 Hello, everyone. So today I'm going to teach you a bad word. I'm going to teach you a bad word Just because I don't want you to be using it. I'm going to teach you that it's a bad word and you should not use it I sound like a really bad parent one of those that says I'm going to make you smoke a lot So you don't smoke or something. Anyway, no I want to teach you a bad word that you should never be using in your vocabulary as a freelancer whether your freelance translator or any other type of freelancer pretty much in any type of business you should not be using this word and But I'm not going to tell you what the word No, I will tell you what the word is actually. No, I won't tell you what the word is not yet First of all, I want you to do a quick exercise I want you to look back to the past week the past seven days And I want you to think in the past seven days for all of you who are looking for clients Which I'm assuming is gonna be pretty much all of you whether you're looking for your first clients or looking to grow your business or you know Get more clients. Anyway, I imagine that's pretty much all of you I want you to look in the past week How many clients have you contacted by clients? I mean prospective clients people who could become your clients like how many new people have you tried to contact this can be whether you're on Pros or or Upwork or you know any of those places where you can they give you a list of potential clients And you try to contact them and send them cold emails or just you know Searching online and trying to find clients there and cold contacting them. Whatever it might be. I don't care Think in the past seven days. How many have you contacted? You have a number more or less you got it okay, remember that number and put it aside because we're gonna we're gonna come back to that and So now I'm going to today. I'm going to break open the whiteboard But I'm going to and my phone is making noise and this this actually has exactly to do with what I'm talking about But we'll get into this. So. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry. So the the the word that I'm saying is a bad word that you should never be using is multitasking And you're gonna think okay, you haven't heard that before you should have multitask blah, blah, blah No, but let me get into this because I really am a fervent believer in this and this is why I and I'm gonna explain why I am and why I think this is such But it's such actually a really useful thing to keep in mind First of all, you so you have that number. How many clients you contacted now? Let's do something Let's do a quick exercise. Let's say you want to contact a certain number of clients I'm gonna say, I don't know 20 clients now You can go on translators cafe or stuff like that this for freelance translators I'm sure all types of freelancers have different types of places they can go to Let's say, you know, you can go there and find, you know, 20 perspective Clients like these agencies and get their contact email right away, but let's say that's not the case Let's say you're not there and you have to use Google or you know Whatever and you have to search for cold contacts because that takes a bit longer So in this scenario just to make it easier as an example, I'm gonna say you are a translator You know, let's say you're a Korean to English translator and you specialize in legal translations, right? So what are you gonna do? You're gonna say, okay? my market would be law firms lawyers and Who do you know who speak Korean and Korean Korean law firms stuff like that you do Korean to English translations So the easiest thing would be to find Law firms in Korea who maybe haven't translated their website into English, you know, that's a pretty easy one So I would say 20 things you do a search And you know, you find the first, you know, you do search law firms in Seoul or whatever it might be and then you'll get a list I mean you write it out in Korean I assume and then you get a list of a certain number of these and then you you know first website or You know, they already have the website in English fine second one Maybe at that one two three one doesn't so you get their contact email and you do this 20 times I'm gonna say that, you know, you click in 20 minutes you can get Email addresses from 20 different law firms, you know, you're gonna have a list and You know, even if it's one yes one no that has their website in English or not You can see it right away. You get their contact email. Let's say you're a bit more picky about the contact email You don't want just any contact email, but you want one of the better partners to contact So I'll give you 30 minutes for this now. This is 30 minutes Let's keep track of all this because It's we're gonna come back to it. So 30 minutes. You are Collecting email addresses, right and then you need to write up a letter to send to these people And you know a pitch letter or something like that explaining your services. I would put You know, I would say most of you by the way If you've taken my course if you follow many of my other videos, you already have something like this You have a letter of introduction. You have a cover letter You have you know a letter an email that you can send out to perspectives that kind of says more or less what you do Let's say you don't okay, but you know what you do more or less and and And so you can write something up. You say hey, how are you doing? I noticed your website isn't in English yet I just wanted to let you know. I'm a Korean to English translator and I could do this at Whatever you prefer for free if you put my name at the bottom of your website Say translated by or you know for a certain fee or something and you know feel free to contact me to discuss it I'm available at this email address this phone number whatever it might be and and in fact yeah, so write something up like that and that I'm sorry, that's not going to take you more than 10 minutes to write something up like that and So I would Have that written let's say 10 minutes And then you send these emails out you've got 20 email addresses to send them out to you have the thing to send out So it's basically copy and paste right you can get that done like that I'll give you a bit more time here as well because every now and then maybe you see someone who went to your same height to the same college or Who you know a law firm that you know for some other reason who knows they live right around you know Their office is right around the corner from where you live or are you have dealt with someone in there? I'll be you know some capacity or whatever it might be There's certain ones that you can personalize it a bit and they're in the first sentence You can be like hey, I noticed you went to my same school What year were you or did you have misses? Whatever? I don't know whatever it might be and you know So a couple of them you can personalize and the other ones you can just send out the stock email Maybe you say I was on your website Such and such partners just you know to show that you person so every one of them You can personalize just by putting the name of the website, but otherwise you can just send them out I'm sorry 20 emails if you're copying and pasting and just changing Maximum one sentence you can do it in 20 minutes. Okay, so that's 20 minutes and This means that within one hour You have sent out 20 email addresses A couple things first of all first of all, I want you to think back. How many emails did you send out in the past week? What was that number? Was it was it 20 or was it less or was it more? What was it the equivalent of? you know say This of of sending out 20 email addresses in one hour I'm gonna I'm gonna say no now the other thing you're probably thinking of Right now is you're like okay, but this is not really realistic because you're like yeah It's possible, but it will be a lot of work, you know to have to do this and blah blah blah But here's where my bad word comes in of multitasking Because actually I think this is very doable now I said I was gonna break out the whiteboard and now you can see if you have one hour You spend the first half hour Getting all the email addresses Then you spend 10 minutes writing up an email to send to all of them Then you spend 20 minutes sending out the email one hour 20 emails that you sent out So Again, you might say well, okay Yeah, you know in theory if you're a robot you can do this But I mean and you know in practice that's not gonna happen Except it will as long as you get rid of all your distractions for me I know I'm terrible at distractions and you know if I don't have as these as you heard my phone earlier If I don't prepare it ahead of time Then I am going to get distracted somehow So when I'm working on my translations on my stuff as you know, my videos are just something I do extra My main job is Trent is a being a translator and running my agency when I'm working on stuff When I need to get in the zone and do stuff like this then my phone is off. I I have a program called self-control on my laptop Which basically anytime I'm wasting time on any website I add it to the blacklist there and so and I know I've talked about self-control before in a past Video, but I add it to that blacklist and that means that I cannot access it I go to self-control. I say I put it on for one hour say for that hour. I cannot access Facebook Twitter YouTube Pretty much any news site. I think Wikipedia, you know anytime I find myself wasting time on a website I add it to that list because I want to block it. I don't want to waste time with it And physical distractions too for those of you who are in school I'm sure at least for me every time I had a test I realized my apartment got really really clean Started cleaning everything just to procrastinate and not to study and the same happens here You know, I'll start reading through those books or I'll start doing this or that and the other And that's why actually I usually need to go to a coffee shop at least once a day to work and get in the zone there because there I can Sit down I have I have my headphones on because the music around distracts me So, you know, I have and I've talked about this before as well. You can find productive playlist productive music Playlists on YouTube Otherwise you can have white noise can't noise cancellation headphones Classical music is another good thing. There's chilled cow Which is a channel on YouTube that I like has low five beats and stuff for me any type of music that has no words and You know kind of drowns out the other stuff that I can keep in the background helps me to work I make it as easy as possible to get work done to get into the zone For those of you who've seen social network What do they call it them being plugged in, you know, when the kids are plugged in then no one can You know, nothing disturbs and nothing distracts them. They're just plugged in and they don't that's how you need to be you need to be plugged in and Plugged in means not multitasking your phone is in bothering you emails aren't bothering you You're not going to Facebook all the time. You're not checking with this You're not doodling with that and you're not getting distracted by anything if you're not getting distracted by anything You can't not do this Okay, because like we said it takes this amount of time to get this done and if you're not doing anything else at all you're getting this done and So when it within an hour, you're going to have you're going to have contacted 20 different people 20 different prospective clients and that's not a bad number Okay, because if you can do this in the morning and then later in the afternoon you can do it again In fact, we start off slow. Let's say you just do this in the morning You schedule it ahead of time. I like to schedule the night before we schedule say 9 a.m. To 10 a.m. I'm gonna do this and you know, whatever it is you need to get into the zone contact clients or you know For me, I try to start off with whatever is the thing I want to do the least You know, that's my first thing when I wake up in the morning I have that hour set aside and you know, you have everything ready. You have your coffee You have whatever and you just get to work at that point What you're gonna find is first of all You can't not get it done because you will get it done with no distractions second of all by the time that first hour stops or even if it's 9 to 10 a.m. By 10 a.m It's already a good day. You've already contacted 20 clients. So You've already had a good day and you're way ahead of the curve already and this is a great feeling to have at least for me I love this feeling and it's kind of addictive and the problem or the the good thing and the bad thing is that When you first start off with this, it's gonna be very hard if you've been multi-tasking up till now You don't you're not used to getting in the zone and all that you're gonna get distracted The important thing is to keep track of what distracts you and find a way not to get distracted by it in the future If says if it's your phone you turn your phone off. I'm sorry during that hour. No one calls you I don't care. What's happening if you? You know if it's something on online They have a bunch of programs that you can block whatever websites whatever programs that you don't waste time on them And you can get work done if it's something here like physical you've figured that out as well Go to a coffee shop go to co-working space Whatever it takes for you to get your work done You try to make it as hard as possible to get distracted as easy as possible to get your work done And that way you can get into the zone and the good news is the more you do it the easier it gets because you will get better and better at it and at that point it You know like I've noticed with myself I get better and better at it at getting stuff done and the amount of stuff that I can get done now Compared to how it was years ago is crazy and I love it You know because I can think up whole campaigns or whatever it might be to do and I can get them done And it's all because of this because I'm not multitasking because I'm Monotasking unit asking poly mono multi unit asking because I'm unit asking And you should all unit ask How is that not a word because it sounds weird anyway do not multitask you need to unit ask and It really pays dividends and the great thing is it pays more and more over time as you get more and more used to it And you're able to do it more and more get plugged in get in the zone Unit ask whatever it might be you will be able to accomplish so much more and that's why I'm saying Multitasking is a bad word. You never want to be multitasking when people say oh multi I'm really good at multitasking. I'm a great multitasker They say certain types of people or women or better multitasking stuff like that. None of that's true multitasking is not good ever and When especially when you're trying to get work done do not multitask always get in the zone get plugged in unit ask I'm gonna I'm gonna register that as a word. I'm gonna copyright that and That way you can get so much more done and I'm a fervent believer in that and That's what I wanted to convey to you today with this whiteboard and everything and so I know I got into it quite a bit But because I'm sure you've heard people say this before don't multitask, but it's something I you should really take seriously Don't just think it's some other trite thing, but it's something you should really take seriously you if you want to get work done and so anyway You know you do something like this you'll be contacted hundreds of clients a week and that way you will be finding new clients and you know That's it's the numbers and that's how it's gonna work So that's all I want to talk about with you today Hopefully you find it useful if you did please don't forget to click thumbs up so I know what works and what doesn't and Don't forget to subscribe and you'll get more videos like this in the future deal with freelancing with freelance translation stuff like that and Otherwise, I will talk to you. Oh, sorry before I go off And before I log off In case you haven't noticed every Friday, there is a video by my sister the consultant consultant's corner and she is She's a freelance consultant freelance business consultant and so she's been giving her advice on our channel for free At least so far. So don't forget to check it out because I'm you know, I'm giving you stuff that I just Think of here and there like don't multitask But she's actually giving advice, you know, she gets paid by her clients to give this advice And you know, so this has real value to it especially for those of you who maybe have already started out and you're kind of want to take it to the next level you want to you know become more professional and And you know do things like the big boys do them, you know and like the professionals do them then Her videos really it's invaluable information and you're getting it here for free every Friday consultants corner Don't forget to check it out and that's pretty much it. I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye