Episode 20 – Juan Felipe Campos

Juan Felipe Campos (@juannikin) is the host of the Productivity Masterminds Podcast. He serves as VP of Tech and Partner at Manos Accelerator via Google Launchpad. He has graduated his company NomadApp from the largest accelerator in the world, Plug and Play, and the Go Silicon Valley program. Juan helps run the largest digital marketing community in Silicon Valley with over 20,000 members. Juan’s companies have been featured in major publications including Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine, and Forbes.

Highlights

• You’re not just managing your time, your managing other aspects of yourself as well: your attention, your intentionality, your energy, and finally your time. Managing time is just the beginning – managing all of the 4 aspects is super powerful.
• You shouldn’t manage your time until you’ve asked yourself where you’re going. Intention without attention is powerless and attention without intention is aimless. Start with a big picture in your mind and then take the baby steps to get there.
• You are mortal and your time is limited. If you don’t protect your time, other people are happy to waste it for you. Every activity comes at the cost of another one that you could have done instead.
• Your time is valuable. Your time is depleting. It matters more than money because you can’t get it back. You can only enjoy it, learn from it, and do better.

Giveaway

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Show notes

[00:49] Hello and welcome to another episode of Productivity Masterminds. Today we have a very special guest. It’s me. I can tell you that running this podcast has been a huge learning experience for me and I just love to share with you what have been the biggest highlights and lessons learned on this season and what those things have been for me. My background is in tech entrepreneurship. I’m based in Silicon Valley and work with VC funded startups and I meet a lot of smart people every day who are pushing themselves to the max on productivity and time management, but if you want to manage your time like some of the top performers we’ve had on the podcast, like Yotam Cohen, who raised 30 million for his company or Jessica Chen, who is an Emmy award-winning content producer, or even like a top-notch productivity expert like David Allen, who is the author of the international bestseller “Getting Things Done” or Stever Robbins who hosts the get-it-done podcast.

[01:48] If you want to manage your time like these guys, you need to get on this totally new level of consciousness about the topic and the number one lesson for me has been: you’re quite simply just not managing just your time, you’re managing other aspects of yourself as well. You’re managing your attention, your intentionality, your energy, and your time. So let’s break it down. So again, you’re not just managing your time. You have to manage your attention, intention, energy, and time. On episode one, Mike talked about productivity and he says that

Productivity is the interplay between intention and attention.

So if you have an intention and attention, you’re productive. He says, if you have an intention, so a reason for doing things, okay, you have an intention, a reason for doing what you’re doing, but you don’t have attention than it’s powerless, right? Because you have all of the intentions, but you’re not taking action. So it’s powerless. It’s like a plan without action. But he says actually, that a lot of people have attention. They’re paying attention day in and day out, hustling and bustling, but they have no intention, no bigger picture, no plan. So it’s aimless. Uh, Sam Huber, on episode 14, he says that he starts with the big picture in mind, so he questions direction and purpose, and then finds the smaller baby steps to get there. That way he can be confident every day that he’s getting one step closer to the end goal because he has an end goal. He has an intention behind his actions. So that’s about attention and intention. But what about the other two? Right? What about energy? And of course time. Well, Manuel Bruschi, the Timeular CEO talks about energy management on episode 11 and how important it is to have the energy you need at the time you need to take care of the scary things and he has a good framework for it, by the way, on episode 11.

Finally about time management on episode five, Matt Kohn talks about tracking your time so you can see what tasks are taking up, what time, and you can be smart about creating processes so you can automate, delegate, or eliminate tasks, and he’s found that you can create 5, 10, 15, or even 20 hours extra per week if you just simplify and systemize non-mission-critical tasks so you can focus on getting in flow and operating in your genius zone. Okay, so those are the four different ones, right? We have attention, intention, energy, and time.

My conclusion again is that time management by itself is for beginners. The best top professionals are managing all four aspects: attention, intention, energy and time. These elements when combined are super powerful.

[04:38] My second big lesson has been that you shouldn’t manage your time until you take a first quick step and I’m about to tell you what that step is. Basically. Let me explain. If you just manage your time, two things are going to happen. Okay, so you get a tool or a product that manages your time because you were overwhelmed and you just start managing how you’re spending your time. Right? Day in and day out, you’re going to get to results. Number one is you’ll get a retrospective receipt of how you spent it so you look back at the end of the week, thanks to the tool that you’re using and you’ll realize that you didn’t do a good enough job at sticking to your ideal myself. So then you’ll try again the following week and the following week and time will go on and you’re not really fixing things quickly enough because you’re always looking backward at the receipt of how you did spend your time.

[05:26] So it always feels like you’re busy and you’re not actually making the impactful changes quickly enough. So if you just manage your time without managing the other things, you’re just pretty much always going to be busy and then that’s number one. And then number two, as you’ll be moving really quickly in the wrong direction, and this is, this has been the big lesson for me, is you shouldn’t manage your time until you fix this aspect. You may be moving really quickly in the wrong direction. So Stever said on episode two, he talked about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and he says,

Efficiency means using little energy and resources to accomplish a task

So if you’re doing it quickly, it means you’re efficient, or if you’re using very little energy, if you’re using very little resources, you’re being very, very efficient,

…but effectiveness, on the other hand, means you’re doing the right thing.

[06:19] And think about that for a second, like what’s better? Doing the right thing slowly or doing the wrong thing very, very quickly. And that’s the point here. If you just manage your time, you run the risk of not zooming out far enough to understand whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. You may be moving quickly and it may trick you into thinking there’s momentum, but if you stop and think and zoom out, you can be both a strategist and an executor of your own life. Schedule your priorities in advance and then start managing your time to hold yourself accountable to speedy progress made in the right direction. I always say that

You can’t find the shortcuts if you don’t know where you’re going.

So by understanding your direction, you can understand what all these amazing guests understand, which is that time management should work in service of life goal management. I’ll say it again, time management should work in service of life goal management.

The third and last big lesson learned for me by recording season one of the Productivity Masterminds podcast is my favorite. It’s that you are mortal and your time is limited.

If you don’t protect your time, other people are happy to waste it for you.

Nicolas Cole talked in episode seven about opportunity costs and seeing every decision in life as an opportunity cost of doing something else. So an hour of watching Netflix – okay, that’s an hour that you’re not working on your goals. Time is limited. Every activity comes at the cost of another one that you could have done instead. Omar Khateeb explained in episode six, how to say no to time wasters by knowing what it is that you want out of life so you can more confidently defend if things are a yes or a no immediately by becoming binary.

[08:05] Yuval Rechter on episode four, he defines just three things to get done each day and goes all in on those. Everything else is a distraction or everything else gets done only after those three things have been done. John Trabelsi finds just one VIP task every day that will get done no matter what. So in the end, here’s the punchline.

Your time is valuable. Your time is depleting. It matters more than money because you can’t get it back. You can only enjoy it, learn from it, and do better.

So there you have it. Productivity masterminds directly from your host who has enjoyed about a dozen amazing conversations. My highlights, again, our number one, you’re not managing your time, you’re managing other aspects of yourself as well: your attention, your intentionality, your energy, and finally your time. Number two is you shouldn’t manage your time until you’ve asked yourself where you’re going. And number three is that you are mortal and your time is limited.

So here’s to much more productivity and fulfillment in your lives. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I just ask for one thing and that is that you leave a five-star rating and review on your favorite podcast APP. You can find me on Twitter @juannikin which will be linked in the show notes, all the best Juan Campos and the Timeular team.