308: Why You Need More Editing in Your Life
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Summary
What does it mean to live a well edited life? Why is it so important in your business? Editing comes in three main categories; time, ideas, and projects. As business owners, we’re constantly creating and adding things to our plate. We discuss how to step back and begin making edits to the things we make, the ideas we have, and our calendars, so we have more of what we actually want. Natasha O’Banion answers the question, “How do I be more productive?”
Main topics:
Why we need to edit
What do we edit?
Focusing your attention
Taking the time you need
Main takeaway: A well edited life is a life lived to its fullest in our purpose and meaning.
Links
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
editing, clients, business, edit, refining, concepts, ideas, editing process, process, pet, writing, calendar, communicate, pet sitters, documents, thinking, life, important, implement, thoughts
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin and this is Pet Sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi, there you are listening to Episode 308. Hello, and thank you to pet sitters associates and our awesome sponsors our Patreon members, like Janney, Janie, Ashley, Jack, Laura, Doug, Becky Adriana, and Beth and others, thank you very much for your financial support every month, it helps us to keep the show going. Yep.
Collin 00:49
And if you want to be part of that, and be part of that community, you can go to pets or confessionals.com/support.
Meghan 00:55
Today we are talking about how to get better at self editing. So what does that mean?
Collin 01:02
Well, it means a lot of stuff. But really, Self Editing means just taking the our first thoughts and refining them and making them better. Today, we're going to take an approach to self editing across three major factors and three big categories in our lives. We're going to talk about self editing in our ideas and concepts, how to refine the ideas that you have in your head. Secondly, we're going to talk about editing the documents, the things that we make, whether that social media, blog posts, emails, or anything else that we write. And then thirdly, we're going to talk about editing for our time, and how to reduce the number of obligations and commitments. So we can start decluttering our life as business owners, so that we can have much more balanced that we're all seeking after. Because as business owners, we are constantly making things. So the editing process could be you have an idea to offer adventurer hikes. That idea is very broad and general and needs a lot of details filled in. So how do we approach making that idea more defined, making that idea better, more workable.
Meghan 02:03
So basically, you're going from concept to design,
Collin 02:07
it's more about never accepting the first idea that comes into your brain. It's about thinking, oh, I want to offer adventurer hikes, and then asking the appropriate follow up questions to refine that idea. So it's not the process of taking it from idea to marketing and booking your first adventure hike. Editing is taking the idea and concept of an adventure hike in your mind. And then thinking through all of the aspects of what that could be, so that you really define it a lot more for you in particular,
Meghan 02:37
and say, for instance, you're going to implement lockboxes. So you may not want to necessarily hit the ground running right away, you want to make sure that that idea is actually going to work and try to flush out all of the potentially negative things that could come about because of that,
Collin 02:52
yes, it's defining exactly what you mean, when you say, implement lockboxes? What does implement mean to you? Are you going to have them your clients, buy them rent them? Are you going to deliver them at the meet and greet? Are you going to supply them at the first visit all of those little steps that go into the process that go into the SOPs, the the eventual boots on the ground activities need to be thought through before we implement that idea. So this process of editing is taking your ideas, your concepts, your documents, your procedures, and looking through them and making sure that they make sense and have a logical order and flow to them.
Meghan 03:31
And then once you have the text written down, so if you use your notes app on your phone, or pen and paper like Collin does, yep. Is then about how do you review it and make sure that it's good, and it says what you want, it doesn't have any misspellings, you know, if you have if you're going to have staff look at this and read this, you want to make sure that it's grammatically correct. If you're going to be having your clients look at this kind of the same thing.
Collin 03:58
Exactly. Nobody takes the first draft of your contract and immediately starts shipping that out to your clients, you're going to have multiple people review that you need to have reviewed that and edited that document to make sure that it is as exact as you want it to be and says exactly what you want it to say. And very importantly here Self Editing is not self censorship. Self Editing is a process by which your thoughts and ideas are clearly communicated to be as effective as possible. Self censorship is a process by which you feel pressure to not say or speak up about something for fear of pushback or ridicule from others. Self censorship is not healthy, but Self Editing is and so we're talking about self editing as a business owner in pet care today, how we go about that process and what are some aspects that we need to think through while we work through that. And so
Meghan 04:51
this can mean blogs that you write SOPs that you have social media posts that you do.
Collin 04:57
Yeah, or it could literally just be idea dozen concepts that you want to think about. For your business. When people ask you, what do you want your business to look like in five years? Well, you may have an initial gut reaction to what that is. But then as you ask some additional questions and probe into that, that is an editing process of refining that and defining it more specifically for what you want.
Meghan 05:22
Okay, so there's the process of editing like tangible things like documents, or intangible things like ideas or concepts that we're going to implement in our business. The process of editing helps us in three major ways, whether we are editing documents, or ideas or our time, the first one that it helps us with is clear communication. So if this is clients, both current clients and potential clients that are contacting you, and then also in marketing, as well, and informing changes and updates, it's very important, you know, if you're going to be switching into lockboxes, it's very important that you clearly communicate to your clients how this is going to benefit them. And what they need to do. This is also important if you're going to be switching software or getting software for the very first time, having that outline of that process for them clearly defined step by step, so they know exactly what they're doing is going to be crucial.
Collin 06:15
Anything that you put out there or produced as a company, always look at it a second or a third time before you hit post before you hit send. That's the editing process. That's the review process. Most of us have been through this process, when we've gone through some sort of essay writing in school, or we've written reports or things like that, we're basically dredging up a lot of those same concepts right now and reapplying them to our business. Because we get really busy, we get our lives are very full. And there's a lot of things on our plates. And we may type something out really fast, and then hit sin without actually editing it back and reviewing it. I know, I do this all the time. That can
Meghan 06:53
happen a lot, when we're sending an update at the end of the visit, and we're trying to rush through it, maybe we have to get to our next appointment or we've gone over on time, or whatever the case may be, we just try to rush through it and get it done.
Collin 07:03
Yeah. So when we are self editing and refining what we're wanting to say that it affects how we communicate. And that actually gives the clear communication that like you mentioned, Meghan,
Meghan 07:13
that process really comes into play when you're going to need another person to do something. So if you're switching software, and you need the client to create an account, you're going to need to go through that process with them and clearly communicate because we all want to make this experience and the client experience magical. And we don't want any hiccups along the way. So you're going to need to clearly communicate that process to them, or whatever the case may be.
Collin 07:37
Again, you would never accept the first draft of the process of writing an onboarding process for your client and then sending that off to them without at least looking at it a second time, you're gonna look at it for misspellings, you're gonna look make sure that the connections from point to point from Step A to step b to step c all make a logical sense and can be interpreted correctly. So we're really going to impact again, it's self editing and having a well edited process is going to help our communication in business with our clients, with our staff, with our community with our assistants. If we have a VA or we have a tax accountant, everything that we send or produced needs to have a second or third pass on it. We talked a lot about setting good boundaries and communicating expectations and setting those for your clients for staff people who work with you and whatever capacity that starts with the clear communication and editing the through all of the cruft and distilling it down to exactly what you're trying to say. Because if you have too much in there, people get lost, they get confused. They stop reading, if it's just too much text, and they end up not actually following your rules and your policies. And I think a major reason is because we don't edit them enough.
Meghan 08:45
The second area where editing can really help us is by decluttering our life. And this is really in terms of the projects that you take on a you look at your schedule, and you go, what can I take on? What do I have the ability to take on? But more importantly, what do I need to remove from my life? What do I not need to be doing that is taking up too much of my time, and I just need to get rid of it. And that starts
Collin 09:09
by looking at your calendar and going is this what I want my days to look like? Great, we do have obligations that we have to meet, we have dogs we have to walk we have cats that need care, we have all of that we have Meet Greets, we have to go to what other stuff is involved in our days that maybe we can stop pulling back and really asking ourselves, is that what I need to be doing? And that that is an editing process of our time and of our calendar.
Meghan 09:35
And the third way that editing can help us is it gives us more focused ideas. If you've never taken a moment to review your ideas or the thoughts that come into your head for your business or even in your personal life as well. You'll never grow in how much you approach things.
Collin 09:50
Things like why do you have your policies in place? What is the why in your business? What's the mission of your business? We ask those questions a lot and we put them to you and we have to address them ourselves. And if we've never tried to coherently put those down and pen and paper or communicate them to somebody else, and they're just nebulously flying around, our ideas are unfocused. And we become unmoored from things that can help us anchor down during times of turmoil, or times of unrest or times of uncertainty. When we have ideas that are clearly focused clearly thought out, we can better communicate those when we do need to. And we can understand more how this is connected to our time. So all three of these are really, really connected. When our ideas are in focus, we're clearly communicating, and we manage our time better. And that's why this editing process is is so critical to us.
Meghan 10:48
Something that you definitely need to edit into your life is pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today at Pet sit llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional and using the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at petsfit llc.com. So it's important to know how we can actually do this how we can implement this. The first one we're going to talk about is documents and text. So what I like to do is when I'm editing an SOP or something that I'm about to send to a client or a social media post, I clear out all distractions when I edit something, I can't really focus on anything else. So I turn off the TV. A lot of times I like to multitask. But this is an area where I am. If I'm editing something I cannot multitask because I need 100% focus on this. So I turn off the TV, any podcast I'm listening, listening to I put my phone on Do Not Disturb, which is super important because I'm on my phone all the time making these edits and these changes. And so if my phone keeps dinging off, it is very annoying and very distracting. So I focus only on the editing, and refining that one thing. So the first pass, I'll go through, I'll edit for grammar and for spelling and punctuation, those little things that can get tripped up. If you're reading it too fast, I really focus on those. And then the second pass that I go through, is I edit for content. And I found that oftentimes I can't do both at the same time, I can't edit for grammar and spelling and content at the same time, because I just really get my mind gets bogged down with them. And I can't cohesively make the to mesh
Collin 12:47
well. And that's a problem that a lot of people suffer from, you have to they try and do too much at once in the editing process and the review process. So I love how you break it down and go, Okay, I'm gonna read it a couple times. The first one is for the grammars. Second one is for the broader concepts and the connectivity of things, and maybe even do a third pass to make sure, then it's cohesive, and it's all together. Because when you try and stuff too much in it, you're at your brain can't handle editing for those two different things, because it takes two different modes of thinking, to edit one's broad concepts, one's very particular and exact spelling is different than big concept. And if you're trying to do multitasking, those, you will miss things, and they'll end up kind of more of a jumbled mess at the end. So a big tip here, when you're editing your documents, your text, your updates, your processes, your emails, multiple passes, reviewing for different things well, and
Meghan 13:39
it does take more time. But it pays off in the end because I you know, autocorrect fails a lot of times, and so on. And so you are able to really, really focus and get it done. When it comes to dealing with ideas or concepts or thoughts that you have for your business center back on what your purpose is, why are you trying to do this thing in the first place? Does it line up with your mission statement? Is it something you just personally want to do? Think through the end goal?
Collin 14:11
Why are you thinking about this in the first place? Is this something that you're going to have to eventually implement in your business or share with others? Is this something that you're going to have to make right or market to people because you're thinking about what a new service could look like? Or maybe you're just trying to mull over something to help you in your decision making process. So an example of this may be you are trying to understand what drives client buying decisions for you and your business. You have to think through a lot of theories. And then we have to refine those. So when you try and understand getting the mindset of your client get in the mindset of your ideal client. Why would they choose you over somebody? Those are ideas, those are concepts that we have to refine and the process of this refining is actually a lot of times the end goal is to testing that. So now I have to think through okay, well, how would I test the theory that I have, that my clients buy me because they think I give them peace of mind, I'm going to market differently a couple times, maybe I'm going to offer different specials, I'm going to put my ads in different places. That's an end goal to my thoughts and my processes here. And I have to refine that by repeating it's basically like a big experiment. This is what science is all about is developing concepts, developing theories, and then testing them through either refining them through real world experimentation with Mac marketing, or advertising, or diving back into more research, doing more reading, thinking about it a little bit more writing out your thoughts, and putting them together in a process to help clarify everything that you have out there and trying to put it all together in one big concept and idea, what you're doing right now is you're developing a philosophy, you're developing a worldview, for your business for how you're interpreting what's going on, to help you make better predictions.
Meghan 16:00
So for example, when gas prices go up, then my clients become more price sensitive, and bookings tend to go down. This is also the case when you raise your prices. So gas prices go up, I have to raise my prices, my clients are already more price sensitive and bookings go down. Write out your thoughts on that, talk through them, do some more research, help clarify what you've put together.
Collin 16:25
A lot of times the thoughts ideas and concepts that we have in our business, start with a question, why did my business go down this month? Let's back that up. Let's refine that question and work through this a little bit and go oh, gas prices went up. Last month, my clients may be more price sensitive. So I can test that by asking them some questions sending out a questionnaire, then prices go up even more than next month, my bookings continued to go down theory looks pretty solid. Now we have a way of interpreting real world data and how that impacts our business. All through the theories that we develop as we see and respond to data and inputs that happen in our business.
Meghan 17:06
Or maybe you want to know why you are all of a sudden getting a specific breed of dog, maybe your logo speaks to that certain clientele or your branding or marketing does as well, or the social media posts. People see those and they think, Oh, you love doodles, you must want to take care of my doodles.
Collin 17:24
So you know, okay, when I put out this kind of information, I get this kind of response. Again, this is developing your thoughts and ideas around your business and how it functions.
Meghan 17:34
Now, as far as editing our time, we need to think about what commitments we have. So on your personal calendar or on your business calendar, are you doing things that align with the balance that you want? Do you have a balance? Is there even such a thing as business and life balance? What are you saying no to? What are you saying yes to? Because oftentimes, when you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else, and vice versa? So is it an equal exchange? Are you happy with? What could you be using that time for? And then be realistic with that?
Collin 18:09
So right now, pull up your calendar and look over the next several days? Is there something on there that you are dreading doing, maybe you committed to something you said yes to an appointment, you said yes to going out with a friend or somebody who you really would rather not do that. Or maybe you've booked a call with the salesperson to walk you through a new software pitch that you're not all that excited about? Say no to those and edit those out of your calendar to get that time back. So you can go to more meet and greets, or you can go on more walks. So you can read more of the books that you actually want to. Because when we edit our time, we're giving our time back to ourselves and releasing ourselves from obligations that we don't want to have on there anyway. So whether this is in your business, maybe you maybe you just really don't like meet and greets. Well, now it's time to come up with a way to do those virtually. So what can you have prepared ahead of time so that you can limit the amount of time that you're doing those? Or can you have somebody else do those? Or maybe it's taxes, or whatever that is? What can we edit out by heading off reducing, reclaiming that time in our lives, so that we can have more of it to do things that we actually want to be doing
Meghan 19:21
this whole editing process, whether it's your time, or the thoughts and ideas that you have or specific documents that you are editing for spelling and grammar is really all about taking back the things that you want to be doing and then kind of shuffling off the things that you don't want to be doing. Leave yourself time and space to think about these things and think through them.
Collin 19:44
Yeah, that's really key in all of these for all these aspects. Whether you're editing a document, whether you're working through the editing process of your time, your thoughts, your philosophies that you have about the world in your business, or whether you're editing your time, give yourself time to process that to think through through the implications of that, Meghan mentioned, when you edit documents, it takes a long time. And you need that time to do that. I mentioned with Doug last week where when I was being taught during my master's program, when I was writing, the best thing that I could do was to leave time in my writing process. So I could go back and look at it, that time is going to give you fresh eyes to look at things in a new way, and give you time to think about what you really want. Because that's the second key aspect, when we are going through the editing process, understand what you're editing towards the end goal, the end goal, the purpose of editing is not to strip away all the words to have a blank page, what was the point of writing in the first place, the point of editing your thoughts or ideas is not to be left thoughtless. That's no point at all, or this point to be editing your time is not to have a completely blank calendar with nothing on there that's important to you. So what is important to you? What do you want that document to actually say? What's the purpose of that social media post? What's the purpose of these thoughts? What will these concepts and ideas and thoughts and philosophies about your business help you do to help you understand how it functions? Why do you want to have a well edited calendar so that we know that when things are on there, they're important to us? When they say how do you know what's important to somebody, well look at their calendar, look at their bank account, that will tell you where they're spending your money, and where you're spending your time is what's important to that person. So when you understand what's important to you, and give yourself the time and space, to focus and think through these things. That's really the fundamentals of a well edited life and a well edited business approach to putting information content and things out there in the world.
Meghan 21:47
Well, and it's also about giving yourself grace. Because say you have a concept for Dog Adventures, dog adventure hikes, and you think through the whole thing, and you ask yourself a lot of questions about how, how would I do this? What do I need to do? How would I How would I present this to clients and then write it out and you get to the end of it? And you're like, Well, this is not actually something that's going to be feasible or something that I don't actually want to do anymore.
Collin 22:11
Yeah, a reminder, the editing process never ends. Right, we are always refining over time. And that we always have that option to back out and say, You know what, the actual edit that I need to make right now is to not commit to adventure hikes, you get to that point where you've thought through all the insurance for the van, and you've looked at the pricing, and you've put in orders for gear, and you have that weightless coming along. And then you realize, you know, I actually don't want to spend my days out there doing them. At that point, you can still say no, and give yourself grace to back out of that and edit that decision that you thought was a good decision. Out. You always have that option when we're editing when we are refining and thinking through what we actually want. Because a well edited life is a well lived life, because it's a life lived full. And for purpose.
Meghan 22:59
We are always looking for ways to be more streamlined and productive in our businesses. So Natasha Banyon, business coach is going to answer the question, how do I be more productive.
23:09
So being productive is literally just maximizing the time that you will want for something to be completed? I find in my personality, when I give myself a five day work week, I'm not that productive. Because I'm like, I'll just do it tomorrow. I'll just do it tomorrow. This whole task, and I'm so like relaxed about it. I'm like, Oh, well, I thought I was gonna do all this stuff. But you know what, I didn't do it. I'll just do it tomorrow. Versus now I only give myself four hours. And I only do it two days a week. Like I'm starting to cut my time more and more like every day. Now I'm in my own KPI against myself of like, How can I cut this? How can I cut this more? So now I'm down to two days, only four hours, my husband's like, how are you going to get anything done in just four hours. I'm like mindset bruh mindset. So in four hours, I set the clock on my phone, and I start working on the tasks that I get done. It's amazing that I get so much done in four hours that I gave myself versus one hour here, one hour here, one hour here one hour here that I'm never going to do. For pet sitters and dog walkers. I always give the life hack of writing in on your schedule admin time as if it was a pet sit. So go in at 9am and putting this as my admin window for one hour or two hours. And then you only give admin windows on Mondays and Wednesdays and then you get more getting on Tuesday and Thursday like set what day of the week, you're gonna work on something specific. So you're not just like rolling down a to do list that's never gonna happen. And then you want to prioritize that list. So you got your brain dump list, but then what has to get done now or today. Give yourself less time to do the task. You'll be surprised how more effective you are. It's so weird and productivity, like don't give yourself eight hours yourself for. And then you're like, Okay, I can't have distractions. I can't have coffee. I can't listen to music because I got four hours to get this done. I'm getting it done. You really dial in?
Collin 25:18
You do you set the self time constraints on the self imposed time constraints on your day, and you do all of a sudden, okay, if I only have four hours, like you just says like, this means a lot of things. This means I can't have distractions. This means I can't be multitasking. This means I can't have everything else going on. So I've got to focus. And it's kind of like the self imposed running up against the deadline. Right? procrastinators are very productive, right before some things do well, so having those self imposed on yourself is a great way to kind of hack that system to now start going okay, this is the time that I have got to get it done. Because it's scheduled in here, like you said, schedule right my day, because then after this, we'll kind of go through this visit, okay, go do something else. And then it really does help you focus for sure.
26:00
And it's like where we're responsible for the productivity, when we don't have a manager saying this is the deadline needed. By this time, we have to set those deadlines. So the good thing about being your previous employee most of us haven't, is we just take those habits from our old workplace that we used to work at, and we put them into our business. I mean, that's really what makes us great. I use a lot of work habits from the automotive industry. I use a lot of work habits from some of the sales training that I've done. And I'm like, what worked for them what work there. Let me do that in my business, and then any new business that I ever start, I'm going to continue that habit.
Meghan 26:42
If you would like to join Natasha's monthly membership group, you could do so at automated ceo.com and use the Kobe SC 20 for 15% off. Thank you for taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to this today. We hope that it has been helpful. And we also want to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon members for supporting
Collin 27:01
the show. Thank you so much for all the support for listening and for sharing the show. It means so much to us and we hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye
