And then we'll go ahead and get started for today.
So today we're going to be focusing
on the Q management system.
So that is a simple and powerful tool
that Dionne has perfected over a 30 year period
to equip leaders to organize things very, very quickly.
We have a comprehensive list of notes.
So if you find like it's going too fast
or you miss something, please ask in the chat
or just know what, how about the replay video
we'll have a very, very comprehensive list of notes there
so that you can download and review afterwards.
And wave at me if you love project management.
I know there's a few people
who probably love project management.
I was a bullet journal aficionado.
I love all kinds of management and planning and journals.
So if you are, today might actually be
a challenging day for you.
And we'll get into why that is so challenging.
And then after we get into the teaching,
we'll have some time for Q and A.
We're actually not going to have breakout time today.
And Dionne I'll explain why in a second.
So my pro tip today goes with my warning.
So today's, the simplicity of what we're gonna learn today
is its power in itself.
So if you love micromanaging the details,
it might be a little challenging to scale that back.
But if you can commit to just 30 days,
try it for 30 days as Dionne's going to go over today,
I promise it will shock you and amaze you
because it did for me.
Again, I love planning journals, organization,
monthly views and all of that, all the details,
but he challenged me, just try it for 30 days,
just see how it goes.
And it literally blew my mind.
So, and then for myself,
I know the days that I feel overwhelmed
are the days that I went to old habits
or are not using my Q journal.
So keep that in mind.
I promise there is treasure in here.
Okay, so everyone's ready to dive in.
I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to you, Dionne.
Thank you, Dionne, I really appreciate that.
Yes, this is an exciting thing to share.
You know, often we try to pick best practices,
but this happens to be one of my best practices.
And, you know, when you're involved in a lot of detail
or you run a lot of different entities.
So I have used this system for over 30 years.
I've used it in a whole range of environments.
So nonprofit organizations, churches, taught leaders,
pastors, school teachers, we've even had,
we've had various people
who come from very professional backgrounds.
So actually I have a co-author
who helped me develop it in the beginning.
And so just to shout out to my friend, Glenn Hobbs,
who's also on the board at Brilliant.
And Glenn runs a division of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
He has about 2000 employees in his team,
which he built over the last four and a half years.
So he did a startup inside of PwC and he runs this system.
And at one time in my career,
I hired somebody who had just sold their company,
him and two partners had sold their business
that they'd built up, sold it for $70 million.
So they were in good place.
They were happy people at that point.
And, you know, somebody who's very successful.
And then he came to run one of our companies.
He was the president of the company and I was the CEO.
And I watched him struggling to do certain functions
and certain tasks.
And so I said to him,
would you like to learn a brand new system?
I know, you know, at that point he was in his early 60s
and I'm asking somebody who's at the peak of their career,
would you like me to fix the way you run your life?
And, you know, he was gracious
and he heard me out.
And a month later I asked him, how's it going?
He said, honestly, if I'd only had this when I was younger,
he said, I've probably halved my stress
and doubled my productivity.
Now that was his experience.
I'm not sure it'll necessarily have that for you.
But what I do wanna do is just walk you through it
and explain how it works and what it does.
So I'm gonna jump in and do a screen share
and walk you through.
There's a lot to, I think it helps to actually see it.
And then we're gonna go through, you know, what it is.
So this is a personal productivity tool.
So the reason we're not gonna do breakouts today
is because this really is for you personally.
This is to take control of your life
and we're gonna try to get you, you know,
into the practicalities of how this works.
And then I've asked some of the team members
just to share their own experiences
and to try to encourage you.
So I know several of you who've been around us
both at 828 as well as Brilliant
are using the system already.
Always good to hear it again
because that's usually when you say, oh, I forgot that bit.
So for you, it's a time to perfect it.
Everybody ready to go and do this thing now that I've created hopefully a little bit of anticipation for it. Let me share my screen and we'll get right to it.
All right, there we go.
So,
basically,
sorry, my screen decided to do its own thing. Give me one second more and here we go.
So, we want to get into this simple idea called simple productivity. As we've talked before,
simplicity drives speed. So, if you want a very powerful way to manage your life and be
known for a person who gets stuff done, this is the tool that we're going to go through.
So, sorry guys, I'm still struggling with all the extra things that Zoom is throwing on the
screen here. So, let me just get rid of that one more time. Okay, there we go. So, key question,
is there a way to be productive and free? And what do we mean by free? We mean that
feeling like your work doesn't run and control your life. And so, what we want to talk through
is why do we even need this? Why do we need another productivity tool? There are 10,000
of them out there. Why would this be any different? And the reason is we want to be free
to find the time for the significant things in our lives, not just the important. And it's amazing
how many, I mean, nobody comes to the end of their lives and says, I wish I had made more money.
I saw a recent survey, it wasn't a survey actually, it was a recent study by Harvard professor,
and he had studied the whole concept of happiness. And they interviewed people over the age of 80.
And they asked them, what was the one thing that made you happy? Not a single person,
many of them were very wealthy, not a single person talked about the money they made,
the products they invented, the career they enjoyed, any of that, they talked almost exclusively
about the relationships in their lives, their children, their spouse, or some of the failures
in those areas. So, for us, the significance as kingdom people, of course, is that we have a higher
view. So, two is we want to make a simple statement, you can be creative and organized.
I don't know where the idea comes from that if you're creative, then that means you, you know,
a little more disorganized. Or if you're an organized person, you're obviously not creative.
Actually, none of this is true. So, we want to bring these two ideas together, you can be creative
and organized. But you need a system you trust to free your mind. The reason why things keep popping
back in your mind, you know, you're going along and oh, I must remember that. Oh, I forgot about
that. The reason things keep popping back into your mind is because you don't have a system you
trust. When you have a system you trust, and you put it in the system, and you know that once it's
committed to that system, that that thing will be taken care of, your mind gets freed up. As simple
as this idea is, it's amazing how few systems actually provide us that degree of freedom.
Free your mind to make it to be able to think about the things you want to think about. Because
if you think at the end of the day, it's really about the mind space that you can commit to what
you're doing. And mind space is that creative part where you can work in an uninterrupted way without
to do is jumping off the page back into your mind. So, we're going to talk about how to create a
system you can trust to free your mind. And finally, if you pull this all off, you get to
grow your reputation for doing what you say, when you say you will do it. And, you know,
it's amazing how simple that idea is. But for many people, just, you know, I think one of the first
things I try to implement when we when I get involved with a business is trying to put this
in place. Because it seems to me that, you know, there are certain cultures, certain organizational
cultures, that allow you to make a commitment. But then as long as you can explain why you didn't
do it, you're good to go. And I've always had a real problem with that. And the reason for that
is to me, if, you know, if I said I will do something by Tuesday, and, you know, Tuesday
morning, and then on Tuesday morning, I let you know, I can't do it for whatever reason.
I didn't just find out on Tuesday morning, or in almost all cases, I knew well in advance.
So so when somebody says that, to me, my first question is, when did you know, you'd not have
it ready on Tuesday morning, and they go, well, I kind of knew on Thursday, and you didn't reset
expectations. What this what this idea of doing, always doing what you say,
when you say you'll do it, sets up a position of leadership
and it really boosts your reputation in the organization,
but it also accelerates your growth as a leader,
as somebody who's managing your own to-dos.
So I'm sure you've tried all the usual things,
to-do apps, note-taking apps, project management tools,
and there's a role for some of these things.
We're gonna go through what those roles might be,
but what we need over and above all the electronic tools,
over and above, we're using Slack and Notion
and we're using Asana
and all these project management tools and monday.com
and whatever it is we're doing,
maybe you use things three or whatever it is your apps are,
your to-dos, your note-taking,
whatever those methodologies are,
none of those in and of themselves
provide a command and control center.
So what we need is we need the one ring,
one system to rule them all
and really does become your precious.
Okay, that's the end of the Lord of the Rings references,
but really is a helpful idea to think about,
you do need one system that sits on top of all of this,
that is the command and control center.
That's the part from a neuroscience point of view
that causes you to trust the system enough
that the to-dos stop jumping back into your mind.
So this one system we call Q, C-U-E, it's an acronym,
and it really stands for Capture, Use and Enhance,
Q, Capture, Use and Enhance.
So this is a simple paper-based system
that commands all the electronic systems,
that commands all the other apps,
all the other things we do.
This is the command and control center
and it's designed to put you not only in command,
not only give you a system you can trust,
but it puts you in a leadership position in many meetings.
As you've probably worked out by now,
the person who's the most organized
usually is the person who gets the leadership of the meeting.
I remember a time when in the early stage of my career,
I had some partners and we were doing factory automation
and we automated an ink factory.
And this ink factory,
I don't know if you've ever seen printing inks,
but they are extremely fine and they get in everywhere.
And so we had all the computers in into the factory
and basically we were creating a fully automated system
so that the owner could literally sit on the computer
at his home and just manufacture in this huge factory.
And so it took us about a year to write all the code
and put all the systems in
and do all the engineering and all the rest.
And then we had the big reveal day.
And unfortunately for us,
we did not realize that the owner was so proud
of this new system that he threw a big party
and he invited all the most influential friends
and his business partners and colleagues,
and they put everything up on a big screen.
And when we hit the on button, it all went nuts.
Ink everywhere, valves open that shouldn't,
pumped ink everywhere.
Everybody in the factory just turned
the sort of bluish color of the ink
that we were running at the time.
It was a complete and utter disaster.
Not only did we waste unbelievable money of ink,
mess up, I mean, I don't know if we'll ever get
that factory perfectly clean again.
But we did this whole thing
in front of all these friends anyway.
So I knew that he was livid.
He was really upset with us.
And we're a bunch of young people in our mid-twenties
pulling this all off.
And so I called him,
but I already had learned this principle
about being able to organize us.
I phoned him and I said, we'd like to come and see you.
He said, yeah, you better.
I could tell he was pretty mad.
And I arrived with a printed agenda.
And before he could say anything, we sat down,
I handed out all the agendas and in the points,
I said, is there anything else you wanna add to the agenda?
He said, what I wanna say,
I said, we're definitely gonna go through
every aspect of it.
And I took command because I was the person
leading the process.
Well, the good news of that is
by the time we got through everything
and we explained everything that we've gone through,
he not only was very generous
in terms of letting us correct the error,
he even helped fund some of those changes.
But I learned from that particular day
that the person who's the most organized,
the person who has the clearest and simplest process
is the one that leads.
So let's go through how's that developed over time.
So the C, we talked about capturing.
How do you capture your thoughts and your actions?
Again, we're gonna go through the C.
We're talking about a simple book,
everything's based off like a paper journal,
which in my case is this one here.
So, and I have my name on it.
For me, if you just have everything in one place,
one simple structural thing,
it helps your brain to map where things are.
So again, the reason why something's in your mind
is because you don't have a place to put them.
And so having the right amount of places to put things
without making it complicated,
without a lot of forms to fill in
or a complicated system to understand,
we wanna capture our to-dos,
we wanna capture key meeting actions
and key project actions.
And I'm gonna explain that in one second.
So once we capture those key to-dos,
meetings and project items,
the next thing is how we use the system.
You have to use the system and commit to it.
And that's why I always ask,
please use it for 90 days,
30 days is sort of the minimum,
but if you can use it for 90 days
and not make any changes,
what you need is you need your mind
to learn to trust the system.
For most of us, we've all started off well
with some new app, with some new organizational tool,
and then we get a couple of months down the road
or a couple of weeks down the road,
and then it all falls apart
because we don't commit to using the system.
And we've made the system simple enough
so that it would be easy to keep using it.
So, when you use your own system,
you create freedom.
And when you believe that your own system works
and you stick to it,
this is the part where it all flips.
This is the point at which the productivity
starts to function.
And we've all used systems for a while,
and they faded, then we changed,
then we tried this,
and then you walk onto somebody's desk
and you see sticky notes and yellow pads with notes,
and they can never find anything.
And so, what we wanna do is we wanna clear all that away
and have a simple system.
Okay, so, as I've already said,
capturing everything puts you in the leadership position.
It gives you the power.
Another story, which I think I may have mentioned
once before, was sitting in a meeting
with a CEO, and he was the 90% owner
of a very large insurance company.
They actually owned 13 insurance companies, all rolled in.
And we were talking about the pricing
of some of the software we were providing.
And he said, no, no, I clearly remember we decided,
and the price was quite a bit lower in his memory.
Now, just one second, and I hit a page back,
and I said, on this date,
he said, oh, wow, you wrote that all down?
I said, I did.
Now, you can imagine when I did that two or three times,
it very quickly became that I was the reference.
So, very quickly, if you're the person
who has that kind of access to information
at your fingertips,
you automatically gain the leadership position.
So, here's a couple of keys,
three big keys of making this all work
to make sure we use it.
Keep one source only.
If you have yellow pads here,
some of the stuff in a to-do list,
some of the stuff on paper,
and you have them in different sources,
this will never work.
So, there has to be a single source,
a single point of control.
And it needs to use white space.
So, the layout on the forms, most people get a book,
they just write both sides of the page,
and they just keep going.
Your brain actually battles to map that.
So, we're gonna talk about how to use a book
in such a way that your brain maps it very, very easily
using white space.
When we ran a school in Atlanta,
one of the things we learned was
you have to leave a lot of white space around the walls.
A lot of teachers, especially for younger kids,
will fill every available space with pictures and diagrams
because they want to keep it stimulating.
But what they found, some researchers found,
that if children, while learning,
have real open space on the wall,
somewhere they can just look at and think,
it creates a landing place, a place to think and to create.
So, we're gonna build some of these elements
into the system.
Okay, so here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna take a book,
and in the book, on the right side of the book
is what we call our action side.
So, here is an example photo from my own mind book.
On the right side, it's just all the to-dos.
You'll notice that there's a to-do list
that's just a date in the top right-hand corner.
I build these to-do lists every single week.
So, every Monday morning, I write a new to-do list.
I go back to the previous to-dos,
and I pull them all into this to-do list.
And I'll explain why in a second.
The right hand side, the left side is for infrequent information.
It's more just information that I may want to capture.
And I'll talk about that in a second.
But for right now, let's just concentrate on the right side, the action side.
So I've got many, many pages where there's absolutely
nothing written on the left side of the page.
And I only use the right side.
And of course, some people say, oh, we need to save paper.
We need to do this.
Well, this sure we need to do those things, but this system is designed
to give your mind a lot of white space to work with.
So our to-do lists all on the right side of the page.
Then on the left side is more like the info side.
So anything that I capture about people.
Now, these are not people I want to put in my contact management list because
the contact list just gets flooded, but maybe it's an occasional thing.
Like somebody gave me a quote, or it's maybe somebody I'm going to talk to once.
It's not necessarily somebody I want to capture in my contact list.
The middle piece is anything to do with money.
You know, just a note about something.
Hey, I gave somebody a price.
I thought of something.
I use this extensively.
This little middle section on the left has saved me so many times.
You know, my accountant once called me, my tax accountant.
And he said, hey, in 2016, because he filed some back taxes
and refiled some things to get some some additional returns that he found.
He said, yeah, but in 2016, there was this amount that was
that was between you and this company.
What was that for?
I went and found the book from that period of time, page back,
put my eye right in the middle of the page because that's the only place
money maps to say my mind.
I know middle on the left side.
And I just put my eye there on the middle left.
And I just started swiping through the pages very quickly.
And I found it.
And there was a note for this amount and what it was.
He said that is in 30 years.
I've never seen anybody be able to do that.
And the bottom section is just ideas.
I often write an idea or a thought or a product idea or, you know, some
some concept that I want to capture or, you know, something I want to do
with my kids or whatever it is.
So these this is just a quick way to capture key ideas.
And again, I rigorously use these three areas.
So sometimes if I'm in a position where I'm trying to capture a a new,
you know, a new thought or an idea or a new product idea, I'll often start
and putting them in this position. So
so anyway, that's where we are.
So the key to this making this all work is this to do list.
If you forget everything else I said and start the to do list every Monday
morning, you say, why do you have to keep rewriting them?
Isn't that a waste of energy and time?
Actually, it serves a very key function.
And that is that to do list allows you to reassess
all the to do's that existed before.
So now one of the things is when you've written your new to do list,
I just circle the number.
That's that's how I prioritize.
I don't have three levels and different priority levels and all that.
I just have to do's and priorities.
And by priorities, I normally circle what I want to do
today or today and tomorrow in the very short time, the short term.
Every week, every Monday, brand new to do list.
And as we're going through that to do list, you'll find out that
every Monday morning you write to the to do list.
You transfer from the previous week's list.
And by the way, once I've cleared that previous week's list,
I just put a big line through that page so that I know I've cleared all those to do's.
And now what happens
if I find that the same item is being written every single Monday?
I have to ask myself, is this just something I can delete?
Do I even need to do this?
Because clearly I'm not getting to it either because I don't want to do it
or because it's too difficult to do or for some reason I'm delaying this.
I'm obviously deliberately avoiding this.
So Christian, can I just delete this?
Do I even need to do this?
Or can I delegate this?
Can I ask somebody else to do this?
Can I give this to somebody in my team?
Or can I give this to, you know, to an accountant or my
my tax person to do it or whatever it is?
Or can I delay this?
Is this really something I have to do this week?
Or can I put this off for a few months and then put it,
you know, in your calendar and say, you know, three months from now,
I want to I want to put I want to relook at this.
Or the final step is, can I automate this?
Now, this is a very interesting point, because in today's modern situations,
we can automate so much stuff, right?
So depending on how technically savvy you are, you can have
there are several automation tools, but maybe it's as simple as why.
What I wanna do is I'm gonna just write a rule in my email.
So when that comes in, automatically copy so-and-so,
copy so-and-so, and mark it as read.
It could be a simple automation like that.
So we call this the three Ds A.
Can I delete it?
Can I delegate it?
Can I delay it?
Or can I automate it?
Now, so that's the reason we want you
to keep rewriting the to-do list every Monday morning
so that you go through this process.
And because what this does is over,
within a few weeks, your brain is remarkably good
at figuring out what you actually going to do this week
and not to put stuff on there that's just,
you know, a lot of us write long to-do lists
and because there's no locked-in timeframe,
they just get longer and longer and longer.
And that general feeling like you're just getting further
and further behind, like you're not in command.
That's the feeling we want to get rid of.
So remember how we want to do this fresh every single week,
start fresh every week, start with a clean slate.
Okay, I'm going to talk very briefly about meetings
and I'm going to talk about the big mistakes
I see most people make.
When most people track a meeting,
they try to write down everything
that was said at the meeting.
Meetings, in this context,
is we start a new page for the meeting
and all we write down is decisions.
We don't write down who said what, just decisions.
And we decided this, is this what we're going to charge?
We decided John is going to do this on Wednesday.
So we write down what was decided, who's doing it, and when.
And that's all you need.
You don't need to write anything else.
And then the reason we circle some of them,
you circle the ones where you're the action point.
And you know directly after the meeting,
you know exactly what you're going to do.
Now, the same for projects.
Now, remember, you can be using Asana or monday.com
or any very complicated
or sophisticated project management system.
This is the system that manages the system.
This can be something like we had a meeting
and we made these decisions
and you circle the one that was your action point.
Then you can go to Asana and do whatever it is,
but this is your command and control center.
This is the place from which you rule all these entities,
all these elements.
And note-taking, I know a lot of us use electronic note-taking.
I have now transitioned entirely electronically
to note-taking as most of us have.
And, but every now and again, there's an action point
from going through a seminar or something like this.
And there's something I want to remember.
And so that's when I will put that on my to-do list.
Once you finish a meeting, what do you do?
You transfer the circled items,
the ones that relate to you, to your to-do.
That's what you do.
That's for meetings, notes, whatever.
Anything that, so you only have one to-do list.
You don't have to-dos that are stuck in your meeting notes.
You don't have to-dos stuck in your projects.
You don't have meeting notes on a loose piece of paper,
on a text, whatever.
You only have one to-do list.
That's the one source.
That's really critical to the plan.
And I'll wrap up with this.
This is a little more of a additional task you can do,
especially for those who've been doing it for a while.
If you find that you have repetitive tasks,
you don't want to keep writing the list
for the same items, right?
So examples like, you know, travel or month end,
at the end of each month, you know, you create a report
or you do whatever it is.
You can just have one monthly list
and you just add to that list.
And so for instance, if you're doing customer service
and there's always the same sort of process
you go through every month or every week,
you create that repetitive list.
And every time you remember something new to do,
you update that list.
So that will make you better and better and better
just doing that one repetitive list.
And so that's not a list that gets copied every week.
That's just a repetitive list.
I'd sometimes dog tag that or, you know,
fold a little corner over just so that I can make sure
I know how to get to that list quickly.
So any of those type of structures work.
So we've talked about capturing,
talked about using and now enhancing.
Now to enhance the system,
we use the Japanese concept of Kaizen,
which just means good change.
And the difference between Kaizen
and most Western ideas of, you know, continual improvement
is the big difference is in the Japanese idea of Kaizen,
it's tiny micro improvements every day
that are hardly noticeable that over a long period of time
produce huge change.
In the West, we're like more staircase.
We want to reorganize the organization.
redo the filing system, you know, do spring cleaning the whole house, or, you know, I'm
going to organize my club instead of doing one tiny thing per day.
So Kaizen is a mindset you do every single day.
And so tiny changes every day will transform.
So maybe to each day, you do a little tweak, make your email a little bit better, that
one little automation, organize your desk a little bit better, clean out one drawer,
tiny little changes every day over time accumulate.
So that's the concept of Kaizen.
So Kaizen is about building quality to people, not processes.
And we can spend a huge amount of time on this topic.
So I'm just going to simply say that generally means a lot of things we do right in the West.
Quality improvements is something that's taken us a very long time.
Because if I ask most companies in the West to improve quality, what do they try to do?
Fix the process.
They try to add more steps to the process.
In general, when you ask people from the East to improve quality, they invest in their people.
And so because their view is that's where the quality will, that's what will create
the quality.
So I want to suggest you invest in yourself, give yourself an opportunity to do this.
So I'm going to end the screen share there for a second.
And just before I hand it back to Dia here, let me make one quick comment.
Whenever I come in and we always present this, there's the usual three big pushbacks.
Number one is I already have a system.
And if I'm the leader of the company, I usually say, that's cool.
Show me your system.
And if it works, great.
But if you drop the ball and you start dropping ball fairly regularly, I'm not going to believe
anything about that system.
Number two is the second pushback is, do we all have to do this?
And my answer is, well, if we do it together, then we develop a confidence in one another
that if I know an item isn't just somewhere on your, you know, in your computer, on your
phone and some loose disparate system, if I know that it's been properly queued, that's
why I call it the cue book.
Once an item is properly queued, I know that you're going to take care of it.
My confidence in you skyrockets.
And thirdly, the pushback is, you know, this seems very paper driven and old fashioned.
And my view is, yeah, find me a better system and I'm in.
I've been looking for them.
I'm always open to learning.
I would love to hear if you do have something that's that brilliant.
I recently saw a video which I sent to some of the team members and is one of the guys
I follow.
Anyone, if any of you use Notion, we all love Notion at Brilliant.
We love Notion at 828.
We love Notion, right?
So Notion is an incredible product.
And we have Slack for our informal communication.
Notion is like our source of truth where we keep all our documents and all our process
and procedures and everything's in Notion.
And somebody had literally planned a life plan around Notion.
It was so complex.
It was so massive.
I mean, he was literally timing how many reps he did in the gym for this exercise.
And he had everything in there.
And I was like, yeah, that doesn't sound very simple to me.
And just if it's not simple, people won't use it.
And so that's I've handed back to you there, Dion.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we're going to skip breakout rooms.
So we're actually going to move into Q&A right now.
And I do have some specific questions.
But before we do that, Dion, I wanted to go back over our three D's and our A. And
I know that those are actually sequential, that you need to do them in that order.
Can we go over that one more time?
Delete, delegate, delay, automate.
You want to make sure you go through in order with your tasks.
Because if you don't, you might be spending time automating something that you should
have really deleted up front or you could have delegated.
So it's actually a way to simplify.
So when you're going through that and every Monday you're rewriting your task, go ahead
and look at that and go, okay, remember who we have the repetitive list that you can add
in your Q journal?
You can have a list for every Monday.
Okay.
Do I delete this?
If I'm removing it over and over again, do I delete it?
Do I delegate it?
Do I delay it?
And do I automate it?
So I wanted to make sure we went over that before we moved on.
Thank you, Kimberly, for posting that in the chat.
Okay.
So people are very excited.
Dion, there's a lot of excited people ready to try the Q system.
It sounds great.
I did get one negative feedback and that was they wanted more Lord of the Rings references.
So next time, more Lord of the Rings references.
With pleasure.
Yeah.
Dion, let me jump in on that.
The 3Ds, I think, yeah, thank you for bringing that up.
That is actually in season three of the training, we actually bring this up for a whole corporate
level.
Because as a businesses, we often end up automating things that shouldn't even exist.
time optimizing processes that should actually have been deleted. And so we do this thing upside down.
What this exercise does, it gets your mind in the right frame of mind to delete things before you
automate them. Delete something before you spend all that time trying to optimize something that
actually shouldn't even be in your world. It shouldn't even exist in your process
as a business or as a person. So thank you for bringing that up. Absolutely. We're getting some
good questions in the chat, please. If you want to throw them in the chat, we can get them
sequentially. Or if you want to raise your hand and ask a question, also feel free to do that.
And then I'll get into some of my questions too. But the first question off the bat was,
Dionne, do you have a separate Q Journal for personal versus business? And I want to wait
for a second for you to share about that. I know that I actually do have two separate,
so I'm breaking the law, Dionne, because I homeschool kids and it's a lot to do in one
journal for me. So I do have two separates, but you tell us, Dionne, why we should only have one
journal. Yeah. Well, so let me comment on your situation because you're not actually breaking
the rules. You're just creating what you've done is you've created a subsystem. It's okay to have
subsystems. It's okay to have your project management or your, like your case, your,
you know, kids homeschool or whatever other things you can have. So you just need one system to rule
them all though. And that's the, that's the thing. So therefore personal, Hey, I want to remember,
send flowers or whatever it is you want to do, you know, in your, your personal life.
I think it's in the same way. You don't have multiple calendars. I mean, you do for your
colleagues to see, but for yourself, you have, you know, you want to know that,
you know, in the evenings, you've got this going on the weekends, got this going on with the kids
or whatever it is you've got, you don't run really what, you know, multiple calendars, same thing.
The key, remember, is for you to feel in control. The key is to free your mind. The key here is to
put you in a position where you own this thing so that you trust the system so that your mind
will be free. And if you've got two systems, three systems, you dilute that effect.
Thank you. Okay. So a couple more questions in chat, and then I'm going to go to raise hand. So
in the chat, Francis asks, I know you write your tasks on Monday, but what does the rest of the
week look like? Where do we put our tasks? Do we just put them on that list? We started on Mondays.
Yes. Just keep your tasks going for the whole week. Absolutely. Yeah. You just keep writing.
The trick is not to start a task that you started six months ago and it's still going.
That's the thing to stop. What we're killing is forcing the three Ds and the A. That's why
we're just writing a new list. Because when you keep writing that same one over each Monday,
that's when you go, hang on a second. Should this even be here? Should I just delete it?
And there are weeks when we have multiple pages of tasks. So, but they're always on that right
column. So it's very easy to go through and find those tasks and keep them structured.
Yeah. Don't worry about trying to leave extra pages and trying to keep it all. What I do is
I start writing, but in the meantime, let's say I'm halfway through the page with the,
and I'm like three quarters of the way through the page. I turn over, I started a meeting. The
next thing I was doing a project. Then on page three or four pages later, I find, oh, I'm carrying
on with the continuation of my list. You're smart. You know that I number mine. So if I get to number
13 and then the top of the page is 14, I know that that 14 means it's part of my list. I don't
have to, I know it's not suddenly part of a meeting or whatever, but you can write to do
continued if I suppose, if you wish. I've never been in. So if I showed you all my Q journals,
that if I held them all up like this, I have literally got 30 years of this stuff and they
stacked in my office. I have, I can go back 15 years and look at stuff and it's amazing. Every
now and again, you do, right? But the more important thing is keeping in command today.
That's the thing. Okay. Last, I am last texted one. Michelle asked, where do we write down the
items we delay or want to do eventually, but can't, is that an idea section, Dion, or where
would you classify that? Yeah. So the best place I do with ideas, I use, I use my phone to drive
that. So I put that in my, in my calendar. I would go in say three months time, and I just
go pick a random date and say, okay, on May 7th, review this point. And I just put it on a, on my
calendar. Another thing is if I don't have my Q book with me, a little cheat, remember I talked
about enhancing the system every now and again, you've got a to-do list and you don't have your
book with you. So what I do is I just take my phone and I send myself an email and in the,
in the subject heading, I put the item I want to add. So I don't have to read it. I can see that
straight off the top. And what happens then is I can immediately get it into my book. Cause I know
once it's in that book, it will happen.
Absolutely. OK, I'll get back to some of the other chat responses,
but right now we're going to go to our raised handers.
So coaching team, I don't know your actual name,
but I would say your actual name.
So go ahead if you want to unmute.
All right. My name is Megan. Sorry.
OK, so I just want to see if I'm like following this.
It almost seems like too simple that I think I'm in my brain.
I'm like, surely it's more complicated.
But I think what I'm hearing you say is like you've got one Q journal
and you can put everything in there for all of your life.
And the right side is always action.
The left side is always information.
So whether it's like I'm writing my to do list for the week,
that'd be the right side or meetings.
Like you said, action items, decisions, right side or project
action items, right side, like for basically you can apply anything.
And it's like action items, right side info, left side.
That's the concept.
I mean, that bottom line, good, good summary.
And you I'm so impressed that you can go back 15 years with this.
So you just you date these things and you just go through your journals
and you're like, that's where it is.
Yeah. So right in the front of the book, if you can see it over there,
actually, as a date, this one started.
And so I know when I when I ended up with the end date on it.
So they don't start. They just keep going.
Yeah. So I've run up to four companies simultaneously
and kept everything set separate running this.
And then recently, you know, I've run eight to eight with Pedro
and I've been involved in running as the president of the company
and I'm running brilliant and I'm running my own company.
And then I started building some of the other companies around Pedro,
keeping them all straight, talking to.
And are you writing separate like lists for these separate things
but in the same book? No. One list.
Yeah, it literally says I'm talking to Graham, then I'm going to Pedro,
then I'm talking to insurance company for Fortis Financial,
and then I'm talking about something about Church for Kingdom Life now.
And then I'm doing this.
I just put them. It's my life.
It doesn't have to be.
Yeah, it's simple, simple, simple. Yeah.
I love it.
Yeah. Yeah. People.
How do you do all that?
The key to doing all that is not to get stressed
and key to not being stressed to have a system you trust.
Absolutely. OK, Natalie, and we have got some fun questions
we're going back to in the chat as well about houses burning down
and how do we make sure we protect this legacy wise?
But Natalie, go ahead.
Yeah. So I've been wanting to ask you this question,
because what happens when you're in those moments?
So in our business, like we have moments where Pedro is rapid fire,
giving us details of the offer that he's finally decided
this is what it's going to be.
And I'm trying to keep up in my little Q notebook with what he's writing.
And inevitably, I always miss something that he says
in the in the process of writing down what he just said.
And I'm really finding that that period of time
is stressful for me because I can't write fast enough.
So do you have any cues for or any ideas for that?
And then my second one is,
what happens when you get ideas in those moments?
So the idea is easy because there goes bottom left
on the on the left side, the bottom piece, the bottom third.
You can you can use a little more space.
If you think the idea is small, it's fine.
I've got a lot of people like Pedro Graham in my life
who speak what I would say very condensedly.
I've got to a point when I talk to Graham,
I've actually got an automation because I automated this on my phone
to get voice memos.
I'd literally say, record this.
And then I just listen.
So you put it next to your computer right on the Zoom call.
They have to record the whole thing.
And I just listen through it.
And then I can you can you can play it back at different speeds.
But Graham is so profound.
And then he says things and then I'll stop, stop him and say,
can you say that again?
And he says something completely different.
I have yet to have him repeat just what that brilliant thing
he just said again, and that's gone.
But the team knows now and sometimes we'll have long,
you know, things and, you know,
we even have some VAs that will then transcribe some of that.
But yeah, record it.
OK, thank you.
OK, Crim.
Yeah, just wanted to quickly like ask about
when you have your journal and then you have subsystems, how do you
do you write?
So say, for instance, we're using Notion and we have our QBook.
Do we write everything in Notion and then we read the same stuff on on the QBook
or do we like generalize it on the book and make it detailed in Notion?
Yeah, that's such a good question.
Michael is asking a very similar question and.
So the idea is, no, definitely don't duplicate it.
What would be your command and control?
Sometimes if there's like a lot of project items,
you can say, go and do item two, seven and 11 on Notion.
You know where it is in Notion,
you know what the project is.
So you don't have to over, whatever puts you in command,
write down what puts you in command.
But write down that when you check that,
you know it's done.
You don't have to repeat.
Like if you have a very complex project management system,
maybe using monday.com or Asana or something,
that's got a lot of detail in there,
but maybe you just should say, you know,
you go look at Asana and you pick the top three things
that you need to do there.
So something like that.
Got it, thanks.
That makes sense.
Okay, Dion, so what is,
have you ever explored a digital option
to capture these things in case of fire or a flood?
I know Notion is probably the closest to that.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Because there are a lot of people who are very concerned.
For me?
That's such a great question.
Says I've never had a flood or a fire.
No, I'm at risk, I would say.
Can you transfer any of this into Notion?
I know creating a second task creates complexity
and we know that complexity is what we're avoiding.
What would you say to our Notion fans
that really want to make this digital?
I know Notion is very tempting because I adore Notion
and I love it and it's so powerful,
but I must say that it doesn't give your brain
the same mapping power.
I literally can remember where on the page a thing is,
you know, and that's very difficult
because that's physically moving around on the screen.
You're paging and you're going through and you're scrolling.
And so what, it destroys the mapping system, I think.
So I think Notion is very powerful,
but I don't think it's a replacement.
Secondly, I would say back to worrying
about capturing the old stuff.
Generally, you're referring to something
within the timeframe of the book you're presently carrying.
For the most part, it's rare you actually go
to one of the older books, very, very rare.
So if I were to lose them all,
I don't think it'll be the end of it for me.
But I don't know, maybe I've tried
to create the electronic version of this
by using writing notes.
I used GoodNotes and I tried to recreate this whole system
and it was just not the same.
Your brain doesn't map the same way
into electronic context.
And it doesn't give that sense of command.
I didn't feel that sense of control.
And so, and I've talked to several people who've tried.
Now, maybe you're wired differently
and you pull it off then, well done.
So I'm not saying it's the only system,
but I have seen it help a lot of people over 30 years.
So if you're the one who improves it, fantastic.
Share it with us.
Oh, we've got lots of questions in this session today, Dion.
I know for me personally,
I will put all of my extensive notes in Notion
and I will put repetitive tasks in Notion,
but I use my Q Journal as the command to point
to go to this project
and get all of these micro detailed tasks down.
And then I calendar blocks to go,
okay, I need to remember this in three weeks.
I'll put that in my calendar.
Those are all digital assists to the Q Journal,
but I do primarily keep everything in the Q Journal.
Okay, so we have a few more questions
and then we will go ahead after that.
I just wanted to make sure here.
Okay, so you did answer Michael's question,
I believe, Michael.
If you don't feel like that answered your question,
pop it in the chat again and I'll get back to that.
So go ahead, Kimberly.
Okay, I'm gonna need a little,
I'm gonna put the training wheels on to get back to paper.
It took forever to get off of paper.
So I have this, it's like a digital tablet,
but it's not a screen.
Like you can actually write on it
and it looks like your handwriting and stuff,
but it does save to the cloud, which I like,
but it's only one page.
I can't do like right, left page.
So what are your thoughts on that?
So what are your thoughts on something like that,
where you kind of still just have one page?
Yeah, I have tried that.
I think there is a real place for it.
I even got a really old iPad on those really big ones,
as big as possible, so I can get some of the left, right.
And it, again, the mind map doesn't work.
So I know you can try, I think probably the,
but if I'm going to so much effort to replicate paper,
why don't I just use the paper?
So that was where I landed,
but you may certainly give it a go.
I think whatever can keep the map in your mind
so that it doesn't scroll or zoom in, that's the problem.
The minute it changes the mapping of your brain,
I think that's where it doesn't feel, come on.
That seems to be,
I'm not sure that's a comprehensive answer either,
but it seems to be, I seem to lose
feeling. So I think whatever you do, he has the rule of thumb. Do
you feel in command? Do you feel you have a system you trust? And
do you feel your mind freeing up? If that isn't happening,
change that then your system isn't working. That's the
criteria we're using.
Fair enough. Can you tell us where to get personalized
leather journal?
Yeah, I just dropped it. Lindsay just asked me a minute ago. I
think I just I'll just let me let me drop it for everyone.
Also put it in with the notes of the replay so that if you're
watching on replay, don't worry, I got you. I'll put on there. I
personally prefer spiral bound because of the way that I write.
But leather journals also work to find something it's fun to go
shopping for your journal and find out what works for you what
you find inspiring. Steven and Bruce and a few other members
are going to try to develop an app. They're already you know,
all this stuff's happening. So there's lots of creativity in
the common. Okay, Karen, go ahead with your question.
So I put it in the chat. But here, Deon, I'm very, very
appointment driven, you know, so and for different organizations
that I work with, you know, like you, I have, you know, different
organizations and my own. So I'm also very visual. And I've been
using a passion planner. And I'm color coded, you know, for what,
like their zoom calls, and there's this client and that
client, and it helps. So I'm already doing paper, because I
love it. And it does help my brain. And so I'm really open to
this, would you then put, like, client calls, sales calls, like
would you put the general category, because you know, the
itemized ones are say in your calendar, or in your paper
planner, like, what's the best way to use that if you're very
appointment and call driven?
Yeah. So again, any subsystem that which what you're
describing is a subsystem, the calendaring here is a subsystem,
anything that you would do to manage that system is what
you're writing in your cue book. So hey, you know, check all my
appointments have all been confirmed, for instance, or make
sure the color codings was kept up to date, because those little
things you tend to forget, whatever helps you manage your
subsystems is what I found papers the best for.
Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. By the way, if your productivity doesn't
dramatically increased through this process, I'll be surprised.
I think it will. I'm with you on that. Yeah.
Someone said that sounds really complicated. I love it. And I
said, stop, stop. Okay, Jenny, go ahead and share this. And
when you're done sharing, if you may already be doing this, but
I would love to hear from you, because I know that we've done
this a number of times what it was like in the beginning of
implementation, and then you know, what it's been like after
a while.
That is actually what I was going to share, because I love
the conversation that's happening, because I can see all
the wheels turning, and people are already sensing the freedom
that's available. And so as someone who has been using this
as part of a team for more than three years, I just want to
say have fun with it, because it will completely set you free
in your workload. I am a list oriented person, and the QBook
has dramatically even changed my life with it. And it will
there will come a point with the QBook, where you realize,
oh, this is my stop safe. This is my fail safe. And for me,
that happened when we had so many projects, we were juggling
so many projects as the businesses was were
transitioning. And I couldn't remember my name, let alone what
I had to do from one day to the next. And my QBook had
everything in there. And what stays with me to this day is is
that I was not waking up at two or three in the morning saying,
wait, what do I have to do? What do I forget? What did I forget?
And it was because I had built that trust with the QBook. And
it does take 60 to 90 days, like Dionne said, to try to figure
out what's working, what do you need to adjust, because you're
going to take in a lot of information right now. And in a
week from now, you're going to ask a question that's already
been answered. But that's okay, because that's part of the
process of learning something new. So have fun with it. Ask
the questions, because there is a place in the QBook for almost
everything. And your team, it just builds such a trust and a
confidence in one another, when you see you're having a meeting
and you see your teammates writing down there to do their
action items from the meeting, and you know that that's going
to get fulfilled, and it's going to get carried through. So those
are my experiences. This is my favorite teaching you guys.
Thank you, Jenny. So good. It's, it's really true. And you
can, after your first 90 days of not trying anything, you can
then enhance further and Kaizen, it is a Kaizen process, you'll
learn how to figure it out, things will start making sense
just takes a little bit of back and forth a little bit of
practice.
this. And so I'm going to go ahead and wrap this training
here. But before you go, we did want to hold any solo members on
the call. If you just don't have time to hang out on the call.
And you're a solo member, please stay on. Dionne has something
he'd like to talk with you about. But thank you so much
post comments and questions also below the video on brilliant
leader.com. I will go ahead and upload some really detailed
notes and some screenshots there just for quick reference. And
I'll be watching that post to make sure if you have questions
happy to answer them in the meantime. So again, there'll be
an end of call survey, please fill that out when you guys are
hopping off. Looks like people are loving the training in the
chat. So go ahead and make sure you hit that survey. Let us know
what you liked what you'd see. If you have any questions or if
you want to see anything improved before next week
session. And we will see everyone next week. Again, if
you're a solo member, please hang out with us for a little
bit longer. Thank you everyone.