090. Monday Motivation—3 Reasons to Fill Your Calendar

Connect with the host:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-e-jenkins/

Website: https://www.birchprosper.com/

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Your calendar reflects your priorities.

Took me a while to realize how important it is put everything in your calendar.

In this episode, I share 3 ways your calendar can help you go to the next level in your life & business:

1. It helps you focus strategically on your goals
2. It shows you which tasks to change/eliminate to maximize your productivity
3. It reveals areas of waste, which means you aren't guarding your time.

Tune in now!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello there, what's up, and welcome back to the Capital Stack. I'm your host, Brandon Jenkins. It's another Monday, so I thought I would start off with a little motivation for you, something to kind of help get your week started. And I want to start with a personal story. So I've been a real estate investor for about 10 years now. And a few years into my career, I realized that I wanted to be a deal maker, I wanted to be a closer, I wanted to be a general partner on large commercial real estate acquisitions. So I started off as a single family rental investor, and I realized that I wanted to scale. I wanted access to larger deals to make more money as a real estate investor to make a larger impact. So that's the path that I wanted to go down. But I started to get a little frustrated by what I thought was the lack of opportunities falling in my lap, right? And that we know that that actually doesn't happen. There's no such a real thing as true luck. We all kind of put in the work and we um set ourselves up to sort of put ourselves in the way of luck, right? We create our own look. So I was getting frustrated because things weren't just falling into my lap. And so fast forward um several years, I went to a Tony Robbins event and I realized that unlike the other people around me who were at the event, so I went there with a group of high performers, a group of deal makers, and a group of people who I actually could learn a lot from in this business. Um I was with the right crowd and I was at the right event because it was one where we were looking to grow and to make some real change in our lives. And so I realized that unlike the people around me, I wasn't spending enough time doing the thing that I said I wanted to do. So I knew I wanted to be a GP, I knew I wanted to attract capital to close more deals, but there was nothing on my calendar that showed that. And this is something that I like to share with people at my meetups as well is you know, if you stop for a moment and look at your calendar, okay? Because your calendar is going to tell the story of what you hold important. If you claim that you have goals that you want to achieve and things you want to accomplish, all you have to do is stop, look at your calendar, and see if you have actually booked time, allotted some time to take the steps toward that. Okay. And so at this event, I I realized at that moment that, oh, you know, even though I'm putting it out there and saying, hey, this is what I want to do, I'm not spending the time, I'm not committing the energy to actually going out and making that happen. As rudimentary as that sounds, there are a lot of people who are in that same situation. You know, we we might be going through the motions, we might be telling people that, hey, this is what we want to do, but it's something uh different entirely for you to put it on your calendar and commit some time to it. And so I want to share a quote with you that for me, it's something that I always uh recall whenever I find myself sort of in a bind or when I find myself getting stuck. And it's a quote by Jim Rowan. It's it says that when you change, everything will change for you. So this was another moment in my career, in my life, where I stopped and realized, okay, I need to change. So what I started to do was to fill my calendar with the things that I cared about. I filled it with calls, I filled it with introductory calls, I filled it with investor calls, I filled it with webinars, I filled it with conferences and events, meetups, virtual meetups, in-person meetups. So I filled it up with so many things that that you know would help me move the needle that would help me get to where I wanted to go. And so I would encourage you to do the same. So I'm gonna share really quickly three things that filling your calendar allows you to do. Okay, so it helps you focus strategically. Filling the white space in your calendar with purposeful activities, okay, it ensures that you maintain focus on your goals. And you have to have goals, right? First of all. But it helps you maintain focus on those goals. You know, every moment that you schedule in your calendar is basically an opportunity for progress. That's how I would look at it. You know, once upon a time, when I looked at uh any calls or anything that I had lined up, I would almost look at it with a sense of dread, like, oh, I have to get on the phone with someone else. But I changed my mindset to say, well, wait, this is actually an opportunity for progress. So each of those little events that I'm taking place in, whether it's a call or a meeting or a presentation, it is helping me move forward just a little bit more toward my goal. So it's an opportunity for progress. It helps you stay aligned with your objectives. And um that way you're not looking like like I was, okay, claiming that I wanted progress, but not actually committing to the work. So that's number one, it helps you uh focus strategically. Number two, it helps you put your time into perspective. All right, you want to see what someone else cares about or what someone cares about, looks look at their calendar. And so just by stepping back, filling your calendar, then it helps you, okay, it prioritize your goals. It helps you see the things that you need to spend more time doing and less time doing. It helps you see the things that you need to eliminate so that you can allow more space for the things that will actually add value to you. Okay, it doesn't help to have a bunch of white space in your calendar because that means you're not moving towards something. White space is never really white space, right? Whatever you even if you have an hour or two that's that's uh quote unquote white space, you're still gonna be doing something during that time. So I would strongly encourage you to fill your calendar up, even with even if it's something that's a leisurely activity, fill it up, pull it in there. That uh, but that way you are focused on whatever that activity is. Okay, so number one, it helps you focus strategically. Number two, it helps you put your time into perspective. And number three, it helps you guard your time. Okay, learn to just say no. All right, there used to be an old slogan when I was uh coming up in school for something unrelated to this, but you need to learn to say no. And um, so I used to be the type of guy that I would say yes to absolutely everything. If any coworker or someone just kind of came up and said, Hey, uh, hey, uh, can you can you help me out with this or hey, can you do this? I would say yes to everything. And in my mind, I was being kind and I was being you know helpful and things like this. Um so I was that person until I met a coworker who was a master of saying no. A guy said no to everything. Uh I quickly realized how efficient this guy was simply because he guarded his time. So he didn't literally say no to everything, but but there were a good number of things that if they were not going to add value to um to what he he was trying to accomplish, then he was very protective of his time. Okay, now one great way to do this is to block time on your calendar. Again, very simple stuff. This is not something that that you know it's rocket science. This is very simple, but when you do this, this simple shift can make a huge adjustment in your productivity and in your ability to reach your goals. Okay, so again, make sure that you, you know, pull up your calendar. If there's some if there's something that you want to focus on, then make sure that you put it in there. Okay, so I want you to have a great week. Just wanted to share that little bit of motivation with you on this Monday, and I'll see you next time.