The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Four-Day Work Week: Achieving Work-Life Balance with Charles Alexander

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 23

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"We're busier than ever before and probably less productive than we've ever been." - Charles Alexander

In this week's episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I speak with Charles Alexander, a renowned business coach and author of "Start Now, Quit Later." Charles discusses how to achieve a four-day work week by setting clear goals, tracking time accurately, and focusing on high-value tasks. He emphasizes the importance of identifying what you truly want to do with your free time and eliminating, batching, delegating, or automating other tasks. A four-day work week offers the potential for greater work-life balance, increased productivity, and more time to spend on personal pursuits and with loved ones. By reassessing how we manage our time and prioritize our tasks, we can break free from the constant busyness that hampers our productivity and enjoy a more fulfilling professional and personal life.

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Louise McDonnell:

Welcome to the social media takeaway. I'm your host, Louise McDonnell. And today I'm speaking to Charles Alexander. Charles is a business coach. He is the author of start now, quit later, and how to start and grow your business without quitting your full time job, which is an Amazon bestseller. And he's also the host of do more by doing less. And today we are going to talk all about how to create a four day work week. You're very welcome to the show.

Charles Alexander:

Thank you so much, Louise. I'm very welcome to be here.

Louise McDonnell:

Great. this is, I have to say it's such an intriguing subject. Like we all kind of start in business because we want the freedom to not have to answer to anybody and we want, you know, to work less, but sometimes we end up working more, sometimes we end up working days, nights, weekends. Before we get into it, tell us about your journey and how you came to be an expert in this area.

Charles Alexander:

So look, and you're 100 percent right. The reason people start a business rarely as ever, do they say, I just want to make all the money in the world and buy all the boats and jewelry and cars. No one ever really says that they say they want to do what they want when they want, how they want, they want freedom. They think money will get them there and it does get you part of the way, but unfortunately it also change you to the desk. If you don't do it the right way and you're talking about journey. So I've been, I've been business coach for almost 2 decades now and a wide variety of topics. That's why I wrote that book starting out quit later because I was watching entirely too many people that are roughly my age, you know, let's say late forties, that would just be frustrated because they were chained to a desk somewhere else, but for someone else, and they thought, man, if I do this on my own, I'll come and go as I please. And then they would, you know, cash out their retirement savings, sell the house and invest all into one thing and boom, then they were chained to the desk of their own making, which is very frustrating. So talking about me coming up with where I am now, you know, doing all this business culture, work with startups, working people that are, in business and I even hate to bring this up because I think we're all pandemic out, but to get to the point where I am now, four years ago, right at four years ago, two is funny. I was, you know, sent home to go from the office to go work for a, we're going to go home and work for a few weeks and we're going to ride this whole COVID thing. I was like, okay. And then, you know, fast forward months later, I'm working harder from home than I ever have in the office. And I always prided myself on, I'm the time management guru. And one day I remember specifically thinking, I'm at home, I got the laptop open. I got, you know, all my notes out and I've got this big to do list. I'm going to knock it all out. Here in the states, there was a lot of money for small business owners to help pay the bills until they can make more money to pay the bills and the rules on how you got that money changed by the minute, whatever, I have no idea what everybody thinks of government in your neck of the woods, but here we look, we're all very proud Americans. And we also know that everybody running everything here is a lunatic. So we're all in agreement on that. We might not be in agreement on anything else. And that one day all of, I'm sitting there working and I'm distracting myself and I'm trying to answer an email and then I think, Oh, you know what? That reminds me of a video I just saw. So I'll go watch the video and then boom, one at a time. I got three kids by the way, Louise, they're now 15, So back then they were whatever 11, 9 and 7. One at a time, they would barge through the door. Daddy, daddy, I can't get on. I can't get on this thing called Google classroom. What's Google classroom? I don't know. So we're homeschooling at the same time So i'm getting the oldest one logged into this thing called Google classroom So i'll go back And then I start trying to remember where I left off and i'm on linkedin And then I go to my text message and then the middle one pops in and she's in tears Daddy, daddy, the ipad won't work All right, let's see. Okay. Well, you got to plug it in pumpkin. Y'all played games on it I like so plug it in she's in So I'm done with her. I'm where was I? I was on a text message. No, was it email? And then the last one came in as my first grader at the time. Daddy, daddy, I can't get on this thing called zoom. Why do you need to zoom? That's what the teacher said. Louise, have you ever seen 21st graders on zoom for the first time ever? It is bananas. They were just, you see just the tops of heads, kids streaking by with no shirts. I got him logged in, locked the door. And for the next two hours, I was just befuddled. I would go from, DMs and Facebook to to the small business administration website, back to my website, I mean, just all over the place and I realized didn't need my own kids to distract me. I was doing a fine job all on my own and I'm the time management guru. From that point, I, and that was my own midlife crisis. I drew a line in the sand, started doing my own research. Listeners, if you get nothing else out of this, read anything by Cal Newport reread the book, deep work at that point. Wrote all in the margins. It looks like a crazy purchase, right? I wrote everywhere, took all the notes, typed the notes up with no clue why I was typing the notes up. And then became kind of what I have now this four day workweek program. And just realize, I got to rethink how I do all of this stuff. And from there's where we got to where we are now.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay. Okay. so the four day work week, like who doesn't want to work a day less than a week? Who doesn't want that freedom? So for somebody that's listening here today. What advice would you give? What's the starting point? What do they need to do?

Charles Alexander:

So the starting point sounds a little unique. So I used to tell people years ago, you just block off the time, work on the things that are the most important, and then everything else will fall into place. Well, that's backwards. People block off time, but they don't know how they're spending their time. And worse yet, they don't necessarily have a goal for what they want to do once they free up time. So that, very recently, I have changed and I'm sticking with it until the cows come home. And I still don't know what that means. It's the same. We have to figure out what we want to, we have to set a goal. Literally you have to write it out. There's some magic to writing things out, but you have to write out what you want your four day work week to look like, and then what you want to do with your time off Here we have a big problem with, for example, we have people that will retire. They work their whole life, 30, 40 years. I want to retire. I want to retire. I don't want to do this job anymore. We're just going to retire. What are you going to do when you retire? I don't know. I figured out that, you know, many people I've seen retire and then within a year, they're either back to work or their health drastically falls off a cliff. There's a lot of research and study to show that they didn't have a goal for retirement. They just thought once they hit retirement, this magic utopia would befall them. And once they figure out that I don't know what I do now they're they're lost. So the first thing people have to do. Is decide and it can be fluid. It can change. This program, you know, we're running through a, we're about to finish up a 90 day program right now. And I have people start every program. Tell me what you want your week to look like and what you want to do with your free time. And that has changed for some people. Some people want Fridays off. Some people want Mondays off. Some people want to take a random day every week off. Some people who are at six days a week. Their four day work week looks like a five day work week now. But what do you want to do with your time? It almost always looks like spend more time with family. Spend more time with friends. I want to cook. People want to cook. People want to read. People want to travel. Surprisingly big answer Louise. I don't know if this is for you, but everybody here wants to hike. I have no concept why a lot of people that say they want to hike. I don't think I've ever hiked a day in their life, but there's some, there's some utopia of hiking in their mind where they've got on their new Timberland boots and they've got that little walking cane, but whatever. That's what they say they want to do. So good for them. But if you don't figure that out first the rest of it, when you start running into trouble. Louise, what would you do with extra time? For example.

Louise McDonnell:

I think this is fascinating because I had never thought about, you know, what I would do with the extra time and as you're speaking, I'm kind of thinking, well, what do I do with my Saturdays? Saturdays can sometimes be, you know, like probably the most unproductive day of the week because I don't have a plan. Yeah.

Charles Alexander:

And that sounds so silly and people get frustrated. Well, I just want to have my free time and I don't want to plan out. I'm going to be a robot, blah, blah, blah. Now, I'm not telling you to be a robot, but. If you don't have a, at least a thought of what you're going to do, you'll waste that time and then you'll regret wasting that time. So now granted, I just told you I've got a house full of kids. I always have plans on the weekend, whether I want them or not. So I know what I'm doing this weekend. But for me, I want to, rest more. I want to hang out with my kids more. I want to do more activities with them. Basketball, football. I want to cook more. I want to, we have a pool. I want to go to my pool more. I just, I see it out there. I want to go to it now. I want to be in the pool. So I know that's what I want. To do but if I don't have that in mind, the next time I have an interruption, so I'm working, let's say I'm working on the next 90 day program. I'm making tweaks and there's one, there's one module. I know I've got to fix, got to redo the video, redo the homework and then a text message comes up. Well, let me just check it real quick. Oh, that makes me think of this. Well, let me go do this. Well, let me go jump on that real quick. This customer needs me and if I don't answer them right away, then the whole, you know what I'm, you go through those mental gymnastics of. Okay. Rationalizing. Well, I'll just take a minute and it doesn't take a minute. It takes 10 minutes and then it takes 23 minutes to return to the same level of focus where you were before research shows. And then before you know it, you, you've drifted off into all of these different directions. Because you didn't realize you were making a trade. So one thing I always tell people every time you say yes. To one thing you're saying no to two other things.

Louise McDonnell:

So true.

Charles Alexander:

Cal Newport, listen to Cal Newport and then scribble this down some more folks. So every time you say yes to something, you, whether you believe it or not, you're saying no to two other things. And I have that happen all the time. We have the discussion in our home, but like, you know, they won't, you know, my wife, well, they want me to serve on the PTO board. You can serve on it, but That's going to mess us up a couple of other play. Well, no, it won't. I'll just add it unless you're magic and you're adding hours to the day. there's no way around it. You are making a trade, whether you admit it or not, that's irrelevant. It is happening. So if you know what you want to spend your time on, I want to be with family, friends, hike. Let's say you're still growing a business. I need to prospect, build more content. I need to meet up with Louise and go through her program so I can be a, digital master. If you are bouncing around all over the place, you don't get to do that. And that's no, there's no one else to blame at that point. So all of that to answer your first question, what's the first thing you gotta do, you gotta figure that out. And then there's another second thing. That's it's like one in one, a, you forgot to figure out where your time is going. Nobody knows where their time is going. it's almost like this. I don't know. I haven't seen the movie The Matrix in a while, but it's like we're all in agreement to ignore this one thing together and we're all living the same little life. The way I always describe it take 2 avenues here, let's say you want to start managing your budget. Louise, you ever done a personal budget?

Louise McDonnell:

Oh, gosh. Not in a long time. Okay.

Charles Alexander:

No, I haven't either. I say that we do ours about once a year once we get, because we'll get to the end of the month and there's still bills, but like the money in the checking account has disappeared. So we have to figure out what we did to it. And usually we ate it. We, you know, it's that it's at a restaurant somewhere and we didn't know that. so you can't really set a budget, a proper budget, I'm going to spend this much on, you know, our home, our insurance, and food, and gas, and kids activities, unless you know how much you're spending now. Oh, you can come up with a budget, but if it's not in reality versus what you're currently spending there, it doesn't work, it falls apart immediately. Or better yet, I've had to learn this one the hard way the older I get. If I want to get in shape. I can't just simply say, well, I'm going to go to the gym more. I'm going to eat less. It's got to be a little more calculated than that. So I've been using an app on my phone, my fitness pal. on my fitness pal, everybody knows that you can just type in whatever food you're eating and it knows it, you know, you can go to the most obscure restaurant and order a burrito. And it knows that Los Cantaritos burrito is 500 calories. And it auto calculates it. What I don't know, or what I never realized, you know, is how much I sneak out of the pantry, like when we're making the kids lunch and I grab a handful of goldfish, 48 calories. Well, I didn't know that. Or that extra glass of wine. I really thought I made it forward to bed. That's another 150 calories. If you don't calculate that first, you don't track it. Then you can't possibly know how much you need to burn. Both of those examples. Are much easier than your time. People lie to themselves and everyone else about how they spend their time. And they want to estimate their time. I'm having a flashback. I think you and I've had this conversation before for everybody. Listen, I was, I went through a program where I'm tweaking All my stuff here and I'm, I'm running it by Louise. And I remember specifically, now that I say this, I'm putting you right on the spot. I said,

Louise McDonnell:

what's coming.

Charles Alexander:

It is. I remember I was telling her and I, and I have, I've got tools. I know how to do it. There's other ways to do it. And everybody, you know, I'm telling folks and I got a half the people I'm pitching this to they're nodding their head. The other half, like, I don't know, Louise specifically said, can I just tell you, can I just estimate it? No, Louise, you can't estimate your time. You have no clue how you're spending your time. I wish I had that recorded somewhere. But the idea is that if we think we're spending. Whatever it is, you know, X number of minutes, hours on, let's say Facebook, Instagram, or email emails, the biggest, the monster out there. We spend a third of our day in email and everybody thinks they're in it for 20 minutes. No way. So you've got, so one in one, eight. Set goals. And then secondarily, find a way to figure out where you're spending your time.

Louise McDonnell:

I was going to imagine though, like when you think about it, like all the distractions, so you have your email. I have three different email inboxes that I check every day. Then you have WhatsApp. You'd have clients sending you messages on WhatsApp. They could be sending you emails. They could be sending you a message on Facebook, a message on Instagram, a message on LinkedIn. Then you have. Not only the message inbox, you have the notifications, you have to check those, then you check your newsfeed of all the different various social media channels. So like, yeah, I'd say most of the time, the time, time, time, you're just distracted. And as you said, when you're doing that, there's two other things you're not doing.

Charles Alexander:

And you get a dopamine hit. I'm not a psychologist, but everybody knows this is true. You get a little dopamine hit when you see that red box with a white number. Ooh, somebody wants, I'm important. Somebody wants to say something to me, whatever you're working on right now. It was exciting. Like 60 seconds ago. And now it's so boring. I don't want to do this right now. And you don't say that you just say, ah, I'll get back to this. This is important. Other things important too. And it gives you a reason to jump ship to the next thing. And once you do that, you go, when you go, when you go, when you go, when you go, you're never working on the thing you're supposed to do. So we can all claim to be just so busy. We're busier than ever before and probably less productive than we've ever been.

Louise McDonnell:

That's so true. So, okay. So the first thing you do is figure out what you want to do with your time, your time off. Then the second thing that you need to do is figure where you're spending your time. Correct. And then you're disgusted after you spend your time.

Charles Alexander:

One more quick tip for the finding your time for anyone that also feels like they don't spend much time in digital distraction. Take a peek at your screen time. That is a disaster. I can tell you, I have went through this time and again with high achievers, people that are making seven figures, that are so proud of themselves, and well, I really only spend, well, I only, and we always put it off on the kids, but kids these days, they just, they're on there all day long. Gen Xers and baby boomers are on their phones between four and five hours per day. And while I do think there's a lot of really cool things that are in there, and you know, for somebody that is a digital, Marketer like yourself. you got to spend time in there, but you've also got to be mindful of how you are doing it. Five hours. Are you sure we needed five hours in there? You remember, I mean, I don't, I don't want to put you on the spot, but there was a day and age where we didn't have this, At all, and I know that the times have changed and you can't just yell at people to get off your digital loan, but go in there and take a peek. And it's not as simple as saying, well, I use it all for business. you know, if you're an iPhone, I know it'll show you what apps you've been using, how many times you picked up your phone. And like I've said, each time you pick up your phone According to Gloria Mark, a researcher for UC Santa Barbara, she does the same research every five years and it states very clearly it takes us between 23 and 25 minutes to return to the same level of focus. And when I say same level of focus, you go back to the task you were doing, but you're not there. Like your brain has got four more things firing away. It's like you're in a crowded room and there's all these distractions and you're not back to where you were. It takes a long time. But if you keep popping the phone up or you keep researching something real quick, it, you never get into the level of deep work that you need to really do the things you're supposed to be doing.

Louise McDonnell:

That's so true. Okay. So you figure out where you're spending your time. What do you do then?

Charles Alexander:

You decide what you're going to do with the time you're currently doing. And so what I do before that. And this is usually a lot of people's first steps like my third you need to figure out what you're supposed to be doing and you've got the list now. And I tell folks, you know, don't just do this for a day. It might take a week or 2, but you know what you're supposed to be doing. Most folks can figure it out very quickly. But what are the things that only Louise can do that moves the needle that she can't really outsource delegate. Automate, eliminate, and in your case, I mean, I'm sure there's several things, but I know for a fact that if you are in front of people, Louise is awesome. She's in front of people. So if she's doing webinars, if she's doing free trainings, if she's doing podcasts, if she's doing referral calls, that makes everything else work better. Now, a lot of people will tell themselves and other people, well, just money to spend more time with Michael. I just give great customer service and all of those things are great. But. You know, if I just am, I'm really great with my own personal clients, but then I don't do all of the other things that bring me more clients. you're relying on everybody else to just feed you, let's say referrals and word of mouth, but in their extra busy lives that we already know that they're distracted. So you figure out what you're supposed to be doing. And it's usually just three to four things. And I think I'm a lot like you, Louise, a lot of mine need to be. doing more live Q and a sessions on LinkedIn. I need to be doing more podcast guesting. I need to be doing more in person workshops and webinars. And if I do those things, then everything else goes well. But those are always the first things I like to cut because I don't get immediate gratification from it. But once you identify what those are and great book for figuring that out the one thing written by. Somebody Keller forget his first name. Not important. Google the one thing. You'll find the book and it asks you like four very specific questions that help you narrow down your one thing. You know, your zone of genius, insert buzzword here, whatever you want to call it, your superpower. then we hang onto that. I'm doing these. Then the rest of the items on that list go into buckets. What are the buckets? You either eliminate it. You batch it, you delegate it, or you automate it. There's really no other buckets. I'm sure somebody else has another bucket, but to me, those are it. That's what you have to do. And if you didn't know where your time's going, then how do you know what to put in a bucket?

Louise McDonnell:

Very true. okay, what happens then? So when people kind of sit down, obviously you, this is what you help them to work through in your program. Cause I can imagine like. It's kind of easy to talk about this, but really hard to do.

Charles Alexander:

Well, that's the reason we have, that's the reason I have, and I'm not making a pitch to whatever you want, you guys want to do listening, you've got to almost get into like a group of people that are trying to, not trying, that are doing this together. If you do it on your own, it's like, it's one of the hardest things to do on your own. It's doable. I mean, I've got a whole class of people right now that have cut. I mean, and I was telling you before they cut that, they cut those hours. They're not working nights. They're not working weekends. The reason that it works well in a community is because if I'm feeling like, ah, this doesn't work. It's just in theory, it's schoolhouse stuff, but in the real world, blah, blah, blah. And then I come into a group of people, whatever that group looks like, it could be. Coffee Tuesday mornings at, you know, the local community college. But if I see the Louise, who's already a little, who is really more successful and more in a little more busy than I was, she's doing it. Well, how did she do it? Oh, she had this question. Oh, I had that question too. I just was too scared to ask for it. I had never thought about that situation. Having a group of people that are going through it at the same time. You are works very well. Trying to do it by yourself. Not so much. Doing it one on one is okay. But even then you can kind of weasel your way out. And the reason I say that a group is important because so many other people, I go back to that original point, are kind of living in this bubble, this, the matrix. Well, you're just busy. Well, that's just how, that's just how life is, you know, and you get a badge of honor. If you can tell somebody how busy you are, if you tell somebody else, you're trying to cut your time. Their first thing is to try to make you not do that because they can't envision the scenario where that exists. They don't mean to, but they're trying to bring you back down to earth. Any other colleagues you have to do what you do, friends, family, whoever, they're like the, you ever heard about, you know, if you put crabs in a bucket, you don't have to put a lid on because once one crab starts climbing up, the other crab grabs them and brings them back down. I don't know if that's true. It'd be worth a Google, but that's what we do to each other. So You've got to find other people that are a little like you that think, I don't want to work 60 hours a week. This is stupid. I'm making minimum wage. I want to enjoy my life. So if you can get within that group that does that, then life is so much easier. And then, you know, you're asking about what do you do with all these other items? There's options, you know, and, and I love the good eliminate option. I mean, there's so many things we do that experiment with it for a week. Try not doing that for one week. I mean, Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world say that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost. Everything.

Louise McDonnell:

So, so true. even sometimes when you go in and you start your working day and you have a plan in your head of what you're going to do and then something happens and you don't do any of it, you're just firefighting. I think a lot of people spend a lot of their time firefighting. They're just reacting to what's coming at them, but it's not actually productive or it's not helping them achieve their goals.

Charles Alexander:

But we like doing it because we feel important and busy. I'm so busy and I must be, I must be doing something right. Cause I'm still here and our experience lies to us sometimes, I mean, if a lot of us were cave people, we'd, we'd have been eaten by the saber tooth tiger by now. We live in a day and age where you can kind of be mediocre and just keep getting by because busy will eventually propel you into just something, you know, enough to make the house payments, but. Holly, it's a lot easier than that at this point. But yeah, there's so many, so many items that we just, so I'll go back. We shouldn't be doing period. And there's a ton of, you know, I have people in the group now that are eliminating a lot of extra meetings that they would call themselves because they just felt like that's what I'm supposed to be doing because they dragged it in from the corporate world. Are they? A lot of people that want to pick their brain for an extra whatever it is, you know, let's have a virtual coffee and those can be good, but you have to make the trade off they're eliminating tick tock one person in the group that has freed up her eight hours by just going from three hours a day to one hour on tick tock and one hour on tick tock is still sometimes too, too long.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh my goodness. One hour. This is a

Charles Alexander:

grownup. This is an adult. This is an entrepreneur who's kicking butt and taking names. And just, you know, I have one that was always asked to be on the next board or next committee or serve here or help there and always had that guilty conscience of spilling. Well, I need to do this freed up almost eight hours immediately from taking her off two boards that she'd been on for a couple of years that were, you know, she was just there.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. so it is possible to work a four day week and to be more productive and achieve your goals. know, if you actually put your mind to it. So I want to invite anyone who's listening here. Like, you know, let us know what you think. Make sure you tag me. Make sure you tag Charles. How did people tag you, Charles? Where do they find you?

Charles Alexander:

They can find me, the website's the easiest way to find me, yourcharlesalexander. com and every social handle I have is yourcharlesalexander, makes it very simple.

Louise McDonnell:

Very good. Very good. Okay. What about AI? What do you think about that? How's that going to, is that going to make us more productive or waste more time?

Charles Alexander:

I love AI and unfortunately people are already figuring out how to use it to waste more time, So one of the pieces I always tell folks is trying to figure out what you're doing now that you could possibly automate there's so many digital tasks that there's a tool that will do that. you know, look, I know the robots are taken over just a lot of them, you know, just, just hand it over. But. so much of the email marketing, you do, or email follow up or data entry, or trying to get your CRM to talk to your project management database, or, you know, Gosh, just anything that you're, entering somewhere. It could almost always be automated. There are a ton of automation tools that are out there. I mean, even you and I, when we scheduled this, Louise sent me a scheduling link. Do you know that we spend on average 15 minutes scheduling a meeting? We spend 15 minutes. To have a meeting, not the meeting, just to set it up. And on average, you people are having 10, 15 meetings a week. That means they're spending two and a half hours just talking about setting up meetings. we can't keep doing that. So easy one, set up a calendar link, hook it to your, you know, whatever online calendar you're using and, you know, give them. Times book with you and by the way that gets into batching batch all of the things you do most common together If you got them spread out all over the place, you're constantly switching Mindset and that is exhausting. But either way AI great chat GPT I know it's gotten better. I know it's gotten better. I met it when it first came out. It was so smart. And then now it's hung out with us. And it's like, I think it drinks a little. I think it does a little day drinking. And it's got, you know, it's got issues, but it's okay. I still love you chat, but quit Googling things. If you want to know how to do something, go into chat. Now, granted, it's pulling from the worldwide web, so it's not always going to be 100 percent correct, but there's a lot of cool things it can do. I mean, even it can act semi, like a virtual. Cool. Assistant, the other day, I'm in, I'm in Excel you'd appreciate this Louise, I'm automating some emails. Well, I've got the entire name, Louise McDonnell, all in one column. So if I want to say, Hey Louise, I don't want to say, Hey Louise McDonnell, that shows you I am, it's not very personal. So I've got a row of names and I've got to put the first name in one column, second name in another column. I can give it to my VA. Thank you. Then I thought, I'm going to try this out. I have the paid for version of chat GPT, I upload it to chat, say, can you, can you make this two columns? Sure, Charles. And it gives me the spreadsheet. It did it for me. I'm not telling you that's a great fine. I'm just telling you when you're asking about AI, it can do a ton of stuff. The place where we start to really lose time with it is when we experiment nonstop. Every time there's a new tool out there, it doesn't mean you have to race right away to go play with it.

Louise McDonnell:

So true, so true, Okay, so any final bits of advice then you'd give Charles to people? Woo.

Charles Alexander:

There's a lot of it just one other thing batching a lot I had mentioned before is almost like a cheat code. If you can really get to a point where you batch like tasks together that will immediately free up a lot of time and space in your mind which works in the real world. So either way, there's, Gosh, there's so many there's 1000 things I could, I could show you. I do live Q and A's regularly on LinkedIn. If you'll go to my site I find me on LinkedIn, attend one of those. They are not sales pitches, folks. I literally get people on there five, six, 10 at a time. And we go around the room over and over and over. And I'm talking to everybody in their personal situation, helping them figure out how to batch their time, what to eliminate, what they should set a goal for and it's very in depth personal and it's something I enjoy doing.

Louise McDonnell:

Brilliant. Okay. Well, look, I think everybody should, check that out, check Charles out on LinkedIn and hop on a call with him because, you know, I'm certainly more motivated for sure. I'm following this podcast to think, first of all, what am I going to do on that day off and how am I going to get to a four day week? And you know, something as well, I think it also would be a wonderful option to be able to offer your employees, you know, to hold on to, to, to people as to say, you know, if you can get your work done in four days. Happy days, you know, so it's about productivity rather than time,

Charles Alexander:

correct? And that's coming for anybody that's wanting to retain employees. That's not something I created, but that's that's starting over here. And it's in your neck of the woods too. Four day work weeks are becoming a thing.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. Okay. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks so much for all your advice. I really enjoyed this conversation. if you enjoyed this, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and make sure that you let us know on social media what you think. So you'll find me under sell on social M or on LinkedIn. You'll find me under Louise McDonald. Thanks so much, Charles. It's been a pleasure.

Charles Alexander:

Bye. Bye.