You if want to give yourself every advantage and edge that you possibly can in order to be as productive as you possibly can, I've found that environment is a very, very big part from a psychological standpoint.

Let’s assume you need to make a sale presentation to a potential customer. Tell me what kind of picture this paints in your head.

You decide to take this prospect to a restaurant - somewhere with the right atmosphere. And to deliver the pitch, do you suddenly decide to talk to them instead of inside the bathroom?

Or you both decide to go through the grocery store, kids screaming and everything.

Or tell 'em all, “Hey, jog along with me as we run through the airport and I'll deliver my sales pitch to you running backwards as best I can because I gotta catch a flight in eight minutes.”

But that's what people do now with the telephone part of their business.

You know, what I did early and still do today is schedule my calls and choose to be in an environment that worked for that call, if it was at all possible to do so.

And so preferably I'm gonna be in my office in the place where I do phone calls, which is different than the place in my office where I write or where I do bookkeeping.

And that person's file is gonna be in front of me. Maybe I made some notes on a 4x6 card and I've got a glass of water.

I'm ready to go.

But today, we have somebody making that important call or taking that important call as an interruption, and they're taking it on their cell phone while they're in the bathroom.

How effective can they possibly be?

They're in the wrong environment and in the wrong place to do that particular job.

I mean, I've been in the supermarket and seen the guy by himself with two toddlers in the cart with him and he's on the cell phone and it's pretty quickly apparent he's not talking to his wife. He has not called home to find out what kind of ketchup to get (and that goes on a lot, by the way), but he's on the phone having a business conversation while pushing a shopping cart, getting mustard and dealing with two toddlers.

Now, how, how good can this possibly be?

Do yourself a favor: Put yourself in the right physical and psychological environment for each important thing that you do.

You can craft this. Choose a physical space and put all of the stuff that you need close by in a work environment that facilitates efficiency.

For example, first thing in the morning, if I'm writing in a two hour span, I probably get up and leave three times to go dump half a cup of cold coffee and make another cup of hot coffee.

So one of the best gifts I got was a candle warmer that keeps the original cup warm. It's got a treasured place now in the cockpit of my work environment where I write.

Create your spaces, make your customers work with you on your terms and in the spots where you can dedicate your attention the best to the work in front of you, not as an interruption to your life (or to their business).

You if want to give yourself every advantage and edge that you possibly can in order to be as productive as you possibly can, I've found that environment is a very, very big part from a psychological standpoint.

I had lunch with two of the Disney Imagineers, and one of these imagineers was a guy who built a very large company and sold it, roughly my age, so this is not some kid. He said that when they're going to go into a meeting and work on an attraction, they take a half an hour and go out and they ride a few rides first.

They're giving the subconscious an opportunity to get in gear with the work at hand. And they're gonna do that in a different place.

Then they're going to get to work.

So build ‘Psychological Triggers’ into your space, the objects and the photographs and the paintings, the stuff that you see immediately around you in your particular work environment, to help you be present.

But please, no more calls at the urinal.

If you’re already a NO B.S Letter subscriber, then my Renegade Time Management training is available to you right now for FREE inside your member portal. Use it to start crafting your perfect processes, triggers and spaces.

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