How to Stop Wasting Time – 7 Time Management Hacks That Actually Work

Hey everybody, how you guys doing? Happy Friday. Um, I am looking forward to talking to you guys today. First of all, if you could, um, I don't bring up YouTube or LinkedIn when I'm actually going live because it's kind of distracting. But, if you guys could tell me whether I'm coming in loud or clear and whether the video is good, that would be awesome. Um, I appreciate all your uh you guys joining me today. We're going to have a really fun and informative, I think, and very helpful session today. Uh, if you haven't connected with me on social. If you could, that'd be great. You go to philipfandom. com/muse and uh you can sign up for my newsletter comes out about every week or two. Um, I don't send out a ton of emails, so you're not going to get slammed with a bunch of stuff, and you can always unsubscribe. But that way, you're on my email list and I can communicate with you directly. And also, when you get those first couple of um, intro welcome emails, you can always just hit reply and it comes right to me. So, if you want to shoot me a note, let me know who you are, what you're doing. I'd love to know um, what's up in your world. And so, happy Friday, Sonia. Welcome. Uh Peter, Julie, cool. Good to see you guys here. Um so we are going to talk about a lot of really awesome things today about time management and looking at it in kind of um kind of a different way. And uh I did want to alert you if you guys aren't familiar with my podcast. It's called Brand Design Masters. It's in the f top I think 5% of marketing podcasts in the world. I have had some amazing guests on my podcast. Marty Newmire, Chris Doe. Last year or so, I've been focusing on um uh solo episodes. Sorry, I had to make sure my volume was down on my speakers. Um I've been focusing on solo episodes and just recently actually some of the uh audio from these live streams I'm repurposing over to my podcast. So, if you have to leave early or if you missed a live stream, I've done eight over the last eight weeks and you want to catch up on that, go to my podcast because all the information is there. It's also super edited down. So, all this chatty stuff at the beginning and the end and the Q& A and stuff is not there. So, it's very straightforward and the content comes right at you like a fire hose. Um, so with that, you guys, I'd love to know where you're hailing from and uh if you have trouble with time management or productivity or efficiency because that's what I'm going to be talking about today. And like I said, in a slightly different way. So, I say we jump right into it. All right, you guys. You guys ready? All right, got to move a couple windows around here. And so what we're going to be talking about is how to stop wasting time. Seven time management hacks that actually work. And I hate that word hacks, but the thing is that the algorithm loves that word hacks. And so it actually shows up in SEO really well, which is why I named it that. But essentially, these really are more like practices. uh there are more methods that you can use to uh increase your level of productivity and focus. And so the problem is that most people feel busy and a lot of times they're not actually moving the ball forward or as far forward as they would like. A while back I did a survey of my email list and I asked everyone in this survey, what are you struggling with the most? And I got back 250 replies to this survey. And I was expecting things like finding more clients, getting up toate on AI, um improving my design skills, making more money. I those are the sorts of answers I was expecting to get. But the answers that I end up getting were predominantly time management and organization. That is what my community of creative professionals is struggling with the most. And so I've focused a little bit of my time and energy to try to help my coaching clients and my community to um to be more efficient and more productive and work through some of this stuff. It's a challenge. It's a challenge even for me. I'm no guru in this but I do practice and do um try to stay up on date up to date on different ways of managing this and today the problem has gotten worse if not better. We have more distractions than ever. We live in a world of constant notifications and pings and banners flying into our

screen. Infinite content coming down the pike. uh Slack messages, DMs, emails, meetings stacked on top of each other. Everyone feels busy, but a lot of us feel like we're not moving the ball forward. The thing that you have to remember is that apps don't fix productivity. The typical response to trying to improve your productivity or your focus or your efficiency is to download or adopt a new app. notion, ClickUp, Monday, Trello, To-Doist, adopting the methodology of Cananban Boards. I mean, the list just goes on and on in terms of tools that you can use to improve your productivity. And they can help to a certain extent kind of organized your to-do list. But you might, you know, assume if you find the right productivity tool that everything is just suddenly going to click and be perfect. But here's the truth. The truth is that apps don't make you productive. Practices do. Productivity tools when it comes down to it are neutral. They just reorganize behavior you already have. So if your habits are scattered, a new tool is just going to organize and reinforce your scattered behavior, right? And so what we're talking about today is really more about self leadership than it is apps. We're not going to be talking about apps. Okay? So I do mention a couple apps very late in the presentation, but this is really not about apps. Uh there is one app I am going to mention though even though I just said I'm not. It's called Toggle. T O G G-L. It's just a time tracking app and it can be very helpful if you want to find out where your time is going. So when you're in that analysis phase of like what am I doing wrong? It can be really helpful to use that app because it helps you track how you're using your time and going back and looking at that can help you kind of um deconstruct it. But as I said, what we're really talking about today is we're talking about self leadership. We're talking about something a little bit deeper. We're talking about your ability to direct your attention, to control your energy, to prioritize meaningful work, and to design your day intentionally. Because the people who perform at a higher level aren't necessarily better at quote unquote time management. They're just better at managing themselves. They're better at leading themselves. So here are seven time management practices that actually work. Here's hack number one. Your energy is the real calendar. Most time management advice focuses on scheduling, but your calendar really isn't the constraint. That's not the thing that you're dealing with. What you're dealing with is your energy, your focus. And you have to manage energy, not just time. And we all know that physical energy changes throughout the day, right? Cognitive day. Everyone has a chronotype. A chronotype is your type of time energy paradigm, right? Your a your archetype. And so there are morning people like me. I'm a morning person. There are midday performers. There are night owls who do their best work at night. And the mistake that you might be making if you're struggling with productivity and time management is you might actually be scheduling your work based on availability instead of energy. And so creative work for us creative professionals they focus on you know creative work right and creative work takes your best brain power right to do design strategy writing thinking client management the list goes on. You have to really kind of shape your day around your peak cognitive hours. So, here's a best practice for you. You want to identify when your brain works best. So, think about when you're the most productive, you're the most sharp. Do you know that you're a morning person, an afternoon person, a night owl? Ask yourself, when do I think more clearly? When do I feel the most

creative? mentally sharp? And then you want to try and map out and protect that window of time because this is where your highest leverage as a creative professional or as a professional in general. That's where your greatest leverage lies and where your best work is going to lie. Hack number two is designing your default day. And I think about this in terms of this. Structure creates freedom. Chaos creates distraction. And most people wake up and they react to the day. An email comes in, a message comes in, meetings happen. You look at your calendar and a bunch of stuff has been added to it. And before you know it, your day is gone. People who perform highly have a tendency to somehow do things differently. They design the structure of their day not minute by minute, but they do it architecturally and kind of hierarchically. So, here's an example of a default day structure. You want to think about your time in terms of zones. You may have a deep work zone where you do your creative work, your thinking, your strategy. You may want to have a communication zone. That's where you handle your email, your Slack messages, your calls, your text messages. You carve out an administrative zone where you're dealing with operations and uh finances and logistics. When you define, excuse me, when you design your default day, decisions disappear. Meaning, you don't wake up wondering what to do. your day already has a bit of a shape to it. A little bit more about that in just a second. Here's hack number three. Hack number three is the one needle mover rule. And this is something that I like to call the illusion of productivity. And I am totally guilty of this myself. In fact, this is the one of the biggest things that I struggle with and I have since probably the earliest days of my career. I want to get things done fast. I want to see volume taken care of. That's my mindset, right? I want to check off 12 boxes on my to-do list fast, right? Because it feels productive. It's a dopamine hit. It makes me feel really good to and I focus on doing a whole bunch of little things fast. And I've developed kind of a name for this. I heard this word before. I didn't make it up, but I call it procrastin. And this is where you're answering emails, striving for email box zero. You're checking all your Slack messages. You're making sure you don't have comments on any of the five social media platforms that you want. You're on. You do quick tests. But then the problem is it's lunchtime or the day ends and you feel like you haven't moved anything forward. So here's the one needle mover rule. Every day you want to ask yourself one question. What is the one thing that could make this day successful? move this needle? One meaningful piece of work. Not 10, not 15 little check boxes, but one. So, here are some examples of what I would consider to be a needle mover. That is finishing a client project, finishing a proposal, recording a video, writing a podcast outline or script, outlining a strategy. Right? If that one thing gets done for me, the day counts. It matters. Everything else is secondary. This focuses and resets your brain to think about your day in terms of impact rather than activity. That's why I call it procrastinating because basically it makes you feel like you're working. But essentially what you are doing is you're procrastinating about addressing the one big needle mover that's going to make that day successful. Do any of you seem to identify with that concept? That's the one that hits me really right between the eyes. And Tim Ferris ages and ages ago, right, the four-hour work week, he introduced this concept to an extent. Um, he focused on three things. I have to break it down to one really to have it be effective, but so think about it in terms of the one needle mover rule. Hack number four is killing reactivity at the source. This is how I think about

this. You want to eliminate reactive work and increase proactive work. So it's reactive versus proactive work. One of the biggest productivity killers is reactive work. Reactive work means other people are controlling your time. You are reacting to things rather than driving the process yourself. You're reacting to emails. You're reacting to Slack or WhatsApp or Discord messages. You're reacting to banners and notifications, phone calls, text messages. I'm stressing you out even listening to these things, right? Client emergencies, social media posts, and comments. — [snorts] — When your day becomes reactive to things that are coming in, you lose ownership of your attention and you want to think about it in terms of owning your own attention. That's that idea of self leadership that I mentioned at the beginning because when you allow yourself to be reactive all the time, you become a professional responder. You're not a creator. You're not a driver of movement and change. you are a professional responder. And so here's a best practice. You want to become a proactive worker. You want to create communication windows. This is a great hack. And that is to say you're only going to answer email three times a day, morning, midday, late afternoon. This is something that I try to do and it really, really helps because I have a tendency to really strive for inbox zero like all the time. And because having, you know, 500 unread messages and I get about 150 a day really stresses me out. And so I'm constantly kind of nipping away at it. But what it does is it's sucking my attention and I'm becoming that professional responder. So I started to institute this thing where I look at and answer email three times a day. I do it first thing in the morning, at lunchtime, and at the end of the day. And I also train my clients to understand that that's the case. And so they don't look for answers super quickly. And I don't become that professional responder. And when you do that, something really powerful happens. You move from reaction to intention. You start directing your own work instead of responding to it. One of the things I try to an example I try to use when I'm talking about this is that protecting your time is you know when you have a CEO or like a head of industry and they may have you know a gatekeeper an admin that person [clears throat] that you have to get to in order to schedule a meeting or get time because this person is super busy right that person is a gatekeeper to a certain extent you want to become your own admin gatekeeper keeper of time. Moving on to hack number five. So hack number five is artificial deadlines. Have you ever noticed that work expands to fill time? There's this thing called Parkinson's law. You might have heard of it. Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it. So available. If you give yourself eight hours to do a logo design, that logo design is going to take out eight hours. If you give yourself three hours to do a logo design, that logo design's got to get done in three hours. If you block the time or create an expectation of time and artificial deadlines to an extent, you are forcing yourself to work within them. A best practice kind of methodology for this is to think of it in terms of constraint. Instead of endless time and endless boundaries, you want to try to create constraint around what it is that you do. Here are some examples. 90-minute work sprints, time creative sessions. So you using toggle timer, great thing. Timed creative sessions. It's also called time blocking to an extent. Refined stopping points, superdefined rest breaks because by using constraint, what it does is it forces decision making. It forces you to get it done and you have to decide. It increases momentum and it removes perfectionism. The more time you give something, the more easier it the easier it is to slip

into perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of those things that I struggle with a lot. And unlimited time is kind of disguised as quality control essentially, right? So you're thinking of it in terms of you [snorts] know constraint eliminates analysis paralysis in a way it forces decision making. So I always say this if perfectionism and fear of failure had a baby it would be called analysis paralysis because constraint that idea of constraint and giving yourself time blocks artificial deadlines then [snorts] it forces decision making because you have to make that decision to get it done and to hit that end point that you've set for yourself. So constraint eliminates analysis paralysis and you know it's a really great way to create that idea and to start to practice artificial deadlines. All right, hack number six. Hack number six is that focus is a trainable skill. In other words, kill the squirrels because multitasking is a total myth. Clinical studies have shown that the brain does not multitask. What it does is it switches attention very quickly and every switch drains cognitive energy. So, here are some examples of squirrels. notifications, popups, alerts, messages, emails, texts, tabs, social media, quote unquote news. I'm just going to check Instagram for a second. Facebook. I'm going to see what's happening on LinkedIn. Procrastinating, right? You're responding. You're becoming that professional responder to the squirrels. And every time you switch your attention like that, you are draining cognitive energy. And those sorts of things will run across your mental field of view every few seconds. That's the sort of business world that we live in. And so what you want to try to do is create a distractionfree work environment. This is what this looks like. Turn off notifications. Close extra browser tabs. Mute your phone. Use headphones to eliminate outside sound. Close your office door if you have an office door to eliminate people, you know, walking through, pets walking across your desk, right? Eliminate those distractions. Oh, another option is, as I mentioned before, answer email three times a day. But we all know that distractions do happen, right? Some of you who are in the audience might know that I practice meditation. And there are a lot of things about meditation that come in really, really handy when you're running your own business or your own creative practice. And one of the techniques that meditators use when you're meditating, your brain wants to work. Your brain is always working. And so when you're meditating, you're trying to quiet your thoughts, right? But thoughts have a tendency to rush in when you're not expecting it or as soon as your mind is resting some you're thinking about snow tires or something just comes into your head. And so meditation um practitioners and trainers talk about it this way. You want to realize that your thoughts are going to happen. There's no way that you're ever going to eliminate them. But when those thoughts happen, you want to recognize them. You recognize them and notice it as if it's a leaf floating down a stream. Okay? And then you just consciously let it pass. You don't beat yourself up. You just return to the work because practicing this, that sort of focus improves with practice. So the more you do it, the better you get at it, the faster you get at it. And that's the same thing that happens with distractions is that the more you architect your space, so it's a distractionless environment or as reduced as possible, when those distractions do come in, they're less frequent. So it's less kind of this constant static and movement. And you will train yourself to be able to react to those distractions quicker and easier, to be able to recover from that distraction, and to maintain your cognitive energy as much as you can. Hack number seven. Hack number seven is you want to build your own personal production system.

And the idea behind that is that you never want to solve the same problem twice. High performing people have a tendency to build systems. They don't reinvent the wheel every day. And so here are some examples from my own systems. One of the systems that I use across a bunch of different things from my hard drive to how I respond to communications are is I use templates a lot. So every time I write an email, the second time I find myself writing a similar email, I realize that this is an email that I have to make a template out of. So I will genericize that communication email and I'll put it in a Google doc. And over time, I have saved probably 40 different email templates responding to sponsorship opportunities, responding to new client opportunities, responding to, you know, people who want to be on my podcast. I have tons and tons of email templates and all I have to do is copy, paste, fill in the personalized information and send it. It's an incredible timesaver. Proposal templates. If you do a lot of proposals, that's another thing that can be really helpful. When I create a proposal, I have a very specific kind of um organizational structure, excuse me, organizational structure to the proposals that I put together. And so sometimes I have proposals for naming, design, sometimes for web services, sometimes for very fullyfledged strategy projects through design, through packaging, brand guidelines, and I've saved a whole number of templates that have the kind of moving parts and even in many cases the description of the phases that I move from client to client and use over and over again. I have a creative brief template. Um, I have a client folder structure template. So, when you get a new client, right, this is one of the things that I noticed early on in my career is that you get a new client and then over time you end up having 15 or 20 folders in every client folder, right? There's video and there's emails and there's, you know, team links production and uh pre presentations. I mean, the list goes on. And so, what I've done is I've created a folder. This says new client. Inside that folder are 20 different folders that have names. And every time I get a new client, I just duplicate that master folder. I put the client name at the top. And then my folder structure is similar across all of my client projects, and I know exactly where to put things and exactly where to find things. Um, this is also super helpful if you're working in-house in an agency or corporation to establish that kind of structure with a team so everyone is using the exact same structure because we know what it's like when they don't. Essentially, every repetitive task should have a template. Every repeatable process should have a system. Now, this is the one place where I am going to mention a couple apps, but this is really more around automation. There are apps like Zapier and active pieces and if then if this then that which is if and these are systems and SAS products that actually create help you create automations across different platforms. So across email across social across it will interconnect a bunch of um aspects of your business and you can create automations around that. If you haven't explored those sorts of applications, Zapier, active pieces, if this and then that, I would suggest that you do because it was one of those things that I didn't really get involved in until a good three or four years into starting my own business. And then when I did, it was like this amazing unlock. And AI is making this even easier more than ever. And it's getting easier and easier to create your own agents. And a AI agents are things that can go out without a platform and do stuff for you. And uh you know without taking a whole another live stream to kind of talk about what that is um suffice it to say that essentially the landscape of being able to create repeatable automated processes for your business is rapidly expanding and growing. And so if you haven't gotten into starting to do this for your own business, now is the time to do it because that is exploding. And so get on that. All right. So what systems do is they reduce your having to think, which is what we want them for. They reduce having to expend cognitive

energy and decision making because decision- making also takes cognitive energy. Every time you remove a decision, you free up additional mental energy for more meaningful work. So just to circle back, what we're talking about here is we're talking about productivity being self leadership. These seven principles, these seven hacks are not really about time management when you get down to it. They're really about self leadership. It's about your ability to direct your attention to protect your energy, to recognize when you have the most energy and to revolve and structure your day around that. how you can focus or recover from distraction to focus on meaningful work. Designing how you are spending your time. Time management is not about squeezing more tasks into the day. It's about making sure that the right work gets your best attention. And with that, I am totally open to kind of questions. we can discuss this. Did any of you um kind of uh feel like you identified with certain areas or certain um aspects of this presentation? [snorts] I kept this one short today because I thought this was going to be really important. Um, and I wanted to be time efficient about it really when it came down to it because it's so easy to talk about time management in terms of apps and apps as I said don't solve the problem. What really solves the problem is looking at your energy, your focus, eliminating distractions and architecting your day in a really meaningful way and [snorts] also trying to become more proactive rather than reactive to not be a professional responder. So with that you guys, I hope you enjoyed this presentation on how to save time and uh these seven hacks that can actually help you be more productive. Um and if you did shoot me a note in the chat if any of you have any questions, I'm happy to make this kind of an open Q& A. If you have any other questions or want to kind of use this as a group coaching session, I can totally do that, too. If you have any questions about um you know creative entrepreneurship or content marketing or your design practice, happy to field any questions. Um I can hang out a few minutes. So talk amongst yourselves. I'm going to take a drink and if you have any questions, let me know here. I'll put on my funky um intro music. — How's that? Yeah. All right. I actually want to call out someone who's in the chat. Um. Ah, turn it off. Okay. Quirk works is a very talented photographer named Peter. And [clears throat] I'm going to out your productivity and your kind of your to-do list hack because I think it's so brilliant. Peter in his office has painters tape stuck to his door. And whenever he gets an idea, a creative idea or some sort of to-do item that maybe is outside of his everyday, you know, kind of process, he writes it on a piece of blue painters tape and he puts it on his door and he will move those around to prioritize those. And uh you always see it in the background when we're chatting on Zoom. And so, um, there can also be Oh, and I was also talking to a colleague of mine, uh, recently in a peer mastermind that I'm in, a woman named Valerie, who specializes in, uh, book marketing, um, helping other people launch their books. And she recently has gotten into Post-it notes. And for her, she has a wall that she creates a big grid of Post-it notes and moves those things. She gets the super sticky kind so you can kind of unstick and restick them and she um sticks them on her wall so she always has things visible. But it also gives her the physicality of being able to actually move things around and they're always there even when she's not looking

at her screen. And so there's a physical aspect of productivity and management and listkeeping and organization that I think has a whole lot of value. And if you are completely digital and are happy with stuff that's just on your screen or just in a SAS product, that's fine. But I've always found it very helpful to have a whiteboard. I use stickies. There are aspects of kind of physical note takingaking um and physical listkeeping that I've always found to be really successful. And uh and Peter says that he is going to um [clears throat] patent the blue tape methodology and make millions off of it. And I have no doubt that he will. Um all right. So, no name. Think you're a question. You're going to ask me a question. You have to think about how to word it. Um, okay. Well, I'm not seeing any questions coming. I am going to put this up here for right now, though. Um, hold on a second. There we go. If you have a question, just type question in all caps and type your question. Or at this point, you can probably just type the question because I'm looking for it and I'm going to see it. Keep a little background music going. All right, we have one question. No name asks, "How do you deal with getting projects done versus it being perfect? " Let me know if this music is annoying you guys. Um, it has caused me a lot of anxiety over the years as a young graphic designer. Perfectionism is just like one of those things that Parkinson's law, right? It fills the time that you allot it. So the more time you give something, the easier it is to noodle back and forth and you get stuck in that decision making, you know, analysis paralysis loop. when it comes down to it, you eventually have to make a decision. One of the things that if you're, you know, a younger designer and you're in your first years of maybe working in house or at an agency, you realize that there are deadlines like there are projects things got to get done in a particular period of time and you just do the absolute best work that you can within the time that you have allowed and put it out there and throw it up to the gods because when it comes down to it, that's the way the world works. Now, if you're working, say you're working on a self assigned project, you're really looking to improve or scale your portfolio and you want to develop some projects or some portfolio pieces that aren't actually real projects. You can afford to give yourself more time with those, right? Because you do want them to be perfect. You want them to really show off your skill set. So that's a place where I would say yes, you can succumb to the need to work for perfectionism. But even in that case, if you're early in your career and you want to kind of improve and fill out your portfolio with meaningful and uh kind of impactful work, you want to make some decisions and get that going. And here's one of the things about it is that I used to review portfolios in San Francisco for the AIGA. I was on the AIGA portfolio review board. And so I looked at hundreds of portfolios of metriculating designers over the years. And one of the things that you realize very quickly is that when you're in school, a lot of times you have tons and tons of time to work on these projects and they're very well- definfined and you have a lot of time to noodle around and you can make your work look really outstanding. But then you put someone like that into the professional environment where they have two days to crank out something exceptional or they have, you know, three days with a team of a couple people and you're up against it and you got to perform. That's a skill set. That's a skill set that you have to learn and nurture is the ability to do your best work that you can and call it a day when the time clock ends. because that kind of working under pressure is an important skill set for any designer because it will eventually come down the pike and um affect you. So, you know, I have to vote for giving yourself deadlines to kind of force that decision-making process because ultimately what it's going to do is it going it's going to hone your skill um so you become more effective uh

professional, creative professional Ah, Mariana, it is so good to see you, Mariana. It's been a while. Um, Mariana says, "I am now 30 years old. Can you believe it? I was 23 when I was in your brand group. " So, Mariana was in one of the first masterminds that I ran called The Guild. Um, and it was a while back. Wow. Do you find it's useful breaking big tasks down into smaller tasks? Seeing more tests makes me feel overwhelmed. That's a really good great question and um personally I do. Personally I break down larger tasks into smaller tasks mainly because there's a lot of moving pieces and they have to be happen in a certain kind of cadence or order and it allows me to check off more boxes. I know this is the procrastinating Phil part is that sometimes if it's a big rock you're moving a big project you're you know task that you have and you're breaking it down into a whole bunch of little bite-sized pieces it can feel like you're making progress and it feels good there's a dopamine hit that comes from checking off each little step that you're doing but for me more than anything else it's really just understanding like how much work I have to do to manage this large task and where I am in the process of getting that task done. Because if it's a really big task, I'm just going to take my publishing a long form YouTube video for example, right? I have to write a script. I have to record it. It has to be edited. I have to figure out what all the text animations are going to be. I have to do the thumbnail. thumbnail that's at the right scale for my newsletter. I have to write the description. I got to figure out the metadata. I'm going to post it and promote it on three different platforms. I'm going to put in my news. There's like so many steps that go into publishing a long form video that it's exhausting. And here's another thing is that I I essentially productized that. I created a template that has all of the steps in producing and, you know, producing and um publishing a long form YouTube video. And because I found myself writing that broken down into smaller pieces task list over and over and over again right in the beginning, I didn't systematize anything. And so it helped me kind of bite off that big, you know, that big rock and also see where I was in the process and feel like I was making progress on that thing. So, personally, I write all the pieces down cuz the other thing and to more address your question about feeling overwhelmed by it, Mariana, is that if I have a big task to do and I don't write all the little steps down, my brain is constantly ping ponging around about all the little steps that's involved in this and that I got to remember to do this, I have that. and my brain that I expend a tremendous amount of cognitive energy just making sure that I'm doing everything within that big project that I'm supposed to be doing. And so if I write down all the little steps, it actually makes me feel less overwhelmed. That's me personally, but as a methodology, I find it um helpful to break them down. Um, all right. So, if there's not any more questions, h okay, sorry, good one. No name just came in. Um, do you have any advice on how AI can assist the design world? I've had to take some time out due to illness. I feel overwhelmed getting into a new design world. Um, we are in a very fluid period of time in our industry. The good news is that you are coming back to it at exactly the right time. Meaning generative AI is just really making its way into the kind of applications that we use. the entire Adobe suite, Affinity, um communication platforms, um email platforms, CRM, um AI is really starting and automation is really starting to kind of get a foothold in those things. The other thing is that because this this uh new paradigm is in its nent stages, a lot of this stuff is like being developed and being executed on and rolling out into the marketplace very quickly and sometimes not even in a very finished state because everyone's rushing to market. And everybody seems to be rushing to market with something that they've slapped the moniker of AI on top of. And so in my opinion, there's a tremendous amount of AI washing like greenwashing. Remember greenwashing when everything was, you know, supposed to be green and um and then it turns out a lot

of companies are just basically BSing about it. I see the same thing with AI right now. everyone is slapping AI on top of everything and it's not necessarily really an AI thing. Um, particularly in the world of agents, like I've seen a lot of companies that are publicizing um the use of agents or how agents are operating inside of their products and they're not actually agents. They're actually just APIs that are linking in to Gemini or Bard or Chat GPT and leveraging large language models in order to give them functionality within their app. So there's a lot of spin. There's a whole lot of spin going on right now. And so I wouldn't really don't freak out. Um, and if you're a fairly new designer, which I think you said you were, it's definitely a good time to be coming back into the industry because you're at a place right now where, you know, a lot of stuff is hitting the market. evolving and not everything that's coming out right now is going to survive. That's the thing. It's like in the next year to two years, the dominant players or the pieces of um the pieces of infrastructure that are going to drive the AI world that's going to be, you know, kind of um there's going to be a lot of fallout. whole lot of companies that go by the wayside and the dominant players are going to rise to the top. And so we're in a period of time right now where there's just like a whole lot of competition. And there's a whole lot of noise in the industry and it's going to be getting clearer and clearer about like what's powerful, what actually works in a designer or creative professional's day-to-day life. Um, okay. Now, let me really answer your question because I kind of went off topic, which is that advice on how AI can assist the design world. I'm a content creator and I do a lot of audio video. I also do a lot of coaching with clients and I run a mastermind group. These are some of the ways that I use AI. I use AI to help me write scripts. um I record my coaching calls with clients and I take the audio from those calls. I run it through Descript. I have it create a transcript. I plug that transcript into Chat TBT. Chat TBT has instructions to um to write me a summary that an internal summary of what that coaching call was so I have it for my records. It will also turn that summary into a very short synopsized email that I can send to my client. I use Descript to edit the video of this live stream stream. So, I'll [clears throat] plug the video from this live stream into Descript and I will strip it of all the blather, all the Q& A and all the intro stuff and all the filler words and all, you know, my likes and all my younos and big pauses and I will edit it down and um and edit uh excuse me um export the audio. I'll import that audio into Logic Pro. I'll edit the video, put in my intro, my outro, my ads, my sponsored stuff, and make that into a podcast. So, I'm using AI's functionality in a lot of different ways. I'm not using it in design. I'm not using any of the Adobe functionality inside Photoshop or Illustrator in terms of my design work. Um, I think that those things again are kind of in their baby crawling stages and but I am using it a lot in content development and writing and editing audio and video and um I'm also using it in my email um program. So my email list uh provider. So, I use [cough and clears throat] I'm totally spacing um Kit I use Kit for my email service provider to write my um my newsletter and my emails out to my email list. And there's a little bit of functionality inside Kit that I use for that. Um so again you know I have a fully you know operating design agency and I am not using AI in terms of any of its graphic design generative properties. I actually don't think this is just me. This is my opinion right now which is that I lived through the dawn of the computer age. I was here before computers. I'm an old guy and I saw computers come around. I saw computers hit the publishing industry and the graphic design industry and the printing industry and there was massive kurluffle and you know

chicken little the sky is falling and the industry is going to be destroyed and graphic designers won't be needed anymore because everyone can be a graphic designer. And the reality was is that all that the desktop publishing explosion and industry presented to us was more tools for creative professionals to use to increase the quality and volume of our work, our productivity and our creativity. And the people who were graphic designers at that period of time who took the time and energy to learn those tools the Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Freehand, those tools back then, those were the people that survived and flourished and had exceptional careers. I feel exactly the same way about AI right now. If you take the time and effort to learn the AI functionality within the tools that you may need for your particular um creative practice, it will be time well spent. Don't freak out too much about it because when it comes down to it, your clients, the clients in the world, the companies in the world, they don't have time to learn this stuff. They don't have the energy. They're making products and services and trying to sell them. and they're going to come to us to leverage AI in whatever capacity that is to create the marketing and assets and um creative materials that they need. So, it's still going to be our job to do. As much as you know, people are saying, "Oh, every company's just going to be able to press a button and the perfect design, the perfect ad, and the perfect copy is just going to pop out. " It doesn't work that way. I don't think it will ever work that way. Okay. I hope that was helpful. Um, I know that was a super long answer to your question. No name, but you kind of got me off on a tear. Um, yes, it is, Sonia. You can do that. Um, I have a mastermind community. It's called Bonfire. And, uh, sorry, that was totally the wrong button and it went off on its own. Okay, here we go. Hitting all the wrong buttons. Okay, I run a mastermind community called Bonfire. It's a group coaching mastermind group. Um, and uh it's an amazing experience. If you don't know what a mastermind group is, it's essentially a group of people who get together to share their goals, support each other, share knowledge. um and improve and grow each other's businesses together. And so in a couple weeks, few weeks actually, I'm going to be having an AI expert come in to speak to the Bonfire community. And uh this woman, I had a really amazing call with her about a week ago and to, you know, kind of vet her experience and what she was going to be sharing when I brought her into the Bonfire group. And my head was kind of blown away by talking to her because she used to be in kind of a different creative profession. She was in book publishing and then she went and got certified in AI and the implementation of AI within businesses. And I was also just looking uh listening to um a little snippet of video from Mark Cuban on threads last night and he was talking about this exact same topic and that is that the people who learn AI and learn how to implement it within businesses are going to pe be the people who rock it to success and career success in the next five years because businesses are all very hungry for the automation that AI offers, but they don't understand it and they don't know how to actually implement it into the working infrastructure of their business. And so this woman um Matalia that I was talking to, she's going to come talk to the group about it because if you learn how to help your clients adopt AI, AI agents, AI automation within the platforms that they use or new platforms they should could change to increase their effectiveness. Those are the people who are gonna basically like never had a problem getting clients and be really killing it over the next five years because there are 30 million businesses in the United States. There are, let me say that again. There are 30 million businesses in the United States and they are all going to want AI working in their business because they're going to be hearing about it 247 and they're going to think, I'm missing out and they're going to want it in their business. So, if you can learn about it and learn how to implement it in businesses, and I would say niche down, choose a category

of industry and market yourself that way, you're never going to go hungry. Um, Sonia, is that what you meant when you said, "Is it okay to bring up the AI guest? " Yes, it is. Um, okay. Mariana asks another question. How do you make yourself stick to your daily structure when higher priority tasks or projects come up? I have trouble finalizing pending projects at my job wanting everything done yesterday. That's a good question, Mariana. And when you work inhouse or in an agency, this is the kind of thing that you have to deal with all the time, right? It's fires. There fires come in. One of the kind of tropes in the and I was just talking about this to a client today in a presentation this morning, which is that there's kind of an agency trope that you always hear from your client at about 4:00 in the afternoon on Friday with some big thing that they need Monday morning for a presentation. It like always happens. And in the creative industry when you're servicing clients, it's kind of like, you know, kind of rolls downhill, right? You people come to agencies when they have run out of ideas and they've run out of time and all they have left is money. And so that's kind of like the story. There are always going to be fires in the corporate and agency world. And if they are thrown on your desk and you are being told to make it a priority, you just got priority. But the thing is that um it's always good to learn how to discern what truly is a priority and make sure that you're aligning with your manager or the management structure in order to make sure that they align with that being a fire. Because one of the things that happens a lot with junior people is that you know they're you know some manager marketing manager will come to your desk and say I need this for this client for tomorrow right and they'll make this thing a fire and throw it on your desk and you'll think oh they need it by tomorrow I definitely have to drop all my other stuff to do this but then [snorts] you go to your creative director or your ECD or your managing director and you say you know between these two or three things what's the real priority and they'll say yeah forget the whole fire I need this tomorrow thing because a lot of times you don't want to become like the raw meat for the piranhas to feed from. You want to make sure that you're trying to get as much support in discerning what the prior priorities are. And when you do that, you actually will learn a lot when you kind of leverage the skill and knowledge and ability of your upper level management to help see how they make decisions around priorities. It'll help you learn how to do that better. Um, I hope that helps. All right. Mia says, "Sir, I'm a UIUX designer now. I'm trying for a job in India. Can you give your inputs to land in a growth? " I'm assuming you wanted to write a growth company or something like that. Um, when it comes down to it, landing a job in any company comes down to two things. Comes down to your portfolio and it interview. if this is a remote job, and it kind of sounds like it is, I have a couple videos on interview skills which have been quite popular. So, if you go to my channel and search for um how to ace a creative professional interview or a designer interview, there's a fairly popular video there which will answer a whole lot of your questions about how to interview in the best possible way to get the job. And if you read through them some of the comments on those vid on that particular video, um there are a lot of people who said, "I I'm so glad I came across this video like the night before I was to interview because it changed everything for me and I got the job. " And there are a lot of comments and this is one of the reasons why I do what I do is because that's the sort of comment on a YouTube video that just warms my heart and makes it all worthwhile for me. Um, and this particular piece of content I did on interviewing skills is uh could be very helpful to you. So I would go to my channel, search for interviewing or uh interviewing skills and that video will pop up and just choose the one that has the most number of views in it because I think it's the highest view in that particular category. Um

and check that out. But it comes down to how you interview, how you communicate what you do and your portfolio. Um, the one thing I'll throw out there is try to learn as much as you can about the company that you're interviewing with, what it is that they do, who the market is that they serve, who their comp who their com comp, excuse me, who their competition is in the category that they work within [snorts] and do your homework. Do your homework on what the company's been doing, the products and services that they've been doing, whether there's any news that they've been involved in recently. um who their competition is, who their customers are, and ask a lot of questions because if you show interest and curiosity on not just a design level, not just an aesthetics of design level, it will rise you will rise above 90% of the other candidates in that interviewing process if you get the opportunity to interview directly. But check out that video definitely. Um okay, guys. Uh, we hit about an hour, so I think I'm going to hit it. If anyone I'll give you like 20 more seconds to see if there are um any other questions. And in the meantime, I'm going to put on my funky outro music. And so you guys, this has been awesome. I hope you have really enjoyed my presentation on how to stop wasting time and seven hacks that can really move the ball forward in terms of changing how productive you can be and how efficient you can be. Because when it comes down to it, like I said, an app is not going to solve your problem. It's about self-management, self leadership, and behavior changes. So, with that, MZ Media, Mariana, uh, Sonia, Peter, Noame, I'm not good with the buttons today. It's been really great seeing you. And so, I'm going to record this little bit for my podcast because this is going to go to my podcast, too. So, I hope you enjoyed this presentation on how to stop wasting time. And, uh, until next time, I'll see you later.