MBA2361 How to Work While Away on Business The Smart Way + Free Ride Friday

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, the place to get better at business with practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. Today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to our$100 MBA program. Our six-part course showing you how to become a better entrepreneur, 100 % guaranteed over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday.

0:44Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson, you will learn how to work while away on business. I'm not talking about going away on holiday. You shouldn't be working while you're on holiday or on vacation. You should be relaxing. But sometimes, if you're like me, you're going to travel for business, whether it's for conferences, for events, for masterminds. Maybe you're meeting a client. Maybe you're closing a partnership deal. The point is, you are out of your regular work environment and schedule.

1:13Things need to get done, but at the same time, you need to focus on why you are traveling in the first place. The event, the conference, the meeting, you're investing a lot of your time, money, and effort to do this, to travel. You want to make sure you hit it out of the park, that you really make sure it's a successful trip. How many of us go on these types of trips, but feel the burden of the work we have to do on a daily basis that kind of has to get done even while we're away? Well, I'm going to show you how to manage that in today's lesson. what has worked for me and what has not worked for me, so you can work smarter when you travel for business.

1:49Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start with a story. Back in 2019, Nicole and I were in Las Vegas. I was speaking at a conference called MicroConf, great conference, all about bootstrap entrepreneurship in the software space. And I would have really enjoyed that conference if it wasn't for the fact I had so much work to do while I was at the conference. I felt so overwhelmed. I also felt guilty because I wasn't meeting everybody I wanted to meet at the conference. I wasn't spending enough time with the attendees or with other people I wanted to get to know. I was exhausted because when the conference was over, I went back to my room.

2:26I was working. I was taking meetings. I was running meetings. And conferences and travel in general, as tiring as it is, I was just putting more and more fatigue on my plate. But kind of just stuck with it because I was like, what am I going to do? I got to get this stuff done. And this is a classic case of not working smarter, but just trying to grind through and work harder. When you're traveling for business, this is not the answer. OK, don't do what I did. I quickly changed my tune. This past Monday, I talked about a book called The 80-20 Rule by Richard Koch, essentially talking about the principle that 80 % of your results are directly correlated to 20 % of your efforts.

3:04And that really stuck with me after this event. Why the 80-20 rule? What does that have to do with, you know, working while traveling? Well, I realized that I was just trying to do everything I normally do when I'm at home, working away, while I was going to a conference, attending, speaking, getting ready for my speech, meeting people, networking. That's just insane. My cup was already full before I even got to the conference. So from that point on, I started to do something a little bit different. Before I traveled for business, I told my EA well in advance, I'm going to this conference, I'm going to this meeting, I'm traveling.

3:40do not put anything on my calendar, okay? What I realized is that I can probably cut out about 40 % of my work if I took no appointments, I had no meetings with my team, and everything was just asynchronous through Basecamp, our project management software, or through email. So that was just the beginning. I said, hey, I don't wanna have anything on my calendar, make sure I don't get blocked, block booked by calendar. Next, internally, I said, what is 20 % of the work that I can do that will allow the business to keep going, to thrive just for this period of time when I'm traveling, whether it's a week or 10 days or whatever it is.

4:15The easiest way to do this is you ask yourself, if I only have 60 minutes a day to work on the business, I'm talking about only 60 minutes. That means after the 60 minutes is up, you cannot look at your phone for emails or messages or anything like that. You're fully focused. You're fully present when it comes to whatever you're doing for that visit, that travel, whether it's a conference, a meeting, whatever it is, that really forces you to get creative and start thinking about what would I do in that 60 minutes? How would I spend it? I spend about 10 minutes on this, 20 minutes on that, five minutes on this, and maybe another 20 minutes in this.

4:50And that's pretty much it. It just forces you. The constraint really helps. And to have it in time blocks of just 60 minutes, it really helps. So just 60 minutes a day. And the reason why I see 60 minutes a day is because what I do is I wake up in the morning wherever I am. I go get some exercise at the hotel gym, get myself a coffee and a breakfast. And while I'm eating my breakfast and having my coffee, I have 60 minutes with my laptop to work on the business when I'm traveling. The clock starts right on my phone. I start it. When you are confronted with this constraint, you start to think, okay, what's the most important thing?

5:26You start making a list on a notebook. What are the priorities? Oh, I don't have to do this. I can do this when I get back. I can do this later. I don't have to do this at all. I can just completely forget about this. Then you start saying, well, maybe I can give this to somebody else. I could delegate this to somebody on my team. I could delegate this to a freelancer. It'd be faster for me to just dictate something with a voice message or with a video and give it to somebody else to do it than for me to do it. So you spend like five minutes game planning for the day and then you just go and take massive action.

5:53You start working really hard. And the great thing is, is you're super focused, right? You're shutting off all distractions, social media, your notifications on your phone because you can't spare a second, right? And you're just zoned in. If you're traveling with somebody like a significant other or even a business partner or whatever it might be, let them know. I can't be interrupted. This is why I like to do it in the morning, early, when everybody's kind of getting ready, when the day hasn't started yet. Even if you want to go to the business center in the hotel so that you're not distracted, go ahead and do that.

6:21And then in the hour, once I'm done with all my tasks, my time is up, I have to force myself and say, hey, that's all time I have. And actually five minutes before the time is up, I look at my to-dos. I look at what I have to do. If there's something pending that has to get done today, I have to delegate it to somebody. I got to tell somebody else, my EA, somebody on my team, take care of this for me. I can't do this. I don't have time for this right now, but I need you to do it today. And when it's up, the time that is, that's the signal that I got to stop working on my business. And whatever I didn't finish, I will do tomorrow, right?

6:53I'll have another hour in the morning tomorrow. But from that moment on, I'm fully present for why I am traveling. The meeting, the client, the whatever, right? I got to be 100 % present. Now, you might be saying, Omar, this sounds great. What are some of the challenges? Well, challenge number one is staying disciplined and making sure you get up and do that hour and you don't push it, you don't hit that snooze button and you miss that time slot to do your hour work and you're just rushing straight to the conference or whatever meeting you have. So, be disciplined. Second challenge, holding yourself accountable and sticking to the hour.

7:25third challenge not going back to work when you have some time afterwards you might be like hey i got some time at lunch oh i got some time after the meeting with my client i'm telling you do not dip back into your work why because again you want to be fully present for the reason why you're there hey if you're at a conference write down all the people that you met make sure you have their numbers make sure you've organized something where you can follow up with them later or meet up with them later. Go and have a coffee with somebody you met. If you met a client and the meeting didn't go so well, journal a little bit about what happened there.

8:00Recap. Make the most of the moment. The reason why you're there. Draft your email response or your reply or your follow-up email that you're going to send them or the offer that you're going to extend to them. Whatever it is. Work on that stuff. The reason why you're here in the first place. Why you're traveling. Go all in. I'm a big believer about going all in in what you do. So if you have committed to traveling for a certain reason. Go all in for that. Maximize your time and effort and focus and energy to make sure that you win at that task. You know why? Because when the trip is over and you're back in your office, you are going to be kicking yourself because you didn't maximize the time there.

8:38You can't take that time back. The people that are there at the conference, people that you're going to meet, the chances you have a chance to maybe grab a meal or a coffee or have another chat or maybe close a deal because of that. Much harder to do that when you are all back home and you're not face-to-face. Take advantage and go all in. The other thing is that if you have some extra time, recover. It's tiring to travel. It's tiring presenting to a customer or to a client or a partner. Take some downtime. Go to the gym. Go to the hotel jacuzzi or pool. Have an early night. Watch a movie. Whatever.

9:14The point is, is that recover, recharge so that the next day, sometimes you're traveling for several days and the conferences a few days or whatever it might be. You again can be fully present. You're not tired. You're not burning the candle from both ends. The problem that we have as entrepreneurs is that we fill in the time with more work when we should not be doing that. When we free ourselves up because we have a new discipline, we should use that time to recharge and not to just do the same thing again. Get tired again and be back to where we were before. The whole point of having this whole strategy so that we're not worn out and tired and exhausted and not making the most of every day.

9:50Lastly, when I travel for business, I like to do my away from my desk kind of autoresponder email. Every email and Gmail is very easy. You can just have an autoresponder message to say, hey, I'm away. I'm busy. I'm working on something. So when somebody emails them, they have an expectation. I just basically say, hey, I'm away from these dates. I'll be slow to reply. I'll get back to you a little bit later. These vacation mode autoresponders are really helpful because that way you don't have to worry about, you know, doing all email and admin while you're away. You can do that when you get back.

10:23I have a little line in my email list that if this is an urgent matter and you need attention immediately or this is a time-sensitive situation, please message or email my assistant. And I give my assistant's email. And then my assistant can handle it for me or she can let me know if I need to get involved. That's it. Over, don't need to check email for the time I'm away. You have to actively take control of your business. If you don't boss your business around, it's going to boss you around, right? It's going to run you around in circles. You got to take control and you got to tell the business who's boss.

10:58You. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. Today's episode's not over yet. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Podcast Fan 192837. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. Podcast fan says, fantastic show, five stars. This show offers the exact type of lessons. New and seasoned leaders alike need to reach the highest levels of leadership. It's a must listen. Thanks, podcast fan, for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar at 100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime access to the$100 MBA program. If you want to win a free ride to the$100 MBA, go ahead and leave us an Apple podcast rating and review right now.

11:41And you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy. Thanks for being amazing, amazing followers of the show. You know that I always have your back. You can always email me if you need any help or assistance over at omar at 100mba.net. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Planning and discipline is your friend in business. The more you plan, the more you're disciplined to stick to the plan, the more freedom you're going to have, the more you're going to enjoy the process of being an entrepreneur. The further you're going to get, the more rested and not worn out you'll be when you arrive at the destination.

12:20It's great to have a great business. It's great to have success in life. But if at the end of the day, you are too worn out to enjoy it, what's the point? You got to take control. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.