In July of 2009 Michelle Tennant Nicholson of Wasabi Publicity, Inc., sat down to speak with Karen Leland, author of the “In An Instant Series” and contributor to PsychologyToday.com and Huffington Post. Michelle and Karen discussed Karens book Time Management In An Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day and Michelle promised to incorporate Leland’s top time tips throughout August 2009, the first month Tennant was 40 years old.
Heres the transcript:
Michelle Tennant:This is Michelle Tennant and Im with Wasabi Publicity. Ive been doing PR for about 20 years and we periodically do teleseminars for a variety of places and the bottom line is publicity results. How do you get more publicity results inside your life and inside your work and your platform, your book, your service, your nonprofit, whatever youre doing?
And thats really the nature of what were gonna be talking about today and I generally like to just kind of keep it a little loose. Keep it a little causal in these calls. We do have live callers on the phone with us today. Theyre muted. So when theyre ready to ask a question or just, you know, make a comment or be part of the panel even, they can hit Star 6 to unmute themselves.
How I generally like to do these calls is really first discuss some key areas that were all struggling with as marketers. Maybe youre a business owner. Maybe youre the head of an organization. Maybe youre a publicist or just an ad executive or marketing professional.
But when youre actually taking messages and giving them to a public target, whether its through the media or through advertising or so forth there are always things that we have to grapple with. So thats really the nature of why we have a special guest with us today and her name is Karen Leland.
And so let me tell you a little bit about Karen Leland. Number 1, shes a featured contributor of the Huffington Post and PsychologyToday.com so for sure make sure you check her out there. But she is the best-selling author of Time Management in an Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day.
Im especially interested about this because as someone who runs two companies, I have a very full life with really interesting hobbies and so forth. Im always got that little nagging complaint of, Oh, Im just too busy to get everything done.
And on top of that, in my spare time Im still working on my these cause I just have a commitment to ongoing growth and development throughout my entire life so Im really interested and so its also a special time for me because were here at the end of July in 2009 doing this recording and next week I turn 40. On Wednesday.
So the other thing that I was thinking about for todays discussion is Im actually gonna take on some of Karens tips and then actually blog about them and how theyre making a difference for me through the month of August at threecolortothemedia.com. So, Karen, no added pressure or anything like that. Im actually gonna take some takeaways. Okay?
Karen Leland:I love it!
Michelle Tennant:Okay. Good. So what else do I want to say about Karen? She is the president of Sterling Marketing Group and that helps authors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses to build their brand with PR and marketing. Shes also a frequent expert for the media and has been on the likes of the Today show, Good Morning America, CNN, the New York Times, Fortune, and even Oprah.
So we are just really delighted to be able to have this conversation with you, Karen. You really are at the top of your game and I really want to have a really in-depth conversation with you.
If youre joining us and youre in front of your computer and you want to read a little more about Karen, definitely go to her website which is SterlingMarketingGroup.com and its Sterling with an e. And then also shes got these really cool productivity pads which are called TimeTamer.com. So check those out while were talking. And really a big, huge welcome, Karen.
Karen Leland:Thank you. I am so delighted to be here, Michelle. You know Ive been an admirer of yours for a long time.
Michelle Tennant:You have?
Karen Leland:Yep.
Michelle Tennant:Oh, I love that. Go ahead and stroke my ego today. I didnt even know that.
Karen Leland:I know whos in my field. I know whos in the field of PR that Im in and I keep an eye on those people and I know how to separate the wheat from the chaff as they say.
Michelle Tennant:I love it. That really makes my day and so to that end, as you know two top professionals in their mutual fields, I really want to get into how do we really address this busyness? That really sucks our productivity and especially publicity results.
I hear all the time from business owners, I say, Look, I dont know that you need a publicist and you need to pay our PR firm thousands of dollars. Why cant you do it yourself? Because I really am a firm believer do it yourself until you actually need a representative. Maybe youre getting to a point with your public platform that it makes sense to have a publicist. Maybe you should be doing it on your own and I think it really varies depending on the business or the organization or the service or product.
So what do you say to people that say, Karen, I just dont have time to make media calls. I just dont have time to even do that.
Karen Leland:I think we have to start with sort of the bigger picture in the context.
Michelle Tennant:Okay. Good.
Karen Leland:If you think about a Monday morning, and whether youre a PR person or whether youre a publicist within a company or whether you are a small business owner. There you are. Youre typing an email. Youre on a conference call. Youre replying to an instant message. Youre grabbing your morning cup of coffee. Youre answering your cell phone but youre doing all that stuff at the same time.
Michelle Tennant:Yeah.
Karen Leland:All at once. And so you look at the research. One study by the family and work institute found that like a full third of Americans are overworked but even worse than that 50 percent of the people they surveyed said that theyre handling too many tasks at the same time or theyre frequently interrupted during the workday. Another study, again just to give you a perspective by Day-Timer, reported that something like 60 percent of workers feel rushed at work and 50 percent say they accomplish only half of what they planned.
So if you just look at the general environment we work in, and this kind of Web 2.0, 24-by-7 multitasking, do less with more world, is it any wonder that people even really intelligent, highly motivated, highly skilled people have trouble staying focused and using their time and energy to gain ground on important marketing and PR efforts? I mean its not unusual that thats a struggle that everybody has.
Michelle Tennant:Well, I think also we all joke about it with our circle of friends and associates. I heard in the workplace, I have ADD. Or maybe Im schizophrenic. They joke about these mental illnesses and I would assert that most of us, you know, there are some of us who do have mental illnesses. But theres a greater number of us just using that loosely and it doesnt really warrant us saying that. Its just an excuse I think.
When I find myself like Ill say to my husband, you know, Oh, my God. Today was so busy. And then hell say, Well, honey what did you do? I own my own businesses so I have rule over my own time and then when we get to what really transpired that day he uncovers interesting things like my pedicure or taking the dogs to the river, you know. Or, Well, I went out for sushi for lunch and just talked a little too long to my .
Karen Leland:Those things are really an important part and thats kind of a whole other topic but just to make the point. Those things are part of creating a balanced life and so I think its very important for anybody that does marketing and PR to realize that you cant be all social media all the time. You cant be on your Twitter and on your Facebook and on your LinkedIn and blogging 24 by 7. You will have no life.
So I think the key is really how well you are at setting time to work and to focus on PR. How really can you avoid distractions so that youve got that time to focus? To get word out about your book, about your business, about your product, about your service.
And I kind of have five things that I recommend people do to do that. Five simple things that I recommend people do to do that.
Michelle Tennant:I want everybody to stay tuned for the five tips but before we jump into that, one of the things that Im really curious about is your birds eye view of how time management has changed over the past few decades.
Karen Leland:Well, thats a great question and I think one way its significantly changed is it used to be the model of time management used to be that you had a to-do list. Right?
Michelle Tennant:Right.
Karen Leland:Write a to-do list for the day and there would be whatever, five or ten items on the list or maybe 10 or 12 items on the list and youd have three projects that you were simultaneously managing. And youd work during the day and youd get through if not all of your to-do list, most of it. And then youd go home feeling like, All right. I got 90 percent of the stuff done and I worked on my three projects and Im done for the day.
Well, that is not the model any more. No one has a to-do list thats only ten items long. Most people have now what I call, you know, its like a rotating to-do list. Its like a blog. Its a long, long to-do list that you can just keep scrolling down. And instead of 3 projects they have 15 projects.
Its a little bit like when you were a kid. You remember Pez candy where youd lift the head off the Pez and youd lift the little Donald Duck head and a little Pez would come out?
Michelle Tennant:Yeah.
Karen Leland:Its like that. You lift the head and the Pez comes out but one Pez just keeps following after another. So I think one of the significant changes in time management is that people dont manage their time any more by a narrow to-do list everyday where everything gets done. Usually everything doesnt get done every day that you think you should or want or need or have on your list to get done.
So its changed a lot in terms of people being able to focus on very specific areas that they want to concentrate on in a particular period of time whether its during a day or during an hour because theres so much information now and theres so much to do and theres so many project. You know those 3 projects are now 15. That 10-item to-do list is now 100-item to-do list or more. That people have had to really change the way they manage their daily to-do. And thats a significant change in time management over the last even seven or eight years.
Michelle Tennant:I think thats a really huge paradigm shift for us all to really get present to because I think sometimes that is a function of just a crappy to-do list. Like Ive gotta prioritize better. Or Ive got actually, you know, like theres always this mentality of Ive gotta do more better. More focus. More focus. That kind of internal self-coaching dialogue that sometimes doesnt work. It doesnt really help.
So what do you think is Id love to, you know, what do you think the biggest time crime is?
Karen Leland:Well, I think theres a couple of really huge time crimes and one time crime is for most people, and particularly people in PR, or people who are trying to do marketing and PR is procrastination. Is a huge time crime.
Michelle Tennant:I think then hopefully youve got those five tips to help us because I know all of us are guilty of procrastination. We dont like to admit it but we all are.
Karen Leland:All of these things that Im gonna talk about will help with that.
Michelle Tennant:Okay. Good.
Karen Leland:So the first thing that I recommend people do to kind of avoid distraction and find time to focus on their PR and their marketing, and again these are all really simple and easy to do. People just dont do them
And the first one is youve really got to have a system or a way to capture all marketing related ideas and actions. So heres what happens. Just think about what happens when youre running too many programs on your computer. You know it usually slows down or freezes up.
The same is true for your brain. Theres really a limit to how much you can hold in your brain at one time and how much you can focus on. So getting stuff out of your head and onto a PDA or paper or into your computer helps free up your mental state.
So let me just give you one simple example. So this morning when I looked at my email, when I opened up my email Inbox and I looked at just the top ten. I just randomly took the top ten emails. Seven of them were opportunities for PR or marketing action. Seven of them.
Seven out of ten were things I could potentially take on for PR or marketing. Including reading a white paper on social media that I had ordered. Taking down contact information for a resource I needed to enter into my address book. Responding to a question from a book publisher about referring authors to me for PR work. Listening to a web seminar I was registered for and missed.
Responding to an invitation to have my book reviewed by a blog, a big blog, and responding to an offer I wanted to pitch regarding my PR services. And then the last one was responding to a request for me to do a virtual book tour proposal from another author. Okay?
So those are just in five minutes of reading my email, ten emails, those were seen PR or marketing actions. Now, one, I cant do all of those on the spot. Right? And nobody on the call can. No one on the call can open their email and do every marketing action they see on their email at one time.
So I cant do them all on the spot. I dont want to try to remember them because thats taking up mental real estate. I dont want to leave them in my Inbox because then my Inbox becomes junked up with a lot of unfinished items and Ill forget about them and they get buried.
So some of those items are big and some are small and some are high priority and some are low priority but they all need to be captured and organized and not in my email Inbox. Again, I just want to say it because they can become easily lost in my email Inbox and then theyre just so much noise.
So by taking the time to capture all those open marketing items and writing them down somewhere or writing them down in the computer and putting them on a list called marketing items. Like for me I use a program called OmniFocus. Thats just the one I use. Theres lots of different programs that you could use.
But the best practice is to have a tool that lets you quickly capture all those things because when youre able to quickly capture them theyre down. Youve got them. Theyre out of your brain and even before you decide what to do with them youve gotten them out of your head and you freed up your attention.
Im gonna talk about what you can decide to do with them in a minute but capturing them is really a critical tool. And the tool could be a yellow pad, a sophisticated software program, a simple to-do file in your computer, a time management book or anything else that serves that purpose.
Michelle Tennant:And I just want to really give a shout out to Google because and Im not sponsored by Google. I dont get paid by them or anything like that but for years I tried different programs. I even did Act or Goldmine or something like that. Outlook. All those programs and they would always fail me in one way or another because Im so virtual. I travel and I have a virtual setting in my business models.
Gmail was a godsend. I love Gmail because you can actually label its different than just putting them in a folder. You can actually label them in a way and its free. And then it actually intertwines with a calendar so if somebodys out there really struggling right now with a system, I have really found Gmail to be really quite something.
Karen Leland:Thats great. And I also want to say if anybody wants some very specific information on how you organize your email, I did actually a Huffington Post piece on this a while back and I have to find the link and Ill let everybody know on the call before the call is over.
Michelle Tennant:And then also what you can do Karen is if you can send it to me then I can actually blog about that, you know, in my next month as Im actually integrating your tips.
Karen Leland:I will do that. It was a piece called, well, I dont remember what it was called but it was about how to organize your email so I will send it to you.
Michelle Tennant:Okay.
Karen Leland:Okay, great. I will shoot that to you. Making a little note. See? Capturing that marketing item right now.
Michelle Tennant:And also its interesting. Im gonna evaluate whats working for me and whats not working and whats really working is a little book that I carry around that has one pagers of all my clients so that in a moments notice if like sometimes happens Good Morning America calls me and says, you know, what do you got?
And then I can just go right through all my news angles. Each client Im gonna have something like five to ten news angles right there for each client inside my book. And thats really easy to carry if Im traveling. So if they call me on the fly Im like ready at all times and its got little folders inside each its like a regular notebook with like the little plastic pages so I can put the one-pager on one side and then just current notes or things to be done at the back. So I both have a digital and then also I love to write so I have a need to actually write things down on paper as well.
Karen Leland:Most people do Michelle. Like I keep a paper and I use it digitally. So most people use different tools. A multiple of tools.
Michelle Tennant:But I found that really great because then I dont have to keep it in my head. I know where it is at all times and its easy enough to travel with. Its highlights. Its not everything and their mother. I leave that for my digital but its like a birds eye view at any given moment.
Karen Leland:And I will say that once youve
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