Latest / The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast / Episode 232. The Myth of "I Am Too Busy"

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Episode 232. The Myth of "I Am Too Busy" · The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast

• 0:00
  When you hear someone that, I'm always busy, I'm always busy. I never hear super successful people, a person say, I'm always busy. You know, they know they're busy. They're not, they're not just talking about it.
• 0:01
  And I've seen this and they're just so busy. I just can't get anything done. I'm just too busy. It's the same thing. It's like, I'm always just putting out fires. I can't be proactive. And this is something that's, that really comes down to you, your strategic approach and what you're doing .
• 0:02
  Yes. If you feel like you're always putting out fires, well, what's the reason for that? What's that bottleneck that's causing it? Is it the customers? Is it internal? Is it staff? Is it dispatch? Is it management? Is it, you know, is it you yourself? Is it your teammates? There could be a lot of things that Could make you feel like that i'm always putting out fires or that i'm always busy And if you keep telling yourself in your head, i'm always busy you're going to be I wrote a linkedin post I think 2018 That I'm always busy because this is really where I started.
• 0:03
  Cause I started listening to people 2019, just really started to listen to people in the environment I was in, in the corporate world, and just from different people inside there, the ones that I thought was super successful and seeing how busy they were going from seven o'clock in the morning until even email on eight o'clock, I mean, mailed them or texted me at o'clock at night, and they're still responding back to me.
• 0:04
  And then seeing other people in the corporate world that I didn't even know if they were doing anything, but they were busy. Anytime I talked to them, they're busy. I'm overloaded with emails. I'm overloaded with this, and I can't do this. And I don't have time for this. And I'm always in meetings. And I took a look at that, that point.
• 0:05
  And that's when I wrote that post when I'm always busy. What is busy to you? Right? What is busy? Are you, are you busy, productive, getting stuff done? Am I putting out fires and being productive, getting stuff done? And this is where it comes back to taking a look, which we talked about already, and reflecting on all those things that you're doing.
• 0:06
  If you're always putting out fires, what are the fires? Okay, first step, you gotta, if you say I'm putting out a fire, what, Does putting out a fire mean to you, not to anybody else, to you? Is that someone calling and saying, okay, we got a call over here and the, and the drain's plugged and the water's leaking?
• 0:07
  And maybe that is putting out a fire. Is it a rack being down somewhere? And then you got to go and rush there. Is it a customer who could have called in on Tuesday, but they're only called in on Friday and now it's an emergency? For a frozen up case. So what is that? Five first step is what is that? I'm putting out a fire to you.
• 0:08
  That's step one. And step two is really reflecting on, okay, if this is always happening and I always feel like I'm putting out a fire, what is your strategic approach now to now tackle that? So this, there's a lot of things that come into play with this. So it's going to be time management, responsibilities, staffing, or resources.
• 0:09
  Okay, training and development will come into play. Lots of different things. And what is the long term solution? Because if you keep saying I'm just putting out fires all the time, you're just going to be putting out fires. Because once again, you're impregnating that into your brain. Because when you say that I'm always putting out fires to someone else, that's probably just a regular day.
• 0:10
  They're not saying I'm putting out fire. So, and some other person maybe, okay, well, what's my, what's my strategy to be more proactive than reactive? Cause we know there's lots of customers that you're going to have that are just reactive. They'll call you just like I said, on Friday afternoon at 5 PM if they could.
• 0:11
  So what is your strategy on that? What is your team strategy? What is your dispatch strategy? Cause I see this time and time again. Companies hire in people in there. They need people to take phone calls from different customers. They don't really understand the refrigeration business and what's important and what's not important.
• 0:12
  And so once again, they need training. So maybe you work with dispatch and talk to them and build this relationship with them and teach them. And don't complain about dispatch because I see this as well. Complaining all other. Sending me to these dumb jobs at this time and that time, and I'm not even in the area, I'm on the other part of the city, and then just complain to them.
• 0:13
  How about you go and train them a little bit, or teach them, and talk to them, and educate them a bit, and help them understand what your situation is, and why you feel like we're putting out fires. Because if you don't work as a team, You're always going to feel like that. And if someone doesn't take that stand and try, and maybe the first time you come up and talk to dispatch, that lead dispatch just tears you a new one or your service manager or whatever, but you don't stop there.
• 0:14
  You keep trying. Maybe it's a different approach. You take a different conversation. You take the different way you talk to them and don't be talking, talking down to people, you know, figure out a solution for all of you. So it makes it easy for everyone. Cause when they're in the know. When they understand, okay, well, how do I delegate all these different jobs appropriately to where the different people are and who can do what?
• 0:15
  Cause that's another thing that we'll talk about in the resources. Like, who do I send the different jobs? Some people can go work on a chiller. Some people cannot. And you know, and they just don't have the experience yet. So getting to the point where you don't feel like you're always putting out fire is really up to you.
• 0:16
  It's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. It might take three months. It might take six months. It might take nine months. It might take a year to really work with the different parties inside your organization and your customers.
• 0:17
  And this is where the strategic approach comes in. And I think if you take the time to figure that out, and this all comes back to sitting down, writing down a plan. Writing down a plan to, and it should be on the top. How do we become more proactive? Step one, talking with the team. Maybe it's in the toolbox, talk meetings.
• 0:18
  Maybe it's setting a meeting with your service manager, with your director. Maybe it's setting a meeting with a dispatch team or whoever's parties involved. And you got to start somewhere because. More and more people I see continue to making excuses or continue to complain about things, but don't want to do anything about it.
• 0:19
  They want someone else to fix the, fix the fires, but it's only gonna, it's only up to you. Nobody's going to come in and fix the fires for you. And it's just going to keep growing. Cause I see that in the corporate world as well. It's just like, they just kept saying they're busy and they kept saying, they just keep piling more stuff on me.
• 0:20
  I'm busy, busy, busy. And this is from directors, you know what I mean? So if you don't take a stand and figure out how to resolve it, it's not going to get resolved. I'm just going to keep complaining until it gets feel so overwhelming that you just want to quit or leave or stop whatever you're doing.
• 0:21
  So you want to take the approach of understanding how you can be. Maybe in one thing, not all of them at once. It's not gonna, you're not going to fix it all at once. The first step is probably getting your mindset that we can do something about this. You know, when we get a call on Friday afternoon, and it's a frozen up end bunker, and maybe this session, you're gonna have to isolate, you're gonna have to pull that case.
• 0:22
  We'll have someone in there on Monday. Or, we have someone close, we can go in there, we can isolate that case, they'll be in there for about 20 minutes, they'll shut down that circuit, you gotta pull it for the weekend. And I know some customers don't want to hear that. Call another one. Call another contractor, then come and do it.
• 0:23
  Right? You've got to decide. And you've got to work with your team. You can't say this as, you know, you can't tell it. That's not your role to tell a customer, no, I'm not going to do it. And maybe it is, depending on the size of your company. But this is something you plan with your, your service manager.
• 0:24
  Maybe you have your service manager call that manager. And say, listen, we're not sending someone out Friday afternoon. We see here on the Ultrasight or E2 or Microtherm or Danfoss that the case has been frozen up since Tuesday. You're calling on Friday afternoon. We already have this in our contract, you know, or you send someone out who wants to go and it's, it's whatever the price is.
• 0:25
  These are the prices you guys set up the prices. And, but the first step is that planning. And then from there, from there, you start to work on how to be more proactive. So this is coming up with a strategy. So you don't feel like you're always putting out fire. So one of the strategies was, okay, each week we're going to have a toolbox talk about how to reduce the amount of inefficiencies we have.
• 0:26
  The inefficiencies could be, uh, from dispatch, sending different people out. It could be from not completing jobs on time because of training and education. Okay. Maybe it's, we don't have the resource cause we don't have the right people in place. So what does that onboarding look like? So when someone new comes on, even if they're from a different company, when they come on, what's that onboarding?
• 0:27
  Do you want to be a part of the solution? Well, you offer of what you can do to help for that onboarding. And some of this may be on your own time. And maybe not getting paid for it. But you know what? Do you want to feel like you're not always putting out fires? That's the question. And if you think it's always going to be up to you, The company didn't pay you for every, uh, everything outside work you're trying to do to accomplish.
• 0:28
  Well, it's going to be, you're just going to always feel like you're always busy or putting out fire. Sometimes you have to take responsibility and do the things that other people don't want to do. That's why it's not getting that. That's why more, most people feel like that because there's people don't want to do it's hard.
• 0:29
  It's time consuming. But if you put the work in to figure it out, to come up with these different approaches, honestly, down the road, six months, a year, you probably won't always feel like you're putting out fires. Now, this could be different if you're a one man show or a three man show in a company. Well, and you just, you're on call all the time.
• 0:30
  This is the way it is, because that business owner's on call all the time for sure. 24 7, because this is supermarket refrigeration or commercial refrigeration. But it's no different even in, in the HVAC world, if you work at a high process, uh, plants, for an example, if you work in a hospital and you take care of the surgeon room and there's weekend, there's surgeries going on, you have to go and fix that.
• 0:31
  You can't let that, that person going to do surgery have 110 degree room. It's just not going to happen. And if they have all the rooms all booked up, you have to go and fix that right away, that's an emergency or, , the same thing as the data center and data centers have a lot of backup, which is, which is good, but in some cases they don't, you have to go out and fix that.
• 0:32
  Even if it's on, on the weekend, maybe it's not as demanding as supermarket refrigeration, because there's a lot more. I guess there's a lot more perishable food, you know, perishable items, but depending on where you're at and what you're, what you're doing, you, you have to get an idea on how you can tackle, tackle those.
• 0:33
  How, how to get a long term solution for putting out fires? So we talked about it already. You, you want a plan. What is that plan? Okay. How do you involve people on the team to get on board and help you out? Because if you're at a big organi, bigger organization and you got 40 or 50 people at your shop, it may be easier to start with one person and talk to them.
• 0:34
  Find someone who feeling similar to you, but don't talk about and complain about it. Talk about it, how we can come up with a solution. So when the summer time hits and all these extra calls are coming in It's like how do you tackle that? So the business is more efficient That's the thing. So there's probably inefficiencies, like I said earlier, maybe in the dispatch, maybe in the service calls, maybe in them, um, maybe in the, the service service manager or the directors or whoever your operation managers, maybe there's inefficiencies there.
• 0:35
  So how do you guys work together as a team?
• 0:36
  How can we collectively start to work together to figure out how to do this and then ask questions? Why do you feel like you're always putting out fires and then a person's going to give some answers Ask another person. Do you feel like you're always busy or putting out fires? What is it? Well, it's these calls where the it's a plug drain or it's the calls on tuesday and you're calling on friday Or it's that this I feel like the The calls that I'm getting are in the opposite side of town when I could be closer to the calls by my place and feel more effective that I can get more.
• 0:37
  Where's those efficiencies? When there was someone else closer to that other job and they sent me to that job and they sent that person to this job. How do we overcome that, those obstacles?
• 0:38
  But you got to sit down and look at it,
• 0:39
  Awesome. All of you have a fantastic week. Crush it out there. Do something different than you did before you will become successful and I will see all of you again have a good one everyone.