, OK, I’ve got this, you know, more involved project. But then I realized, OK, there’s one part of the project that involves me making a phone call to somebody and getting something started. So instead of not doing anything for that 10 minutes, I was thinking about Teresa’s idea of the ten-minute, the power ten, as I call it. 

John And how can I do something that will at least be progress? You know, a lot of authors, people that write books subscribed to the concept that listen, take four minutes a day or something small or in this case, 10 minutes and just write, write a page, write two sentences, write whatever it is, and just keep the momentum going. So I love this concept. So the kind of challenge to you is, can you take little blocks of time, little 10 minute intervals in between meetings, whatever it is, and instead of just letting them tick by, yeah, we need a break every once in a while and we need rest. Of course, I’m not saying that sometimes meditation. I figured out a way to meditate in 10 minutes. It’s amazing what I didn’t think about. What I’ve always had trouble with doing is meditating because, for me, it’s just hard to do number one and still is to kind of almost turn your brain off. 

John But two is just the time. It was a time thing too, and it just made me not want to do it because I’m thinking, OK, I’m going to do it for half an hour. Forty-five minutes an hour, I figured out a way to do it in 10 minutes, and it’s great and I feel terrific. Sometimes it’s seven-eight minutes, but it’s never longer than 10 minutes. I use an app called Calm and they have a daily meditation guided meditation. It’s fantastic. So now that’s part of my day that wasn’t there before, and it’s made an impact. And it’s because of this power 10 concept. It’s a great, great way to look at it. So I want you to think about just takeaway from today’s episode. 

John Think about your day, think about tomorrow or today, whatever time you listen to this and take one 10 minute segment of time, whatever it is, whether you plan it out or not, and just focus on what you can do in that 10 minutes. And then when ten minutes is up, you’re done. Move on to something else. Rest, relax, whatever. But instead of being overwhelmed when it’s you know, my dad always says you eat an elephant one bite at a time. It’s true. I’ve tried it very hard to eat it whole. You got to eat it one bite at a time. And but in reality, you know, that’s what the concept is. Take a little bit of a chunk, do a little bit part of it. And in 10 minutes, everybody has 10 minutes. Everybody can focus on something for 10 minutes. Try it. 

John Work with your teams on that. If you’re exercising, do something. If you’ve never gone to a gym or you’ve never exercised. Don’t try to tackle doing an hour workout every day. Don’t worry about that. Can you do 10 minutes of exercise a day? That’s it. If you do 10 minutes of exercise a day. Guess what? If you’ve never done exercise a day and every day or anything, that’s a massive improvement. That’s going to actually make a difference. It’s going to make you feel better. You’re actually going to probably lose some weight. Muscles are going to tone everything that 10 minutes is easy. Everybody can focus on something for 10 minutes. All right, so take this idea. 

John Thanks again to Teresa Roberts for your brilliant idea. Simple but brilliant. I love simple but brilliant, and I told you I was going to make a podcast out of it, and here I am, sticking to my commitment. It’s nine minutes in. I’m giving you a minute back to start your day and work on your power 10. 

John So as always, like, subscribe, share, give me feedback on future guests and content and go down below give five-star reviews. Thanks for listening! I’ll see you next time. Bye. Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader for suggestions or inquiries about having me at your next event or personal coaching, reach me at John@johnlaurito.com. Once again, that’s John@johnlaurito.com. Thanks, lead on!