E429 | The Productivity Secret Weapon

Today, I discuss a tactic that I have developed for myself to help crush productivity.  It is ok to give yourself "thinking time" and to let your mind wander sometimes.  It's ok to give yourself the downtime to do this!  Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the worst parts, in my opinion, of running a practice myself, was trying to figure out super bills and trying to keep track of super bills as well. Here's what I would get. Nobody would tell me they won a super bill and then six months later I'd get an email letting me know they needed six super bills so they could submit for outer network reimbursement, and I had to go back in and try to figure out what I saw him for and put everything together correctly for them.

This is. A company like PT Everywhere solves this problem and creates a ton of time freedom. For me, all of the super bills for anybody that we see within this platform with our local practice is housed within their member portal. So they actually can access it themself. We can see it, we can print it off with one click, we can actually track all their payments, their memberships, their packages that they have, and send them out anything they need from a documentation standpoint.

All in one simple, easy to track place. This saves a ton of time and it's really made it seamless for us to be able to have better communication on the reimbursement side with our clients that are requesting it. So if you are in practice for yourself, you're thinking about going into a cash rack, it's, I highly recommend heading over to pt everywhere.com, checking out what they got going on, because it has helped us a ton.

We use it personally, and I highly recommend that. Use it within your practice. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

Hey, what's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I'm gonna share, I think it's a secret weapon with you in terms of making the right decision and mental performance. And I think for a lot of people, they talk about, they're elaborate.

Hacks that they have and their lengthy morning routines, which I am guilty of having a fairly long morning routine. It's definitely not for everybody, but o one thing that is totally free that I wanna share with you guys, that is, has made a hum huge impact on me on a number of levels.

But ultimately I've noticed it be incredibly helpful in business and in my ability to think clearly. Downtime is what I call thinking time, which I got from a buddy of mine. The, there's a book the Road Less Stupid, I think is what it's called. He really likes it. I actually haven't read all of it.

I've read the first maybe 10 pages, but he calls it Thinking Time. It's a, it comes from this book. And there's also another book called Stillness is the Key, which Ryan Holiday wrote, which I read, which I thought was. And a lot of it they talk about just letting your mind wander intentionally and giving yourself downtime where you're not inundating yourself with information.

I'm guilty of this. I'm a prolific, prolific. Content consumer. I produce a lot of content, but I listen to so many audiobooks podcasts. Like I, I just listen to a lot of content, a lot of information, and for me, I, I just, I find that I can retain things better that way holds my attention better that way.

And for some of you, obviously if you listen to this, you're the same way. But one thing that I started doing, this is probably. A month ago I switched up what I was doing in the morning and I realized I just wasn't getting enough non-exercise based movement. I don't, I'm not in the clinic anymore.

I work out of a home office and it's very efficient. I was a lot of positives, but what I found is my non-exercise based movement was very low. I was, 4,000 steps a day. If it was a day that I went on a run, I would crack 10,000. But for day that I didn't I wasn't getting at least 10,000 steps as a benchmark, right?

So I decided, Okay. As part of my morning routine, I'm gonna switch this up and I take my dog on about a two mile walk every morning. And during that time, initially I started listening to podcasts or an audiobook while I would do that, and I decided, you know what? Let's test this where I don't listen to anything and I just.

I walk with Teddy in the morning. We usually go for a walk around, I don't know, five 15 or so, five 30. And it's been great. It's been great. And it's interesting what happens I think for many of us, we think that is unused time, right? We have to. Any little bit of like learning or content absorption into every single minute.

On our drive. And it's great. Like I've definitely made my car, in my classroom and many of you, I recommend doing the same thing. But there is something to be said for legitimate, just downtime, not thinking about anything. And movement in particular, I think, stimulates. A lot of this sort of sifting through different things in your brain when you're not inundating that with a podcast or a audiobook.

And for me, going on this two mile walk a lot of it was just I wanted to get some more non xray based movement mainly for like joint health. And what I found is I get more mental health out of it than probably anything else. Because of time to let. Settle and I always come back and it's so funny.

It's like I may have something that I'm working on trying to solve. Some challenge is the things I love about business is there's always something that you have to try to figure out. Or a problem that you're working on. There's always something that you're trying to improve or optimize or is there a better way, like thinking outside the box and it's great.

It's my favorite part of business. When you have some downtime for your brain to just settle and not be inundated with all these other, things all of a sudden it's funny what kind of just happens. It things settle and you get clarity. And clarity is a very rare thing. I get this two ways.

One, Is with discussions with other business owners that might see something from a slightly different angle. I think this is the benefit of any sort of mastermind group, if they're incorporating some sort of small group, work and hearing what other people are doing or their view on something.

And having these discussions not just from business. I forget a lot of. Personal value outta this out of having discussions with people that are not necessarily the same to me on many topics, and and being open to listening to them and seeing their point of view, I think is huge.

Something that, honestly, I don't think people do enough anymore. I think everybody's just angry at each other and they all want to yell at each other about shit. But not actually listening to each other and try to get a better idea as to why someone views something a certain way in, in business.

What is so nice is there's a very objective measure as to how somebody's doing, and that is the health of your business. That's your revenue. At, on the business side, the personal side, there's many other things that people can let go. And it's important to track those as well as far as like personal development goes.

But just in business it's very clear to see how somebody's doing. So you can have your opinions, but in some cases, your opinion. Doesn't, if it's not proven it's just a theory, right? It doesn't really hold a lot of weight versus somebody that's already accomplished something you're trying to accomplish.

And so it's beneficial to have these conversations with other business owners. You get a lot of clarity from that. The other thing they get a lot of clarity from is downtime, especially when there's some movement involved in it. Some people will notice this like, When they run, we work with a lot of PTs that are runners or work with runners, and it's just movement, meditation, it's just it's just time to think, time to focus on your breathing, to focus on your cadence, and all of a sudden, this thing that was puzzling you or challenging you, you're able to, be more creative and independently solve these problems.

And I actually don't know how it works. I'm sure there's plenty of things I could look up as to why it is the way it is, but neurologically, I don't know. All I know is that downtime is something that we don't get. Enough of we're inundated with social media, with content with television, with the internet, with kids, with all kinds of things.

And to engineer even 20 minutes of, some downtime I think. Is an unfair advantage if you are in business. And I'm, this is obviously helpful in many other ways, but if you're a business owner or you're aspired to be a business owner, that time is incredibly valuable and I think oftentimes you think it's a waste.

But there's a reason I wake up early. I wake up early, so I can do many of these things before my family gets up. I find that I'm very productive at that time. You might have to find. An evening walk works best for you or a midday walk. Maybe you do that over your lunch break and take some time to walk around and just think, and just.

Enjoy wherever you're walking, focus on what does that leaf look like? It's crazy. Like trees are fucking amazing and we just discount them all the time. But if you really think about it like it's a beautiful thing. And if you stop to really focus on it and appreciate it, it's, There's a lot of gratitude that comes from that, but there's also a lot of positives when it just comes to mental health and just clarity of things as your brain settles down and it doesn't have to try to do all these things at once.

It's, I guess it's like your computer, like working too hard all the time. It becomes more efficient whenever there's less to do and you restart it and you get, you get an opportunity to decrease some of the burden on it and that our brain is the same way. Totally.

It's a, it's an absolute advantage if you start implementing it on a daily basis. And I think it is something that you're probably gonna realize, man, I wish I was doing this more often. This takes some time, go for a walk, breathe a little bit, focus on some things outside of whatever's bothering you or troubling you or challenging you.

And it's funny what our brain will do because independently we tend to get to a point where we solve those problems.

Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there that are.

Literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connect with other clinicians all over the country. I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week. And we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.