Hello, and welcome to another episode, number 21 of Behind the Madness. I'm your host, James Roberts, I am the owner and founder here at Method HQ. Today we are talking about sharpening the saw So I'm here with Jamie and today we're talking about sharpening, the saw. Now, Jamie, this is something I know nothing about. I hadn't heard of the concept until I read Tilly's blog. So if you wouldn't mind fill me in and fill the listeners in.
Sharpening the saw is a concept from a fantastic book, one that I would recommend any business owner or anyone really who wants to be successful. And it's all about making sure you are as efficient and effective at what you do. The book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a very, very, very good read. So do pick it up. But sharpening the saw is all about the concepts of making sure you are a sharp tool.
I'm sorry.
A sharp tool, yeah, not that kind of tool, James, beneficial one. That's the kind of lighthearted stuff we really, really go for it. But the best way to talk about this is really go through a story. So I want you to imagine there's a guy in the woods and he is cutting down a tree with his dull tool.
Okay.
After a few hours, his neighbor gets bored of this and he just can't take it anymore. So he goes over and he says, why don't you sharpen the saw and this neighbor turns around and goes. But that will take me time. But by taking the time sharpening the saw, will take him less time to finish the task he's doing. We often in life put things behind what we need to do, we don't always prioritize correctly.
Sometimes, if we want to become more educated, we can't take 15 minutes a day to read, or we can't take the four times a week to go to the gym to look after our bodies. And then after a while, these lack of habits build up. And then we see the results as a whole and think, oh my God, that's happened overnight. By sharpening the saw on a regular basis by getting 1% better. Then you will see huge, huge results. So the real question we have is do you have time sharpen the saw, do you make time?
Because these are the moments that you've really got to ask yourself if you want the results and you're going to have to break down those habits. Reading 15 minutes a day we can all find, going for a lunch time walk we can all do. And these are the moments that make sure that we are a sharp tool, we are better business owners, marketing departments. We are better at branding our products. Could you go out to the weekend and speak to 10 customers?
Could you jump on the emails in your CRM and say, I'm going to send five of these to see who would want to voucher code for sending me some feedback. Would that help your offering Would that shape your future products? Yes it would. But these are the moments that you've got to take by sharpening what you do to make sure you do it the best. So there's a bit long-winded James. But it is one of those things that's really, really important.
Yeah, and I think it's brilliant and I do like the term I was reading a book, which those who know me know that that is a feat in itself. It was actually, all about sleep I can't remember the author. but I will make sure I get it down in the show notes. Try and read a book on how you sleep. Oh, you know, we should all be fairly good at it. We do it quite often, but it was around naps, it was around basically making us better human beings through the right kind of sleep or the right.
It wasn't called sleep. It was called rest. There we go. So it was all about rest.
He fell asleep.
And I fell asleep and it was all sleep related. It was all napping related. It was all basically about recharging your batteries, but it comes back to this, it comes back to certain times, Winston Churchill for example, was a very, very big napper. He's running the country at a pivotal time and he would make time for sleep because he knew the decisions that he would have to make needed his full capacity to be able to do that.
So he would schedule out time to actually to rest, recharge to go again. And I think it's, you know, a similar concept to this. In the fact that, you know, you have to schedule time in to improve yourself and be that what it is, you know, it could just be sharpening the saw so you can go again quicker. It could be you know, making a plan of action before just diving in and doing what you need to do.
All of these things, even down to scheduling your team and yes, it's going to take time to do it rather than just let them sort it out amongst themselves but they're going to be much better optimized and, and work at a much better rate. If you do, just take that time to start off with. So, yeah. I liked the concept. It's right up there with with my kind of productivity and optimization that I like to do within a lot of companies. Anyway. So yeah, I think it's a really really good concept.
And as you said, everybody, can find time, find 15 minutes to, as you said to read, or even if you're not very good reader, like me find time to to put a podcast on or an audio book. But time for yourself. To make you better to learn, you know, we mentioned in the last podcast around us and rebranding our website and the reasons we did it were around our customers and trying to improve or enrich the content that we're offering to them.
And we could have not done that we could have quite happily carried on as we were, we could have kind of forgotten about them if you like, and carried on regardless. But we took a step back, we stopped, we had a chat about it and realised that it was the right thing to do. And we schedule time in to do that. Now, the time slipped you. You know I think we're on our third deadline for our own website, but it was there, it was worked on constantly and we finally did release the website.
And I think that's where you can always find time. You know, your timescales might, might shift slightly, but we realised that we needed to take that time to focus on ourselves.
It's a really interesting one, James, because something I heard recently that came on the back of the pandemic and obviously during that, I think we can all agree, we had a lot of time. A lot of people had more time than they probably ever had in their adult lives suddenly appear. And I heard something recently that said that thing that you've been wanting to do, it's not a case of time, it's a case of discipline. Because whether you wanted to learn a language or learn the guitar.
Whatever it was, we have had the time, so if you haven't done it, then it's case a discipline rather than time. Finding the time is one thing, making the time is another, using tactics, like your calendar to time block. If you know, you want to lose weight, or you know you want to be more productive at work, block out 15 minutes in the day to read, block out the time in your diary. When something goes in a diary, we are programmed in to not want to cancel it.
You don't often cancel a dentist Although I think we all wish we probably could. Sorry, dentists. But when it's in the diary, people can't book over it. You're making a commitment to yourself. If you booked in to read with a client. You wouldn't cancel it. So why would you do it to yourself? You are shortchanging or self by doing that.
I think look at those goals as well in the same token, you know, you how to eat an elephant you know, you do it bit by bit and, and I think it's exactly the same thing here.
Frowned upon that
It is. It is. Oops. Same way as it didn't use to be able to get my taxis as well. How did you use to get, But anyway, that's another, another side. And that finishes off another podcast. So In summary, by sharpening the saw, you can keep yourself mentally refreshed. You're better prepared to deal with unprecedented curveballs that life can throw at you. And the same obviously applies for your business. So by constantly ensuring that this saw remained sharp, your business will grow and renew.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do share it with people who you think might find interest in it. Over the next few weeks. We've also got some great guests that we're going to get it involved. And make sure you do follow along and also give us some feedback. Obviously over iTunes is great. It does help us kind of go up through the ranks. So the more feedback you can give us the more comments positive. Obviously we don't want the negative ones, email them to Paul.
All of those positive comments that you can kind of put on iTunes will really help us reach more listeners, which is kind of what we want to do. So until next time, keep that saw sharp.