Ep. 169: Michael Teape - Win Back One Day of Your Time with Productive Work!

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Contact Michael Teape: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teapetraining/

Teape Training International (TTI): https://www.teapetraininginternational.com

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Adam: (00:04)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host, Adam Larson, and you're now listening to episode 169 of our series. Today's featured guest is Michael Teape. Michael is the owner and lead training consultant for Teape Training International. He is a thought leader in people development who brings over 25 years of corporate learning and development experience across multiple industries. He enjoys running the trainer events for facilitators globally, and works with senior leadership teams to improve their working relationships and outward facing impact in the organization. In this episode, Michael focuses on time management and building a culture around working smarter and focusing on productive work. To kick things off Michael addresses, how you can win back one whole day of your time per week. So keep listening to hear more as we head over to the conversation now.
Mitch: (01:07)
So one of the things that, I know you really talk about is how to win back one day of your team's time every single week. And when I read that at first, I thought that was pretty ambitious. If you break it down, we have accounting listeners, 20% of the week is free.
Michael: (01:25)
You know, I knew you'd be talking about figures, Mitchell since we got started.
Mitch: (01:27)
That's right. So, you know, I just want to know your perspective on this. How do you go about achieving such kind of time management?
Michael: (01:36)
Well, there's multiple streams of how you do that. And yeah, people are like 20%. They always raise their eyebrows when I say that, but truly there's a couple of things you can do. And you know, we work on, first of all, are you actually efficiently working the time you're in the office or the time you're working at home, you know, working on a strategy or, you know, a piece of technical work. In an hour, you know, how effective are you? So I ask everybody, including your listeners. The one question is, how effective are you in that hour? Are you really being productive? And I've got it down to under, I can do in 20 minutes to 30 minutes what you could do in an hour. You can get that down to half that time. If you focus, you know exactly what you're working on and you're in the zone, you're just thinking about this research.
Michael: (02:34)
You're just looking up the strategy. You're just crafting it. If you're not interrupted by the noise of the world, emails, iPhones, Androids, there's just so much going on. People interrupting you all the time. If you create a bubble, it's amazing what you can write in 30 to 45 minutes. So that's one of the biggest parts of it is can I get more out of an hour? And I guarantee you can. So focus, good planning, prioritizing, knowing what you are doing for that 20 minutes. And then the other part of it is brain chemistry. So is understanding how you work. You've heard the thing you've probably heard before. What's your best time of the day, or people often say, oh, I'm best mid morning, evening. They'll offer that quite freely. So they know they're thinking about it. And it's using those times to do your more difficult work.
Michael: (03:35)
Your more heavy thinking, research work. And then using the times, you know, you're not sufficient actually doing something that activates your body, something either physical or the boring, easy work, replying to emails. We'll talk, I'm sure we'll talk about emails. Everyone's always got a question about, that's a whole subject on, how do you look at emails? How do you deal with them? You've got a think of it as a strategy. So there's so much you can do even. So if you're working with others as well. So that was individual. If you're working with a team, is how effective are your meetings? Most of the startups that I work with, they never hold a meeting more than 30 minutes. Yeah. So you can imagine, even with their clients, they've got their clients in tune. We get into the conversation. We're 10, 15 minutes in people start getting really serious, real quick.
Michael: (04:27)
They get to the point. And if we need to book some more time, what's it about we're going to do that. So rather than letting a meeting roll on and on and on, I don't recommend that if your first meeting a client, you know, from this strategic point of view, but once you've got to know a client, they will appreciate the fact. You can get things done in half an hour instead of an hour. So you you're shaving time by getting more done in the time. And where does your team spend the time together? You don't need to attend an update meeting. It's just a waste of time An update meeting is just somebody else reading out what you could have read on a document and in an email. It's what are we going to do with it? Let's cut that. Did you all get the update?
Michael: (05:10)
Yes. Great. What are your thoughts on it? Boom. I've just shaved 15 minutes of time off your meeting, right? So there are so many different aspects to it. And I, you know, the overarching piece, I would say there's three things to consider. One is your mindset. So knowing what's going on here, how you approach work, you've heard growth mindset and fixed mindset. So that working on that piece. So you're connected as quickly as possible to your work. Secondly, is choosing goals, productivity tools, organization, tools that work for you for your work. And you personally, there is no point using tools that you is hard work for you, or you don't get, feel excited to be using. I know I used, excited and organizational tools in the same sentence, but without that, you've got to pick tools that gonna work for the work you do and suit you personally.
Michael: (06:09)
And, and lastly, get good about your time and your rituals is rituals and routines are fantastic. If you can set them up to you rather than let them happen. So if you finish a piece of work today, all of your listeners, next piece of work, you finish, focus on what you're doing afterwards. What are you doing? Do you just sit back? Do you look at the phone or are you actually okay. I'm physically taking a couple of minutes, then I'm going to get into my next piece. I am going to get up, walk around the desk, grab a coffee, change my mood, get some energy going and boom, straight back into it. Cause I guarantee once you finish one piece of work, oh, yeah. You're like, oh good. That's over. And then you waste a good amount of time, relaxing, pat yourself on the back, subconsciously looking at your emails before you get into to the next piece. And before you know it, you've lost time as well. So do you see from that, just that alone, you're able to save 20% of your time and your team's time. Yeah. Just in those areas there.
Mitch: (07:12)
That's, it's very interesting. And you mentioned a lot of things that I did want to bring up, through this conversation, but it kind of all ...