Welcome back to Tom engineering. It's great to be with you and wherever you may be in this wonderful world, I hope absolutely everything is super, and rocking and rolling in your neck of the woods. William Clement stone, a self made billionaire who started with absolutely nothing once said, and I'm going to read this because it's a quote and I don't want to get it wrong. You are productive your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment.
The things around you helping you towards success, or are they holding you back? See what Mr. Stone was getting getting at was that You have a choice to either actively manage and control your space, or it will actively manage and control you. Now, when I say space, I'm not talking about the solar system or the universe, I'm talking about two things, the space that surrounds your working environment and the space between your ears. You see, you possess the choice to control for the most part, what enters and is tolerated. In both of these. You possess the power to, to decide what impacts on your state of mind, your clarity of assessment, and the quality of your decision making and cognitive ability.
What I would like you to consider is to begin being ruthless in this area and be consciously aware of what You will and will not put me in your space. About a decade ago, I was engaged to consult privately with the owner of a large international distributor of natural stone products. I was already booked solid for about four weeks so by the time the day for our consultation arrived, we're almost a month had passed. When I first arrived at his his head office, Anthony told me that he was burnt out and seriously considering walking away from the business. So we asked him to hold off on that decision just for a short time while we proceeded with the consultation about his company. Now over the over the the day that we were together, we covered a vast amount of details and issues and problems and you know, solutions about his company.
But to cut a long story short at the end of the day, at the end of the first day with Anthony, he asked me this, what do you see as the biggest problem in my business right now? So I asked me He was okay with me being completely honest and direct with him because I knew that with what I was about to say to him, there was a good chance that that I was potentially going to seriously offending him. But he told me to go ahead and shoot from the hip. And this is what I said to him. Anything you want work environment is a pigsty, making any decisions, let alone healthy decisions in this space is not only difficult, it's almost impossible. You have crap everywhere.
Your data is continually interrupted, and you have no boundaries around what is and what is not acceptable in your space. So it's the one that you have no energy or focus. How can you have either when you walk into this environment every single day, the biggest problem you have right now is the state of your environment. Because it is consuming your life and productive force right from underneath your nose and you don't even know it. That is your biggest, biggest issue I said to him, and it would serve you beyond measure, beyond measure to deal with that immediately. Now, Anthony was a little stunned at my reply because he'd been expecting a technical business answer.
And yes, he was a little embarrassed by my comments. But to his credit, he understood, it had not been my intention to shame him in any way, shape, or form. Rather, my intention had been to open his awareness to the things that he was completely oblivious to. Because remember, awareness is the first key to improvement. And to Anthony's credit, he took immediate action. He and his team stayed up all night, literally all night and clean their entire operational environment.
He set parameters around when and how he could be contacted or interrupted, and a number of other things that we had discussed. Me and called me the following. afternoon and told me he could not thank me enough for being as blunt as I had been with him. He told me what they had done overnight, and that he was amazed at how the energy in his office among his entire team and among his entire team had literally literally transformed overnight. And even though we only had two hours sleep, he couldn't remember the last time he felt so positive and more importantly, able to think and make clear decisions, his words, not mine. In the following eight months, we continue to work on Anthony's business, and he was able to convert that company, his company from a burdensome operation into a thriving entity that truly freed him.
Today, he still owns that company he was considering walking away from and I'm incredibly proud of what he did. Now, before anything jumps into your mind, I'm not suggesting that a single action alone such as tidy His office and operational environment on that long night transformed and company. However, it laid the platform for an environment and a progression of decisions and actions, crucial to transforming it into the thriving entity it became in such a short time, that outcome would never have occurred, had he not taken action regarding his space. Okay, now, please don't let that example simplify this too much. When I speak about the immediate space that surrounds your physical locality, I'm not just referring to the cleanliness of your desk or office. This term covers a whole list of components that you choose to allow into your space, which directly impact on your ability to function optimally.
It's up to you to look at your immediate space and ask a couple of very honest and direct questions and you will want to write these down because the is a never ending process first, what am I allowing into my space that is that is absorbing or consuming my productive capacity by concentration and my attention? Second, what am I allowing into my space that is not serving or supporting me or And third, what am I allowing into my space that is slowing me down, then simply remove them or remove it with extreme prejudice, or at the very least, manage it or give it boundaries so it is not managing you. It really is that simple. And please keep this in mind. Many of these components are disguised just like Michaels habits that I discussed in module one. So, look carefully.
I'll illustrate a number of suggestions for you to consider in a later module when I discuss my NIMS time management tool. But the first step here is to be aware of the principal and aware of What is impacting your productivity, so you can adjust as required. Consider it for from, consider it from this perspective. When you turn on a computer and open up a single program, it operates relatively quickly, correctly or operates relatively well. When you open a second program, the computer slows down a little open a third, it slows down a little more, open a dozen programs and it struggles to do anything at all correct? Well, your mind is exactly the same.
You see your mind is the greatest supercomputer on the planet. It observes, it perceives and it processes absolutely everything. And it doesn't require your permission to open programs. Even when you're not consciously processing your environment. Your subconscious is opening programs and doing exactly that and every open program as in potential distractions. Issue interruption or disturbance in your mind eats up your energy, your ability to process, your productivity and most importantly your power of concentration and focus.
It has now been scientifically proven that your ability to focus and achieve more has very little to do with your ability to pay attention. Most people, most people waste their energy subconsciously saying things like, I must focus I must focus I must focus. But what has been scientifically proven at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, is that enhanced focus and as a result, enhanced productivity, which drives profitability and prosperity is more accurately linked to your ability to suppress or remove distraction or potential disturbances. Now please allow me to repeat that what has been scientifically proven is that enhanced focus and as a result, enhanced productivity which drives profitability and prosperity is more accurately linked to your ability to suppress or remove distraction or potential disturbance. So, the less distractions your mind has the marriage, the more focus and power will be allocated to focusing on processing and completing what is really important.
Hence, you can perform more effectively and efficiently which results in greater productivity, which results in greater profitability and prosperity. It really is a very simple equation. If you're not aware of the importance of your space, then distractions can creep in without you even being aware of it. And often, they happen so they creep in so slowly that they become an accepted part of your environment. As the gnome. Once again, remember Mako from module one, I'm sure you've had days when you feel as if you've got nothing done, right.
We've all had them. Well, I can assure you if you review those days in detail and review them accurately, you'll discover that you allowed you allowed your space to be infiltrated by distractions and disturbance. These distractions may have been people they may have been events, emails, phone calls, clutter, whatever, anything that was not aligned with the with your focus on your important and productive work. work. The key here is the words. Once again, you allowed, you allow your space to be infiltrated.
It was your choice. You see, by not understanding or appreciating the importance and the value of your space and setting framework and boundaries around them. You sold it off to the lowest bidder, just like Michael was doing every day of his business before we met. So, the first step is to begin to train yourself to be consciously aware of your space and what you are allowing what you are allowing into it and manage this proactively. Because every distraction or interruption in your space is an open program that impedes your capacity to Concentrate, focus and produce these distractions and interruptions. Being almost intangible, they appear innocuous or harmless on the surface, but they are in fact a cancer that slowly decays your capacity for productivity.
And as such profitability and prosperity. They steal right from under your nose, hours in your day, days in your week, weeks in your months, and months in your years. The silver lining to all of this, however, is that it's completely avoidable. You possess the power to decide what you allow into your space and into your mind. You decide what what impacts on your emotional state, your energy, your resilience, your concentration, your absolutely everything you possess the power to choose right now to read a script eradicate these obstacles. obstacles.
And all it takes is awareness, appreciation, structure and positive action to manage and avoid these hidden and destructive forces. And that's what we're doing right here right now in time engineering. As I mentioned earlier in this module, you can start this process by simply asking yourself a couple of tough questions or the right questions, to establish what is and what is not serving you in your space, and then take action, remove it, adjust it, managing whatever, so that it works in in your support and defense, rather than working against you. Bro, it's broadening your concentration rather than deteriorating it and boosting yours and your business's capacity for production and expansion. Once you begin to appreciate the extreme value of your space, you'll find a number of things will occur. Firstly, by simply becoming aware of your space, almost automatically, the things that shouldn't be in your space will begin to dissipate.
As you take action to reduce the possibility of your space being invaded, you will have a lot less on your plate to manage. This approach of respecting your space will filter down into your whole team. And all of this will lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of time on your hands. Then, if you're committed appropriately and correctly, to the things you should be engaging in, which we will cover very shortly in a later module. This willing this increase in available time should translate automatically into increased productivity and profits. Once again, don't be overwhelmed in any way by this concept of space.
Remember, as I said in the introductory module, This, these first couple of modules of time engineering are context setting modules. We just getting the knowledge in place in the coming in the coming modules, I should say, I'm going to be giving you lots of examples to to cement your learning and your comprehension and understanding of these principles. I assure you, the GIS will all click in shortly and it will all make complete sense. In the next module, we're going to cover the second twin the other Siamese twin time, we'll also be covering the lore of time and why so many business owners Miss truly leveraging this critical component to success. So until we meet again, in the next module, please basically think clearly and have an absolutely incredible day.