Episode 102: Your Most Valuable Resource for Improving Productivity

Minette Riordan: In the book, they talked about how when they made the move from working with high performance athletes to working with entrepreneurs, they’re shocked and dismayed at the fact that there’s no natural opportunities for rest and renewal built into most people’s businesses and that we’re rarely taking time off.
Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t have enough time?”

Brad Dobson: “I am so overwhelmed.”

Minette Riordan: “I need more clarity.”

Brad Dobson: “I don’t know how to do this.”

Minette Riordan: “My to-do list is miles long.”

Brad Dobson: “I’m exhausted.”

Minette Riordan: “There’s got to be a better way.”

Brad Dobson: Hi, there. I’m Brad.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Minette. Not only have we said all these things ourselves but we’ve heard our community of creative entrepreneurs say them over and over again.

Brad Dobson: That’s why we created the Structure & Flow podcast. I’m structure.

Minette Riordan: And I’m flow, and this is the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: We believe that doing more and working harder are not the solution to your productivity challenges.

Minette Riordan: We believe in more play, more fun and more profit. Join us as we explore the interplay between structure and flow so that we can bring more grace and ease to your creative business.

Brad Dobson: Hi and welcome to episode 102 of Structure & Flow, the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking about pillar number two of the nine pillars of productivity, and that pillar is …

Minette Riordan: Energy.

Brad Dobson: Which is appropriate because it’s 8:00 in the morning and we’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with our coffee.

Minette Riordan: Are we?

Brad Dobson: Yes. We’re ready to go.

Minette Riordan: We’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The title of the podcast was your most valuable resource for improving productivity.

Brad Dobson: We had a separate title today.

Minette Riordan: We did.

Brad Dobson: You caught me off guard with that one.

Minette Riordan: We’re talking about the second pillar which is energy and energy is your most valuable resource. It’s actually not time. Time is not.

Brad Dobson: Not intelligence?

Minette Riordan: No.

Brad Dobson: Not space?

Minette Riordan: Not for productivity. I think often we make the mistake of thinking that time management is our most important opportunity for increasing productivity, but I think that energy management is actually more important.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, that’s interesting because I was reading an article that you sent me this morning that we’re gonna go over today and it definitely puts a different spin on things that I think we have a tendency to look at productivity, and time management, and effective time management is a panacea but that doesn’t really help you and I see this a lot in my training, my Ironman training where you can be organized as much as you want and go and put the workouts in but if you don’t have the energy reserves there, you’re not gonna have an effective workout, and the same is true for, I think, a work block.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, absolutely. I want to share the quote today which is from Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr in their book, The Powerful Engagement which is really what we’re focusing on today is sharing some of the lessons that we’ve taken away from that book. They write that, “The number of hours in a day is fixed but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become.

Brad Dobson: I think we could riff on that, just on that statement for the whole podcast. I like to decompose some of that. One thing that struck-

Minette Riordan: Decompose?

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Minette Riordan: Deconstruct?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, decompose.

Minette Riordan: Can you decompose something?

Brad Dobson: Sure.

Minette Riordan: Like a body?

Brad Dobson: We’ll parse it. Let’s agree on parse. One thing that struck me-

Minette Riordan: Parseltongue? Harry Potter?

Brad Dobson: Maybe a little too much energy.

Minette Riordan: Into my coffee?

Brad Dobson: This is relevant to the point I was gonna make.

Minette Riordan: Excuse me. I’ve got a little bit of a cold so I apologize for being a little froggy this morning, or afternoon, or neither, whenever they’re listening.

Brad Dobson: Anyways, back to the point. I was trying to talk about what they say here with quantity and quality of energy so perhaps Minette there had a little bit of quantity of energy but maybe not the right quality of energy. I thought that was very interesting. For me that means … It doesn’t help you to just be all hopped up on caffeine and fruit loops.

Minette Riordan: Not fruit loops but coffee.

Brad Dobson: It helps a little bit but it speaks to the quality of your energy as opposed to having eaten an effective breakfast and maybe gotten a great night sleep.

Minette Riordan: It’s so true. I think for me when I first started reading this book, it was just mind-blowing aha and we’ve been personally talking around the topic of energy and productivity probably for a while and really trying to zero in on how can we be more focused and in reading the book, I think it was fascinating to think that focus flows from focusing on the four different types of energy that they talked about and we’re gonna go into more detail but before we do that, as you were doing your intro a minute ago, I was thinking about your first Ironman and that’s why we’re recording this. You’re just three Sundays away from your third Ironman. I was thinking about your very first Ironman, four, five years ago and how you managed your energy that day so obviously it was sleep and it was a lot of physical training but to me your mental and spiritual energy were really high that day.

Brad Dobson: I brought it that day, smile all day. It’s important part of getting to the finish line, I think.

Minette Riordan: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, the premise of their book is founded on their research and work with professional high performing athletes especially we’re starting with tennis players and really noticing how they were taking a lot of time for rest and renewal during certain periods of the year, during their off season but also between every single point that they were playing on the field and Brad and I both love to watch tennis online. We’ve been big tennis fans for a long time, and if you watch the best players like Roger Federer for example, you notice how he recuperates between each point of a game and they said in the book that you can actually … That they were able to drop their heartbeat by 20 beats per minute.

Brad Dobson: Sure.

Minette Riordan: Just by their ritual.

Brad Dobson: More than their competitor.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. More than their competitor. It’s why they outlast their competitors when they go to four to five sets in a tennis game, and so I found this fascinating when I think about my own work habits and how I tend to manage or not manage my energy and I think I shared one of the recent podcast about Brad’s sweet note on our anniversary this year how I’m working too much and I realized that I probably do some of this a little bit naturally but as we talk about these four different types of energy, we’re gonna get to this place of talking about energy rituals that I think are super powerful and how when you create a ritual or a habit if you like that term better then it doesn’t actually take more energy to do it because you don’t have to make a decision about it. We talked a lot about decisions and how having to make decisions really can set your willpower and how we have limited amounts of willpower.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. I think I like to add, obviously, they brought up the example of the tennis players. The example that came to mind for me is when you watch kids run. If you tell a child, “Hey, I need you to run around this field five times,” and as soon as you tell him go, they’re gonna sprint like their life depends on it and they’ll be out of air by halfway down the field and they’ll walk for a little bit and then they’ll sprint again. Then they’ll do the exact same thing. It’s not a measured pace. I was interested that this was the approach that really they looked at. They tie it to our ultradian rhythms which I need to … I guess I’ll leave that research for you. I need to do some research on it myself but it’s actual known bodily rhythms that we have. Obviously we have circadian rhythms that people are more familiar with.

Minette Riordan: What the ultradian rhythm said was that we can only push for about 90 to 120 minutes until our four type of energy are completely depleted and need the opportunity to renew.

Brad Dobson: Right. This is how they fit the whole model together where we’ve talked about focus blocks before, we’ve talked about Deep Work from Cal Newport who abides by a 90-minute block of deep work. Then you want to look at getting 15 to 20 minutes of recuperation after that to build your energy back up. Those things actually fit together in a natural process for the human body as far as Schwartz and Loehr are talking about.

Minette Riordan: I want to go back to one of the big takeaways in the book and then we need to actually share what these four types of energy are that we keep hinting at. In the book, they talked about how when they made the move from working with high performance athletes to working with entrepreneurs, they’re shocked and dismayed at the fact that there’s no natural opportunities for rest and renewal built into most people’s businesses and that we’re rarely taking time off whether it’s intermittent time off during the day and during the week or whether it’s a more sustained opportunity for rest and renewal during the year that we’re pushing so hard that we’re literally killing ourselves.
We’re creating stress and having too much cortisol in our systems and all these different things that are happening because we’re not managing our energy and it was such a powerful reminder that we can build in these energy rituals to care for ourselves and actually be more productive. I think we’ve said before on this show that for us productivity isn’t about just getting more work done, but it’s about getting quality work done and the right work done and still having the time off to enjoy your life and really to have that quality of life that we all started our own businesses to achieve in the first place.

Brad Dobson: It’s not work more, it’s work better and end up doing it with grace and ease. Let’s talk about these rituals and the types of energy that we want to bring in to this recuperative ritual, I guess we could call it.

Minette Riordan: I think you need to talk about the first one because it’s one that you’ve been working, really, really hard on lately.

Brad Dobson: Mental energy?

Minette Riordan: No. The very first one is physical energy.

Brad Dobson: Oh, physical energy. Sorry. I was looking from the list here.

Minette Riordan: Sorry. We had two different lists here. Sorry.

Brad Dobson: Physical energy. Clearly this is a combination of your overall health. Your overall health, I think is defined … It certainly is for me personally from all the research that I’ve done, it’s defined by the quality of sleep you get, the quality of nutrition that you put in your body and I guess we can also add the fact that you’re actually getting some sort of exercise. You’re out in the sun, in nature, those types of things that the human body craves. Physical energy could also include physical contact or …

Minette Riordan: Touch?

Brad Dobson: Touch with other people. That’s right.

Minette Riordan: Love to touch.

Brad Dobson: It’s good for me-

Minette Riordan: Brand like’s touch.

Brad Dobson: It’s good for me to have my wife rub her hands over my body.

Minette Riordan: Usually not so much in public though.

Brad Dobson: Sleep is just critical here of all of these things. You can get by quite well without food for quite some time. You can’t do too well without water after a few days but sleep is not so much.

Minette Riordan: It’s so true. They do. In the book, they talk extensively about how important exercise is and when they’re talking about exercise, they’re not talking about doing an Ironman triathlon. That’s for the crazy people like Brad that love that intensity but for the rest of us, they’re talking about a 30-minute walk doing yoga, doing weight training once or twice a week. It’s not trying to completely turn your life upside down and say, “Go be a professional athlete,” but it’s taking these respites and moments of renewal and creating rituals around getting physical fitness and I think Brand and I would both attest that when we’re feeling physically fit and our body feels really good that sleep actually is way better.

Brad Dobson: Absolutely.

Minette Riordan: This is not a show about nutrition or diet or promoting eating habits but we’ve both been spending a lot of time in the last couple of years ourselves and with our kids as well really looking at how the foods that we’re choosing to eat or the beverages that we’re choosing to put into our body are also impacting our physical energy. If you’re not feeling great maybe a lot of different reasons and food could be the simplest one so really finding what the diet, not a weight loss diet but what’s the true meaning of diet is just simply food that you eat everyday but what’s a diet that really works for you.

Brad Dobson: One of the discussion groups I belong to uses the term, WOE, way of eating which is-

Minette Riordan: Way of eating, that’s a good one.

Brad Dobson: … different than all of the loaded baggage that comes along with diet. I think at the end of the day though, your physical state defines your mental state to a large degree. You’re just gonna really struggle with all of these mental exercises if you can’t get your physical state together.

Minette Riordan: I find that managing my physical energy has a huge impact on the second type of energy which is emotional energy and that if I don’t get outside every single day, it definitely has an impact on my emotions and when we talk about emotional energy, we’re really talking about our ability to react to situations with a broad set of feelings like really stretching into how we’re feeling and allowing ourselves the full range of happiness, sadness, grief, joy, exhaustion, acceleration. Having emotional resilience really is about allowing ourselves to feel whatever is going on with us and to respond. Sometimes the best way to respond emotionally is take a break.
Maria Shriver had a great article in spirituality and health about the power of the pause and managing your emotional energy often has to do with taking many meditation breaks or mindfulness breaks or I find that Brad and I will often both need a break in the afternoon and one of us will go clean the kitchen from the breakfast dishes. Just taking those mindful pauses where we can really step away but emotional energy especially I think out of the other types of energy is often impacted by our physical energy as well. When we’re tired, we can’t function. We have great stories about our teenage son that we’ve had some really rough days with him and it became really clear over the years there was this pattern that if he doesn’t get sleep, he’s a bear to be around. He’s just a real bear so the importance of sleep.

Brad Dobson: From emotional state, you’re thinking that we shouldn’t spend all day reading Facebook comments about political posts, 24/7 triggered about the state of …

Minette Riordan: No, we should not. What Loehr and Schwartz talked about in the book is how important it is to spend time in happiness and positivity and joy, and doing work that fills us up emotionally as well as financially in all the other different types of energy but learning how to spend more time and positive emotions is a practice. It’s easier said than done because so many of us have limiting beliefs. We have stories that are telling ourselves we get caught up in the anger and negativity of what’s happening. I’m just thinking about the silly God post about-

Brad Dobson: We’re not bringing that to the podcast.

Minette Riordan: Okay. Darn it. No politics on the Structure & Flow podcast. At least not today but that just noticing what are the things that you could do every single day that would lift your emotional state so we talked about how we can we improve our physical state but what could you do to lift your emotional state of really simple practice that I love that lifts me so quickly as a gratitude practice. I found myself the other day feeling really overwhelmed. We were in a planning meeting yesterday and I was like I can feel the weight in my shoulders of all the things that need to get done and I took a moment of pause after our planning meeting to just say, “What am I feeling most grateful for right now?” Just doing that helped my emotional state improved and help me get unstuck and out of that state of overwhelm and back into a state of flow.

Brad Dobson: I’m interested you’re all about positivity in that statement and I guess I would add meditation to a way to improve emotional energy but I don’t look at that from the perspective of trying to be in a positive place. I look at it as a neutral thing that tends to attenuate the large emotional swings and stuff like that. I’m not looking at it to remove anger, I’m looking at it to understand anger. We have a lot of signals I think in the media and in books and everybody wants to be happy.

Minette Riordan: Don’t worry, be happy.

Brad Dobson: Everyone wants to be happy. They want positivity. Is that really what you want or is it that you want to have equanimity and calm?

Minette Riordan: I think it’s both end. I think if you look at neuroscience, there’s clear signs of activity in the brain when we feel joyful and happy. It activates different parts of our brain. I would say that another way to create emotional calm other than mindfulness would also be creativity so coloring, painting, playing in the dirt, finding ways to just release some of the feelings yes, I think we need to seek to understand and embrace all of our full range of emotions and meditation is a great way to do that but I do think that when we approach a day from a positive mindset we’re more productive.

Brad Dobson: That’s true. I think these kind of dovetail together emotional energy with the last two which are gonna be mental energy and spiritual energy and I like their take on spiritual energy. Let’s go for mental energy first.

Minette Riordan: Mental energy helps you not cave when things get tough and power through the boring parts that work when you need to so that powering through when things are tough, we see a lot of resistance in our business with our clients at people not wanting to do the parts of their work that feel hard or boring or not fun and while we’re big proponents of making sure that you’re doing work that fills you up and that is fun and playful and has a positive impact in the world, there’s gonna be parts of growing and sustaining a profitable business that aren’t particularly fun but are a little boring and that sometimes you just have to sit down and power through.
Very few people I know in the creative industries love looking at their numbers or love collecting the data and looking at their key performance indicators. Learning how to make some of these things, I think results oriented will help you build some resilience and some mental toughness. I also like to talk about one of the ways to increase that mental resilience or toughness or ability to persevere and push through is to stay connected to your purpose which leads right into spiritual energy and into what we call and we talked about on this show before is your big why. Why are you doing what you’re doing if you’re really committed to building your business and making it successful you have to have some mental toughness?

Brad Dobson: I like the way they talked about how … When they talked about spiritual energy, they’re not necessarily talking about religion, it’s fine if your spiritual energy comes from religion but in their case, they’re talking about it in terms of why are you put on this earth or why …

Minette Riordan: What’s your purpose?

Brad Dobson: What’s your purpose in life? Of course they go through this classic exercise. Some of you, I’m sure have heard of it where you look at what statement you’d like to have as your epitaph, the one on your gravestone and that type of thing where you have a month to live or you have a day to live? What went well? What are the things that you regretted, those types of things. There’s various exercises I guess but it’s a great way to connect with who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’re listening to us in the morning on your way to work. Why are you working? Is it to support your family?
That’s a wonderful thing bringing up children that are great kids, that are gonna help everybody? Maybe it’s to make people’s hearts open with your art, through music or painting. It could be a huge number of things but it helps to be able to have that spiritual energy that you can tap into as a source of something to renew and keep you going through maybe it’s boring work, maybe it’s great work.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, absolutely. Another aspect of looking at your spiritual energy is one of the favorite parts of what we teach in our business planning process which is really getting clear about what your core values are. When you are living a life that is based on core values, you’re living a life that’s in alignment. You’re living a life full of purpose and meaning and intention and we’ve done a lot of work ourselves around our core values, I would say over the last decade that we come back over and over, and over again to what our personal core values are, what our family core values are as well as what our business core values are and I’m looking [crosstalk 00:23:29]

Brad Dobson: I have them right beside me on the wall.

Minette Riordan: Right beside Brad on the wall right here and one of the core values that we love to talk about is that we all have the freedom to write our own stories and I think that really applies when we’re talking about this concept of energy management and how the powerful engagement that we discovered in this book by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz can really change your entire perspectives and not only will it increase and improve productivity to focus on energy but I think it will improve your ability to focus and really do work that matters and to believe that you can make the changes and that’s where the freedom to rewrite your own story, you really get to determine your day and so many people complain and say, “I’m so busy and I’m working. I’m doing this and I’m doing that,” but actually legally if you work for a company, you get breaks. You get a lunch break. You get two 15-minute breaks in the day. It’s part of worker’s compensation.

Brad Dobson: Unless you work for Amazon.

Minette Riordan: Unless you work for Amazon.

Brad Dobson: Just all sort of stories about their shipping, anyways.

Minette Riordan: About their shipping.

Brad Dobson: It doesn’t matter.

Minette Riordan: I don’t know what he’s talking about. We won’t go down that rabbit hole but for most of us who are listening to this podcast who are entrepreneurs, we own our own business. We can write the story of what our ideal day looks like and then start working on moving towards that ideal day and part of what that ideal day should include are these energy rituals so you want to talk a little bit about the energy rituals.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I do. I think it was … This struck me that it related a lot to what I had worked out for … I guess I had created a ritual related to the focus blocks that we talked about in a previous episode. What Schwartz and Loehr have put together is the concept of creating a renewal ritual and this might be 15 to 20 minutes and I can tell already I’m gonna have it on paper and it’s gonna be in front of me. The point of the ritual and the same I what I did with the focus blocks is to remove decision-making and I like the words they used in terms of push and pull.
If you have a habit in place, if you have a ritual in place, it pulls you. For most of us, the best example of this is brushing our teeth. Our parents instilled this in us when we were little kids. I don’t know that we did that great of a job with our kids but it gets to the point where you can’t go to bed without doing it. Maybe you’re lying there in bed reading and it’s just bugging you and you got to get up and do it. That’s a habit where it’s just instilling you and it pulls you. You’re not pushing yourself, “Oh, I got to go brush my teeth.” It’s the way our brain works. We have it set up in our brain. It’s a pathway that we’ve instilled so we want to do the same thing with our renewal ritual.

Minette Riordan: I love the idea of having it be a ritual rather than just a habit because I feel like-

Brad Dobson: Semantics a little bit.

Minette Riordan: It is semantics but the energy … The word, ritual is something sacred and something that is super, super important to us and yes, the habit of brushing our teeth is important to the health of our teeth of our lifetime but throughout the day, I would say at least twice during the day after your focus blocks and certainly at lunch time you’re gonna have a couple of periods of 15 to 20 minutes, maybe an hour at lunch and maybe one after work when you first get home or first get up in the morning. What do you do during these energy rituals? I want to maybe give a couple of examples of what that might look like during those rest times.

Brad Dobson: Right. We need to tie those too before different energy types which you remember our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual so certainly physical. It might be five minutes of yoga. It might be walk around your local park. Just get out in the sun, do some weeding. There’s always weeding to do.

Minette Riordan: Touch your feet in the grass. Make contact with the earth. We’re lucky we live close to the beach. We can walk to where we can see the beach, we could take 20 minutes and drive and just gaze at the beach.

Brad Dobson: If you’re a dog owner, you get that for free.

Minette Riordan: Yes, you do. You get to walk outside. Another physical one that I think actually maybe really touches on all four would be meditation and or yoga would really help you to manage all four areas of energy.

Brad Dobson: There’s deep breathing exercises that are really effective. All sorts of stuff like that.

Minette Riordan: Doing the dishes. It’s one of the classic stories of mindfulness is mindful dish washing but it’s something that’s completely different than your business and this does not include technology people. This is not reading Reddit.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, exactly.

Minette Riordan: It’s not surfing on Facebook. That’s not what they consider to be full disengagement where we’re really stepping away from information input and doing something completely different and if you’re wondering what to do for these energy rituals, thing about some of your favorite hobbies that maybe you aren’t making time for.

Brad Dobson: Decluttering, that’s a hobby, right?

Minette Riordan: Yeah. You can definitely spend some time decluttering. I was thinking about pulling out your guitar or sitting down at the piano that’s sitting over here off the screen a little bit. For me it’s just 15 minutes of painting or making art or pulling pictures from magazines for collage projects so creativity is a great one for doing some kind of energy ritual. It could be taking 20 minutes to maybe chop vegetables to make a salad for dinner so that when you actually do get to the end of the day, you’re not exhausted and order a pizza instead of eating something healthy. It’s something that’s taking you outside your work focus and giving you a moment of pauseful, restful recovery and renewal.

Brad Dobson: Certainly I have tendency to do that with headphones and listening to music or maybe a podcast. That’s not really that helpful. You want to target a little more quiet blocking meditation or Zen dishes is a great way to combine some of these things.

Minette Riordan: That’d be a great name for a blog.

Brad Dobson: Zen dishes?

Minette Riordan: Yes.

Brad Dobson: How about the emotional, spiritual parts of this? How can we include this in our little 15 to 20-minute ritual?

Minette Riordan: For me meditation really is wonderful for both of those.

Brad Dobson: Or visualization.

Minette Riordan: Visualization, doing a guided visualization really using the time to set intentions. One of the things that I’m really focused on right now is how can I be more intentional about the life and the business that I want to create getting some clarity around the business but the other one that I would add that I know works so well, there’s tons of studies that have been done about the power of this and it’s the simplest thing in the world in its journaling.
Literally just taking your journal out and writing, doodling or some note-taking, just some simple brain dumping which is one of my favorite ways to do my journaling to get things out of my mind so I have a little bit more clarity and focus. A journal with a pen and paper. You can use Evernote or Google Keep or one of tour favorite apps to do this but there is something really precious about the ritual of writing with pen and paper, so I highly encourage to make one of your restful energy renewal blocks everyday to be about journaling.

Brad Dobson: Did we get all of them?

Minette Riordan: I think we did.

Brad Dobson: Awesome. good stuff. I think this is super effective and it’s gonna be the next step although actually the next step was teeming which we talked about with another one of our guest on a podcast coming up. Gosh, how am I going to put all these things together?

Minette Riordan: Actually, we need to make a note of that because that’ll be a great episode. By the time we get to the end of the nine pillars and combine that with an awesome idea about teeming which is coming up. It’s gonna be episode 105 with Allan Brown [crosstalk 00:31:44]

Brad Dobson: We will have a whole system, won’t we?

Minette Riordan: We will have a whole system for improving productivity without doing more but just doing better. It’s gonna be pretty exciting. You wanna tell them what we’re gonna talk about next week?

Brad Dobson: Next week is gonna be pillar number three of the nine pillars of productivity and it’ boundaries, so get out of my space, man. We all need boundaries so that’s gonna be a fun talk.

Minette Riordan: We do.

Brad Dobson: In the show notes for this one, we’ll have links. That’s what I was going to say. Links to the books.

Minette Riordan: The Power of Full Engagement.

Brad Dobson: The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. We’ll also have link to Deep Work by Cal Newport and a couple links to other episodes that we’ve talked about in this-

Minette Riordan: Yeah, especially if you haven’t listened to the focus blocks episode, that was a real favorite where Brad went really deep in the woods working for him with these focus blocks so I highly encourage you to listen to that one. One of our early ones was talking about big why and why that’s so important. That was back when we were still the Path to Profit podcast.

Brad Dobson: That’s right. If you haven’t taken our unique productivity style quiz yet, we’d love you to take that into pathtoprofitacademy.com/upsquiz. We’ll have that link in the show notes and the episode post, we’ll also have a link to that. It’s a great way to get started on figuring out what it is about you that struggles with productivity, what it is about you that has gifts related to productivity …

Minette Riordan: Absolutely.

Brad Dobson: … and your style related to that. It’s worth getting that under way and pretty soon we’re gonna have a cool thing that we’re gonna be selling related to that.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. Our productivity blueprint, it’s coming.

Brad Dobson: It’s coming.

Minette Riordan: It’s waiting on me to get that finish so I need to get a little bit more productive but we’ve been working on a lot of other things. The other invitation I have for you is if you want to get to know us a little more, come play with us on Facebook. We have a free Facebook group called Productivity for Creative Business Owners where we share a lot more of this juicy goodness around productivity. I love doing Facebook Live so you all can catch me doing Facebook Live and even painting while I’m talking on Facebook so come join us, Productivity for Creative for Creative Entrepreneurs on Facebook.

Brad Dobson: Work better, not work more.

Minette Riordan: That’s right. All right. We’ll see you guys all next week. Have an awesome productive and restful week.

Brad Dobson: Thanks for listening to Structure & Flow, the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. To find out more about this episode and others, go to pathtoprofitacademy.com and click on the podcast link.