 Ladies and gentlemen, our first keynote speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a leading scheduling app that he's convinced will change how we manage and invest our time. He, Rohil, he has been called a top sales speaker, virtual keynote speaker, social media speaker, and motivational guest speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming Mr. John Hall, co-founder and president, calendar.com. You will be speaking on the top of mind in challenging times. Very warm welcome to you, John. Thank you very much, Kathy, for that introduction. It is great to be here. So we're gonna have a bunch of fun and also really, before I get really rolling in this presentation, I wanna go over my house roll number one. Anybody who's seen me speak, I'm really, very big on this and it's keeping things real. A lot of speakers, they just give a presentation, they bounce, they don't talk to people afterwards. Since we're doing things virtual, now let's, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, connect. Say you saw me from this event, so I can connect with you and also follow my newsletter, do different things beyond this, because there's only so much a speaker can do in 20 to 30 minutes and I wanna help you beyond that. So hopefully you're good with roll number one there. So this top of mind speech has a lot of factors that can influence how you're engaging people and how you're staying top of mind. So right now we have a temporary new normal. We don't really know what the next year holds for us, but we do know that time is a major factor of how we're spending time to engage people and the ROI that we're getting back. So I wanna talk about the ROI of the time that we're putting in and what we can do to do things better, especially in this new digital world. So here are some of the key things that factor in to an ROI, so the return on investment over our time is strategically aligned in efforts, especially digitally, you wanna make sure the team is on the same page and you're utilizing resources in the best way. Second, building trust and relationships has never been more important. There's a lack of trust, in my last year's keynote I said, oh, I think there's gonna be a massive lack of trust with the election. I did not predict what was gonna happen this year and there's even been more trust barriers that we're having to get past as marketers and as communicators. And then lastly, just specific self-awareness of how you perform, how you spend your time, where you're prioritizing and where you're focusing. So the first thing was strategic and hand-on-line in efforts. Now, one of the things I used to say all the time was kill two birds with one stone. Then in the last couple of months, I realized that killing birds just doesn't make sense throwing stones at them. So I've got a nice little picture of feeding birds with a stone instead here. So what I mean by that is that you can do a lot of things as a team member. You can say, hey, I'm gonna be the leader here. I'm gonna get this, I'm gonna be the executor. I'm going to be the strategist. But in reality is that the best digital people are ones that understand how a team works together. And so when I mean strategic and alignment, I mean, this is a racy matrix which this is taught in MBA schools and it's something that I even learned back in the day when I was educating myself on just kind of advanced business tactics and things like that. But I don't necessarily say you have to use one of these, but I love the exercise of going through it. So if you wanna email me, I can send you the, or I can send it to the group, the template for this. But the reason I love these is that it helps you think about your job and your duties and your tasks. On the left-hand side, and it might be a little hard to read with the text, but on the left-hand side, there's a bunch of tasks. And then on the top side, there's all these positions and the different roles. And then you have who's driving this, who's responsible for this, who's accountable for it. And I like this as a mind exercise because whenever you're doing things where whether it's like you're creating blog content or whether you are doing a PR strategy, it touches a variety of different people. And when we're in this virtual world and we're operating remotely, it's so important that you're including the people that what you're doing can affect. And you're also getting the feedback that's needed for you to perform in the best way. So as you can see through this document, I can go through and just think about it, just identify who are the people that I need to communicate in what way. So I want you to think about this, run through this exercise, write down the tasks that you do, write down who's involved and just get yourself thinking about how you can cohesively move together as a team because like in this new world, I'm telling you the most effective teams are gonna be the ones that get this very clear and are looking out for each other, helping each other out and moving the ship together. Building trust and relationships, this is something that I love talking about because I think that especially we need to be overcome sitting right now with building trust. It's never been more important. I said that last year, but I had no idea what was on the horizon. But right now people miss that connection in a lot of different ways when you're communicating. Customers miss personalization. A lot of times, I mean I have some friends that legitimately have only seen their close friends or close loved ones in the last six months. So not just because of the professional aspect of how we're engaging people, it's also just being good human beings and getting people, whether you jump on a Zoom call, like if you're on a Zoom call with anybody, you should immediately bring energy, immediately create rapport. You should really create uncomfortable environments for people that are gonna do business with you and they also communicate that to them in a way that engages them. So lack of trust, this is something if you have seen Dumb and Dumber, this is an example I tell when Jim Carrey, if you haven't seen the movie, Jim Carrey's character sees his best friend with his girl and he, as a result of it, he felt betrayed and a lack of trust happened. So he put turbo lacks and a laxative in his friend's drink. Now that's crazy, but ultimately when there is a lack of trust, people act crazy. And also they just don't make good decisions. And so for when you're doing any form of digital marketing, any time you're communicating with someone, the check should be have I generated trust with this person? When you have partners or people on your team, like number one, care about their motivations and successes. Like if it's a customer, what motivates a customer to buy from you? What motivates them to continue to buy from you? Ask people like live in your customers. I was just, I own a company called calendar.com where I was just telling the sales person, I was like, I want you to live with these customers. I want you to understand them, be them. Like really get to know what goes on in their mind and that needs to be communicated so that we can market, we can communicate in that way. And so right now to me, salespeople are one of the best researchers that you have with your communications. Introduction and advocating for people. A lot of times this is for partnerships that you're forming or you have like really, really look out for people, send introductions, find joint ventures or joint partnerships with people who engage that same customer, form those good relationships so that you can once again look out for each other. This is a world where we kind of need to band together to move forward with, so find good partners, find good people that you can move forward with. Gifting and recognizing people. Recognizing people is just something that is just right now I'm trying to do consistently. I recently had a bad experience with a marketer on a team and I communicated it. And one of the things that I remembered when I did that was remember that it's easy to communicate these frustrations because you're frustrated, but always remember to communicate when people do well. So right after that, I spent a good 30 minutes just thinking about the people over the last week that had been easy to deal with. Customers that had given feedback or like I looked at a couple that went through our customer care and personally emailed them as the CEO and said, hey, thank you for giving this feedback. A lot of people don't give it and they just like bounce and leave the tool. And I wanted to personalize that to make them feel once again that we're recognizing and appreciate the efforts. And I want that to be rewarded. From that, you create these super brand advocates. And if we do, I think with COVID and what happened here, I think that a lot of the best companies stayed alive because of brand advocates because of those people that truly love the company because they stuck with them throughout that time and didn't immediately just cut them because there was no connection. And then lastly, consistent education. This is an important one for me just because I think right now there's a lack of trust in media and what information is out there. So it's really important that you do your best as a company to become a true trusted source. When you're pumping out like content, I used to be like, I mean, 10 years ago, I would have said just pump out content because in reality, quantity was the game back then and the content was king if you don't remember that when then I think it evolved into distribution was king slash queen because people who had so much content out all that mattered is if you could get them to see it. Now to me, that next evolution is relevancy and like, is it relevant and does it truly engage the person? And I think that I just got involved with the company irrelevance.com where the reason why I got involved in first place because I think that's this next iteration where we had content as king slash point then we had distribution. Now this next evolution to me is relevancy. And so I think it's just gonna be key is that are we being relevant with our content? Are we getting the relevant people to engage with us? Like, that's what's extremely important right now to make sure that we're engaging the right people with the right content. So with us, the last kind of major point I'm gonna go over is this idea of self-awareness. And I think this is something that before I started Calendar.com with my business partner, we really thought we were effective. We really thought that we were pretty effective. Communicators and this and this and then we started tracking our time and learning a bit more. And we found out we just weren't. I've actually put a couple of these things as a joke, but it's like scrapbooking and day drinking like I wasn't actually doing these things, but that's actually what my calendar looked like. There was all these crazy things that I was scheduling and I was in meetings longer than an hour. Look, I have eight meetings longer than one hour. When I know, I'm not effective after like 45 minutes. I am an entrepreneur, I get distracted easily. And the idea that I had eight one-hour meetings and one 30 minutes span is nuts. And sometimes because I need to be absolutely effective with my time, I missed a few meetings. And so I made changes where relationship for sales, building organic SEO, scheduled time with wife and kids. Right now, scheduling that time is not to get all mushy on you guys, but like it's super important for your own mental strength that you're able to schedule and be deliberate with that time with the people you care about right now. Because those are people and that time is gonna help you kind of get through the more demanding professional time. Because right now we have a very demanding professional time because a lot of companies are in survival mode. And so just make sure you're being truly effective. If you look, I got rid of my more than an hour meetings. I rejected more meetings. It really, and also I looked at who I was spending time with. I put Justin Bieber on the bottom, even though I really don't spend any time at all. But you get the point is that people, and my wife being at the top, the self-awareness that goes on, this is so important because when we engage people, when we're planning out our time, we want to be truly effective. We want to make ourselves the best version of our self and that time has a massive effect on how we are as professionals. Something in a tactic that I use if you have ever heard of the term time boxing. A lot of people do this, but they don't know the term. But if you look at this HBR article, there was a study of 100 productivity hacks. Time boxing was ranked as the most useful. I mean, honestly, I can back that up without even looking at data. For me, once I started implementing time boxing, just so you know the kind of definition, or at least my definition is, when you are allocating certain amounts of time to accomplish tasks and you're planning ahead, and for me it's even scheduling break time. I don't schedule time to relax my brain. My brain's always going and it results in burnout and me it's thinking less effectively. So what I would tell you is I've scheduled the breaks. Scheduled the time with a family. If you look at my calendar nowadays, I legitimately am scheduled from in the morning to a night. Now am I busy every single moment? No, some of those are a disconnect from work, make sure you take a lunch break. I used to never take lunch breaks and I would just always work through those. Now I give myself a little break and it gives me myself the permission to relax your brain so you can come back fully charged. At the same time as that, when you set goals on accomplishing certain tasks during a certain amount of time, it's proven that you're gonna get them done or you're more likely you're going to get them done. And so look up, if you type in Prezi Timeboxing, near a wall, the author of Indistractable, myself, John Bradshaw with appointment, Tracey Grace, we got together and did a video kind of the summary on that. And it is definitely to me one of the most important tactics that you can have as an effective professional because once again, you will accomplish things quicker. And in addition, you will also give yourself the mental breaks that are much needed in this time. I cannot tell you how important that is as we're in this digital environment, as things are changing in 2021, we need to get our mental strength up to the best ability so that we can dominate certain areas because there are gonna be companies that fail and you do not want your company to be that one. So this is a quote that I mean, that's the thing about life. It is short, precious, each day is a gift. We should do everything we can to spend our time in the best way possible. I love that quote, I keep it on my desk just cause the time is something we don't get back. It is this last year, there's been a lot of global deaths, there's been a lot of challenges and so really, really be effective with your time. Make it the most, make it the most useful you can possibly have and be self aware of that. So as you, as I promised, this is, I still got one more thing after this, but this is my contact information. I have a LinkedIn newsletter that you guys can check out. I keep it up to about pretty much weekly and so feel free to connect there. Definitely a resource in my book top of mine and I actually have that there and here's a copy of it if you've never seen it before. So check that out as well. And then lastly, in this world, focus is going to be a major priority and I want you guys to print this out. This is something that I have on my desk as well is that there's things that matter and there's things you can control. In your job and in your professional life, I'm telling you there's a lot of things that you cannot control and you cannot make those things distract you from your overall goals, your priorities, your marketing initiatives, your communication initiatives and overall business goals. And so keep this at your desk, fill in the middle and say like, whenever you're frustrated, like recently there was a problem with the client this week and it was a big client when I cared about a lot and I honestly think and it did matter to me because I truly cared, but the things that were affecting are things that were not in my control. There was a lot of things that were affecting this relationship that I did not see, couldn't see and had no idea. And so to me, I've got to let that go and I've got to focus on the clients, the people, the priorities where it does overlap, where it is matter and it's things that I can control. And so keep that at your desk. That is a last parting gift and if there's anything else at all, like I said, reach out to me. Let me know if there's anything I can do and yeah, I hope you guys, I'll give you back a little time here and just reflect. Obviously, you know I value time here, so spend the next couple of minutes just really reflecting on any takeaway. I don't care if it's a small takeaway, if you print something like this out or just take away one or two things, do it. And if I can help out in the future, please reach out, but thank you for your time. I certainly appreciate the group. Have a good day.