 Hello, everyone. How's it going? Today, I'm going to talk about a tactic that I use that might get a big technical, but I think it's very useful and I use it for sales, but also for work. In fact, I use it for pretty much everything I do. Now, I got this tactic from a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, which by the way is a very good book. But let me introduce it briefly what this tactic is and kind of how it works. So what Newport writes, he talks in this book, Deep Work, he talks about having measures and he recommends measuring your productivity with leading measures, which are measures of your inputs that you can change day-to-day and are related to your desired goals. And you also, and this is opposed to lagging measures, which are more reliable, but are only visible in the past. So, and I'm reading this from the thing, but basically he has leading measures and lagging measures. Leading measures are your inputs are what you put in and that you can change day-to-day and they're related to your desired goals, but they're not your desired goals per se, but these are things you do. Number of words written, hours spent deep working, number of emails sent out, you know, that's what you have control over. Lagging measures are more reliable as to what you're looking for, but but they're only visible after they've already been accomplished and they're not something you do directly. So this this will be something like how much you earn, you know, earn this much, how many new clients you've acquired in a month or anything along those lines. And I found this very interesting and so let me show you briefly how I apply it to my work. There are a couple, so the first thing that I apply to is sales. Every freelancer out there is going to have to deal with sales. If you're looking for new clients, you're going to have to deal with sales and there are a couple ways to deal with it. Some people will say, okay, I need five clients by the end of the month. And to me, that is a lagging measure because you can only see that you have five clients after it and some not something you have direct control over. You don't get to say, okay, this this this this are my clients. Boom, done. No, all you do is you contact people, you talk to them, you call them, you see them face to face, you email them and you try to see, do you want to be my client? And they'll say, no, thanks. I'm good. No, thanks. I'm good. No, thanks. I'm good. Oh, yes, maybe. Okay. Let's talk about it. And so you don't have direct control over it. All you have, you know, all you have to go by is kind of trial and error. And so what I do is I try to measure the things I do have direct control over. Now I've been doing this for a while, but you can also see based on your experience what works best. So say you're sending out emails and say you want to send out, you know, sales emails that you want to, you'd say, are you interested in hiring me or something like that? And or I'd be interested in being put in your database or I'd be interested in working for you, whatever it might be. So that's something you can actually measure. How many of these emails you send out. So if you decide, okay, I want to send out 10, 20 of these emails a day, and I recommend somewhere around 20 something because with emails, emails are the easiest way to do sales just because you just send them out, but they're also the one with the kind of the worst response. So say you send 20 emails out every day, that's something you can control. And it's based on a calculation because if you're thinking, okay, maybe one out of every 100 emails turns into an actual sale. So I need to send out, and if I want to get four or five new clients by the end of the month, I need to send out 100 emails. So if I send out 20 emails a day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, that's 100 emails per week, out of those one will become a client. Okay, I should get four clients by the end of the month, something like that. I'm just coming up with these numbers like this, but at least that kind of gives an idea of, at least that gives you something that you can shoot for directly and not saying, I want four clients by the end of the month. And so what you do is once you have this leading measure rather than the lagging measure, you only concentrate on that on sending out those emails. That's it. Another variation of this that I've heard is someone, this guy who worked in sales, and he said it's very common in sales. I don't know if it's true or not, but he worked in phone sales. And he said that actually a lot of salespeople, what they'll shoot for is not how many sales they make, because once again, you get more rejection than sales and you don't have much control over that. He said, but how many rejections? And it'll be something like, okay, once I get 10, 20 rejections, then I can stop for my lunch break. And so they shoot to get rejections, right? And so, hi, are you interested? No, I'm not interested. Okay. Rejection one. And then they go through the motions. And then every now and then they'll get someone's like, Oh yeah, actually, I'm interested. Tell me more about it. And that doesn't count towards their quota for lunchtime. So they're like, Oh, no, I need to add another call. But in the meantime, they made a sale. So actually it's pretty good. And they'll feel good about that. And that'll be able to push them and keep going forward. So anyway, I think looking at leading measures is always good. And that's in terms of sales in terms of other things. One is income. A lot of people will say I want to earn 80,000 a year or I don't know, four or 5,000 a month. Okay, you want to earn four or 5,000 a month. But if that's all you say about it, it's not going to happen. Trust me. What you need to do is, so what I do is kind of break it down. What does that mean in terms of things I have to do with things I actually have control over? And yeah, if that means sales, then it's something like that. If it means doing a lot more work and more work hours, then I try to break that down. And so I'll say something like, okay, I need three hours deep work as he calls it or in the zone work per day. And then I can achieve my goal. Okay, that I have control over. I can set aside three hours every day that I have control over, wherein I actually get my work done. And then the other thing will fall in place almost by itself. What I have to do is concentrate on the stuff I have direct control over. And I try to apply this to everything, by the way. So yeah, like going to the gym, you can go to the gym, you can say, okay, I want to lose this amount of pounds or I want to gain this much muscle. Okay, if you just say that, it's not going to happen. But if you kind of break it down, be like, okay, if I run this much per day, work out this many times per week, cut down what I eat by this much, something you should work. So that's what I do. I need to go to the gym three times a week. I need to run 10, 20 minutes every time I go to the gym. Okay, I have control over that. Even having control over that, you notice how often, at least for me, how often I actually skip the gym or stuff like that. But so imagine it's stuff you don't have control over, how easy it is not to achieve it. So find things you can have control over. And those are the things that will lead to the what he calls the lagging measures, the actual results. But focus on the things you have control over, not on the other thing. So if I want to lose weight, I want to lose 10 pounds by the end of the month. That's a great goal to have, but just having I want to lose 10 pounds by the end of the month won't make it happen. What will make it happen is things I have control over. Going to the gym three times a week, running 20 minutes every time I go to the gym, not eating, I don't know, cake or cookies or whatever, and sticking to healthy meals, whatever it might be. And then if I do, if I just concentrate on that, I'll lose the 10 pounds without even thinking about the 10 pounds, right? And anyway, so this is something that I've been trying to apply, as you can see, to many facets of my life and especially to work. When I deal with work, I try to deal with stuff I have control over. The number of emails I send out, the number of people I meet because I try to meet people face to face. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, I want to attend three events per week that are relevant to what I do. And when I'm at that event, I want to, you know, because I don't want to go to the event and hang out there. So no, I want to receive, I want to meet people and either send, give or receive five business cards per event. So then I have their email address, and that's something concrete that I have more control over. And I like that. Just having business cards per se, just attending these events does nothing, but they lead to the results that I need later. And so anyway, that's something that I recommend. Again, it's a kind of a different way of looking at things that I liked a lot. It was once again, it was from the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport. I'll leave a link to it down in the description below, actually, just in case, because it is a very good book. And but yeah, one of the issues he deals with are these leading versus lagging measures and which one you should be keeping track of. Because very often it's not obvious and, you know, you want to keep track of one and the other at the same time, but it can get confusing. And so he kind of delves into it a bit more deeply. But I just wanted to show how I've been applying it to my work. And so I think you'll find it useful for your work as well, to concentrate on these leading measures, these things you have direct control over in order to achieve your goals later on. So yeah, hopefully you did find it useful. I hope you did. Don't forget to leave a thumbs up if you do find this useful, because that always helps out. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't. And also remember, I provide services myself as well. I read over resumes, profile pages, websites. I have a link to a questionnaire you can fill out in the description below, which if you're interested in that, I also provide one-on-one consulting. I have a link to that as well. And otherwise, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye.