Audio Notes Episode 1: The Power of Compression

The power of compression (for young leaders)

As you grow as a:

• young leader
• young professional and
• entrepreneur is just a leader in general,

One of the things that you’ll see over time is you will have to do more in less time!

At first, it might sound untenable!

You’re like:

how am I going to be able to do this?

Well, at the end of the day, what you really end up doing is practicing this skill that not a lot of people talk about, which is compression!

So what is compression?

you’re basically taking the tasks that you have in front of you, and distilling it down into its key parts and compressing it.

Compressing it and pressing down on it until you’re like:

Okay, this thing, I can get done faster and faster and faster.

Because now you have the neural pathways, for those of you that are brain science nerds, you have the neural pathways that are there, and you become more efficient at it.

And also, you become more effective at it, obviously, if you’re picking the right thing.

So why is compression so valuable?

Well think of a car compactor.

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it’s much easier to stack two or three cars that have been really compressed into pancakes than it is to put one oddly shaped car on top of the other.

It leads to standardization and allows to better throughput.

which is basically a fancy way to say you’re going to become more productive by compressing your tasks.

The founders I work with through coaching.

I know one of the things that we’re talking about when they’re scaling is this idea of:

• how do I scale myself?

• How do I grow?

• How do I still get the things that I need to get done?

while more challenges and more things are going to be added onto my plate that I can’t anticipate.

Compression is one of those things, right? It goes hand in hand with batching.

Batching

For those of you who haven’t heard about batching tasks, effectively, you kind of group all the same tasks in one day.

EXAMPLE: Tony Robbins RPM System

I know Tony Robbins does a version of this with his RPM system.

Example: Sara Blakely

I know Sara Blakely talks about it of you know, she’ll have one day of the week where she focuses on a product, right for me, I use Thursdays as my meeting days, and I get a lot of my admin work done. That’s batching.

Now in that batching.

that one day where I’m getting that stuff done, I have compression of going, Hey, here’s seven minutes, here’s a one pager that I must have. So I can then focus in on the key details.

In another example of compression, you’ll see in businesses an executive summary, effectively, it’s like, okay, I might have 15 pages that I need to read through, but give me the summary that I can get the clear nuggets and bits out.

Another thing is having clear templated agendas is a form of compression for a meeting going, okay, here are the variables that we’re going to fill in, here’s what we need to get to. And it used to take me an hour to get through the agenda.

Right now it’s gonna take 15 minutes.

So for those of you that want to actually use compression as a practical skill, here, two things to focus on, take a task that let’s say, pick a meeting that you have in your calendar that takes about an hour to get through. But it drags on, compress it to 50%, aim to take that meeting, and that was an hour meeting and push it into 30 minutes a type. And, you know, 30 minutes of meeting time, because you can say, Okay, I’m gonna prep 20 minutes, because you know, let’s say Joe, ask these three questions that we spend 15 minutes to 20 minutes of the meeting, just trying to answer it going back and forth, nothing’s really productive. Instead, you spend 20 minutes ahead of the meeting and say, You know what, I already did this work, here’s a draft, and you share it with them. And effectively, if there any approvals or meetings or next steps, you do that. So that’s one challenge for you your compression challenge.

Second thing you can focus in on is what is something that you’ve done often, and create a template for it.

So for me, it could be, you know, working on just making things a little smoother throughout the day by saying, okay,

I get to get a quick workout.

Okay, and so getting a half hour workout, how can I get a 15 minute workout?

How can I get a three minute workout and bring a level of intensity to it. So yeah, when I have the time to get an hour be nice, but if I can just do the five or 15 minute, it’s a lot faster.

I you know, we’re talking about removing guilt as well here because you no longer feel guilty about not doing that thing.

[Note: That’s just a part of good behavioral design by Tiny Habits.]

Instead you check the box. And you can always expand when you have more time, which is the key power of compression. Expanding when you have more time.

Which at the core breaks down into if you have the time for you know, an hour, you can always go 10 hour, but if you design for six minutes and say okay, I’m gonna get this done in this time for six minutes. That is game changing, because if you have the time you can expand to the hour, but if you don’t, you still got the work done that you needed to get done and the core of it. For those of you who are familiar with the 8020 principle part of this has the 8020 principle component in compression you’re really focused focusing on a, what is it? 20%? What is the key thing? What is the key two things that I need to do to get this done? For those of you who have read the one thing, same idea, it’s the one thing that you need to get done the Tim Ferriss fans out there, right. It’s the lead domino that he talks about, that knocks everything else over. And when you put yourself on a shorter timeframe, using Parkinson’s Law, for those of you who are nerds from The Four Hour Workweek, that’s what you’re doing, you’re saying, okay, in these five minutes, I’m gonna do this thing to move it forward. What’s nice about this is for those of you who read tiny habits, you’re effectively doing your starter step, you’re saying, okay, in these five minutes, or in this 30 seconds, or in this two seconds, I’m gonna focus on this thing and get that thing done. And naturally, you start a chain of behavior, because you’ve already built momentum.

So all in all, in summary, right, compression is a valuable skill that will only accrue value over time!

That means start investing in it now!

Because three years from now, four years from now, five years from now, you’re going to appreciate it more and more, because it’s going to allow you to do more with less.

Second key component of compression, right?

There are two compression challenges I’ve given you in this audio note, check it out. And try that right one is take an hour long meeting and compress it down to 30 minutes, do your prep work ahead of time if you need to have templated actions, then from there.

The third component and the most valuable component is:

understanding that the power of compression is if you design for six minutes, you can always expand to 60 minutes when you have more time, versus if you design for 60 minutes and you only have six minutes a lot bigger challenge. So all in all right. We covered the power of compression.

I’m excited to hear what you have to thank and thanks for listening