How You Should Be Stacking Your Day

Watch the episode here:

• How not to be a roadblock
• Quick hits take less than five minutes
• The first hour should be quick hits
• Your must-hits
• Hit the things you planned to do today

Hey what’s shakin’, hey, I’m Rick Jordan. And today, we’re going all in. There are a couple of things. It’s about time management today and some things that have worked for me, but also things that I want to see you do. And it’s organizing your time, it’s organizing your day in a specific way that makes sense to keep things moving and not be the, stumbling block, or the roadblock for people to actually hear back from you. You’ve probably heard at some point in the past where, you know, always get the most difficult stuff out of the way. First, the tough parts of your day are out of the way. First, you know, the stuff that’s going to take you the longest, that hardest, right out of the gate, that way, you’re not too tired later, or you can make sure that you have time, I’m going to flip that for you today. Because this is something that I want to see you do. There’s a phrase that I’ve, I’ve taught up before, as far as strategically planning your day. And the first part is called Quick Hits. 

Now let me explain what these are. Quick kits are things that take five minutes or less. That’s it, they’re their things that take five minutes or less, and you can stack the first hour of your day for these quick hits. But because of the timing around that, you don’t want to do any more than 10. You don’t want to have any more than 10 quick hits these quick hits could be something as simple as a follow-up phone call. But the qualifiers, it has to take five minutes or less, it could be just checking on something for somebody, something you said that you would do for them, it could be just a quick email reply, it could be just a quick text message back to your customers, you’re the people who you’re you’re working with on maybe a service ticket, or whatever it is, right or even maybe it’s a vendor, right? Somebody external that serves you that you need to follow up with because even with vendors, I always say Never trust a vendor every five words.

 These are times these quick hits to say, hey, you never got back to me, I asked you for this two days ago, stack the beginning of your day, with quick hits during the first hour of block time. That’s it. As soon as you get to your desk, as soon as you start your day, quick hits are the way to get on the right foot. Because think about it this way. That one thing, right, it could be one small piece of information that somebody is waiting on you for that’s actually holding up an entire project, or holding up a goal from getting across the finish line just because they needed one piece of information from you, that simply takes two minutes, or less than five minutes as a quick hit to get to that. Or just a quick follow-up call. As I said, just a quick email. That’s it to keep things moving along. That’s the first hour of your day, that should be the first hour of your day. That way, you’ve got the rest of the day to work on all that hard stuff to things that are gonna take a while those quick hits will continuously move things along. And that’s really what when I take a look at it, my people, that’s what I expect because we don’t want to be the roadblock for anything.

 So immediately at the beginning of the day, schedule your quick hits, and this is getting organized. So write these things down. Some people work really, really well the night before, or it may be at the end of your workday the day before to go through. Okay, these are my Quick Hits for tomorrow morning. As soon as I get in, this is what I’m going to do, I’m gonna bust through these and you might not have time, you might just have five, you might have seven, whatever it is, but no more than 10 because you want to keep it within that hour. This is the secret sauce that is starting your day out right and making sure that nobody who is depending on you is waiting for you. It’s beautiful. All right, the second thing I have for you today, I talked about quick hits. The second thing I want you to do as you’re planning your day out or must hit this is no more than five things. These are critical, crucial things that you absolutely need to get done today. Or if you’re planning it the day before, at the end of your workday, whatever you’re planning for the next day, they’re things that you need to get done. 

That day, there must hits no more than five, because you want to feel like you can win the day. Okay, and I don’t think anybody at least not that I know of including myself has like five critical, crucial important things to get done. Like if there’s a deadline that’s that day, there’s something that’s going to take you 30 minutes to do you have to make sure you get it done that day. That’s what you want to put on this list. And I want to encourage you to put personal things on this list to not just work right because it could be working out and could be your must-hit for that day. If you work out you get your body right your mind gets right and then you can be more productive. So a Must can be something even personal maybe it’s something like even calling your kid’s pediatrician because you need to set up a doctor’s appointment even though that might be a quick hit but you know doctors’ offices right? Sometimes they take forever to You’re sitting on hold whatever, but that’s a must maybe it’s scheduling a physical for your kid. You know, those are things that can be must-hit, they’re both personal and work-related five things, no more than that. These two areas with QuicKutz and Mustards are going to completely change your life and your level of productivity so that you can perform at completely high standards. 

For My People, that’s what we expect, right? We expect high standards, this is something that will help you perform at the highest possible level, our quick hits, and must hits. Now the last thing I’m going to give you today is something that was brought into my life years ago, and it’s called TNT. Okay, today, not tomorrow, you might be getting to the end of your day, and you might be tired, because maybe you dealt with some horrible customers, right? Just some irate people, you know, not very fair to you. But hey, that’s the role that you’re in. When we’re in a service-based company. That’s the role that you’re in, I get it. And something comes in. I know, we’ve all experienced this, like, two minutes before our suppose at the end of the workday, that’s something that you take a look at it because if nothing else, put the expectation on yourself to respond to that person. Don’t leave it untouched. Because if you’re not going to make time to do it today, you’re certainly not going to make time to do it tomorrow. This means you might have to stay late. This means you might have to extend your workday, but it’s all to provide the best possible service to our customers. That’s why we say today, not tomorrow, or if it’s something really quick, don’t procrastinate, don’t be lazy, especially if it’s two minutes or less. That applies hugely to TNT. It’s something that I live by that if it takes just two minutes, frickin do it right now. Because if you keep pushing that off, you’re gonna forget about that. If it takes two minutes or less, just do it right. And, two minutes or less can be as simple as responding to somebody. 

When something comes in like that, at the end of the day. Why put it off until tomorrow, what you can accomplish today? We are not a culture of laziness, right? That’s not what we look at. We’re a culture of high performance and high standards. And that’s what our customers expect from us. So that’s how we approach them. I don’t think that they would want that if you were in the shoes of your customers, the people that you serve, what would you want? Would you want to make contact it at 435? o’clock, maybe 4:58 pm? Right? If your day ends at 5 pm. And here, no response the next day? How amazing because this is creating that holy shit moment. Right? How amazing would it be to just quickly respond to that? And say, you know, what, how important is this where you are you pick up the phone, and you call first as we talked about, say, hey, is this something urgent? Do you need me to do it right now? Are you stuck? You would have to get this in towards the end of the day. Are you on a deadline? Or is it something that I can schedule for first thing tomorrow morning, at this time, and we can work on it together? That is a simple response that makes all the difference in the world. And that’s what makes TNT so powerful today, not tomorrow. It’s amazing right? 

Now, the last thing that I want to give to you, I know I said that was the point right? So now I’m gonna speak straight to you on some things that we’re going to do to help out with some of those things over the next short period of time. With reaching out, we’re actually going to be moving all of our incoming calls over to our office in the Philippines. And that does a lot of cool things for us because we’ll have coverage. In the Eastern time zone, we’ll actually have coverage because we have staggered shifts at the address office. Terrell is our manager with Reachout. He’s our manager in the Philippines. And they’re staggered shifts to where there’s coverage all the way up to 6 pm Central time because we staggered like eight to five and then 10 to six or something like that. I don’t know what it is. But Ryan could actually give you more information. But I know we have covered all the way up until 6 pm Central Time, which is 7 pm Eastern Time for incoming calls to our service TAFE. That means that we’re going to have coverage for an extra two hours and which we might be used to on the East Coast. And that’s frickin fantastic, okay. But still, I want to be clear on this, that still does not negate your responsibility for TNT for today, not tomorrow.

 If you see tickets that are coming in, you don’t just leave them there for somebody else. If it’s 4:58 pm, you can still pick them up, and you can respond and then you can figure out what to do with it at that point. It doesn’t abdicate your responsibility to still perform at high standards. It just means that that’s what we’re doing for our customers in order to make it easily accessible to get help at more hours of the day. That’s and then afterward, of course, we have our dispatch center that takes phone calls, and that actually even helps eliminate after-hours calls to that’s in place. As of right now all over the country, there are questions that they asked. And it’s the same thing. It’s the same question that I just told you to ask to. When you’re responding at 4:58 pm. You’re picking up the phone, you’re calling and you’re saying, hey, is this something urgent right now? Or is it something that I can work on with you first thing in the morning? How about this time? It’s the same approach that our dispatch center has, after hours to help eliminate some of those things that are not urgent. It really reduces the number of after-hours costs. So you can go back we’re going to send out the recording for this of course, listen to it again, because we talked about three very important things today. wickets must hit and TNT today, not tomorrow. Go crush it today and every day. Let’s Go ALL IN for everybody that we serve.