DGS 181: How To Strategically Plan Your Day

Do you experience a lot of pressure and noise in your business? Have you had the same tasks on your to-do list for months? Every business owner benefits from having time set aside for strategic planning.

Property management growth expert, Jason Hull shares the secrets for how to strategically plan out your daily tasks to lower your stress and tackle to-do list items effectively.

You’ll Learn…

[02:03] Setting Aside Strategic Time and Why it Matters

[03:26] Setting Intentions for Events in Your Day

[05:15] Feeling the Negative Feelings to Lower Pressure and Noise

[08:24] Why Celebrating and Appreciating the Good Matters

[11:23] Finishing up Your Schedule

[14:02] The Secret Final Step: Offloading

Tweetables

“The king or queen needs to eat first, otherwise you’re going to have a starving kingdom.”

“One of the simplest daily things you can do to get more juice out of your day, more momentum will be to do daily planning.”

“When you make a decision about what your intention is like, what outcome that you desire to have from this interaction or this event, you are more likely to have that happen.”

“I want you to remember that the only thing you can do with negative emotions is to feel them.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] If your baseline stress level is higher and higher and higher because you’re just adapting to things and you’re tolerating things, you are going to feel more anxious and more preloaded and more stressed, and it’s gonna catch up with you.

[00:00:12] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase your revenue, help others, impact lives, and you’re interested in growing in your business and in life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers, love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate. Think you’re crazy for doing it. You think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

[00:00:48] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

[00:01:10] So today’s conversation topic for today’s show is going to be daily planning. And so what I wanted to go over today with you is daily planning and how I plan my day. A lot of these ideas I learned from one of my mentors and coaches, Alex Charfen, with my own adaptation to this. And so this is my way of doing daily planning. And if you’re wanting to follow along or try this or do this, you can go to doorgrow.com/dailyplanning, and you can fill out this form and go through this process. I’ve built a really cool form to take you through this process. It asks for your email address and it will email you your to-do list of everything that you filled out on this.

[00:02:01] So I’m gonna take you through this. So first step in doing your planning, and you wanna do this either at night, which was recommended by Thanh Pham, one of my friends, who runs asianefficiency.com, and he recommends that you do it the night before. I usually will do it in the mornings early. I like to get up early before the kids, pets, work, phone calls, et cetera, and use that sacred time in the morning, but whatever time that you do this, map out some strategic time, and I want you to be clear on this principle, that strategic time is really where a business owner is best spending their time rather than tactical day to day work, right?

[00:02:42] Tactical stuff needs to get done, but anything that’s tactical usually can be done by somebody else. You can offload that you can hire somebody to do that, eventually is the goal. But you spending your time– somebody needs to be spending their time doing strategic work on the business instead of in the business. Somebody needs to be the general in the tent, you know, making the strategy for the army. The king or queen needs to eat first. Otherwise, you’re going to have a starving kingdom. This is where you kind of place yourself at the head of this company and get to be the visionary during strategic time. One of the simplest daily things you can do to get more juice out of your day, more momentum will be to do daily planning.

[00:03:21] So, first thing we want to do is take a look at your schedule for the upcoming day. So the first step is: schedule an intention attracting what you want. So what scheduled events do you have today or for the next day? And what is your intention for each. So for those of you that are a little bit new agey, or those of you that have followed, you know, different gurus or coaches out there, intention is a very powerful thing. You’ve probably heard them talk about it. What I have found is when I set my intention for what I want to occur or happen, unconsciously something– it happens differently. Like, I don’t know. Some will say the universe like makes it come true, or maybe your unconscious mind starts working on that challenge.

[00:04:03] But when you make a decision about what your intention is like, what outcome that you desire to have from this interaction or this event, you are more likely to have that happen. And so my recommendation is that you go through your schedule, and in the example you’ll see on the daily planning form that you’ll be filling out, you put some sort of timestamp, like “at [9:00] AM I’m meeting Fred Smith, and my goal is to inspire him to hit his sales goals”, for example, or “at [10:00] AM, I’m meeting with Fred Savage from The Wonder Years– just kidding– and I’m gonna negotiate a win-win deal.” Right? That’s my intention. So you’re gonna have certain appointments, certain interactions meetings with your team, different.

[00:04:44] What’s your intention for each of those and just by consciously setting an intention for each, what I find is I get a lot more of what I really want out of those instead of just kind of stumbling into them. I know what my intention is. And so make sure you have your intention set. You’re gonna get much greater results. If your intention is to close the deal, you’re far more likely to close the deal just by putting it out there and to your mind, your unconscious mind, to the universe, to God, whatever you believe in– by setting the intention, you’re far more likely to get that result.

[00:05:15] So the next step after you do that is avoiding and discomfort, emotional health, and lowering your pressure and noise. So what uncomfortable feelings did you not want to experience in the previous day? What made you uncomfortable recently? State related actions that you can take. And so as a reminder, I want you to remember that the only thing you can do with negative emotions is to feel them. And usually thinkers like myself, logical people, we try to find ways to not have to feel those uncomfortable feelings in the future. But the only thing you really can do with the feeling is to feel it. And so rather than just analyze about the feeling or analyze it, or just think about, “how can I avoid this in the future and how can I escape this feeling?”

[00:06:00] One thing I would recommend that you set an intention to do as a to-do item is to spend time feeling that feeling. So as an example, these are different action items or to-do items related to discomfort. I find that a lot of these things are simply solved by an Amazon order or something like that. Like I was uncomfortable maybe because I ran outta toothpaste or I ran outta soap or I didn’t have this. Cool. Those are easy. I can make those to-do items, “order toothpaste,” “order, you know, this,” right. Place an Instacart order, get some groceries. Right? So example: upset at partner, fear, I fear an uncomfortable conversation. Have the conversation.

[00:06:38] Another example: feeling anxious. Sit for five minutes and feel through that emotion, that anxiety and feel through it. Lawn, not being mowed, bothering me, research and find a gardener, right? Like these type of things. Right. So figure out what– because as entrepreneurs, we tend to just keep more and more on our plate. We tend to cause more and more challenges, and we’re really adaptable and we get really good at these painful things and these uncomfortable things just becoming white noise. I don’t want these to be white noise for you because the more white noise you have, the harder it is to hear everything else, and so if we’re talking about emotions and stress, if your baseline stress level is higher and higher and higher because you’re just adapting to things and you’re tolerating things, you are going to feel more anxious and more preloaded and more stressed, and it’s gonna catch up with you.

[00:07:27] And stress is the number one killer, like it eats at you. Your body eventually starts to break down if stress is high enough. It starts to kind of cannibalize itself. So cortisol is released. Cortisol is a stress hormone, cortisol, negates all of the effects of testosterone, which, whether you’re a guy or a girl, testosterone is what motivates you to have sex drive. It’s what motivates you to accomplish things to some degree, it also can sap other chemicals in your brain, so I want you to be healthy as possible. So we want to lower that baseline pressure and noise. That means clearing out all these really easy, sometimes, things to solve. Right? And sometimes you just need to feel through something and just experience the feeling cuz you cannot feel it forever, and then it will go away.

[00:08:12] So that’s the next step. What things could you do that day to solve, you know, discomfort or things that made you uncomfortable in the previous day and just getting clear on which things are causing you discomfort. The third step is celebration. It’s celebrate things you wanna reinforce more of. The things you celebrate, tend to grow, and so what wins do you need to celebrate? What wins have you had? What accomplishments do you have? This sends a powerful message to your subconscious, that, “Hey, these wins mattered. A lot of times we make the mistakes as entrepreneurs that we achieve an accomplishment, and then we send a powerful signal to our unconscious that it didn’t matter.

[00:08:50] So celebrating those wins, but also celebrate the work. If you are celebrating the work and the effort to achieve certain things, you’re going to be much better at achieving those things. That wires your dopamine to be more effective for winning. So celebrate the actions. Celebrate, “Hey, I made 300 phone calls this week of outreach,” or Hey, “I did…” whatever it is that you accomplished. Celebrate those type of things you wanna reinforce more of just celebrating the end results sometimes can demoralize us because sometimes we don’t have control over the end result, but we can control the actions leading up to it. So celebrate the actions. So example: the team hit 80% of our commitments this week. Post to the team about it and celebrate right. Or highlight them in our meeting today and celebrate with them. Where I worked out three days in a row, brag to somebody. Right. You know, so figure out some action items you can take to reinforce this.

[00:09:48] The next step is appreciate. This is powerful. Now, I used to use the word gratitude, and I love the idea of gratitude, but ‘ appreciate’ is a more effective word. And I like this, especially being here, kind of in the real estate sort of industry, when things appreciate, it has a double meaning. When you want to appreciate something, you are recognizing its value, but not only that, when you appreciate things, you also are taking an asset or something valuable and you’re increasing its value. And so the things you want to grow, appreciate them, and they will grow. They’re going to appreciate in value as well. So who do you need to appreciate, you know, this day? What are you grateful for today? State related actions that you can take.

[00:10:33] So an example: Adam reached out to all of our clients. I want to appreciate him during our morning huddle or Sarah helped me sort out some ideas. I want to make sure I appreciate her in our morning huddle as a team. Right? So appreciation will give you some action items that will benefit and bless you and your team, right. Putting some appreciation, some gratitude out lets your team know that they get to feel appreciated, and so appreciation helps me grow my team members and helps improve the relationship that I have with my team and improves the culture of the team. So appreciation is powerful. Appreciation helps your relationships. Appreciation helps you with your kids, right? Recognizing things and seeing the good in others, appreciation is the next step and then ideas and inspiration.

[00:11:23] So this is step five: capture your inner genius or other tasks. So throughout the day, I’m usually writing down ideas, taking notes on things, so I wanna go back through those and say, “What ideas did I have? What sparks did I have? Do I want to add these to maybe an idea board or an idea list? Or is there something that I want the team to do? I just got this great idea talking to a client. Maybe we should do that for everybody.”

[00:11:47] Anything else? This is basically the, ‘anything else category.’ What ideas, books, videos, actions you need to take, add to your to-do list. State them as related actions. So for example: read It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried. It’s a good book by the way. Or “create sales script for Referral Secrets training,” you know, or stuff like this, right, for my clients. So as you get ideas, you can feed these in your daily planning as well and capture those ideas, so you have them as action items. So if you have, you know, appreciation, gratitude, and these type of things, they should be converted into actionable items, because otherwise they’re not really useful, right? Because feelings don’t really exist to other people, unless they’re expressed, right. Love is an action. Right? Love is an action that creates the feeling of love, so take the action and it will create these things. So I want you to convert these into actions.

[00:12:42] So number six is your to-do list. Like anything else you haven’t listed before? Maybe it’s not ideas. Maybe it’s not other things, but you’re just like, “I know these other things need to get done.” This is kind of that miscellaneous catchall at the end. Like “I need to email my accountant about that SBA loan thing,” or “I need to cancel that unused Hulu account” or, you know, whatever. Right. So anything else on your to-do list? You. Put that stuff in there and you click ‘okay.’ And then I added this question. This is a very powerful question. This is number seven. This is, I think the last thing, besides it asking for your email address: what is the one thing or your next right thing, right?

[00:13:23] What is the one thing in your business or personal life that if you could do this day, that by doing it will make everything else easier or unnecessary? What’s the earliest or first step or next action towards that, the next right thing that you can do to accomplish that one thing. This would make the day a win if you could just get this one thing done. So, and I have an example, like: make money= do four hours of outbound prospecting this day and get some cash in. Right? If that’s that’s my one focus today, if I could just accomplish that. That allows you to take this big to-do list and boil it down.

[00:14:02] Now, the secret next step in this, that is not mentioned on this daily planning– I think it’s mentioned on the output screen at the end. The last step that you, I want you to take is that if you have any team members, if you have an assistant– which everybody should have an assistant– if you have an assistant or team members is to take this output, you plug in your email address, it will then send you an email with your big to-do list of all the stuff that you want to accomplish, and then you take this list and you give this to your assistant or you delegate all these things to your team, so you can cross them off your list. A really good leader has a really good team, and a really good leader knows to delegate. What I do is I take this list– and if you’re handwriting this out, what I used to do when I would hand write it is I would just write somebody’s name next to each of these things.

[00:14:53] I’d write some initials for team members. I’m like, ” This is Adam’s. This is gonna go to Sarah. This is going to go to Kyle on my team. These team members can take these things off my plate.” That’s why they exist is to support you as an entrepreneur. “And this can go to my assistant, Mar…” so I just as assign these things out. And so that’s how I do daily planning. So then my to-do list doesn’t continually grow every day. I’m able to delegate and assign, and it gets smaller and smaller every day. My discomfort gets smaller and smaller every day, or I’m tackling something in it every day. I’m appreciating people every day. Right? And when we’re grateful, we attract more abundance into our life and better things come to us. Right? So psychologically it rewires our brain for more positivity. I’m starting to notice things that I didn’t notice before. So this is really effective. There’s a lot of psychology that goes into this planning process.

[00:15:43] I encourage you to use it. I would love to hear from you. So wherever you’re seeing this video, comment below, if you start using this or let, let me know, I’d love to get your feedback. What is working for you? What do you do differently in your daily planning, if you have anything else that you do? But this covers most of the things that I’ve heard regarding plans for the day and will help you have a really clear– you’ll have your agenda for time with your intention, you’ll have the things that you’re grateful for, you’ll have the things that you wanna celebrate, you’ll have all your ideas, and you will have the stresses and the discomforts, you’ll become more conscious of those so you can get rid of them and offload them to lower your baseline pressure and noise, and you’ll have clarity on your one main thing that you need to accomplish that day so you can give yourself permission to have a win, right. And feel like you did something right. So that is daily planning. So I hope this is really helpful. Again, you can check that out by going to doorgrow.com/dailyplanning, one word, and you can go through this daily planning.

[00:16:47] Normally, I only gave this out to clients. It’s a super effective way of creating momentum right away for new clients. And I wanna share that with everybody. I hope you find it beneficial. And if you’re wanting to get in momentum and get signed up for our upcoming Rapid Revamp program, I highly recommend you check out this new program. It’s gonna be really, really awesome. Some of you may have heard about or experienced our Seed Program. Some of you heard about maybe our Grow and Scale Mastermind. We’ve got this new program called Build to Sell. So you can build a new business, build your business so that you can sell this business in the next three to five years for a seven-figure exit.

[00:17:26] Even if you’re starting from scratch, I’ve helped people scale their business up to this level, or you’ll have a business that is built to sell, but you’ll realize that when you build a business to sell, it’s a great asset and you’re gonna want to keep it. So you may want to stay in that business and keep it, but you won’t be miserable in it anymore because you’ve built it effectively, so you’re not involved in it the way that you would have to be, and you wouldn’t be able to be if you were gonna sell it. Right. And so this is going to create really effective businesses built to sell. The first three-month 90-day program we have is called the Rapid Revamp. We’re gonna clean up your pricing, clean up your branding, clean up your website, optimize your entire sales pipeline, clean up your sales process, and give you three of our top acquisition strategies so you’re adding doors without spending a dime on marketing, and we’re gonna do all that in a 90 day period. It’s rapid, it’s a training program you’re gonna be moving through on a weekly basis with your class with a group.

[00:18:23] Our first class is already starting. By the time you see and hear this, it will have already started, so you are too late for this. We only wanna allow 30 people in. We open this up to our existing mastermind clients. We have over 40 signed up already… already right now. But our next cycle is gonna start in October right after rent week, which is the first week of the month. It’s gonna be the week after that on Tuesday. So get in. It’s first, come first serve. We’re only opening up for a certain number of slots that we feel like we can confidently take through in a course in a class over the next 90 days after that. So make sure you get in early. So if you’re interested in this, reach out to our team, you can check us out at doorgrow.com and get on a call.

[00:19:08] So until next time everybody to our mutual growth. And I’m out. Bye everyone.

[00:19:13] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!

[00:19:40] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Enjoyed this episode on how to strategically plan your day? Get equipped with more content like it by exploring past episodes of the #DoorGrowShow.