How To Be A Self-Management Ninja with Lawrence Tam – Lisa Torres

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If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Hey, this is Lawrence Tam. Thank you for attending our Inner Circle audios. And we have a special guest, and we're going to be talking about different ways you can, I guess, systematize and shrink the time you have, I guess be more efficient. We all have 24 hours in a day.

We all have the same constraints. Yet some people are way more productive than others. Why is that possible? How does someone who works part-time produce more than someone who works full-time? I have a special guest, Lisa Torres.

Are you on the line? Yes, I'm here, Lawrence. Thanks for having me. Sweet. Lisa, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about you, and let's dive into what you're going to cover tonight.

Awesome. Well, thanks again for having me, guys. My name is Lisa Torres. I have been an Internet marketer since 2008 when I got laid off from my job. You know, I saw the opportunity of what the Internet had to offer, and I just basically took advantage of it.

So I think what I developed over the years is a sense of learning how to really be a self-management ninja, which is the topic of this call, how to be a self-management ninja, and how to pretty much get more done in less time to reap bigger rewards. Because my thing when I had the job, sitting in that cubicle all day, was that I hated sitting behind a cubicle from 9 a.m. to 5, sometimes 6 and 7 o'clock at night, and so I wanted to master that in my business, too. So I came up with this plan that I'm going to basically share with everyone on this call or whoever is listening to this call right now. Sweet.

That's pretty much it as far as I'm concerned. Okay. So what is this labeled? The management ninja? How to be a self-management ninja.

God. Okay. So break it down. What do we got? So we're basically getting more done in less time so that we can reap bigger rewards.

Okay. So it falls in like a three-step process that I basically came up with myself. It's something that I kind of tweaked over the years and kind of perfected it to really work in my favor so that I didn't have to work so hard in my business and I could kind of spend more time doing the things that I love, like hanging out with my family and traveling and things like that. I didn't want to be a slave to my business. So that's the reason why I came up with the three-step process.

And the first one I like to call the brain-dumping process. The brain-dumping process. So what I want you to do right now when you're listening to this call, I want you to take a piece of paper and a pen. You can rewind this call if you want to, stop and play, pause, whatever. But take a piece of paper and a pen.

I want you to draw a line straight down the middle. And what you're going to do is you're going to write column A on the left and column B on the right. Okay, so you have two columns. In column A, that's going to be the brain-dumping section. That's where everything that keeps you up at night is going to go on that column.

Everything. Everything that you need to get done but keep procrastinating on, that's what's going to go inside of that column A. And if you're like me, when I first got started, you have a lot of things that keep you up at night. You have a lot of things to get done but you keep procrastinating on. So the rules, though, there's rules when it comes to this three-step process.

And the rule is to basically have a timer beside you, whether it be on your watch or on the computer or on your cell phone or whatever. But get a timer because when you start using a timer, it's basically going to help you be a little bit more productive in a certain amount of time. So you only have a certain amount of time to do certain projects. And that is how when you start putting time, using a timer, you're going to start getting more done because you know that you only have a certain amount of time to get that specific project done. And that is going to allow you to spend more time doing things that you do love, like, for example, spending time with family, going to play golf, going to play tennis, doing whatever it is that you like.

So the rule for column A, where you're going to do the brain dumping, again, everything that keeps you up at night and everything that you need to get done but you keep procrastinating on. You're going to set a timer for 10 minutes. And during that 10 minutes, you're going to write everything that comes to your mind. You're just going to dump it on a piece of paper. Okay, that's the brain dump.

10 minutes, no editing. Okay? Does that make sense, Lawrence? Yeah, man, I like it. So 10 minutes, timing yourself on how much you can put down on something that would keep you up at night.

Exactly. Yep. Okay. So now you're going to take another five minutes, and you're going to put a line across everything on that list in column A that is absolutely out of your control. So, for example, we'll use a personal example, and I'm going to share with you a business example.

So a personal example would be something like you want your spouse to pay more attention to you. You're doing everything to make the relationship work, and it's still not working. This is personal, right? Well, guess what? It's out of your control.

So scratch it off, put a line across it. Okay, that's an example of personal. The next one is business. Okay? You want your team, and this is another example.

You want your team to duplicate, let's say. Okay? So you provide them with support and coaching, and they still do nothing. Well, guess what? That's out of your control.

So that needs to be scratched off, and, you know, you put a line across it too. Make sense? Make sense? Okay. Yep, sure does.

Okay, awesome. Now my door just opened here, so just give me a second while I close this door really quickly. Sorry about that. No problem. Okay.

So, you know, now that you've scratched off the personal, you've scratched off the business, everything that you're basically dumping on that piece of paper on column A. Now you're going to take another five minutes to transfer and scratch off everything that is dreadful or that you've been procrastinating for months or maybe even years, anything basically that you don't like to do or don't want to do or, you know, that it's not important or not that important to you, but you know that it needs to get done. Okay? So you're going to transfer it to column B, and you're going to scratch it off column A. Now I know this is a little confusing, because it's probably more if you're a visual person like me, you're like, what the hell is she talking about?

But the best thing for you to do is basically to pause, rewind, and make sure you get what I'm talking about, you know, and you implement it. The next thing is you're going to take three minutes to scratch everything off in column B that you've been saying that you wanted to do forever, such as maybe learning a new language or learning how to play a new instrument, whatever, okay? If you have not gotten that done already, then clearly it's not important, so get it off the list. Got it? Okay, perfect.

Are you liking this so far? Yeah, good. Good. Okay, so now we're going to take another five minutes, and remember, this is timer-based, and the timer is the absolute most important of this whole exercise, okay? You have to have a timer and you have to set it to the times that I'm telling you to set it to.

Okay, so the next step is to take five minutes to repeat the process, okay? So it's very simple. You write a new sheet of paper, column A, column B, then you transfer everything from the old paper to the new paper that has not been scratched off, okay? So that has not been scratched off. So what's left in column A are the things that you need to focus on and prioritize.

What's left in column B are the things that you can outsource and delegate. Got it? Got it. Okay, okay. Okay?

Okay. So now, notice something here. I want you to notice something. Notice how I put a time on everything. Ten minutes for this, five minutes for that, three minutes for this.

That is the key secret to being a self-management ninja and basically learning how to get more things done in less time to reap bigger rewards. Okay, that's why I said getting a timer is super-duper important, okay, and setting little increments of times how you're going to implement the brain-dumping process, okay? So that's the brain-dumping process. We're done with that. Before we move on to step two, do you have any questions about the brain-dumping process?

So you have two sheets of paper or you have one sheet of paper? It's one sheet of paper to start off with, with all of your brain dump on there, but the second sheet of paper is going to be the stuff that is not important to you. So everything on that new piece of paper with the column A and column B, that's what's going to – those are the important things that you're going to keep because everything else is eliminated. You're throwing it out the window. It doesn't matter.

Okay. Get it out of here. It's a filtering process. Right, exactly. It's a filtering process.

Ball it up. Throw it in the garbage. It doesn't matter anymore. We're working with a new sheet of paper now, a new column A and a new column B, okay? Okay.

So now we're moving on to step two, and step two is basically the most important top five priorities, okay? And you're probably wondering why the brain dumping – what does brain dumping have to do with the top five priorities? Well, I'm going to explain that in just a second. So what I want you to do is I want you to get a new sheet of paper, and I want you to write down – or you can actually flip that first paper over if you want to because what I want you to do now is I want you to write down your top five priorities in the order of importance. So let me give you an example of what mine is.

Mine is, number one, health and spirituality. Number two, relationship. Number three, family. Number four, personal growth. And number five, business and creativity.

Specifically in that order. That is my number one through five top priority. The reason why is because health and spirituality, we put God first. We put God first. And because if you're not healthy, guess what?

You can't run a successful business. You can't have a healthy relationship. You know, you're a bad influence on your family. Those are the two most important things for me. Relationship is number two.

It comes before the family because if my relationship is in order, then everything is out of whack. Number three is the family, making sure that's good. Four is personal growth has to come before business and creativity because if I don't work on me and my personal development, then I'm not going to have a successful business. Make sense? Okay.

Okay, so step number three. After you have written down, you know, your priorities and you did your brain dumping, now it's time to take that brain dumping list that you have of the things that you need to do, whether it be in your personal life, your business life, whatever, you're going to combine the two, and we're going to work on step number three, which is basically your schedule and your daily to-do list. Okay, so let's go back really quickly before I move forward with this one. The first one, we're going to go back to the first one really quickly. The reason why I put health and spirituality first is because that is the first thing that I'm going to work on every single morning.

So what I want you to do is I want you to write from one to five on a piece of paper, which is basically your top five priorities, one through five. My top priority, if you can visualize a sheet of paper, number one, health and spirituality, and in parentheses, I put from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. That's the first thing that I want to focus on in the morning. Make sense?

And that's the reason why it's on my top priority list. It's the number one priority that I want to focus on. I don't want to focus on that at night. I want that to be the first thing that I do when I wake up, work on my health and spirituality. That's the most important.

That's my number one priority. Number two was relationships. Okay? So when you're creating your schedule, I like to use Google Calendar. Very simple to do.

You can get notifications on your cell phone. There's an app that you can install, and you can use it on the go. It's super simple to do. Make sure that when you're creating your top five priorities and that you're creating your schedule in your daily to-do list that you're using the app, because the app is what's going to keep you organized. Okay?

So the second one is relationships. So we have date nights on Fridays, daily three-hour or four-hour or five-hour, whatever you want to do, afternoon breaks with the husband or the wife. You cut off your time at a certain time. So let's say 10 p.m., that's it. Makes sense, Lawrence?

Yeah, you have to have limits. Exactly. You have to have limits, because if you don't, guess who's going to get upset? The spouse. Yeah.

Have you experienced that as well? Yes, yes. You do have to put priorities, but you do have to have more responsibilities than just one priority. Right. So if date nights on Friday nights is, let's say, from 7 to 10 o'clock, then you've got to make sure that you're there from 7 to 10 o'clock and present at the moment.

You can't be 7 to 10 o'clock and then on your cell phone checking Facebook. You know, it's just not going to work. Whatever it is that you're scheduled for on your schedule, you have to be present in that moment. Okay? Okay.

So number three, if you guys remember, it was family. So family on the calendar is going to be from 4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. That's my time. You know, your family time could be whatever, you know, it really depends on what your top priorities were.

My number three priority was family time, so that is going to be 4 to 6.30. That's when I, you know, cook dinner, we sit down, we talk, blah, blah, blah. Okay? Nothing else interrupts that between 4 and 6.30. Got it?

Okay. Do you do that as well, Lawrence? We batch. Yeah. So very similar.

Okay. Yeah. I have to batch my work in kid time, so when it's time to, you know, go out, ride bikes, or, you know, play with the baby, we have those hard deadlines. Exactly. Exactly.

And it works better, correct? Correct. When you're in that moment and present with your family as opposed to, you know, taking your laptop with you and trying to be with the family and working at the same time. It's not a good mix. Number four, personal growth.

For me, it's 30 minutes every single day. Yours could be 30 minutes to an hour. So what do you do in the personal growth time? Well, it could be reading a book, listening to an audio, watching a video, something like that. Whatever it is that's going to be your personal development time, and it's going to be 30 minutes, well, guess what?

That has to go on the calendar too. So you're just basically taking everything and putting it on the calendar, literally everything, soccer games, baseball games, dance recitals, whatever it is, you've got to put it into the calendar. And then finally, number five is the business and creativity. For me, it's 9.30 to 12.30 and 7.00 p.m. to 10.00 p.m., okay?

So on the weekdays, for me, it's 9.30 a.m. to 12.00 p.m. because I work from home full time, so those are my hours. Your hours are going to be different because you still may have, you know, a 9 to 5, you know, job, whatever. So you have to work according to your schedule.

And so mine is 9.30 to 12.30 in the mornings, and then, you know, I have the rest of the day to do what I want to do, and then at night, from 7.00 to 10.00, I'm working on my business. And on the weekends, I'm setting two hours on Saturdays and two hours on Sundays to work on creativity. So that may be things like working on, you know, trying to think of new ad campaigns, maybe images that I want to post on Facebook, maybe e-mails that I want to send out, maybe videos that I want to cut and put out there into the community. So when I say business and creativity, business is the business part of it is literally being present in my business and doing business income-producing activities. With the creativity, I leave for the weekends, and I devote two hours on Saturdays and two hours on Sundays, and it could be a morning, night, whatever works for you.

But in that time, you take two hours each of those days to create your plan of action for the week. So really, there really is no excuses as to what, you know, a lot of people, I hear a lot of people say, oh, I haven't shot a video yet, or, you know, done a blog post because I really don't know what to talk about. You know, I can't think of ideas. Well, if you take two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, if you can, maybe you could do an hour. Then really, planning for the week, you know, your creativity for the week should not be an issue anymore.

Okay? Make sense? So, you're actually cultivating ideas on the weekends but producing on weekdays? Absolutely. Okay.

Absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. So, that's pretty much it. So, let's recap really quickly.

Step one is the brain dump. Remember, you're trying to put everything on paper that you want to accomplish in life. Okay? All the things that you wanted to do. You know, all the things that you know that you have to do but you haven't done it yet.

Whatever it is, remember, we talked about the column A and the column B and then creating a new list with everything that you're going to keep from the original two columns. Okay? And then, step number two was to come up with your top five priorities and then putting them in order on, which is step number three, on your calendar, your to-do list, your daily to-do list, your schedule. So, that's pretty much it. Do you have any questions for me, Lawrence?

So, okay. So, you're using a calendar. Is that also for like others to see, like a team member or a spouse to see that you're blocked out, like you're not reachable at that time? Actually, no. Nope.

It's just for me, although that's not a bad idea. But I think it's more of a personal, like for me, my calendar is more personal. I look at it on a daily basis because I want to know what do I have going on for that day. But you know what's funny is that when you create the calendar, like I find some days that I don't even have to look at the calendar anymore because it just becomes a habit. And that's what we're working on.

We're working on developing the habit because once you work on developing the habit, especially with your top five priorities, then for me, that's how I've had my success because I speak to a lot of people where they're like either all over the place or they're making excuses or they're using the job as an excuse of why they can't get things done. And it's always a never-ending cycle with just the excuses that people have to make. But I found, and I used to be one of those people, so I know, but I found that going through this process really eliminates all the stuff that you really shouldn't be focusing on and just really honing into the things that you must be focusing on in order to produce the kind of results that you want, not only in your business but in your personal life, your relationships, your health, your spirituality, all levels of your life because our life is based, we have levels, right? We have different categories. Think of it kind of like a pie chart.

You know, you have a round pie chart and then inside you have your health and your family and your personal development and your business and all these things, but we find that most people either just focus too much on business and personal development and they, you know, disregard their family and relationships and health and spirituality or we have some people focusing more on family stuff and they're not really building their businesses although they really want to. Then we have people that are working on, you know, being creative all the time but yet they're not producing income-producing activities. They're too busy doing the busy work. So I found that with creating the top five priorities in order of importance and then putting that on a calendar, for me, that's what worked and I don't know if whoever's watching this, if they were watching me speaking on stage in D.C. where I kind of went over just a little snippet of this and one of the women came up on stage.

One of the ladies came up on stage that actually took my, because I had a whole PowerPoint presentation on this thing and I gave like a training on it and she said when she followed this training, it absolutely completely changed her business, but it also saved her marriage. So does it work? It absolutely does work. Yeah. So, yeah.

That's good. So like having a weighted scale, I think there's a lot of people who have worries or concerns about certain things about their business or life, but there's just certain things that are more important to that individual and not understanding which is the most important, then you start to see allocations of your time, does it actually coincide? So a basic relationship would be if someone gave you like a pound of gold or 100 bucks, you can both save their money, but which one is more important? Which has more weight to it? Which one would you rather have?

So if in your life, like you're saying, health and spirituality is important, you gotta make sure you're carving out time for that so that you're not feeling like even though you're working producing. And not only carving the time, but actually being present in that time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's difficult.

It's difficult because we're always built to have the multiple hats kind of deal, right? Doing everything at the same time. And finding different ways to segment, separate, and I guess turn off, right? Right. Then on and turn off.

Yeah, exactly. And one way I've found is we're talking about the learning cycle for a lot of people who are on the call probably still have a job or maybe they're at their business and they commute a lot. Commuting is a really good way to compress that time and actually learn through audios, especially like this one. You're probably listening to this in the car right now and you can't write, you can't really watch a video, you can't write on a chalkboard right now or a whiteboard. But listening to things while you're driving and just getting that brain turning so by the time you get to the office, you jot down the three things you learned or the three things you want to write about or the three things you want to write an email about, being able to compress time.

I took that a step further and I actually have made a habit to listen to a podcast while I'm taking a shower. And so I only get a couple minutes out of it, but it helps me focus like what am I really doing when I'm taking a shower? I'm like, I don't know. It's mindless time. So like I'll do the same thing when I'm like mowing the lawn.

Well, I don't mow the lawn anymore, but when I used to, that was like the perfect time to like two hours of mowing the lawn and weeding. I would compress all that time and actually do a lot of the audio books and audio trains while I'm doing something where you're going through the motions. So if you have something that you're actually going through the motions, you should be compressing some other way of learning or some way you can compress into your business while you're doing something that doesn't need all five senses or how many senses you have. Right. Absolutely.

Yep. I mean, yeah, there's a ton of, I mean, like you said, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, washing the dishes, all, you know, going for a walk or whatever, all those little moments that you have just basically where your ears are free. We want your ears to be, you have to find moments where your ears are free. So what are the moments where your ears are free? Well, your ears are free when you're mowing the lawn, just throw the iPod on with some earphones, listen to an inner circle audio.

When you are going for a walk, you know, put your plug in your ears, use your ears. When you're washing the dishes, plug in the earpods, you know, the earplugs. So there's so many different, you know, when I used to have a 9 to 5, my commute to work on the express bus from the Bronx to Manhattan was an hour and if there was traffic, it was probably like an hour and like 20 minutes. That is when I used to work on my personal development. Well, back then, I don't think we really had the iPod thing going on.

For me, it was more books. It was more books. We had the CD player that we would carry with us, but for me, it was more carrying the books, you know, the personal development books and utilizing that time to, you know, so if you're taking a train or the bus or something like that, that's also time that you can actually brain dump, you know, listen to inner circle audios like this one. You know, now is the time when we have cell phones with cameras in them. I mean, that's the perfect time to just whip out the camera and start shooting videos.

You know, so I mean, the excuses have to end and the implementation has to begin and that's just pretty much it. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, people get excuses all the time like, I work, I come home, I'm tired and I go to bed and I'm just saying, wow, like you just wasted your whole day that you could have been building at least an hour or two into your business because I remember I used to write drafts of my emails during lunch at work and then send them at night or, you know, schedule them out for the next day, but as other cubicle mates would, you know, listen to the radio or something like that or listen to, you know, politics or business news, I'm always listening to some type of training about certain that's just hot or something that's new like Twitter. Like Twitter just came out. What is Twitter?

And I would just listen to these trainings. And now with the way cell phones are and the way internet is, you can stream so much information into your phone or even on your computer, being able to do that while you multitask on, you know, if you have a boring job, I mean, my job was pretty boring, so I could definitely learn something while I'm doing something at work, multitasking to that point. So then when you do come home, you don't feel guilty that you're not building your business. You have that time for your spouse or for your kids. Absolutely.

And one thing that I used to do too was I used to take the hour and a half, the hour to an hour and a half in the morning going to work on the express bus. I used to take the other hour, hour and a half at night coming home on the express bus, okay? That's, let's say it was just an hour each way. That's two hours right there. Okay, that I could do something for my business, okay?

We have the iPads now. You could sit there and type up your emails on the bus. And I'm just speaking to people that, you know, because there may be people that are driving for an hour to and from work. I'm really speaking to the people who want to get some things done in their business who actually drive like I used to do. They used to take the express bus or the train or things like that.

For me, it was an hour in the morning, an hour at night, an hour during my lunch. I used to put a sign on the back of my chair, do not disturb, I'm out. I'm not kidding. And I used to sit there at my desk, you know, just working in my business. For an hour, I used to go outside, run downstairs to the deli, grab a quick sandwich or a salad or whatever.

It took me about 15 minutes, the whole process, to come back up and have 45 minutes to work on my business with the do not disturb sign, I'm out to lunch. Don't even talk to me. So, no, I'm serious, but there's just like so many and, you know, people take smoke breaks all the time. I used to take conference room breaks to make phone calls. You know, I used to take like, you know, 10-minute conference breaks throughout the day, at least three of them, to go squeeze in as much as I can for my business when I had a job.

So, you know, I mean, so that's like three hours right there. That's like three and a half, maybe four hours you can squeeze in throughout the day before you even get home. And then maybe even add another hour, you know, before you go to bed, you can work for an hour, maybe you can wake up an hour early and get some stuff. So that's like, if we literally counted everything that I talked about, that's like six hours right there, five or six hours of work that you could be putting into your business. So again, the excuses have to go.

The excuses do not know, they no longer exist anymore, at least not in my book. There is no room for excuses. Not when you can fit in the time. Yeah. Especially when some people do 40 hours and then you have other people who do two jobs or three jobs.

Like, how do they do that? It's like, well, because they're working, like, doesn't mean you can't work. Of course you can. Maybe you sleep too much. I don't know what it is.

Maybe you do need an alarm clock, right? And maybe you're full time now and you're just like, I get to wake up at noon. Like, okay, well, how much production do you put in the day, right, or are you just messing around? So it's just time to get focused and, you know, what your chart does actually, you know, puts into plain view, is it really that important for you to sleep 12 hours in a day? Like really?

Right. Exactly. So figure out what you really want and move forward to it. So thank you guys. Thank you, Lisa Torres.

Thank you for attending this Inner Circle call. My name is Lawrence Tam. So what you should do is, you know, there's going to be other calls that you should definitely listen to. But as always, listen to this one on the recording. Go through it again.

Get your pen and paper out. Go ahead and write it down and listen to the past and future calls for the Inner Circle. So I want to thank you for being a member of Inner Circle Calls. Thank you.