A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. If you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. Or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I got some exciting stuff to talk about today. Five productivity hacks for your construction business. I talked to a lot of clients. I talked to a lot of contractors who struggle with time management. You guys struggle big time with time management. You're running around like, you know, hairs on fire. People calling you all day, throwing off your schedule, screwing everything up. You get at the end of the day and you're like, I did not get anything done that I wanted to get done today. What happened? Where did all my time go? Well, I got news for you guys. There's unlimited time. I mean, there really is. There's unlimited time to get things done if you prioritize them. See, what happens is you think things that are important. and make them urgent, but they're not actually urgent. They're important, but they're not urgent. But you make everything urgent because you need to be the one who fixes everything. And I don't know if this is like a subconscious pride thing where it's like, oh, I'm so great. I'm the greatest person on earth because everybody needs me and I can fix everything and I'm so awesome at this and I'm the fixer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I don't know if that's a psychology thing, if that's a subconscious or we secretly desire to be wanted and be able to solve problems. I don't know. I don't know what causes it. But for whatever reason, we just simply waste time all the time. If I followed you around for eight hours a day or 24 hours straight, I could find probably five hours that you've wasted. every single day. And I'm just as guilty. I'm not immune to this. I struggle with wasting time too. And so it's something that's a constant battle that we fight. And so I want to give you five tips to help fight that so that you can be a little more productive in your business and not waste as much time. Coffee, it's good for your soul. All right. Number one, you probably heard this before. I don't think people fully understand what it means. Number one is time blocking. It's time blocking. It's blocking your time. Pretty self-explanatory, right? No, not so much. Not so much. So time blocking is to prioritize and allocate specific blocks of time for different tasks throughout the day. And this enables... focused work and prevents distractions from derailing your productivity. It's about taking control of your time rather than letting your day control you. Now, here is what I recommend. And I've talked a little bit about this in different capacities, especially with sales and stuff. You need to know when you're most productive. That's the thing you need to understand. You need to take inventory of your own self when you're most productive. When do you get into your flow state when you're like everything's just clicking and you're just knocking stuff out? Is that in the morning? Is that after lunch? Is that at the end of the day? When is that? For me, when I was on the tools, I didn't really get started until after lunch. The morning was kind of like the warm-up time. I would be twice as productive in the afternoon as I would in the morning whenever I was working on the tools. And it's still the same in the office for me. Sometimes I don't even become in my flow state until like 3,4,5 o 'clock in the afternoon. And then I got to go home and I'm like, oh man, I was just in my flow state. But identifying when you're at your best to do different tasks. Because not every task requires you to be in a flow state. Not every task requires your full attention. Others require more attention. For example, sales, if you're doing a sales call, you want to be at your best. You don't want to schedule a sales call at 7 o 'clock in the morning when you haven't had your five pots of coffee. Some of you guys are like five pots a day of coffee drinkers. You drink it like it's an IV hooked into your arm. But if you're not awake yet until 10 o 'clock in the morning, don't schedule a sales call before 10 o 'clock in the morning. I know it sounds crazy, but people do this all the time. Like, oh, that's when my customer was available. No, that's when you let them be available. Guys, set times. If it's Monday from 1 to 5 and Wednesday from 1 to 5 and Thursday from 10 to 2 and Friday from 10 to 2, whatever, they give some options for your clients. But you don't have to be available 24-7 to do sales calls. Another thing is you don't do it when you're at home and your kids are screaming in the background. If you're calling people back in the evening, when you get home from work and you're making your sales calls and your kids are in the background screaming, TV's on, and you're not paying attention, stop doing that right now. Stop it. If you have to call people back in the evening, which I don't think you should, but if you have to, don't do it when there's distractions in the background because it's 10 times louder on the phone than what you hear. you're immune to it because you just tune it out. Your clients can hear it all the time. It's like super loud. It's extremely annoying. I freaking hate it when people do that to me when I'm talking to them on the phone. I have a rule in the profit club. If we ever do role plays, you better not be on and driving in the car. If you do it, I'm hanging up on you because you should not be calling people back when you're driving in the car. So time blocking. It's actually setting time of the day. So for me, as an example, let me pull up my calendar here. I don't have it in front of me. Let me pull it up here. This is my schedule. Okay. 5 a. m. I wake up. Between 5.30 and 6.15, I work out. Now, lately, I haven't been getting to the gym until about 6. So I work out from about 6 to 7. So the time can vary a little bit. But it's on my schedule, on my calendar. From 5.30 to 6.15, work out. From 6.30 to 7.15, get ready. From 7.15 on, which is about 15,20 minutes, is personal time. That's where I can do devotional. I can read the Bible. I can meditate or pray, you know, things that I want to do for myself. And then at 8 a. m., I have video approvals. I make lots of content. And so from 8 till 8.30, I'm approving videos for my VA. I have a full-time VA that does all my editing. I'm, she's editing the videos, giving my approval. I'm watching, listening to them, approving those every day from 830 till 845. I do banking. I log into my online banking. I approve any transactions that have happened in the last day. I look at any reports that I want to. And I do that every day for less than 15 minutes. Usually it's like five minutes. I give myself 15, but it usually takes me like five minutes. And then I have emails. From 8.45 till 9 a. m. with 15 minutes, I return or read or return emails every single day. It's on my calendar. So basically from 5 a. m. until 9 a. m. every day is a set schedule that never deviates. Now, are there times where I got to take my son to school in the morning because my wife can't and I got to change my schedule? Yes, that stuff happens. But if you don't have a schedule, then you just let it get filled up with useless stuff. Then I have lots of different things throughout the day. I have at 4 p. m.,4 to 5 is my live on TikTok. It's blocked out. Every single day from 5 to 5.30, I fill out my daily lead tracker. I have a tracking report that I do every day, how many people I talk to on the calls, how many appointments were set, how many DMs I had. How many sales? I fill out that report every single day from 5 to 5.30. From 5.30 to 5.45, I go in and I add new Facebook friends. I'm trying to network and grow my lead sources. So I have that set up. Then I have my coaching calls. Different times throughout the week. Those are blocked off. Then I also have times for following up on leads. I have times for recording my podcast. I have times for have lunch or coffee with my wife, so on and so on. I have times for recording content where I specifically take time to record content. And I even have time to go to the range and practice shooting if I want to. These are all blocked out so that I can't fill it with anything else because I don't want my day hijacked by stuff that happens. Do things happen? Do I need to change my schedule? Do I need to move stuff around? Absolutely. Stuff happens, right? But I'm not just reacting to the day. So time blocking is saying every morning from 8 to 8.30, I'm returning emails. And during that time, I'm turning my phone off. I'm deleting every tab that's open on my browser. And the only thing I have open is my email tab. And that's it. I'm not doing anything else. I'm not taking phone calls. I'm not doing sales calls. I'm not answering questions from my team. If I have one, I'm not doing any of that. From 8.30 to 9 or whatever time it is, this is what I'm doing. And make sure everyone on your team knows not to disturb you unless it's an emergency. And then you define what an emergency is. Don't call me. Don't text me. Don't message me. Don't knock on my door unless the building's on fire. Someone got hurt. Whatever. The world's coming to an end. Don't bother me while I'm doing these things. And you train your staff to understand this. But if you don't do this, then you're reacting. If you don't have a set email time, then you're checking your email six times a day. And five of the times you check it, there's no new emails in there. You just waste time. So time block, and those are the only times you do these things. That's time blocking. Number two, and this helps as well. If you have regular routines, like my morning routine doesn't change, that can be set. But sometimes you have things each week that you need to do. So the number two is schedule your week in advance. Either Friday before you go home or Sunday afternoon or whatever, Monday morning early on. Set your week in advance. These are the things I need to get done this week. I already have my time blocked out of the things that I have to do every day. And then I'm going to fill in, okay, I need to work on a system. I need to work on creating a system for the guys to turn in equipment, whatever, making something up. That's probably going to take me a couple hours. So I'm going to block off Monday from 9 to 11. I'm going to block off two hours. to work on this and I'm not going to do anything else. I'm turning my phone off. I'm working on this. You guys, most of these five things require discipline. A lot of you lack serious discipline. You have to be focused and you have to have discipline. So if you schedule your week in advance and you can have blocks in there, like you can put time blocks of like three to four hours of nothing, right? It can be empty, but it's scheduled emptiness. You can have, you know, visit the job sites, but it's scheduled. Right. And so if you, if you put on there, let's say every morning you got to go get your guys ready. So from eight to nine, you're getting the guys ready and, or, you know, whatever, seven, seven 30, whatever time you start. So let's say seven 30 to eight 30 or seven 30 to nine, you get your guys started on the jobs and you go around and you look at all the, you know, the jobs you got going on. So from seven 30 to nine, you have to get it done. Because at nine o 'clock, you're onto something else. So it's not just 7.30. I go to the job site and the guys are like, hey, boss, man, I'm glad you're here. We need some more drywall. Can you go get it for us? And you're like, yeah, I can do that. I don't want to lose time. I don't want to lose productivity time. So I'll go do that for you. And then before you know it, it's 11 o 'clock and you still haven't even visited the other job sites. Versus, man, I wish I could, but I got to be done at 9.30. At 930, I have another task I got to do. So you're going to have to figure it out. Send somebody else to go do it. Call them, whatever. Right? When you discipline yourself like that, you take yourself out of the equation. But when I look at your schedule, which most of you don't even use a schedule, by the way. You just react to the day. But when I look at your schedule, if you have one, it's completely wide open. Other than appointments that you have, you don't schedule anything else. So that is scheduling your week in advance. Number three, this goes back to discipline. Number three is the power of no. It's saying no. Learn to say no to tasks or commitments that don't serve your business goals. It's essential for maintaining focus and serving energy and ensuring that your time is spent on the most beneficial activities. You have to learn to say no. You have to learn to say no to your team, to your customers, to your vendors, to the charities. You have to say no. Quit being a people pleaser. There's no such thing as a people pleaser. It's just a thing you made up in your head. You can't please people. You can't make people happy. If you're married, you should know you can't make your spouse happy. They're either happy or they're not. It's an internal... It's not an external. You can't make your customers happy. Some of you, that right there is what causes you so much grief in your life because you think it's your responsibility to make customers happy. Hey, Brad, there's a tiny little 1 32nd of a nick on this wall. And I just think we need to repaint the whole wall. Okay, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's just repaint a whole 300 square foot wall because there's a tiny little 1 32nd. Nick in there because I want to make you happy. Barbara, I want to make you happy. I have to laugh at myself. I have to laugh at this because it's ridiculous. Yet so many people do this. Like, no, no, stop trying to make people happy. Learn to say no. Provide good value, good experience, and say no in the process. Say no to your team. Say no to your spouse. Say no to your kids if it's appropriate. Learn to say no. I have a joke for me and my family when my kids are like, hey, dad, can we go? And I say no. Hey, dad, can we go? No. Hey, dad, can we? No. I just instantly say no. It's kind of a joke. Usually I end up saying yes if it's something that needs to be said yes to. But it's like I default no. Hey, can you go help someone? No. Can you donate money? No. No. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. You're not going to steal from my time. You're not going to take away from what I'm trying to do. No. The answer is no. Learn to say no. Number four, this isn't so much a productivity hack as it is to set you up for success. And I kind of just told you what I do. Number four is mindful mornings. It's having a morning routine. Way back in the day, You know, I'd wait till like 725, wake up and then get out the door by 730. Like wake up, get dressed, leave. Right. Cause I just like, I want to sleep to the very end. I want to stay up till one o 'clock in the morning playing video games. Then I'll sleep till, you know,725, hop up and be out the door by 730. Like that was, that was the, what I thought was a good morning routine. No, a morning routine can include, like I told you. working out, meditation. If you're spiritual, reading the Bible or whatever, if you have other religions, like doing your meditation, your prayers, quiet time. Sometimes I'll just sit there for about 10 minutes and not do anything, like not be on my phone, not just sit there in darkness, in complete silence, and just sit there and center myself. Other times I will use an app to meditate. I'll listen to an app that gives you breathing techniques and stuff. Or I will, like I said, I'll do a lesson. I'll do a routine and reading the Bible. I got a new routine I just started this week of reading in the Bible and doing things differently than I've ever done before for personal growth reasons. And so it's a little bit of a challenge to get into that routine. I struggle. I don't do it perfectly. But it's something I'm working on to make it better. And I'll tell you about a bonus here later on. There's actually six things, but I'll tell you about that in a second and how it ties back into what I just told you with the morning routine. But when you start your day with a mindful morning routine, whether it's meditation, exercise, reading, eating, breakfast, you basically can start on a positive note and that can drastically improve your focus and productivity throughout the day. Start your morning off correctly. Start your morning off right. And then the rest of the day, you'll have a much better chance that it goes well. If you start your day off bad, you're probably going to have a bad day. So I've learned, and it's only taken me like 12 years, I don't talk to my wife in the morning about anything that has any political or economical or anything that has to do with the world or the government or anything controversial. I do not have those conversations in the morning because it will instantly turn into a bad morning. So I just stay away from all that stuff. But have some type of morning routine. Okay, number five. This is one of my favorites. This really works well to help with the discipline aspect of it. Number five is what I call the top five priorities. So you should have a dry erase board somewhere in your office and you create your top five priorities for your business. Now, you may have a separate top five priorities for a production team, and you may have a separate one for your office team. Or you may just have one, if you're small enough, you may just have one for the whole business. But basically, your top five priorities are the five things that you need to work on in your business to get to the next level. These are things that are going to move the needle the most in your business. So you get a dry erase board. And you put three columns, like five rows, three columns. The first column is what do we need, right? What do we need? The second column is why do we need it? And the third column is where are we at in the process? So if you identify that you need an estimating system because you're just doing it on paper now in Excel. You need an estimating system. Then you would put on there, what do we need? An estimating system. Why do we need it? It's going to make us more efficient, save time, provide a better experience. And where are we at in the process? Just getting started. We're just now researching. We're in the research phase, whatever. And the next priority, what is that? We need to find a time tracking worksheet or whatever. Time tracking app. Right now, the guy just write down a piece of paper and it gets lost and it's the wrong times and blah, blah, blah. So I want to get some type of digital time tracking app for their phone so they can track time. Cool. What's the object? A time tracking app. Why do we need it? To make sure we have accurate times for billing and to make sure our people are paid correctly. Where are we at in the process? Maybe you've already researched it and you say we're narrowing it down to the three that we like. And you do this for the five things. Okay? Now, these can be things that only take you one day to fix. It can be things that will take you six months to fix. The top five priorities are not based on timeframes. It's not based on how quickly you can do these things. It's based on these are the five things that as a team we've identified are things that we need to fix in our business. Right? And here's the beauty of it. You cannot add anything else to this list. You have five things on that list. And if something else comes up, you get a call from your guys. Hey, boss, we've got a problem. The truck, the engine just blew out in the truck. We've got to get it fixed. Okay, that's a serious problem. We need to get it fixed. That's a priority now. So what do I have to do? I have to remove something off the priority board. I have to take it off. I have to erase it and I got to put something else in its place. I'm going to put the truck, I'm going to take the timesheet apps, I'm going to delete it. I'm going to put the truck in its place until it can be fixed. Now, that may be a bad example because obviously if a truck's blown, you're just going to take it to the mechanic. They're going to say, get a new motor and you got to do it, right? That's not going to require a whole lot of time commitment to do that. So if it's something that you're going to fix in one or two days, you may not want to replace it on the board. But if it's something that's, like I said, that was probably a bad example. Let's say the guys say, hey, the van needs to be better organized. We don't have anywhere to put tools. It's just we're just throwing them in the back. It's crazy. It's costing us time and productivity. And you're like, okay, that's a serious problem. We need to address that. Let's look at the top five priorities. Let's compare it. Okay, well, these other five priorities are going to cost us more money. And if we get them fixed, we'll help us increase our profits more than organizing the van. So we're not going to put it on the board yet. We're not giving it any attention. We're not giving it any energy because we've identified that it's not more important than these top five priorities. And you don't have to be the one doing the five priorities, guys. It can be your whole team. You may not do any of it, but you got these five priorities. And then anytime. there's downtime in your business, you're working on these five priorities. So if your office manager ends up getting done with her work a couple hours early, then she can spend the rest of the day working on some of these priorities. And so you knock them out. And once you knock out, you find the app that you want to time track, you delete it off the board, and you put something else in its place. Now you can go back. to the van organization and add that on there. Right? If you only have five, it forces you to focus on those five and not let what I call, just made it up in my head just now, I'm going to call it fire creep. Right? Fire creep. Fire creep is whenever something happens, your hair catches fire, it becomes an emergency right this second. It's only going to last for two hours. And then after that, it's over. But to you, it's everything that's important. And so it's like creeping in. It's like, oh my gosh, this is the most important thing we got to fix right now. I'm going to add it to the board. I'm going to add it to my list. We got to do this right now. We got to solve this problem right this second. Right? Fire creep. Maybe it's a better nerf. I wish I could talk today. Maybe there's a better name for that. If you got a better name for it, or if there's an official name for it, throw it in my messaging. Message me, DM me, comment, whatever. Let me know what it is. Maybe it's like problem creep or whatever. I like fire creep. Sounds like an evil Marvel villain or something. Fire creep. I don't know. Needs some work. But you can't change the priorities, guys. You can't change them. You get the five and that's it. If you're going to change them, you got to address the team. Team, this is what we got new coming up. The guys want the vans. Yeah, that's definitely something we want to do. These other five are more important. You're going to have to shelf that idea for now. And you don't have like a sub list, guys. You don't have your top five priorities and then right below it have the next five priorities. No, you're not allowed to write it down. You're not allowed to put it in a place for later. You're not allowed to even give energy to it. The guys say, hey boss, the vans need to be organized. Okay. Once we get done with these five priorities, maybe we'll come back to it. Once we get these five priorities done, then give me a reminder and we can possibly add it. But I'm not going to write it down somewhere or something. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. We need to do that. I'll put it as number six just below this board because that's the next one. No, there's no waiting list. There's no bench warmers. It's five priorities and that's it. Nothing else. I hope I'm making this very clear to you because I know your intentions. I know your habits. You are not allowed to do that. If it's important enough, it will come back up again in the future. I promise you. If it's something that really needs to be fixed, it will be a reoccurring issue that keeps coming up. You're not going to forget about it. Because as soon as they say, hey, boss, we need a new van organizer, you're like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. And you go online and you start Googling. Van organizers, van organizing ideas, how to organize your van. You get stuck on YouTube. Next thing you know, you wasted three hours watching YouTube videos on how to organize your van setup, how to build custom shelves in your van, how to set up your van to be the most efficient, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you still haven't solved the problem. You just became aware that there is a problem and that now it's something you need to do. but you just wasted three hours of your day researching something that you don't need to start yet. Tell me I'm wrong. Go to the comments. Shoot me a DM. Tell me I'm wrong about that. You guys will go and waste a half a day trying to solve a problem because it's on fire that day. Stop doing that. Stop making important things urgent. So the bonus thing I want to shout out to you is to help with your morning routine. It's to help to keep you focused. That is my profit journal. I've talked about it before, but you can buy it online. I'll put the link in the show notes. It has a daily profit plan, and it's really designed to focus on taking actions towards hitting your profit goals. So I got a one big box here. It's like this month's sales goal. What do we want to sell this month? And what are three steps that I can take today to help reach my goal? There's things on here like three things I'm grateful for because it's always good to be grounded in gratefulness. Five new ideas. There's a box to create five new ideas. You want to increase your creativity, which helps you actually helps to release endorphins and make you more quicker, wittier, smarter. You release creativity. So five new ideas. You can. Helps to do that. There's areas for writing down a morning mind dump, an evening mind dump. And then there's also, there's like a morning section and the evening section or end of the day section. There's questions like your biggest learning lesson today, looking for a solution to, this is good if you have something that keeps annoying you, keeps nabbing at you. You write this down. I'm looking for a solution to, you write it down and your subconscious will start working on that for you. You can rate your day. You can put down your total sales for the day. And there's a little thing called profit multipliers. And these profit multipliers are really geared towards those, the mindset, the morning mindset, the things you need to do in the morning to get better, to exercise, to pray, to meditate, to drink water or whatever it is you need to do to be healthy. So if you want to pick this up, it's in the, I'll put in the link in the show notes. That's set up to get you through a quarter, three months. and then you'll have to order a new one. But go check it out. It's designed to help you focus on what's important each day. That's the end of the show, guys. I appreciate you hanging out with me. Do me a favor. Go leave a review. One thing I want to do is I'm looking to change up the intro. It's been a couple years now. I'm getting kind of tired with it. So let me hear your ideas on that. What do you think I should do with the intro? Should I just leave it alone? Because it's now become... synonymous of the podcast? Should I change it? I'm thinking of doing a very short version of the guitar and then quick intro. So we only have like a, maybe a 10,15 second total intro. Give me your thoughts on that. Reach out to me on social, shoot me an email. If you're on Spotify, you can leave, you can actually comment on that episode. Let me know your thoughts on a new intro for the podcast. I want to hear from it. And also if you know any guests that I should. recommend or not recommend. If you have any guests to recommend that I should interview, drop me a message and let me know that as well. So next time, guys, you can find me on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. If you haven't done it yet, join my free Facebook group, the Contract Profit Blueprint. And remember, profit is not a dirty word. See ya.
