[00:00:09.200] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.560] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.980] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.740] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.820] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back if you've been with us before.

[00:00:25.580] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:26.260] - Gordon
It's been a busy week, and I say that every week, but it's always a busy week.

[00:00:30.220] - Taylor
And you always say that every week as well.

[00:00:32.000] - Gordon
And do you know what's funny is that when you work for yourself, I think you make it busy. You find things to do or you find your list just grows with things that need doing, isn't that right?

[00:00:43.520] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:43.960] - Gordon
Yeah. So let's get straight on to our topics. Would you like to go first or shall I?

[00:00:49.480] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:00:50.800] - Gordon
Okay, so this week I have been recording some FACE: The Podcast. Now, FACE: The Podcast is a different podcast that I do, which is meant for Family And Children's Entertainers. Do you see what I did there? F-A-C-E, you see? And it's talking to and interviewing other family and children's entertainers. And the episodes are just over an hour or so each, and we talk to them about the ways that they do their shows; and their thinking behind what tricks they do; and their persona; and marketing; and everything to do with the business of entertaining children and families. And when we've done three episodes of three different people, we then have a roundtable, which I think is a great idea and has worked really well in the first one that we did. I've just recorded some more episodes and a new roundtable. And the roundtable is where we have the three previous interviewees and myself in a Zoom, and we just talk about things that are current, and we get different people's viewpoints. And one of the ones that we did was just recorded today. And my thanks to those who were part of that, if you listen to this. And it got me thinking, because one of the questions that we discussed was, what is the best thing about conventions? So when you meet up at conventions to have talks, and you have meetings, and you have lectures, and you have shops and dealers and people selling things - what's the best thing for each person? And it turned out that each of us felt that meeting people that we don't see very often, sitting down and chatting with them, was actually one of the most beneficial parts of a convention. And I tend to agree. The reason I go to magic clubs, which is like meetings for magicians, is a very similar reason. You go because you want to talk to other magicians, you want to share ideas with them, you want to get their opinions on things, you want to talk to them about things that have happened maybe over the last few weeks and just see if you've mishandled something or see if something you did was out of the ordinary. And just talk to people who are in the know, other people who are business professionals in this business. And so yeah, it's a little bit like you going to BNI and networking. And I think probably 'networking' is probably too much of a business word for what it is we do. But I do find that it's one of the most beneficial parts of meetings of magicians. And I think it's probably a really good part of what all business owners and people who run businesses should be doing: talking to other business owners. Not necessarily in their niche. I think for me it's good because I'm not in competition with these other people because they're all very localised. But if you've got a bigger business and you're talking to people who own a similar business just down the road from you, that may not be quite as beneficial because I think there'll be a lot of closed discussion going on there. But yeah, I think talking to other professionals in your business, who aren't necessarily competitors, is a really good thing to do. Well, I know the answer to this. You find the same, right? Because that's why you're members of The Admin Bar and various other groups that are with web professionals, aren't they?

[00:04:49.700] - Taylor
Yeah, I enjoy talking to people who are in similar situations. It's good to be able to bounce ideas off, ask for help, suggestions. If I am stuck with a section for a design, I'll go to some of my friends and say, "what do you think of this?" And then they give me suggestions and feedback. And I've thought, "oh, I didn't think about that." Or I can say, "I've got this situation where..." I had one recently where a client didn't renew their domain. And I asked them all and said, "how would you deal with this?" A lot of them said to let, leave them to manage it. It's their issue. When some of them were like, "actually, why don't you take control of it?" So there's different opinions and they obviously gave their reasons. But it's nice to be able to see what other people have done in situations that I've come across.

[00:05:46.360] - Gordon
And the more information you've got on situations like that, the better informed you can make a decision, right? So you've got all the information, you can then weigh up the pros and cons and decide what's best for you. So, yeah, I think what I'm trying to say is if you have the opportunity to meet with other professionals in your niche or just other business owners, then see if you can do that. Is there a BNI meeting? Is there something maybe a little bit less formal than that? Maybe you can-

[00:06:17.960] - Taylor
There's a website called Meetup, which have lots of meetups for different hobbies, for different groups and types of people. There's WordPress ones. There's obviously pretty much anything you can think of is there's probably a meetup for.

[00:06:32.290] - Gordon
Yeah. And I think for me, they're very beneficial, and I'm pretty sure that they would be for other business owners as well. So have a look. Use the website that Taylor has mentioned. We'll put a link in the show notes once I go and look it up myself and see if maybe you can just get a group of people together locally to you and just meet up once a month or once every couple of weeks or however is the best for you. And you can learn from other people and they can learn from you. That's my topic over. What would you like to talk about?

[00:07:08.370] - Taylor
So on Wednesday, I slept through my alarm.

[00:07:11.887] - Gordon
Oh.

[00:07:13.120] - Taylor
And this wasn't good because I had a PT session that was booked. So I woke up at half eight in the morning and my PT session was for half seven.

[00:07:23.420] - Taylor
Not ideal.

[00:07:24.220] - Gordon
No, not great.

[00:07:25.210] - Taylor
I had actually woken up at half five that day, but I ended up going back to sleep because I was all... I say I was going back to sleep. I wanted to sleep in for a tiny bit longer, 20 minutes or so, because I had time, because it was 5:30. I didn't need to be at the gym until a quarter past seven. So I had an hour or so before I needed to leave or do anything. That 20 minutes turned into two, two and a half hours-ish, and then I ended up missing. I apologised to my PT and said, "Apologies, I slept through," and he said, "These things happen." And I could have very easily given up my 75-day challenge.

[00:08:05.020] - Gordon
Oh, yes, of course. That was part of it, wasn't it? And if you give up, for those who don't know, if you give up, if you don't manage to do all of the bits on a day for your 75-day challenge, your clock starts back at zero again and you have to start over, right?

[00:08:19.920] - Taylor
Yeah, you go back to day one.

[00:08:21.240] - Gordon
Right.

[00:08:22.250] - Taylor
And I could have. And probably had I not been doing this challenge, I probably would have given up the momentum in the streak that I was on. I haven't missed the day so far, and I've been really consistent. And it takes a lot of planning, is what I've found. More planning than I ever anticipated, because I have to think about, "okay, where am I going to get these two 45 minutes into my day?" When I'm at the gym or if I'm doing some sort of sports, 45 minutes is easy to do because-

[00:08:55.330] - Gordon
We should explain. The two 45 minutes are one doing indoor activity and one doing outdoor activity. Is that right?

[00:09:01.370] - Taylor
At least one outdoor is all that's required. And doing some sport or some exercise, the 45 minutes goes very, very easily because most things are like an hour long. Going for a walk for 45 minutes is actually quite difficult because all of the places that I would walk to are less than 45 minutes. So walking to the office, for example, is about half an hour.

[00:09:28.390] - Gordon
Well, walking to the office in a particular route is half an hour, but you can find a different route and go a different way, and that will then...

[00:09:37.120] - Taylor
Yeah, it's more of just walking somewhere that is 45 minutes is more of what I was trying to say.

[00:09:42.520] - Gordon
But that takes planning, as you just mentioned.

[00:09:44.450] - Taylor
Exactly. And so I've had to plan a lot more about, "okay, if I'm going to be out this evening, I'm not going to have time to do that, so I need to get them done before then." So I, on Wednesday, walked around the park with the dog, and then I ended up walking from the park to the office. And then you picked me up in the evening on Wednesday.

[00:10:03.670] - Gordon
I did.

[00:10:04.680] - Taylor
I had to plan all that because I knew that I was going to be out in the evening on Wednesday, and so I wouldn't have had any time from about five o'clock-ish to do anything.

[00:10:14.740] - Gordon
And the last thing you want to do at 11 o'clock at night when you get home is go for a walk in the dark.

[00:10:19.830] - Taylor
Sometimes I wouldn't even have time to do that because we'd get home at half eleven, which is less than 45 minutes.

[00:10:27.310] - Gordon
And you've got an early morning on Thursday for BNI, so again, you don't particularly want to be exercising just before bed.

[00:10:34.630] - Taylor
Yeah. So, yeah, I guess my topic was just about planning and making sure that you keep pushing forward of what you've planned to do, even if things don't go to plan.

[00:10:49.360] - Gordon
And your solution to stopping yourself from falling asleep again and not getting up, what's that?

[00:10:57.040] - Taylor
Just stay up, basically. I think the biggest thing is just to get moving and go downstairs, maybe make my protein shake for the morning. Just do something that gets me over the five minutes that when you go to the toilet when you first wake up, you're still half asleep. It's very easy to get back into bed. So maybe go downstairs or do something just to get myself up and moving. And then by that point, it's like, "okay, I'm awake now. I'm not going to be able to get back to sleep." Just to get over that small hurdle.

[00:11:30.790] - Gordon
You could move your reading to the morning and have that as a wake up for yourself.

[00:11:36.050] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:11:37.450] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say today?

[00:11:39.330] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:11:40.430] - Gordon
Okay. Nice short episode for you. I think it was nice and concise, and there's quite a lot of information in there. But thank you for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.

[00:11:54.650] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:12:01.740] - Gordon
And if you click that little bell icon in YouTube, then you'll be alerted when our new episodes go live, which is normally 1pm on a Friday. And you can also listen to us on your favourite podcast platform if you prefer to do it that way. That way you don't get to look at us, but that might be a bonus for some people, especially this side. We'll see you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:12:34.110] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:12:36.660] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:12:37.210] - Taylor
Bye.

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