0080: Having A Bias For Action Can Uplevel Your Schedule

Raw transcript:

how do you determine
how long it takes you to get something
done
like if you say oh i’ve got this
audition to do it’s going to take a
couple of hours or i’ve got this
voiceover
thing to tape to to record it’s going to
take me a half an hour to do it how do
you determine those things
i’d love to know and i’ve got some
advice for you
in this episode of the vo heroes podcast
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back in the 90s i was really fortunate
because i worked
at america online
and i was not just the voice of their
tech support line that was actually
something i did before i actually worked
there as an employee but as an employee
i had the good pleasure to work on a
team called the cool team we we brought
rich media to aol we created the first
sound and video
uh when aol was mostly pictures and text
and my boss
great guy
by the name of mark irwin i think he now
works for discovery or he did
um there’s a meeting with him and is in
his office and he goes we were talking
about a project and he goes how long do
you think it would take you to get that
done and i you know i looked at it and i
said i don’t know probably about a week
week and a half and he goes what if i
asked you for it like by this afternoon
i was like wait a minute
you just asked me how long it was going
to take he goes yeah yeah i know but
what if you had to get it done this
afternoon
i was like
uh
okay and in my head it was like do you
want it fast you wanted cheap do you
want it good
you know but i thought about it and i’m
like all right well i could work on it
and see how far i get and i got it done
that afternoon
and we talked about it afterwards and
he’s the one that introduced me to a
concept that i now call
having a bias for action certainly i’m
not perfect i’ve let things slide all
over the place throughout my life but
one of the things that i really take a
great deal of pride on is being able to
deal with things sooner rather than
later
and also dealing with things in a more
compressed time frame
than i might have initially imagined so
for example when i asked you at the top
of the show
uh you know how long does it take you to
do you know a few hours to do an
on-camera audition or a half an hour to
do
an audition for voiceover
um i found that if you
just take that initial
estimate
it probably will take you that long i
mean the job will expand to the amount
of time that you allot to it right or
you can say now i can do this quicker i
can do this without without impinging
whatsoever on the quality i can do this
faster i don’t have to take that much
time
i don’t have to worry about getting it
absolutely perfect or i can make it
pretty much perfect but in less time
and one of the things that i find really
interesting is when i introduce this
concept to my clients when we’re
coaching
and they say oh that’ll take me forever
i’m like really will it
whatever that is
uh and i get them to think about it
which i’d like you to do is just think
about it when you decide this is how
long something is going to take
ask yourself is that true
is it really going to take that much
time now there’s a really good chance
that there are some things
that will take a lot longer than you
thought they would when you do them
but many things will take far less time
and if you give yourself
a time frame that’s shorter rather than
longer
you’ll be more efficient you absolutely
will be more efficient i’d love to know
if this makes sense to you
the comments below are waiting if you’re
on voheros.com please let me know
right
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okay thank you so much i’m david h
lawrence the 17th i thank you so much
for watching and for listening and i
will see you in the next episode of the
vo heroes podcast
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