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Redefining Summer to Boost Business Productivity and Personal Joy · The One Small Change Podcast

0:00
Welcome to the one small change quarterly
0:04
clarity check in call. I'm here to give you some thoughts
0:07
about how to look at your business now that
0:11
we're going into the third quarter. So the first thing is the
0:15
biggest myth that because it's summertime, business
0:18
slows down. So I want you to be a little bit of a contrarian and
0:21
say to yourself, what if this wasn't true?
0:25
What if in fact, you know, the summer was amazing? So we're going
0:29
to take a look at that. I mean, because one of the things that I
0:32
said was, where is it not summer? And started
0:36
looking at what kind of opportunities are there. But the other thing
0:39
is July 1st can be a place where
0:43
you can have as much energy as you do on January 1st.
0:47
You know how we have all this anticipation and we are all ready to do
0:51
things. You can have that with July. It does
0:54
not have to be. It's summertime and yada,
0:58
yada, yada. But here's the thing that I want you to think about. I'm going
1:02
to, I'm going to introduce a new model for you called productivity Ahead.
1:06
And the first part of that is a, is awareness.
1:10
Awareness of the situation. Our situation is
1:13
constantly changing and you get to
1:17
define what the situation is and what
1:21
you're going to accomplish in it. So the myth is that summer
1:24
is slow. It does not have to be.
1:29
Now, part of the problem or part of the challenge
1:33
is understanding how to change
1:36
your priorities so that you get the impact
1:40
that you want. So one of the reasons we think of summer is
1:44
slow is because people are on vacation or people don't want to work or
1:48
people don't want to talk to me, that kind of thing. And also
1:51
because you want to spend time with your family, especially if you've got kids or
1:55
you have places that you go and things you want to do. And so the
1:58
issue is taking a look at this particular
2:02
point in time, especially July and August and
2:06
maybe even September, if you got back to school, kinds
2:09
of things, and say, what am I going to make
2:13
priorities? Maybe. I mean, your
2:16
kids are always a priority. But you know, and vacation
2:20
or taking time off with your spouse or whatever the case may be is
2:24
always a priority. But maybe you need to do it in a little bit different
2:27
way. Maybe there's some things that are going to go to the bottom
2:31
of the, you know, in terms of priority. So it's warm,
2:35
you know, maybe you're not going to cook these huge meals. Maybe meals are going
2:38
to take up a lot less time. Maybe you're Going to teach your kids to
2:42
cook. I don't know why I'm stuck on kids today, but apparently I
2:45
am. So the first thing is that summer
2:49
does not have to be slow. You can think of July
2:52
as your new, your second, you know, new
2:56
year to take a reality check in your business. And one
3:00
of the things that's so good is that, you know, you get to
3:04
pause, you get to evaluate, and you get to
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leapfrog ahead, you know, and maybe get more done because
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you can focus on things longer and other people are not
3:15
doing things. So you get a chance to actually stand out in the crowd
3:18
more. The other thing is, nobody's buying,
3:24
and that's not necessarily true. There may be a lot less choices for them to
3:28
buy from. And so your offer is going to stand out.
3:32
I'll wait till September to focus again, which
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means all the momentum that you build up, you're going to lose, and you
3:39
want to keep that going. I don't want to plan
3:43
and mess up my vacation. I don't think that's true either. I
3:47
think there's a way to do all of these things and
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still come out with what you're trying to accomplish if you
3:54
are focused and make an effort to do it.
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Okay, so we already said you want to do the right thing for the right
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reason at the right time, the right way, and especially right for you. And
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so this is a great. A great way to look at this. So, for
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instance, this might be a time when you have a shorter work
4:13
week so that you have more time to spend doing
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other things. And a shorter work week doesn't mean that you're taking off Monday and
4:20
Friday necessarily. It could be anything that you want.
4:24
You don't have to be held back by previous false
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notions about the way things work. The other thing
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is, the model that I'm going to give you is called
4:36
productivity ahead. So I already gave you the A, which is
4:40
awareness of the situation. Your situation is different now
4:44
than it would be in December for a lot of different
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reasons. And because you're you, I have no idea what that is,
4:52
but that's something to look at. So the next thing is, if you want to
4:55
have more time to do other things, something
4:59
has to go on hold right now. For me, a
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lot of times, hold is something that's not
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going to, you know, that has a long lead in, that may
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not come to fruition for a while, that I can put off for a few
5:13
weeks. It also is ideas, because you don't need
5:17
to develop a whole lot of Things that you're not going to do till later.
5:20
Because information is constantly changing, right?
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And so when you finally get ready to do this thing that you
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developed several months earlier, it may not even be the same
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thing. So what can I put on hold? What can I
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eliminate? That's the E. Right? So when you're taking
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a look at what you can eliminate, take a look at
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not only, you know, the actual thing, but
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the which of those things are draining your energy and which of those
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things are giving you energy? The things that drain you of your energy
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are that you're not really all that excited. The shoulds I should do this.
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See if you can eliminate them. Okay. And if you're not
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sure what to do with it, then put it in the hold.
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Okay. The next thing is to automate. Now,
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automation we think of as being something that
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happens in a technical way, but it does not
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have to. Automation simply means a process,
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right. That you follow a process. One of the things that I did
6:25
when my kids got to be a certain age again, we're in summer and I'm
6:28
talking about kids, was, you know, I'm the queen of the
6:32
one pot meal. I like to put it together, throw it in the oven
6:35
or the soup pot and walk away. My husband, on the other hand,
6:39
is a really good cook. And so I cook Saturday. He cooks
6:43
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday we had leftovers Wednesday. My
6:46
daughter, who was the queen of pasta, we had pasta every Wednesday night,
6:50
whether it was spaghetti or noodles or ravioli or shells or
6:54
something or. Right. And it sounds funny saying this because I
6:57
haven't had this in years, but on Thursday, my son made sloppy Joe's, which was
7:01
his favorite meal. And on Friday, we went into the refrigerator and we
7:05
cleaned it out. We each picked the meal or a combination of meals that were
7:08
left over and finished everything. And then we started over again. So that
7:12
was. That was an automation. Right. And when
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you can automate, go through these steps not only in your business, but in your
7:19
personal life, what can I put on hold in my personal life? What can I
7:23
put on hold in my business? What can I eliminate in my personal life? What
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can I eliminate in my business? What can I automate in both
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these places? Right. And now once you've done
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that, now you're ready to delegate. And people have the
7:37
wrong impression of delegation. If you start with
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delegation, what's going to happen is you are delegating the wrong things.
7:45
You are delegating the things that are at the top of the pile. What you're
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actually doing, what Delegation actually is. Is training. It is
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training people to be able to step in and do what you do.
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So, for instance, in your personal life, delegation might be having the
8:01
kids do their own laundry. Okay? In your. In your
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business, delegation is finding somebody else that can.
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You can train to do what you do the
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way you want it done. Now, be sure you understand
8:16
this. It does not mean that you are
8:20
training a mini me. That is the absolute
8:23
wrong way to go about this. Because what that if you have a mini me,
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they're going to have all the strengths that you have and all the weaknesses
8:31
that you have, but they're going to be double or triple. So you
8:35
don't want a mini me, but you do want somebody who can
8:38
get you the results that you want. Now,
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I want to go back to the whole idea of summertime, right?
8:47
And time constraints. Time is
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kind of a. So let's start with prioritizing. You're
8:55
aware of the situation you're in and you want to prioritize it. So one of
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the first things that I'm going to say to you is what are the things
9:02
that you absolutely want to get done this summer, whether it's personal
9:06
or business? And you need to put that down
9:10
and put it in your calendar, make time for it,
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because those are the things if you don't, you're not
9:18
going to do and take advantage of the summertime. So
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I've already got days blocked down the shore on my calendar,
9:25
and the family already knows and has reminded me. Right.
9:29
The next thing you want to do is realize
9:33
that you can accelerate your business by
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changing the time constraints that
9:40
we've been brought up to believe. All right, My. One of the reasons that
9:44
I thought about this was one time I had
9:48
some kind of intestinal virus or whatever, and I could
9:52
only go about 45 minutes without having to run
9:56
for a bio break. And I was
9:59
like, you know, but at the end of the
10:03
day, I was surprised that I got more things
10:06
done sick than I did
10:10
well, because I knew that I had a hard stop. It
10:14
was like, I need. I had 45 minutes to do something, really focus on
10:18
it really hard, try to get it done as fast as I could and keep
10:21
going. And so I wrote a book with Andre Stenberg, any book,
10:24
called the 45 Minute Hour. And it's kind of like the
10:28
Pomodoro method. But the idea is, you know,
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for me, 25 minutes. 20 minutes is not enough. I can't
10:35
focus that fast, I guess. But 45 minutes is
10:39
great because it's, you know, It's a short amount of time.
10:43
It's less than an hour. So you're cramming an hour's worth of work
10:46
into 45 minutes. And then you have 15 minutes to do what
10:50
I call the tiny transitional task. And that means things that
10:54
only take you 15 minutes, right?
10:58
Or it's just a break, or it's to go outside for 15 minutes, or
11:01
it's to return phone calls or send emails, whatever you want to do.
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But the idea is that you can get more hours
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in the day, more hours worth of work done in the
11:14
day than you can by using the regular
11:17
hour time. Now, this is really important this summer because you're trying
11:21
to carve out. Your priorities are shifting and you're trying to carve
11:25
out more personal time. The other thing that
11:28
works really well is what I call the 21
11:32
day month. So every 21 days, you
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consider to be the equivalent of the month. And what happens is
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then you get 15 months in the year so you can
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accelerate your business because you're moving faster.
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Because our mental. Our mental thing is the first month, the first week we're
11:50
really committed. The second, the last week, we're really committed,
11:54
and someplace in the middle, we move our moment, you know, we lose our
11:57
momentum. So when there's only three weeks to get
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something done, you tend to stay motivated
12:05
and activated for the whole three weeks. So
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that's another change in time. Construct
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the third one I'm going to tell you about, and I kind of hinted to
12:16
it was your week. A week does not have to
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be seven days for you. It could be four and
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three. So you've got your main week and then you've got your
12:27
mini week that you're going to do things with. And I know this may sound
12:30
a little weird, but it works really well.
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Now. I'm not sure you want to live your whole life like this.
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You're working hard and working really fast,
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but you can get a lot accomplished in the summertime in
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this third quarter that is going to set you up for success in the
12:52
fourth quarter and also give you the time that you want
12:56
to be outside to do pleasurable things. It may even
13:00
give you a chance to change some of your habits. If you say, oh, if
13:03
I do this a couple of times a week, I can
13:07
easily carve out time to go exercise or take a class or go to the
13:11
movies or do something that you really want to do.
13:15
The other thing is, believe it or
13:19
not, this is a great time to make connections.
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One of the advantages of making connections is
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people like to be disturbed during the summertime. It's like,
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why not meet somebody and have a good time, right? So
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the other advantage is that when you make
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connections, you have the opportunity to
13:41
learn things that are going to help you leapfrog in your business.
13:45
Things you don't have to do every single step sometimes.
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The example that somebody told me that always impressed me is
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for a lot of countries, poor countries, they never
13:56
got landlines for telephones. They went right
14:00
from, you know, no phones to cell phones, right?
14:04
And they didn't have to do the infrastructure or invest and stuff like that.
14:07
So you can also get ideas that can help you with that,
14:11
people that can help you learn how to do things. So
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one of the things, and this was a while ago, but I really liked it.
14:18
One of the things that someone said to me, probably the easy way
14:22
to have a meeting or an event is to set it up in
14:26
Zoom, because as people register for it, you can
14:29
resend out the. The notice really simply without having to write an
14:33
email or do any of that stuff. And you can send it out as
14:37
many times as you want. It was like, oh, my God, that's a huge lifesaver,
14:40
right? That's going to help you with time.
14:44
There are a lot of tricks of the trade that you can
14:48
learn when you listen to how other people do things and
14:52
how they get it accomplished. And so I would say to you,
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you know, summer is the time when
15:00
I think you get to
15:04
prioritize pleasure and
15:07
business growth at the same time and have a lot of fun doing it.
15:12
Last summer, we traveled and we made sure that
15:16
we stopped and met a couple people that I'd only met on Zoom before.
15:20
And it was a wonderful experience, actually meeting somebody in person.
15:24
And that was like a priority that I had last year. So,
15:28
again, situational awareness. Know that some
15:31
of the habits that you may change in the summertime may not
15:35
work well when we get to the fourth quarter, right?
15:39
But that's okay because you can say to yourself, I'll do this again next.
15:43
Next year, maybe I will do it for the second and the third quarter,
15:46
and I will use some other kind of thing for the fourth and the first.
15:51
So I'm gonna go back to where I started
15:55
first. And I think I said this last time is the more
15:59
boundaries, the more benchmarks you have, the faster you're going to move,
16:02
because the less you're going to have be able to. To slide back and
16:06
lose your momentum. So again, if you have the 15,
16:10
15 month year, you're checking in on yourself 15
16:13
times versus just 12. Right.
16:18
If you have break your week up into two parts
16:22
again you've got more check in points. If you do the 45
16:26
minute hour again you have more check in points. And so
16:30
you're just going to move faster just by the fact that you have to say
16:34
where am I? What have I got accomplished? What have I got left to do?
16:37
All right, so that's the first thing that time is. Time is, you
16:41
know, kind of a man made constraint.
16:46
Yes, there are some, you know, like the sun sets and
16:50
rises, that kind of thing. But the thing that we've got that there's 60
16:53
minutes in an hour. Somebody came up with that. Right.
16:58
And you'll notice that when you're really focused on something, something,
17:02
sometimes the time seems like it goes so fast or in
17:06
other situations the time seems like it goes
17:09
excruciatingly low. So you can control that
17:13
somewhat by the way that you work.
17:16
The other thing is know that
17:20
reprioritize with intention. You know,
17:24
if you don't make spending
17:28
family time or vacation time or whatever it is a priority
17:33
so that it is a goal unto itself and
17:37
you are doing it because somebody else wants you to do
17:40
it. You're not going to enjoy it as much because you're not
17:44
going to be as ready, you're not going to be as
17:48
have as you're going to have too many things that are left on hold, kind
17:51
of. So I would say to you
17:56
first, think of July
17:59
1st and this is past July 1st, but think of July
18:03
1st as an absolute way
18:07
to reset your year.
18:10
Come to it with the same energy that you have
18:15
for January 1st. The other thing is
18:19
when you're prioritizing, say to yourself, or when you
18:23
are talking about these myths or constraints, say
18:26
to yourself, what if this wasn't true? What if it
18:30
wasn't true that people didn't buy anything in the
18:34
summer? Right. What would I do?
18:38
Okay, so that gives you a different insight. What I did
18:42
was say where is it not summer? And I decided to have a
18:46
summit during the summer and it's not summer in Australia.
18:50
So I decided to make it what I call Australia friendly
18:54
time. Friendly. Right. Because I've been in a lot of networking
18:57
groups where people have been in events and stuff like that. It's like the middle
19:01
of the night for them. So this is going to be like 7 o' clock
19:04
in the morning for them. It's going to be in the evening for me. All
19:08
right, so is it, is it true?
19:12
What if it wasn't true and where is this not true
19:16
are two really good questions that you can ask
19:19
yourself so that you can get ahead on what you're doing.
19:24
And lastly, know that not everything
19:27
is going to work all the time, right?
19:32
So things that work right, you want to keep
19:36
but realize why, why they are working and when they are
19:40
working, right? So they may be a good strategy for the summer, but they
19:43
may not be a great strategy for the winter of how you're handling
19:47
your time and what you're getting done. But the whole purpose
19:51
for this is just because the
19:54
month and the week has changed, don't lose the momentum
19:59
that you've already started. Build on it. Keep building on
20:03
it. Because every time you slow down,
20:07
every time you stop, it takes inertia. You have to
20:11
overcome inertia again. And I'm not saying to you that you
20:14
shouldn't take a break or that you shouldn't take some time off. I
20:18
mean, you know, I think that everybody should, in their
20:22
calendar should put some time for creativity because
20:25
you have to make space for that. You have to be
20:29
relaxed, you have to feel comfortable, right? And
20:32
it doesn't mean that you have to take a whole day. It could mean that
20:35
you take two hours every week. It, you know, depending on
20:39
how your brain focuses, right?
20:43
But what you want to do is make sure you're working on the right
20:47
priorities for the right reason, the right way at the right
20:50
time, and they're right for you. So that's my
20:54
quarterly clarity check in call for you.
20:59
Enjoy this quarter, but it doesn't mean that your
21:03
business is going to slow down. This is the busiest summer
21:06
that I've ever had and at the same time, I've
21:10
had more time to do things with my family and my husband
21:14
because I had that intention to do that. So
21:17
that's it. So if you're listening to the One Small chain for the
21:21
first time, I'm glad you're here. I hope you will come
21:25
back. There's some wonderful episodes and some wonderful free gifts.
21:29
I will be doing this again when we get to the the beginning of the
21:32
fourth quarter. And there are lots of ways you can connect with
21:36
me. You can book a call. The one thing that I haven't
21:40
really talked much about is I have my accelerated VIP month.
21:44
Summer is great to do that. You can really focus
21:48
and really get your momentum going. If you're interested in that,
21:52
we need to book a call. It is one on one high
21:55
touch. We take a look at everything that you've got and we
21:59
streamline it and give you focus so that by the time you get to
22:02
September, you are whizzing along.
22:06
Okay. Also, you're gonna see
22:10
my monthly workshop. Also, if you're listening to
22:14
this, hopefully you signed up for the Sunday Scoop. So having said
22:17
all that, there's lots of ways that we can connect and
22:21
stay connected. I hope that you'll find something that you really liked in
22:25
this. If you're listening to this, be sure to make a comment and share it
22:28
on on social media. But until then,
22:34
change can be simple, but it's not always easy, and
22:39
it takes you out of your comfort zone. But it is so well worth it.
22:42
This is Yvonne McCoy, and I am glad you spent this time with me
22:46
today. Bye.