Time Management & Productivity – Monthly Mastermind August 2024

Time Management & Productivity – Monthly Mastermind August 2024

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Transcription:
All right. Welcome to August Mastermind. I am your host, Dr. Lisa Faast. Happy to all see you virtually and we are going to be talking about time management. I’m going to be sharing some of my secrets for getting a lot of shit done on and I kind of switched up this month’s topic because after office hours this week talking to some of my inner circle members this week like seems like fall in the crazy chaos. The fall is come a little early. Everybody is already feeling seemingly very overwhelmed. Lots of patients are asking for flu shots already. And you know, some early cases of cold and flu and some you know whatever other bugs are out there in the world is hitting and so I thought it’d be a great time for us to kind of dive into time management and productivity and sharing what I do and managing all of my different businesses including my pharmacy, obviously diversifier X, being a mom of four which is crazy enough in itself, and hopefully to help you get more stuff done, feel a little bit calmer about this kind of coming time. And that way you can still move your pharmacy forward. I think a lot of times we’ll get busy doing the stuff in full and we forget to kind of work on and move our business forward. So that is the goal today. You can pop your questions in the meeting chat. I’ve got that up. I’m happy to answer any and all questions of course, and let’s go ahead and get started. So before we get started, I want to quickly talk to you about FH to Pharma. So this is company it’s been around for quite a few years. Some of you might have used their oxy a PAP products, especially when there’s shortages of a lot of the popular products. There’s is unique combination of doses so I’ve had a lot of people asking like where can you get some sea tattoos? You know or where can you get some of these things so ethics to farm it can be a great option especially those looking for a lower acetaminophen ratio with with the Oxy but there’s two other products that they have with the GLP ones, both commercial compounds, no matter what kind of GLP ones when people lose a significant amount of weight. They sometimes can run into some gallbladder issues. So your style did the use of the year style. The 204 100 milligram is kind of picked up recently and they also have a glycopyrrolate which is used for stomach acid. But it’s also used a lot times for excessive sweating, or excessive saliva and some other things. So there’s some interesting uses for the glycopyrrolate products. And so we appreciate FH to support and bringing you programs like this and if you ever have any questions about their products, or you want to order just go right to their website, FH to pharma.net not.com.net and talk to the team over there. They’re fantastic. They they clinically they got all this stuff down. But they really carry some great products that are doing goods for pharmacies out there. All right, for those of you that have been inside the membership for a bit, hopefully you’ve checked out our pharmacy profit matrix. This is really our success path for membership and we’re going to be continuing to make this even easier to use and keep refining it for you guys as time goes on. It’s essentially a four step process to having a profitable pharmacy is and step one is you got to reverse your poor cash flow and your poor profits. You got to build a strong business foundation, then you have to start creating systems you can scale then you work on diversifying and growing your profitable pharmacy so today is kind of the playground that we’re playing in today is what I consider like CEO tips. You know how to be a good leader how to manage a lot of different things, and you know, keep your sanity and all at the same time. And so this is this is where we were kind of playing in on the profit matrix today. Because the more you can be efficient the more you can get shit done. The more you can help your employees get more stuff done, and the better and more efficient we are unable to scale our businesses or even step back. Sometimes scaling means you stepping out of the role and somebody else stepping in and you get to go off and do other things that you want to do. So that’s where we’re playing at today. And productivity versus time management. We’re going to start right off when kind of like just a little bit of definitions here. My personal sense of productivity is the ability to get things done in an efficient and consistent manner. You know, fresh for studying for your big test is not necessarily being productive, that’s not consistent. You know, that can lead to burnout. So this is about being consistently and being able to get stuff done. Time management is kind of the set of guidelines or theories. or strategies that you use in order to be productive. So time management is controlling what you’re doing at any given part of the day in order to become productive. And many times we can get busy being busy, and we’re not actually getting stuff done and that’s what we’re here to eliminate today. So GSD are my three favorite leaders. get shit done. That is my mantra that I live by. And I’m excited to bring it to you and help you get more GSD done. So my goal is to focus on being productive instead of busy. All right, and we’re gonna go through like how I do this and how I think about this. Um, I know it’s very popular out in the world of business, especially with entrepreneurs, if your your Instagram looks like my Instagram, you know, I follow and look at a lot of different entrepreneurial things in order to,
you know, share and learn and you know, all those kinds of things. And there’s all these things about morning routines and you know, stepping away and this is, you know, just all these kinds of hacks, if you will, my personal belief, my personal hack is every minute you’re not doing the work. You’re not doing the work sometimes to get stuff done. You just have to get stuff done. Um, that’s not to say you shouldn’t take time away to meditate if that refills you or you shouldn’t write in your journal if that fulfills you. But just know that every minute you’re not doing the work, you’re not doing the work. And so I just my personal mantra led by is I get as much stuff done from the time I wake up until the time I just run out of brainpower. Like I’m the Energizer Bunny, I started 100 And I just go to zero and sometimes I’m zero at three o’clock in the afternoon. Sometimes I’m zero at 10pm at night. And so I just go and I get as much stuff done. It’s kind of what I tell my kids all the time is do what you have to do then you can do what you want to do. And that is how I just live both personally and professionally. So I don’t have a morning routine. I don’t make my bed every morning. I don’t you know meditate or journal write or you know any of those other things because I would just rather get the work done. And that’s my stress relief when I’m able to cross things off my list and I no longer sitting there staring at my to do list and it’s really super full. That is where I get fulfilled. So you do you go I don’t have any problems with anybody else having a routine as long as it actually helps you complete stuff. If it just procrastinates and you get that warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re going to be doing it later, then you should probably give that up and just do the work. All right. So we included some things for you today to do a little bit. We’re gonna go through an energy tracker really quick. I’m gonna give you my tips. We’re gonna go through what I consider an expert task analysis, delegating and then to take care of yourself. This is a big theme on the office hours this past week is you know, the coal put on your own oxygen mask before you help others. You’ve got to take care of yourself before you can just give give give give for everybody else so we’re going to start off with understanding yourself a little bit better you know the answer to this but in case you don’t I’ll walk kind of walk you through on like how to figure this out. So when you productive Are you a morning person, afternoon person, a late night person? There’s no right or wrong answer here. Okay, it’s just you being you, and you’re better off not fighting your natural internal clock. Okay, so if you hate getting up early in the morning, and you’re a night owl, that’s okay. Don’t let somebody else maybe you’re married to a morning person. Or your business partner is a morning person. Don’t let them because they’re different than you make you change your natural internal energy clock because you’re going to be better when you don’t fight your natural energy. If you’re our morning, early person you love waking up at four in the morning, then by all means go do that. I’m not a believer that everybody has to say you have to have the same wakeup time and the same go to sleep time. I personally have become a very early to better you text me at 830 chances are I am not answering back because I’m either already in bed or getting ready for bed. And I have just figured out that is my natural internal clock right? If you don’t know your natural, your energy track it for a while. What do you do on vacation when you have no you know defined time where you have to be anywhere? Where do you just are the sharpest where’s your brain? Because you might wake up early but maybe your brain doesn’t kick in till noon. All right. And you can use this little energy tracker that we have to help you that okay, so whatever it ends up being your time, do the hard work when you are at your peak energy. So again, for me, I’m at my peak energy in the beginning part of the day. So I do all of my heart stuff at the end at the beginning of the day. And at the end of the day, I do easier stuff. I respond to emails, I do mom stuff. I might take some meetings, but it doesn’t require hefty brain lifting. So just manage your day around your natural energy. So I’m going to give you guys like 60 seconds. This is just an energy tracker, this is the sheet Look at yourself. You don’t have to if you didn’t print this out, you’d obviously don’t have to do this right now this is for tracking but just give 60 seconds thought on if you’re a morning person, late night person if you don’t know. You can also put it in the chat but I’ll give you just 60 seconds to do that
all right, so if you don’t know your natural energy, do use this energy tracker over a few days, kind of figure out like Where were your natural focuses where you were you don’t get exhausted right away doing the hard work. And that can just help you to better understand yourself. Now we live in the real world. You can’t always just wake up at noon every day. My teenagers would love to do that. So we often have to go against our natural instinct. Some of the times when when you wake up or you got to get children to school, or children early to sports. But just know it’s good to keep in mind hey, if I’m really just on it after lunch I just get like this little burst then do the hard things. You know work on that audit after lunch, have the one on ones with employees after lunch, you know, schedule some of those things that you can control to line up with where your energy is. All right. So set yourself up for success. Now we’re going to just go in and I’m just going to bring them to you buy productivity tips. Now. These are just my tips. These are things that I’ve learned. They may work for you. They may not you may think hey, this is a stupid idea or hey, that’s fantastic. All right. So one, use a calendar. I know that sounds obvious, but so many pharmacy owners like live their life by the seat of their pants, because that’s what pharmacy is, um, you know, people don’t make appointments to go to the pharmacy and it’s just kind of come and go that, frankly, that that that bad habit, or that that natural way that pharmacy is kind of rolls off over into everything else in our life. It’s like well, I don’t want to put it on my calendar. For 2pm Because who knows we might be busy at 2pm and so therefore you just get very lacks about a calendar, whereas I’d rather live by a calendar and then if something comes up if there’s some emergency, then you accommodate those that step outside of that. So use a calendar I personally live and die by my calendar, especially in times right now schools back in I got four kids, I got one kid doing competitive sports. I’ve got our two young ones doing elective things like cheerleading and I nine sports and all these other things and goodness gracious. If you looked at our full calendar, we looked at our full calendar and we wondered what do we do ourselves but we have to live by our calendar. I my daughter we signed up for snacks for her first cheer practice. Guess what, three days before that it said buy snacks like I might not remember what I’m buying snacks for but I already pre thought about it and predetermined my calendar of when I needed to do things. So I have gotten in the habit of using a calendar and one of the best things you can do is make other people respect your calendar. And that was a big moment for me when I was respecting my calendars but other people weren’t. So now our kids are family by employees like everybody knows to go look at least his calendar and that that will tell you if she’s available so live and die by my calendar. If it’s not on my calendar, I will most likely forget it. And if it’s in my calendar, I will absolutely do it. So I trust that so always obey your calendar when I would like I said the store says go buy cookies. I may not remember what I’m buying cookies for but I got it. I know I gotta go to the store and get some cookies. So always obey your calendar and you can really start to do this. Put your audits in there, put your employee one on ones put all your things in there. And then think about okay, I have an employee one on one. I just scheduled it for September 12. What do I have to do before that? Well, I probably need to you know, do some thinking maybe you’ve have an evaluation form you fill out Okay, so when should I do that by? Well, I’d like to have that done five days before Okay, so then put it on your calendar September 7, do employee evaluation. And that’s pretty much how I live my life. And then each day I don’t have to put a lot of brainpower into what am I doing today? I just sit down, open my calendar and boom, there’s the stuff that I got to do. So teach others to respect your calendar. Like I said, I share my calendar with my whole team. I share my calendar with family, we can always go in there and see what what I should be doing at any given time. Program reminders reminders are huge for me. So many times like I use Google Calendar. You can use any calendar you want. I program in there, you know the little notifications. If it’s things that are like in my office, you know, it’s a two minute and a five minute notification. If I have to travel I calendar, the travel time so many of us grew up on that. You know if you’re at your pharmacy and you got to go to a doctor’s office, your doctor’s office appointment is at four so your alarm goes off at four and you’re like, well crap, it takes 20 minutes to go to my doctor’s office. And so that’s where then I put my office appointment at four and then I put my 330 leads for the you know the doctor’s office appointment. And so program in your reminders, ensure your calendars on your phone okay? I know there’s lots of like lifebalance X experts out there that are like take everything off your phone, all your notifications, all this whatever, not for your calendar, at least not not for me because life is too busy and I frankly will forget something that’s critically important. So make sure your calendar is on your phone and you get the notifications on your phone. Because there’s been plenty of time where I’m cooking dinner or I’m cooking lunch or doing something and that notification goes off and it’s like, oh, I would have totally forgot about that thing if it weren’t for that notification. So, lastly, again, always obey your calendar. If you get that habit of putting everything on there, then actually life comes pretty simple by just obeying your calendar. All right, time blocking. All right, this is one of the things that I really learned as that first time pharmacy owner, um, I realized that I was you know, you start to realize you’re so much more efficient when when you’re not interrupted when you set aside time to do something like when you were working on an audit or I was working on a hormone patient, you know, it was like, Oh, well, I’m, I’m only gonna do hormone patients for this hour and it was like, No, I got through a lot of hormone patients in that hour. So build your calendar out for specific specific tasks that must be done. Okay. Um, maybe again, like an audit. I don’t know why audits are on Well, I do know why audits are mine. I’ve talked to a lot of members lately. We’ve gotten some audits all by often, by the way. And so you got like a big audit, you gotta gather a whole bunch of different things. So put them on your calendar where you don’t know you may not know exactly what you’re going to be doing for that audit, but you’re going to block you know, this hour maybe when you know a new pharmacist comes on the shift or maybe it’s you’re going to close the pharmacy and you’re going to work on it for that hour after the pharmacy is closed. But you’re putting something on your thing where it’s like you’re working on the audit, you’re going to devote your time to doing that because an object is one of those things you don’t want to look at for three minutes, go get distracted, come back and by the time you finish re looking at it for three minutes. All you’ve done is reread what you’ve already just read, and now you’re being distracted again. So these are some of those things. Time blocking is great for things where you need deep thought work. We’re being interrupted is going to be very detrimental. So it’s great for big tasks to stay on project. Employee one on ones meetings with hired help space for personal appointments, or lunch.
scheduled some lunch on there every once in a while, but time blocking and that way you’re regularly happening so I encourage you especially as a pharmacy owner, you know, self care, we’ll talk a little bit about self care, but say your appointments like Wednesdays Wednesday mornings could be your just time block for appointments and it can be a general appointment book bucket. So if you need to make a doctor’s appointment you know to make it for Wednesday morning if you need to take your car in to get the tires rotated, you know to make it for Wednesday morning, like having the time buckets of when you know things can take place. I know the first time when I hired a pharmacist, my very first pharmacist they only worked one day a week because they worked at the hospital the other four days but it was every Wednesday. So I knew Wednesday mornings if I was going to get anything done in life, I needed to schedule it Wednesday morning, because that’s when I had my part time pharmacists that first came in. So you need to look at your calendar and figure out like what are some time blocks that I can put on my calendar that I know that I’m going to be able to use and then you and then you tell yourself what to use them for. That was a big, big kind of aha for me. The other thing is batching. So we talked a little bit about doing things over and over and you get better at them. So emails, highly recommend you don’t check emails all throughout the day. You know, maybe you sit down after lunch, you eat your food and then you take 15 minutes and you go through all your emails because you can get through way more emails in 15 minutes by cleaning up your your inbox and doing quick quick responses than trying to do one at a time or it pings. And it goes off and you immediately respond that often switching them tasks kills a lot of time. So things that are very repetitive. So checking prescriptions. This was a big one for me inside the pharmacy where the whole team the whole operations was going you know 24/7 It basically never stopped, you know, the cashiers robberies, you know, capturing the technicians were typing, the technicians were filling and it would just go go go but they would stack up my checks. So I would not be just standing there you know, on the bench just holding humming, waiting for those checks to come. I would step away from the bench and go do my pharmacy owner stuff or go Do you know my hormone patient stuff or go do something that only I could do? But I would step away from the bench and they would let the checks pile up. But then I would come back and I could do all of my checks and I could do it in like, I mean 510 minutes, I could get a whole stack done. And that was so much more efficient than just standing there at the bench. You know, twiddling my thumbs waiting for the and checking them as they came in. So batching can be really really good when it’s a bunch of repetitive tasks. You can also set blocks, you can kind of combine blocks with batching. So for example, like emails, or opening the mail, I know that seems kind of silly, but it’s like, you know, we get behind sometimes on things like that. So you can set up the time block and then you’re only going to check you know, you’re only going to open the email twice a week. That’s fine. Set those time blocks for 30 minutes, maybe twice a week. And that’s when you do all your mailing is when you write you know maybe you write your checks or maybe you you know put away or file or whatever those things are that you that you need to do. You can set up the blocks and then do the batching of all of those things. That don’t necessarily have to be done right away. Now, I will say like when we stood as batching for the check for the checking prescriptions, if there was a winner, a waiter would interrupt that batching thing. So I might be in the back. You know, evaluating hormone patient or you know, doing something like that and if there was a waiter, the staff would just yell waiter and I knew to come out check that one real quick and then let them go. But the other ones I did not check the other ones. I let them continue to pile up until I was done what I was doing that I would go back and batch check them all. And that became so much more productive. I wasn’t tied to the bench. Just wait for the next prescription to check. And so I think that’s a really good thing. Same thing kind of with typing. We started doing this with the technicians, you know, prescriptions were coming in, prescriptions were dropped off. And sometimes they needed to do other things and it was okay to kind of let that build up as long as they went back to and then they just bastion and they wouldn’t get interrupted and they could be a little bit more efficient. So that’s how you can kind of like quote unquote, multitask do a bunch of different things within a day is not by switching them all the time but by batching them into little buckets of time. And that’s because each time you change tasks, you lose time and you lose focus on that. So my other thing that I did when I was first to pharmacy owners, I started coming up with themed days. So what is the theme day so it was a business focus for each day. As a pharmacy owner, you have to do lots of things. Obviously, you know, there’s marketing, there’s finances, there’s compliance, there’s, you know, team development and team report and there’s all these different things and it’s like, how do I manage it all? And so what I started doing was having a theme today, so Monday, you know could be marketing. I always did finances on Friday. I was a literation person. You don’t have to but I did you know Tuesdays were my technicians and those kinds of things to where I had that extra time away from the bench. I was going to work on those topics that day. So my brain was like kind of turned in to marketing. You know, marketing is on Monday. I would meet with the marketer, I would talk about marketing, I might do social media posts, I might do a video, you know, just those kinds of things would happen on a Monday when I had the time to do those things. And if it didn’t land in marketing and somebody was reaching out was like great. I do that on Fridays or I do that on Thursdays and it’s okay to tell people No, I have a schedule. I have a process. I need you to you know, call me back on Wednesday, or whatnot. But these themed days it really helped create a business focus for each day. And this was critical to my success when I success when I was still a dispensing pharmacist when I was at Main pharmacist that was on the bench. I was able to still make sure I paid attention to all the different things that I needed to in my business because I had themed days where I paid attention to that. And that was really, really helpful so you only work on the things that fit in your theme day unless it’s a three hour and fire you know three alarm fire obviously you gotta take care of that. But otherwise, I only worked on those things and the other stuff I just pushed to that day what I knew I’d be focusing on those things and it couldn’t usually wait a day or two in order for that to happen. So examples Monday marketing Tuesday team Friday financials, you know, all those kinds of things make up your own schedule. And it really helped me to kind of navigate that. How do I be the staff pharmacist and be the pharmacy owner that still you know, propels your pharmacy forward on that day to day business. So All right, next next little thing is a brain dump. I’m certainly not the only person to ever talk about a brain dump but your brain was not desired to be a filing cabinet. Okay, you were taking up valuable RAM if you will, thinking capability by trying to remember everything in your brain. All right. I don’t know if this is just a female thing or if the males the two but it’s like I literally have a million thoughts in my head at any given moment. And so what you want to do is you just write down everything that’s in your brain like just brain dump, brain vomit onto paper onto a computer, whatever you whatever you need to do, and that helps get it out of your brain. And it’s kind of amazing, like once you free up that RAM space, all of a sudden your brain is now now free to like create solutions to all those problems that you were just kind of keeping it in and so write everything down that’s floating around. I then organize that. So organize that into like things that are urgent, important, low priority, not a priority, maybe just an idea you want to do. But that helps get you to organize all the things that are floating around into your brain. Then of course, when you know urgent things, you go take care of it. And it’s amazing how much more clarity you have and how much faster thinking you are. Once you’ve done the brain dump and you’re like, Oh, well now I can solve that urgent problem that I just didn’t see a way through before. Now I can figure it out because it’s like you have the extra brain capacity to to do it. So then when you have a new idea, which like I have new ideas all the time, then it’s like I already have my my paper or my my virtual paper my little my little remarkable and I just add that to there and so it doesn’t take up that brain space. And this is kind of one of those things like I don’t have any like scientific proof. I know a lot of people have written like books and stuff on this, but man, I tell you, I can feel the difference. When I know I gotta get all the stuff out of my head. But don’t just leave it messy notes, go back and organize them. And then that way you can quickly know exactly which what you got to focus on next to do.
Alright, um, your brain dump so my brain dump document. I like to think of it as a living document. You are free to add you are free to subtract, you are free to reorganize that, but it’s kind of like this living document of like Lisa’s brain when these days we’ll just be able to plug into a computer and with that but for now you know you kind of have to manually manage those manage those things but it’s so much better at being out of the brain and on a physical something and then again the frees up your mind of clutter of all the things on there. So then on your list that you create this is this is a really important part. When it’s in your brain, you know about it, and only you are kind of managing that if you will. Once you get it out onto a list and you’ve prioritized it. Then you can find opportunities to delegate and we’re going to talk about delegation but if it’s always stuck in your brain, it’s never gonna get to like the point where you’re outside and you’re thinking of somebody else can take care of it. So that’s a very big important part. I’m a big daily to do Lister. Okay, it is the first thing that I sit down when I sit down at my desk and I’m working sometimes I don’t even make it out of bed before I start thinking about my to do list but I create a to do list every single day. I give have my non negotiables of the things that absolutely must get done and then like, hey, if I have time I’ll do all these other things. So I create my to do list and then I put them in order priority like what is absolutely must be done. Generally speaking, I do wouldn’t have more than one to three of like, absolutely must do today. You know things like when an audit to do or you got to renew a license or something like that. Like those kinds of things. You’re like this absolutely has to be done today. I do not leave this pharmacy until this thing is done. The other things you know they’re not quite that dire. So really, really important to prioritize this. This is my way of rewarding myself for daily wins. I get those dopamine hits when I get to cross off you know that little list it makes me very happy. And so this is this. That’s what works for me. You know, you find what works for you, but I just I again, I get my happy dopamine hits when I do that. For me, it makes the journey the goal like all the little steps that you have to do to have a successful pharmacy I could never write down a whole list of like, Oh, do you have an entirely successful pharmacy and here’s the you know, 10,252 steps in order to do that. So to me it makes every day I know I’m getting closer to whatever my goals are, and I enjoy the journey more not just waiting to the destination because a lot of my goals, especially this point in my life in my career, are big goals and big things. They take months to come to fruition. I work on projects or ideas for months, sometimes years. And so I have to figure out a way to reward and enjoy myself along the way and that’s where a daily my daily to do list comes in. And that’s how I reward myself as I get happy. But I finished all my things on my list and the things on my list are things that are getting me closer to my end goal. Alright, so what are the tools that I’ve used? So I mentioned before use Google Calendar. You are free to use Microsoft you’re weird person, but feel free to use Microsoft or any other calendaring system out there. I use Google I also use my remarkable tablets. So that’s this little electronic notebook saying I was a big notebook person. And and then I was losing the notebooks. Like I’d have this notebook and I’d go to a meeting or I do something and I write in the notebook and then you know the next day I’d grab a different notebook and what I just was constantly then losing my notebooks or whatever but remarkable has solved all that. It’s entirely expensive. I guarantee you that I don’t know what the current price is like seven 800 bucks. And for years I didn’t buy one because it was seven 800 bucks. My husband bought it for me my last birthday and it has seriously been the best gift ever. I use it more it has made me so much more efficient. I never lose a note. And I wish I would have bought it for myself years ago and I probably would be even better than I am today because it would have made me more efficient. So those are things that I use. I use Calendly for booking calls. I know a lot of you have you’re just you’re that typical bench pharmacist, you may not be doing appointments, but if you ever do need to use appointments, whether it’s for you know, a clinical service or your vaccines, you can use Calendly or if it’s to meet with vendors. You know, meet with somebody instead of people randomly calling you when it’s convenient for them. Have them called you when it’s convenient for you so I use Calendly good old pen paper still works absolutely use pen and paper. Lots of people use Trello or notion boards those those use what’s called the Kanban method of like organization and productivity. Virtual Assistants. Absolutely. I have we have five virtual assistants here at diversify, and they are freaking fantastic. Um, I have gotten them all from Shelly and I put Shelley’s email there so if you’ve ever thought about having a virtual assistant I highly, highly recommend it. And it is a great way to get more stuff done without you actually having to do it. So those are the tools that I use. Alright, some random thoughts on productivity. My thoughts are if it takes less than a minute then I just do it. If doing the thing takes less than a minute, I’m not going to write it on a to do list. I’m not going to write it on to thing I’m just going to get it done and then just be done with it. So that’s that’s my philosophy. Don’t rely on your brain rely on a system and that’s where my calendaring comes in my my lists come in. Those are my systems that I use so I very rarely, like forget anything. The worst case scenario is when I’m driving, somebody calls me and they say, Hey, can we meet Tuesday at four? And I’m like, Yeah, sure that sounds good. And then by the time I’m done driving, I have forgotten. So I don’t do that anymore. I say yeah, sure, send me an email. And when I get the email, I will confirm that’s good and put it on the calendar. So I have learned to train myself to rely on the system, not on my brain. Um, sometimes some of you all just need to do an inbox detonation. And what I mean by that is I’ve seen some of your guys’s inboxes and you have 510 15 20,000 emails in your inbox. Um, you’re never going to read them. And so sometimes you just need to blow it up and start over from scratch and just having new systems starting over from scratch. That’s a okay. Me personally, my goal is to get to Inbox Zero every day. So I’m able to clear my inbox and the way that I do is if an email is in my inbox, that means I still need to work on it. I still need to do something on it. If I’ve done the email either responded, or it did the thing, whatever the email was about, then I’ve either deleted it. I’m a big email Deleter I know scary that scares people, or I put it away in in the email folder where it needs to go. So but if you literally have 1000s So for some of you even hundreds of emails you’re just never gonna go through those. Just select all and hit delete and start new. You’ll be a little scared to hit that button but calm will come after that and it’s quite amazing. All right, leveraging your time figuring out how to leverage your time is the greatest superpower for success. Every nine and eight figure versus in person I know that means they’re making 10 millions or even 100 millions of dollars. They understand this like to the records in their DNA. They try to figure out every minute of every day. How can I turn this one minute into 10 minutes? In some way shape or form and that’s leveraging. So for example, our VA team, my main assistant jus, who kind of leads the VA team, when they sent out the calendar for my son’s waterpolo the practices the games, the tournaments, the all the things that he needed to do. I forget like started sweating from like just reading the email. So what did I do? I forwarded that email to Juve and say, Hey, do put these all on my calendar for me. And that was it. And then I deleted the email and I went on to the next thing. I didn’t have to spend it but it probably took me hours and oh, I don’t know how many hours it took you. But it was a whole lot less than then it took me to send an email to forward it to do so in that moment. I was leveraging my time like a frickin boss. And that is what leveraging time is. Now for most of you. This is going to be your employees and that’s why I coined the phrase many years ago, work at the top of your license, because you always want to be pushing work and tasks downstream. There are certain things that only you can do in your business. Maybe you can only do them because you’re the pharmacist, maybe you can only do it because you’re the business owner. Maybe you’re the only one that can do it because you have to make all the final investor decisions. Like there’s things that only you can do. So everything else that you’re doing that somebody else could be doing. You’re not leveraging your time to the best that it can be. So you want to push work downstream and have make sure that you are doing the stuff that you can do. Make sure your pharmacists are doing the stuff only pharmacists can do. Make sure technicians are doing work that only technicians can do. So in my pharmacies, I tend to over staff if you will over stack
cashiers or clerks. And that is because we push tasks down. So my cashiers are amazing employees and they do tons of things. If they’re legally allowed to do it. We let them do all of those things. You know, and then that way only the tech work goes to the tech only the pharmacists work goes to the pharmacist and so on and so forth. So leveraging your time and understanding how to leverage your employees time really is a key to success, especially in pharmacy when margins are so tight. Um, another thing is saying no can be a powerful tool. When you I learned this lesson. Actually the book boundaries is really I think, where I learned this lesson from is when you say no to something one thing that means you’re allowing yourself to say yes to other things. And when you say yes to something, that means you are automatically saying no to other things because we don’t have unlimited time. We don’t have unlimited capacity or energy. Or desire or will or all those kinds of things. And so it is a seesaw. And so when I because I have trouble saying no, I’m an enabler, my name is Lisa FAAST. And I have trouble saying no. And when I really understood that was every single time I was saying yes, I actually was saying no to something else. And it really forced me to start prioritizing what I was going to say yes to so you only have so much space for yes. And sometimes the best thing you can do for your pharmacy is to say no, because then that’s allowing you to say yes to something else. That’s even more important. So saying no is a is a powerful word. And my delegation recommendation is if somebody can do it 80% As good as you that is perfect for them. So never expect somebody to be perfect. Never expect them to even be as 80% as good as you. We are we’ve got to be okay that we’re not creating clones of ourselves. Nobody’s gonna care about your pharmacy as much as you are. Nobody’s going to know much about your visions as you are but if they can take over tasks from you and be 60 70% as good as you that is a thumbs up because I guarantee you you’re not paying them 60 70% of what your hourly rate should be. Not to say what you actually pay yourself. That’s a whole other conversation because you didn’t pay yourself. But um, we’re you got to understand the expectations for delegation too many times pharmacy owners delegate something, and then they didn’t quite do it just right now we’re not talking about like errors and clinical messed up so we’re just talking about efficiency or you know exactly how they do things. And they’re like, oh, I’ll just take it back. No, no, no, our expectations have got to be reset whenever you’re delegating, because nobody’s as good as you. That’s just that’s just the way the world works. All right. One of my time blocks every month. And on the calendar an hour somewhere on my calendar month is unsubscribe time. And that’s where I go through my email because I just automatically delete a bunch of emails. I could do a whole other session on just how I manage my inbox. And so then I do what I do is I go in and I open my trash my trash folder in my email. And if I never want to hear from those people again, I don’t get value, they waste my time, whatever. I’m just not interested anymore. I just go through and I spend time unsubscribing from emails and doing this one hour a month actually nowadays I rarely even fill up the whole hour but I’m doing it for at least an hour for several months, I started to clean up my inbox so much that it was very it’s much easier to reach Inbox Zero. I’m getting the emails that I’m only truly really interested in. And I’m not wasting time on useless information. You know, you buy a shirt from a random company and all of a sudden you get an email from them every day asking to buy another shirt. You know, those ones I unsubscribed and my my life is not any worse for it. So, alright, those are my random tips. All right, a little self evaluation time. I’m gonna give you just a couple of minutes because you’re gonna want to do this longer, you know by yourself, but very quickly think of create a little task list for yourself, maybe 10 The first 10 things that come to mind and you’re going to put them into these four different boxes and these four different boxes are used by lots of people, myself, and my team was just at a mastermind the last couple of couple of days in San Diego, and this exact little grid is what Ryan, the host of that mastermind created. So your top left hand corner box is you’d like and you do well. The top right hand kind like a box is you don’t like but you do it well, bottom left hand as you like it, but you don’t do it well. And the bottom right hand is you don’t like and you don’t do it well, so I’ll give you just some real quick examples. I used to do the books for my pharmacy, my very first pharmacy. I used to come in on Sundays and do the books I’d go to church. I go to lunch, and then I’d go into the pharmacy on Sundays. Um, that landed in the bottom left for me. I loved it. I loved doing numbers, but guess what I was not a great bookkeeper or a CPA because I am not a bookkeeper or see a CPA especially the beginning of my first business. I could probably do it pretty good now but so I was not only doing time and spending time in the pharmacy on a Sunday, but it could be with family or friends or taking a bath or whatever. And doing the books but then I had to pay somebody to fix all the things that I did wrong. And so that was something that that landed in that like and don’t do well, for example. So anyways, I’m gonna give you just a couple of minutes right now and just to kind of get the thought process let me know if you have any questions. And then you’ll love to sit down and do this for like all the things that you do in your pharmacy. And you can even do this for your employees or some of your, like manager type employees as well. It’s it’s a useful exercise for them. So anyways, alright, I’ll give you two minutes just to kind of work out and get some ideas and let me know if you have any questions and then we’ll move on.
All right, if you have any questions or you’re not sure about something, let me know but I highly recommend you brain dump all the things that you do. Now, I don’t necessarily mean like the things you have to do if you’re the licensed pharmacist and you have to check prescriptions, even if you don’t like it. Like it’s one of those things you have to do like nobody else can do that. So not talking necessarily about those things, but what are all the other things you know, whether it’s a, you know, paying bills or you know, doing the right you know, the writing checks or balancing your checkbook or you know, those kind of things, maybe it’s the one on ones for your employees or whatever. But the point is of this is to one, figure out the things that you should be delegating so the things you don’t do well, are things you should delegate, because you’re already not doing them well even if you’d like them, like I did with my bookkeeping, financials and financial understanding and understanding the health of my business got so much better when I gave it to a bookkeeper and I fully handed it over to them then I actually got to use my high level skills of understanding those financials, I liked numbers, but then I got to do things like understanding the KPIs and that’s why I’m such a KPI nerd and I got into you know, higher performing and where I needed to optimize and what I needed to do and so taking actions on the financials is something that I liked, and I did well, but the actual bookkeeping part, it was best for me to delegate. So this can be a really helpful task to figure out like what you need to delegate out of your life. Now some things you may not be able to get rid of, like for example, you don’t like checking prescriptions. Hopefully you do it well. But you might want to keep that until you get another pharmacists then, you know, hey, my goal is to be able to hire another pharmacist that they’re checking prescriptions, and I get to work with our hormone patients or I get to sell supplements to patients then or I get to do clinical services like that. This really helps you to help focus on like maybe what seemed Your goal should be as well. Alright, helps you to understand what to focus on. Because again, if only you can do it, and you do it. Well. You know, those are things that you should be focusing on probably. What do you need to give up? What do you not do? Well, what do you not like doing? Well, those are great opportunities for delegating. You can do this for your employees as well get them to understand maybe you have two cashiers and maybe one of them loves inventory management and cleaning the shelves and the other one hates it. So well. Let’s let the one that love. It doesn’t more and maybe something else, you know, the other one takes over. So this can just help kind of make those little love kind of changing the dial for people’s positions and what they do to make sure it matches what they what they love what they like to do. Certainly if somebody’s bad at something, you don’t you know, sometimes again, you have to do it, but you either want to level them up so they’re not bad at it, or maybe hand that task off to somebody else. You definitely want to delegate that bottom row those those are the things that you would be looking for like if you’re managing your website and your you know, social media advertising and posting and you hate it and you’re not good at it. That’s probably one of the things that you should do. You should delegate so that would be an example. When you delegate, one of my earliest business lessons was how to not delegate I was a horrible delegator. Not only in the sense of handing off the project, like actually identifying something but when I didn’t identify something and I delegated it, I just assumed that person like it was clear what to do. Like they would do it like me, and I didn’t have to follow up and I didn’t have to like monitor like I know that sounds completely like kind of dumb saying it out loud. But it was just I didn’t realize that people weren’t me. Um, you know, we all just kind of think people think like, think like we think and so this delegation tracker is a way to, hey, I’ve delegated this task. Here’s who’s complaining it who’s her should be complaining it you know, like, let’s transfer it in like let’s, let’s do it. Now. There’s not necessarily always a monthly cost in there. Like when I hired a bookkeeper, yes, there was a monthly cost for my bookkeeper. But if you’re delegating something to your technician or something like that, like their pay is already in in your payroll. So you don’t you don’t necessarily have a monthly cost. But it really you want to delegate not abdicate. You know, delegation is not just, it’s off my plate. I never have to think about that again. It’s hey, I need to make sure that I properly show somebody what my expectations are. I let them know when due dates are I let them know like, You got to give them the framework so that they can succeed and taking over that task from you. So this little delegation tracker can come in handy when you start to actually, you know, get things off your plate and give them to other people. It can help keep tracking that. But it only takes me 10 minutes I hear this a lot and I’m sure you do too, or you think it and it only 10 minutes can be really really hurtful to your time productivity and time management. So if it’s just 10 minutes if you’re doing just one thing, you know, one thing a day is well, it’s just 10 minutes, 15 minutes a week, 3.6 hours a month, 43 hours a year, if you do it for three tasks if you just take on three tasks, because it’s going to take you 10 minutes, and it’s something that somebody else could have done. That adds up to two and a half hours a week. 3.23 weeks a year like it’s a lot of time that you could be doing something else that only you should be doing. And you can push those tasks down to somebody else. So who are you delegating to most of the time is going to be your employees technician, another pharmacist, a cashier, delivery driver, whatever those cases may be outside companies like when I hired a bookkeeper that was an outside company that I delegated my my bookkeeping to virtual assistants, I’ve mentioned virtual assistants, you can have virtual assistants through your social media. You know, check your inbox, check your email, you can actually have a virtual assistant for your email. You know, there’s lots of things to use virtual assistants for but that’s that’s kind of who you’re delegating to. How to delegate again, delegation is not abdication. It is not like yay, I hired a social media BA and now I never have to look at social media. Again, that is not what delegation is. So delegate first you got to clearly communicate priority. This is especially important for a lot of the pharmacy tasks that are delegated. Hey, why don’t you call Mrs. Smith about her prescription? Is that now is that today is that this week? Like what’s the priority like? Call Mrs. Smith about her prescription in the next 10 minutes please like that’s a completely different, better clear communication. So when you communicate to your employees about doing stuff, whether it’s returning expired inventory, cleaning the fridge, mopping the floor, whatever the case may be, it’s always good that you add that priority or that buy when all right so what are they doing? How do you want to do them and by when do you want them to do it by that’s really how you delegate. That’s how you set up that framework of communication for the person that you’re delegating to. So they can properly prioritize it within all the stuff that they’re doing. All right. Just like when the phone rings, the phone ringing is an urgent task, you prioritize answering the phone over say taking out the trash. And so you know that gets understood fairly quickly in a pharmacy but for all the other little things you’ve got to give them the what it is how to do it. And by when all right. So if you want them to clean the shelf, mop the floor and you know order the shred trash to be dumped. Like what is that priority? You know what comes first, and it may seem obvious to you but you’re the owner, you’re the manager, you’re the ones like you look at the world differently than the employees. So rather than just let’s play the guessing game, it’s best to just tell them and do that. The other thing is to start small. Don’t delegate your very first big, often audit to your technician that’s never gone through an audit before all right, that is a a recipe for failure not success. So start small start with little things build trust in not only trust in you and trust in them in that relationship, but also competence competence in them of taking something over competence in you that you can clearly communicate and come up with good results. So start small and build trust and confidence. Schedule regular check ins okay if it’s especially if it’s a task like a project that’s going to take place maybe over a couple of weeks or something, don’t just delegate and assume they’re just doing what they need to do without ever checking in. Okay, so schedule regular check ins, how are they doing? For example, I do this with my employee who schedules our flu clinics for my pharmacy. I’m not on site. I’m not there. She’ll send me you know, every other week we you know, we have some email exchanges about them what scheduled you know, the resources, how’s the schedule looking for the covering pharmacists, those kinds of things. I’m letting her know one, that it’s important enough that I’m paying attention to it, but to I’m making myself available so that if she has any questions or has any barriers, we have the time for us to go through that. So scheduled regular check ins, I give feedback, I help them get better. It’s not just hey, do it this way. It’s Hey, do it this way because and when they understand that underlying why it helps them get better so that they get more efficient. At doing things because again, your goal is to leverage your time to the max. And if you help them become more efficient, you get to get more things off your plate and still have them done. And that is the ultimate way to grow your business and to scale. Alright, last little bit here. We’re
going to talk about taking care of yourself. You get a drink water. I’m gonna go through this a little quick, um, cuz you can take a screenshot of this or whatnot. But one sleep make sure you get sleep, support your adrenals my favorite product is from synbiotic It’s called adrenal supertonic. I swear it makes me feel superhuman. Um, go to the damn doctor. Don’t put it off, get your bloodwork done, get the basics done. We as healthcare practitioners, like I’m fine, you know, the car still turned on today. We’re good like, go to the damn doctor, get your tests hydrate drink water, bio light, whatever floats your boat. Stay hydrated, all right, just move and get outside. So many times, especially during cold and flu season, we’re in that pharmacy behind the bench from you know eight in the morning till we close at 7pm and it’s like we never saw the light of day take five minutes, go outside the building, walk around the building twice and come back in like Do whatever you have to do to move and just get outside. Just a little bit doesn’t have to be long but just a little bit. It completely will help you reenter, reinvigorate yourself kind of help elevate your mood. Respect yourself. Alright, this can be from your boundaries. You know somebody texts you at 11 o’clock at night that doesn’t mean you have to respond respect yourself in the in the goals that you want to create you want to keep somebody’s trying to derail you somebody’s you know, getting you Off Plan, whether that’s a friend, family member and employee, whatever, like it’s okay. That you’re on a path and you want to stick to that path. And then lastly, invest in yourself. All right, you’re a part of this membership. You get amazing freakin resources. Like I gotta like say, I gotta pat myself and my team on the back. Like, we have a lot of stuff here for you invest in yourself, take time away. It’s okay to spend an hour you know, watching a course or on a mastermind like this. Because the goal is these are not expenses of time. These are investments of time you’re gonna get a return on that. You’re gonna be able to sell more stuff if you teach yourself So invest in yourself. Not only you know, leadership education as a parent, you know, all the different roles that you have as a person. It’s okay to invest in yourself and sometimes that means stepping away for a little bit. Turn it off once in a while. That’s the hardest one for me. I sometimes don’t know how to act when you know I shut off my work brain. I don’t know that I ever completely shut it off. But I’ve gotten a lot better recently and kind of turning off the work brain and just taking a step back and letting myself recharge just a little bit. It really does go a long way. So here’s my full list of like the stuff that I take alright, and you can just like take a screenshot of this, but here’s all my supplements on the left. So all the different things that I take, and then kind of the stuff that I do so massages, facials. I don’t necessarily get them monthly. I try getting outside time with the kids hiring. I hire out for household chores. Alright people I got a weekly cleaner we got somebody who does our lawn like because that allows me to do what only I can do that ultimately makes far more money for our family then you know myself washing, washing the dishes. And then of course time with you know, husbands and kids and all those kinds of things. I enjoy reading and listening so I listen to podcasts. I enjoy reading. Those are my little bits of of, you know when I get to recuperate, but what is your list? Like? Write things down? Like what joy sometimes we forget as adults, like, what do we enjoy? We kind of lose ourselves, we lose our identity and our pharmacies we lose our identity and our parenting and so I think it’s important to you know, go back and like figure out like, what plan do I want to follow? Not that anybody follows any plan? 100% I certainly don’t even follow my own plan. 100% But I’m at it, and you know, you know, probably get a good 80% At least and so certainly feel a lot better when I’m more on plan than offline, which again, helps to get realization that I want to be on plan more because it helps So alright, I know we’re getting close to the top of the hour. And so if you have any questions, feel free to pop them in here. Or if you think of something later, you can always contact me or posted in the chat. And that is it. So I will stop sharing all right, I don’t see any questions pop up there. So um, hope this was helpful for you. Doesn’t matter. You know, really what time of year I think kind of going through and figuring out what works for you. Oh, question did come in. Where do I get synbiotic directly from semiotica so it’s a company online I probably synbiotic att.com But I just purchased directly from from synbiotic Um and always good to kind of like, refresh your time management skills because we all get a little lazy, you know, you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna do this and do this and then you kind of, you know, slide away from it. So it’s always good to kind of snap back and get refocused. And I think going into Fall season for pharmacy owners is a is a perfect time to do that as well. So I will let you go and reach out if you have any questions or post them in the community chat. We are here to help you and thrive in any way possible. So never hesitate to ask. We’re here to serve you and hopefully watch your pharmacy become uber successful because that is our goal is I hope it’s your goal to so All right, everybody. Adios and bye bye