Streamlining Your Workflow for a Brighter 2025

Achieving balance in both family and business can be challenging, especially when transitioning back into work after the holidays. This episode shares strategic insights on managing email, reassessing priorities, and planning for a successful return to business as a travel professional. 

• Discussing the challenge of balancing family leadership and running a business 
• Effective methods to manage a cluttered email inbox 
• Utilizing SaneBox for streamlined email management 
• Importance of reassessing and prioritizing tasks 
• Planning strategies for a successful and productive week 
• Introduced a free business summit to help travel professionals enhance their effectiveness

Chapters

• 0:10 Travel Masters Podcast
• 10:06 Mastering Weekly Planning for Success
• 17:08 Connect With Us

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for our podcast. I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help. Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business. On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you. Our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you in your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? Hey, welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. I'm Morris Sims. Hey, thanks for being here and listening to our podcast. Our objective is to provide you with information and ideas to help you get what you want from your business.

Speaker 1: 1:58

Today we're getting the kids back in school and the family we're all trying to get back into our routines. I'm sure I am so very thankful for my beautiful wife, carla, when I think back to the years when our kids were growing up. She did all that. All I had to do is get back into my routine of going to work every day. Everything else, carla took care of it. If you're trying to do the family leadership and run a business, I can only imagine how hard that is. I want you to know that I admire you for doing it. Loving your family so much that you'll do all of that work is just it's outstanding. It is leadership and it is management. Somehow and I don't pretend to know how Carla got it all done and I was allowed to just focus on work Truly amazing to me, and I know there are many of you out there that are doing exactly the same thing. So thank you for being that leader for your family.

Speaker 1: 3:01

But when the routines are all back and everyone's operating in their lane, your mind's probably going to turn toward your business. Wow, I just had this amazing sense of deja vu. It's like I've said all this before and I probably have. Anyway, that just kind of struck me big time. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this is the same thing that we have experienced so often in my family and probably in a whole bunch of others. Okay, so let's get back to this here.

Speaker 1: 3:30

Okay, when your mind does turn back to business, where do you start? Where do you begin? Well, here are the top couple of things that I suggest to get back into the swing of things in running your business, and these are the two things that hit me the most. And it just gives you a place to start. You know, if you have a place to start and you get moving, then all of a sudden the snowball is going down the hill and it's hard to stop or the train's moving on the track and the momentum is behind you and you're going at, you know, 100 miles an hour. So anyway, here they are the first couple of things that I would suggest that you take a look at, and the first is your email inbox. Chances are it is packed if you haven't really been working on it all throughout the holidays, so it very well may have all sorts of stuff in it. Now take a look at your email box and do one of three things with each individual email. In other words, start at the top of the inbox and look at the first one and decide Either act on it right then because whatever action it requires you can complete in under three minutes or file it in a file where you'll be able to find it. That's the key. You'll be able to find it when you have time to work on it. Now, this may be titled or it may be a part of an ongoing project, and if it is, obviously you file it with that project. But put it somewhere where you can find it, in a file folder electronically on your computer and put a time on your calendar when you're going to work on that project or when you're going to go back and find that email.

Speaker 1: 5:03

If it is something that's important that you need to do, the third thing you can do is to trash it. Yep, delete it. Press that button, delete and get rid of it. Maybe it's junk and you know for sure that you don't care what happens to it and you don't care to do anything about it, or keep it to fill up your inbox space that you don't really need to fill up, right? Or it may be something that genuinely pertains to business, but it's just not a priority right now. So you can delete it, because you know that when it does become a priority, that concept or that communication is going to resurface somehow. Somebody's going to send it to you in a follow-up or it'll come up in your system, but for now you don't need it. You don't really need to save it. It's not that important. So delete it and finally feel really good about every email that you delete.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Okay, when I start doing this, my objective is to delete as much as possible. I don't want to file it. If I can keep from filing it, I don't want to have to do anything with it. If I don't have to do anything, I really have a great desire to just delete it. That's just me. So you keep going until you've cleared out your inbox.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Now I have an app that helps me do that every day. It's called SaneBox. It gathers all the emails that are not important and moves them out of my inbox. It takes them out and it saves them for later. It sticks them in a file called Sane Later and I can go there and look at it anyway. But at the end of the day, each day, sane Box sends me an email with a link to the digest. I open it and it's all those emails that it has removed from my inbox, which makes my inbox much more manageable, but they're all sitting there for me to look at real quick.

Speaker 1: 7:03

I open that digest and in I don't know three or four minutes, I pull out anything that I want to read and either file or trash the rest. With the click of a button I can put things back in the inbox so that SaneBox won't ever gather them in the future. In other words, I get on there. Oh geez, that's an email that I really would like to see every time it comes through. So I put it back in the inbox or I can either file it or I can trash everything. With the click of a button I can select all and trash everything that I didn't put back in the inbox or read or do something with. It takes literally three minutes and I'm talking about 60 to 80 to 100 emails maybe three minutes just to go down and look at them and say, no, I don't want to do anything with that one, don't want to do anything, don't want to do, don't want to do, don't want to, don't, don't, don't, don't. Oh, there's one that I really wanted. Okay, I'm going to throw that back in the inbox and I'll look at it later today. That's it. That's all there is to it. If I really don't like the email and I'm thinking I don't ever want to see this again, sanebox allows me to, with the click of a button, throw it down a big black hole Actually, it's just another folder, but it's called the black hole folder and they won't ever show up anywhere at all. Any new ones that come in from that company or from that address is going to go back into the black hole. I absolutely love my SaneBox. It's great. So, saneboxcom, give it a try if that's something that makes some sense to you, all right.

Speaker 1: 8:35

Second thing you can do is now that email is not calling your name and distracting you. Now you can focus on your priorities. But first, I don't know about you, but I have to make sure the priority order that I set up in the past is still the same today. This tells me what's most important, what is the most important place where I can spend my time right now. I can spend my time right now. If I don't have that priority list and I haven't looked at the order of priorities to make sure it's still up to date, I just might be working on a project or a task, while the most important thing is that they're waiting on my attention and might miss a deadline because I wasn't working on it. So I've got to look at those priorities and then start at the top of the list. And number three you got to take some time to plan.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Okay and I know I've said it before, I'll say it again planning is useless. Why? Because things change, but if you don't plan, then you don't know where to start. If you don't plan, you haven't gone through that process of planning and while the plan itself is going to change, the process of doing the planning and creating the plan is where all the good stuff happens, and I didn't think of that. That's a quote from Dwight Eisenhower and it's absolutely true. Planning is useless, but the process of planning is essential.

Speaker 1: 10:06

Now my plan allows me to know what I'm going to do every day when I get up in the morning. I get up in the morning, I put mine in Microsoft OneNote and I click on that and there it is Tuesday Number one these things. It starts with my morning routine. All the things that I want to do in the morning to get myself and my brain ready are on my list and they're on every day. But then it gets into the things that are priorities for me for that day and I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Now, again, I didn't come up with that. I'm not that smart, but I am smart enough to go, look and find other people who are doing good things and then take what they do and adjust it and tweak it and make it fit for me, and that's what I did here. It all came out of Darren Hardy's Sunday planning system. So Google that Google Sunday planning system or Darren Hardy's Sunday planning. You Google something along those lines and you'll find it in the list, darren Hardy's Sunday planning system. Google it and watch his video. It's a lead magnet. So it's going to answer your email address. Please do it. Give them your email address. You can unsubscribe later if you want to, but do that so that you can watch his video. Watch his video and listen to the story. It's a very interesting and compelling story in and of itself, but the process that he goes through, that he teaches and he learns, is just wonderful.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Some of it may not apply. Some of it didn't apply to my work and the way I do it, but the idea of planning the week on the weekends on Sunday, if you will, or Saturday planning the week, and then having every day in the coming week set up with a plan man, that's powerful. It has changed my life and I've been doing it for years now. It absolutely changed my life. Now you know what you're supposed to do every day. If you took the time to plan the week, then at the end of every day all you have to do is tweak that plan for tomorrow a little bit, based on what you were able to accomplish today. You know, maybe you're able to get a couple of things done that you had planned for tomorrow, but you got them done today. Or maybe a couple of new things came up that you need to add to the list for tomorrow, but the key is you're not sitting in front of a blank piece of paper saying, gee, what's the most important thing I need to do tomorrow, because it's already done for you Now. All you have to do is adjust it.

Speaker 1: 12:39

Hey, pardon the interruption, but I have an announcement for you about a free opportunity that's going to allow you to learn more about how to increase your revenue and have more time to enjoy it. I'm hosting a free summit on February 26th and 27th, filled with business experts to help you build your business so that you can reach your vision that you have for your success. Cindy Miner is going to join us to share the top things that make travel agents successful. Elise Enriquez will teach you how to use systems to help you get more things done more efficiently. Marilyn Jenkins is going to teach you about branding and using your Google profile, while Eli Delaney golly, gee, eli's the creator of the Rockstar follow-up system, and he's going to teach you about how to make sure that you don't forget to follow up on all those opportunities that are out there. And the great Tim Fitzpatrick from Rialto Marketing is going to teach you how to build your marketing plan, and just so much more. But look, speaking of more, david Visco is going to be with us. David is an author, a consultant and, in his own words, a profit acceleration strategist. That's exactly what we need to find ways to increase your revenue and have more time to enjoy it. And, by the way, david and his wife, barbara, own a travel agency, so he's got some experience from all different kind of businesses to help you. And yeah, by the way, I'm going to be teaching you how to sell without being salesy and we're going to talk about the clarity principle in your business.

Speaker 1: 14:12

So, wrapping up the summit at 2 pm Central Time on the 27th, wrapping it up is Dr Randy Marshall. Randy's a dear friend of mine and a mentor. He's going to share with you the secret to mental health. For business owners like ourselves. It is the most practical and useful concept I have ever learned in my entire career. This one thing seriously changed my life. Here's the deal it's all free, all you have to do is register and you can join the summit for these 10 live presentations. But hey, look, if you can't join live, that's okay. The summit's going to be recorded and if you register, you'll have access to those presentations for 14 days.

Speaker 1: 14:56

So right now, join the VIP waiting list to be sure that you're one of the first to know when registration is open. Here's the URL to join the waiting list and I apologize, it's a bit cumbersome so I'll repeat it. But here we go. You ready? H-t-t-p-s. Colon slash slash Ross. Hyphen Morris hyphen Sims dot mykajabicom slash soon. I'll do it again. Here we go https. Colon slash slash r-o-s-s hyphen m-o-r-r-i-s hyphen s-i-m-s dot mykajabi, which is m-y-k-a-J-A-B-I dot com slash soon. S-o-o-n. That's it. If you'll go there and just put your name on the waiting list, then we'll let you know as soon as registration opens and you can get in and reserve your seat. You'll get a notice from me it's going to come around the 1st of February that registration is going to be open and then you can register and save your seat for the free summit Y'all. I just I can't wait to kick this thing off and I look forward to seeing you there. So right now, right now, just while we're stopped, please join that VIP waiting list. I'll see you at the summit. For right now. Let's get back to the show Now.

Speaker 1: 16:21

All of this will help you focus, and focus is the most important part of running a business. All this stuff that we've talked about is going to help you focus on the most important parts of your life, your family and your business. Because when you plan your week, the thing you start with is what are my priorities for my family? What are my things that I need to do specifically for family? Because that's in our case, that's my top priority. I'm going to put that on there first. You know, I think I'll do a whole video training session in the Travel Masters resources file about weekly planning. Yeah, okay, so that's coming soon, but right now, I got to go put that on my priority list as a top project.

Speaker 1: 17:08

Hey, thanks again for listening. It really does mean a lot to me to know that you're out there, so please don't hesitate to engage with us. Send me an email, simsrm2017 at gmailcom, and I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you think. But for right now, hey, best wishes. Make it a great week, go meet somebody new and have a great start to 2025. I'll see you again next time. I'm Morris Sims. You.