Delivered a 12" x 36" banner to an eye doctor this afternoon. Didn't charge but $25 as a FITD. They loved it as they wanted it for a "kids corner". Was asked to quote print for their Google review cards they hand out and pocket folders they give with care instructions in them. This could open the door for GBP management as well as other digital possibilities and give reoccurring income with print as well.

You are not multitasking. You are task switching, and your brain charges you a fee every single time. Here is what gets me. Agency owners wear multitasking like a badge of honor. "I was on a client call, writing a proposal, and clearing Slack all at once." Cool. You did three things badly and called it a productive morning. 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗲 Outside of automatic stuff like walking and chewing gum, you cannot run two thinking tasks at the same time. You flip between them. Every flip has a setup cost, like a machine shop stopping the line to swap tooling between runs. Researchers at the University of Michigan measured this back in 2001 and named it switch cost. The APA's summary of that work puts the damage at up to 40% of your productive time lost just to the flipping. Not the work. The flipping. And the more complex the task, the bigger the hit. Which is unfortunate, because complex is the only kind of work that pays us well. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁: 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗲 Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington found something worse. When you jump from Task A to Task B, a chunk of your attention stays parked on Task A. She called it attention residue. So you are on the client call, but part of your head is still back in that proposal. The call gets a watered-down version of you. Then the proposal gets a watered-down version of you. Most people argue about multitasking like it is a speed problem. It is a quality problem. That should scare us more, because quality is the actual product in this business. Clients are not buying our hours. They are buying judgment, strategy, and copy that converts. Diluted judgment is a refund request with a delay on it. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟮𝟯 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝘅 Gloria Mark's team at UC Irvine followed knowledge workers around real offices with real interruptions. After getting pulled off a task, it took roughly 23 minutes to fully get back to it. Run that math on a normal agency day. Six interruptions before lunch, and your entire morning went to re-entry instead of output. You were busy. You just were not working.

𝗡𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗳𝗳 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲. You learn it from the client who ghosted you after month two. The invoice that never got paid. The "quick little website project" you scoped in five minutes and then paid for over five months. Those lessons stick because they cost something. Money, time, sleep, or all three at once. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗜'𝗺 𝗮𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 Half the people in this room are about to walk face-first into a wall that the other half already hit. Reading about a mistake isn't the same as living it, but it is a whole lot cheaper. We have saying: "You educated or you get educated..." Your story might save someone here a few thousand dollars and a very bad quarter. That's a solid trade for a five-minute comment. 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘀𝗶𝘅 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 (𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁) A friend referred a guy to me. We got on the phone, he seemed sharp, and I did what a lot of you do. I ran him a full PPC audit for free as a courtesy. Found the leaks, showed him exactly where his money was going, sent it over. Ghosted. Six months later he calls. "Hey, can you look at my PPC again?" Same favor, same friend, so I did a second audit. Lighter, but still real work. When I got into the backend, there they were. My recommendations from audit one, implemented. He took the roadmap and hired someone else to implement. I sent the second audit anyway, with a polite note pointing out the changes. Ghosted again. Four months after that, he calls with a problem and asks me to take a look. So I asked him a question: "Do you work for free?" "No. Of course not. Why?" "Because I've now done two full PPC teardowns for you and been paid for zero of them. I'm happy to help. On retainer." He said no thanks and hung up. The next day I get an angry message from the friend who referred him. I'm the jerk. I wouldn't do "one small thing." He's firing her because of me. Once I walked her through the actual timeline (2 unpaid audits roughly 6 hours of free work and him hiring someone else). She understood, sort of calmed down.

Stop spending three weeks on a decision you could undo in an afternoon Last spring I watched an agency owner take 19 days to decide whether to move from Canva to Figma. Nineteen days. Threads in three Facebook groups. A spreadsheet. A trial account he never opened. For a tool that cost him about fifteen bucks a month and had a cancel button. That same guy signed a 12 month co-working lease in roughly 40 minutes because the space had good light and free cold brew. Read that again, because it is the whole problem in one story. We agonize over the cheap stuff we can undo. Then we sprint through the expensive stuff we cannot. Today I want to hand you the sorting tool that fixes this. It takes about 90 seconds to run, it works on almost every call you will make this year, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗴𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 Your brain prices decisions by discomfort, and discomfort has almost nothing to do with cost. A decision feels big when it is unfamiliar, public, or emotional. It does not feel big based on what it actually costs you if you get it wrong. So the new software choice feels heavy because you have never used the software. And the handshake deal with your buddy's cousin feels light because you like the guy. Discomfort and cost are two different things. Your gut only reads one of them. There is real research behind this. Paul Nutt at Ohio State studied hundreds of real organizational decisions and found that roughly half of them failed. One of the biggest drivers was not stupidity or bad luck. It was leaders who narrowed the search too early, locked onto one option, and then pushed it through (Nutt, Academy of Management Executive, 1999). Half. Coin flip odds. From people with actual budgets and actual teams. So the fix is not "think harder." Thinking harder on the wrong decision is how you lose 19 days to a Canva subscription. The fix is sorting first. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: 𝗢𝗻𝗲-𝗪𝗮𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝘄𝗼-𝗪𝗮𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗼𝗿𝘀 Jeff Bezos laid this out in his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders and came back to it in 2016. He split every decision into two buckets.

I have new pet peeve. I'm in hundreds of groups skool, facebook, linkedin. And the people that join the group, claim they read them and then immediately violate them just get my goat. Spamming DM's, posting innocuous comments to try and mine the group for business or just total post inappropriate is mind blowing. I'm not trying to be a tyRANT but if people are violating our groups rules. I need to know who the bad actors are so I can remove them.