1.Hello and welcome back, Roman, to another A1 show

Hello and welcome back, Roman, to another A1 show. Thanks for joining me today. I've got another action-packed show. Let me clear the desk here in front of me and get started. So today I want to talk to you about a concept called batching. I'm always getting questions. How can you get so much dough when you see that endless errors in the day? Well, a lot of it for me is batching on the next plane, this little known concept. I'm also going to talk to you about exactly where I am this week and what I'm doing. It's an interesting, strange, bizarre week for me. So let's jump straight into it. I'll give you a bit of a round up as to what's been going on with me for the last week. Anyone who's been watching the daily vlogs, if you haven't been watching the daily vlogs, seriously, what are you doing with your life? Who is not watching my seven-minute daily vlogs? I'll tell you one thing, they take a lot more than seven minutes to record. If you're watching this on YouTube, jump down after the show and watch one of the vlogs. You're gonna hopefully love them and if you don't let me know in the comments. I'm gonna start tweaking them because that's the sort of guy I am. I want to make you feel a little bit special and warm. I want to make you feel like you have a little bit of an impact on the direction of the vlogs, which you will. So, I've been sick. I've been sick. You couldn't tell it from my beautiful complexion on camera at the moment. And you certainly couldn't tell it on podcast platforms. But yeah, in pretty sick all week I had a viral infection and a bedbound, not ideal preparations for the world championships this Friday in Canada. And that's where I am at the moment, but I'm coming to you guys through the magic of the Internet. Internet is a magic time travel device which we've been gifted. Yeah, so I'm in Toronto as you're watching this and I'm preparing for the world championships on the tandem, on the track of 4k a month of a pursuit and I'm feeling exactly what's involved in that at the end of the show. But as I'm saying, I've had a pretty disruptive week with that war infection. So I haven't had optimum training at all. It's been a lot of sitting on bed, trying to hoie-drace, and just trying to rest. I'm feeling pretty miserable. I've logged my ultimate misery day as well. That wasn't last year or when. So go back and check in the vlogs. It's a picture of me blowing a snotty rag. So that's how you'll know. It's your under the right track with that one. Let's dive in and talk about a concept called batching. is the idea of the bunch of the same task at the same time. So an example to help you understand this because I just explained that really poorly is the dishwasher. Think about the dishwasher. You never dream of sticking the dishwasher on and running the full dishwasher cycle every time you had one plate, one knife and one fork. For you, would you not do that? Because It's just not an efficient way to use your time and it's just a non-efficient way to use your labour. So instead, what do you do? You wait until the dishwasher is full, you wait until it's hit a certain tipping point of dishes. Normally, full capacity on the dishwasher and then you stick that bad boy on and the whole batch gets washed at once. It's a very efficient way to wash dishes. We do the same things with a washing machine. and you'll never watch one sock or one pair of socks and your jocks later on that day because you spend your whole day just doing tiny trivial tasks. Now, let's have a think about how we use our mobile phones at the moment. Let's have a think about how we use social media. Let's have a think about how we use email even in work and professional capacity. Do we need to be checking our email every 15 minutes? Or is this the exact same as low in the dishwasher? every time we have a noise from fork. So while content, that's the latter, that you are the person that's demonstrating the early signs of insanity, if you're checking your email every 15 minutes. It's not disrespectful, it's not. People don't expect instant replies on email. It's you've built a habit and this habit is detrimental to your productivity and I'm not gonna give you astounding stats to how detrimental this and your productivity later. But if we start to audit our time and we look at how many tasks that we're actually completing that are just pointless to be completed in isolation, phone calls, absolutely pointless to be completed in isolation.

2.Is a task that needs to be botched

This is a task that needs to be botched. So what I will often do is batch all my phone calls in a period in the morning time. So I'll say from 9 o'clock to 11 o'clock, that's phone call time. And then what it means is you can get out and we've talked about low level exercise and If you haven't listened to those podcasts, we're talking about the Blue Zones. Blue Zones are parts of the world, so I've got to know in Japan, certainly in Italy. These are areas where people typically live longer. There's a higher concentration of centurions. People live over a hundred in these areas. And one of the common traits they have is low level physical activity all day long. So a lot of low level physical activity. But people always say to me, you know, I'm in an office job. How do I get physical activity? How do I get this low level? Well, this is one really easy example you get low level physical activity. You get yourself a set of headphones, you batch your phone calls so you walk while you talk. As long as you're not doing a full on power walk, there's going to be zero effect on your ability to communicate. You're not going to be panicked and don't go walking upstairs for the entire phone call. You batch the phone calls, you batch your email. It's becoming more popular now, especially our friends that are abroad and San Fran, especially for people who are saying, I check email between 9am and 930am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday so you can expect their employee, Jordan Dozeros. We're totally fine with that. I heard a good story from a friend recently that more senior mentor of his was with him and my buddy's phone rang and he looked at him and the mentor, you could see that he was a little bit stressed and he was a little bit aw I should answer this. Because you can feel that the power, the pull of the phone had on my body and your man just looked at him and said you know it's your phone. It's not their phone. Just because they call doesn't mean you have to answer. You get to decide when you answer because it's your phone and that's what we lose track of a lot. We let the phone on us instead of us on the phone. It's the exact same with social media as one of the most powerful disruptors of attention at the moment. Think about social media. How often are you going on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Now how often do you need to go on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Can you catch up on these things every time you're just sitting on the toilet? Seriously, I know it sounds absolutely ludicrous but can we batch them and say social media time is shit time. You're shit and you're check in Twitter. So it sounds dumb but it's a nice little way to just say, look this is a trivial nonsense part of my life and it doesn't deserve any more in my attention than the time it takes me to have a dump. Sorry for being crude about it. You can start to batch your days and that's what I'm going to find that especially, especially helpful. So for For me, I build, especially with the heavier content creation stuff I'm dealing with the moment. So I'm batching my days for a Monday for me by typically batching all my China plants. It makes no sense for me to write China plants for some athletes on Monday, some on Tuesday. Everyone's trying to plant for the week ahead, get written on Monday morning, like communicate out with clients on Monday morning, and see what their schedules are like, and then build out for China plants on Monday morning. You might get changes during the week and that's fine, but let's build it all and build that infrastructure for success early Monday morning. I also have Mondays my rest day off the bike, so I batch all my cycling related jobs onto Monday. If the bike needs a new chain, it's not happening on a Thursday because on Friday I could need new brake pads, so I just leave it all until Monday and it gets its new chain and its new brake pads. I also do my cycling laundry for the week on Monday and if I'm making any sort of bars for a week like Sarah's Energy Balls. They were most linked up in the description down below. The Energy Ball recipe book, they are class. They're well worth checking out. I make them all on Monday and I just have it for a week. Tuesday is typically my YouTube day where I try and create as much of my content for YouTube as I can on a Tuesday. Bunch is a quarter ways and stuff can be all around Tuesday.

3.Some of it now with daily vlog has to be an unknown

Some of it now with daily vlog has to be an unknown. That's the nature of a day you've logged and it is violating my batch and principle here a bit but this is the thing with the batch and you don't you're not going to take it in its entirety you need to take this concept understand the concept and then adapt it to your livestock. So batch and out your days like that can be super super effective. Wednesday is my podcast day like you're seeing this podcast because it's a Wednesday it's a podcast every Wednesday and that's the way I just ensure that I know where I get into a headspace that morning where I I'm like, fine, what am I doing today? I'm recording podcasts. I'm going to go to two podcasts. It's equipment only has to be hooked up once. You know, I only have to sit down here, get to set ready, sit in the studio, once the camera only needs to be pulled out. Once you've recorded multiple things on the same day. And you can also block out weeks, which I've seen where you're going to say, you know what, in the first week of January, that's going to be my creative week. So I'm going to deal with all creative tasks on the fourth week. Second week it's gonna be my administrative style tasks. So I'll do them all on the second week. So forth and so forth. So what I would be urging you to do is last week we talked about, if anyone didn't say it, I said, to get a piece of paper. And once so I bet write your Sunday list, stuff you'd like to do Sunday, I'd like to learn French, I'd like to learn guitar, I'd like to live in Gerona, I'd like to travel the world in a band, write these down on your Sunday list. It's the lifestyle you wanna build for yourself. And on the first side of the page, write down your daily to-do list. And it's normally absolutely garbage, checking email, commuting, scrolling through social media, stuck in a shit job I don't like, meaningless interactions online. And then you just ask yourself, if this is your to-day list, how are you going to get to your Sunday list? Because the actions we do today are what build our Sunday. So if our actions today are calibrated with our Sunday, it's not going to happen. It's a pipe dream. But to follow on from that and extension of that, when we start auditing our time and wondering what way we're gonna block this stuff out and we're gonna batch this out, we start realizing that some of this stuff that we're dealing with, it's one, completely pointless and we can cut it out. Or two, we can outsource it. We can, you know, does a company, BrickWorks India, I use, which were amazing if you're looking for a remote virtual assistant. Go and check them out, they're amazing, they're trustworthy, they're credible. but they have an amazing diversity of talents. Like they'll do anything, any sort of job from board processing to graphic design to book and cinema tickets or flights, to stuff that occupies your time. You can outsource that. And it's a fraction of the cost you would think it is to get that sort of stuff done and it frees you up more time. You'll also just find things that are downright waste your time and aren't taking a closer to your Sunday list. Those just need to be completely, completely axed. out of us. So, Hawaii might be asking at this point should I bother with this whole concept of bachie. And it's because studies are just so concrete now as to the disruptive power of task switching. So task switching is when we're moving from wanting to an earth. So if I'm sitting down to try and go out a chapter for a book and I pull out my phone and I look at my phone, That change from focus from the creative over to the trivia and then back to the creative. It's not seamless when we switch it from the swippers. That works, definitely not a word. When we switch from one task to another, it's called task switching and we lose massive focus. To illustrate how much focus we lose, there's a study in the US that I've seen and in SAT e-scores. Participants that came, there's a decent-sized sample group, and participants that came in stoned performed six points higher on average on their SCT scores than people who are interrupted with intermittent cell phone use. So it's stoned, it's less harmful to your productivity than tasks reaching and picking up your mobile phone to look at it. Let that sink in because every one of us is picking up our mobile phone when we should not be picking up our mobile phone. So let's start building what I'm calling force fail time.

4.Idea of force fail time a lot

I like this idea of force fail time a lot. It's just protected focus time for doing exactly what we should be doing at that moment and it's being ruthless with it. If it's for me, if I'm rising, I'll have to get my phone, turn it off and it has to be in the middle room. If it's close to me, you know, maybe it's a discipline thing, maybe it's a habit thing, but if it's close to me, I'll reach for it and I'll pick it up as soon as I'm struggling. But if it's not there, I'll struggle on, again, a solution and I'll keep going and I won't suffer from that task switching. I think when you sit down and you order to arrive on this and you realise that there's so much of your stuff is trivial that you can pull it back. There's a lovely stock quote and I just flick pages so I'd have it, I didn't know I've heard. And the quote is perfection, it's not wonder, it's not more to add rather when there is nothing more to take away and I think that's really the essence of this. When we start stripping back that stuff that we don't need, we don't want, that's when we get perfection. So I'd say to you unplug, refocus, find out what items are work batching, outsource or ditch the rest and you will have a lot more time and time. You will have much more time for your priorities in life and you're much much more likely to hit your someday goals. Right, that was a valuable round. It's valuable for you know most of the time in this podcast I'm preaching to an audience of one, preaching on myself and it's stuff that I felt super helpful and that's why I'm giving it to you guys because I'm hopeful that I'm portioning the audience. Let me know in the comments down below if you're watching on YouTube or if you're a podcast that jumped across YouTube and let me know in the comments If you're finding those sort of tips helpful because I find them so helpful in keeping me motivated, keeping me on track and keeping me sort of hitting those targets and moving towards my someday targets instead of just travelling through that endless list of daily to do. So let's talk bike racing. Let's talk the wacky bazaar world of tandem racing. So if anyone's been following the podcast, I was effectively in silent retirement for two years doing very little on the bike racing a little bit locally for fun, but not trying in any serious way. And then I had a call from Buddy of Mine about four months ago at this stage. Good Buddy of Mine, Peter Ryan. Yeah, if anyone doesn't know Peter Ryan's story, Peter Ryan's is a fascinating story. Peter was an inter-county holler for temporary. who doesn't know what Harlem is, it's a national sport here in Ireland and they're fanatical about it in temporary. So he was a very promising open common athlete and probably butchering his story but the details are right, the details, the exact details may not be right but the general gist is he lost his eyesight to the generous of eye disease at the age of 18 and then he went through a really difficult period where he struggled to come to terms with where he got addicted alcohol subsequently went into a treatment center, came out to fire soil, the treatment center, and he's been, I'm going to say, an exemplary human since then, went to Rio Para Olympics. He's raised crazy amounts of money for charities, been elected for Finnegane as a local counselor, and now I'm on the tandem with him, hopefully secure on qualification for for his second Olympic Games, which would be massive. So I've come in at short notice, he's on a four year Olympic cycle, but I've come in very late in the day, hoping to secure qualification. Qualification runs until June. And the way it works is over the last four years Ireland have secured a number of bikes. And that period runs of securing Olympic qualifying points. That runs until June. Then in June, we'll know how many bikes we're sending. And then it's down to Silicon Valley, that's the who they send in those positions. So although I haven't been there for the four years, I'm still well in the shakeup. So qualification is by no means guaranteed a very important event this Friday evening. So thanks in advance, because I know you're good people, and I know on YouTube, you're gonna be jumping in the comments down below right now, and you're gonna be like, fuck and do it out until you bring her home for the parish, shut the parish. Yeah, tanks and van for those well wishes. Was that too much? Too try hard? Too much need in your support?

5.Do need it on its fuel for me, so definitely jump in down below

I do need it on its fuel for me, so definitely jump in down below. Yeah, so this Friday's a big one for us. Racing the 4K pursuit on the tandem on the indoor track in Toronto in the world championships. Hoping for a time of around 421, four minutes, 21, which if you work out the mats on that, it's a pretty fast-ever speed. It's a pretty big effort for me, probably around 480 watts for the 4 minutes 20, which is decent moving. Even back when I was driving the bike full time, that was decent moving for me. The big things in this event are not power and waste or power on the CDA coefficient from Pildraig. So we've worked a lot on our Aero game, worked my hair and I'm an specialist, testing helm, testing shoes, shoe covers. I'm going with a Cask helmets. Spin 11 are doing the speed suits which make a huge difference as well. They're a great sponsor for Sock and On, so shout out to them. We're going with Bont shoes and no shoe covers when an arrow sucked. So yeah, definitely keep an eye on Friday and those results and give me the good volumes. It's an event where bold must need to give absolutely 100%, but we need to deliver that effort in perfect synchronicity. So true to banks, it's super important to have a bow on the power at the same time. Down the straighter, getting a little micro brake, but it's important to take that brake exactly the same time. Because it's fixed gear, so that means we can't change gear during the event and there's no brakes. So you're not just one other bike on the track and the idea is to try and beat the other bike on time and then in the qualifying round so we're on one round definitely it's called the qualifying round everybody posts a time and then at the end of the qualifying round the four fastest bikes go into two races one for gold and silver and the other four bronze or nothing and they race against each other on separate sides of the track both trying to post the fastest time but also if you catch the other bike the race is over it's a really interesting race to watch jump over onto YouTube until I've been 4km of pursuit, time to man you'll see what it is. It's basically the same as a 4km individual pursuit from then. Very very enjoyable. I rode a good bit of track back in 2010, 2011 but it's been on a decent track hiatus so it's been great, been back involved with the track team, trying to camp in Portugal before Christmas I'm still in New York after Christmas and now Toronto at the moment. After this, I'm going to take a little bit of downtime and chill before it started the road season. And then the next big target for me won't be until the World Road Race Championships in June. Although I will race locally with my trade team, the big focus will be on June back with your shares, Janie. I just find that if any of you have had a chance to wear your national jersey, let me know down below. and you just find that you're 10 feet tall when you have your national jersey on. It's an amazing feeling to wear the Irish jersey. You've been lucky enough to do it in a few different forms through the years and it's absolutely brilliant to maybe talk, walk away from the sport and come back into the sport to fully appreciate how amazing it is. But in full amazement still, I'm in full awe and I'm fully motivated for this Friday, for this 4-kilometer pursuit. Guys, I'm gonna leave it there for this episode. Please, please, please spread the word on the podcast, spread the word on the YouTube daily vlogs. There's a lot of effort going into the daily vlogs the moment. So please give me the love on those and I'm gonna talk to everyone here on YouTube tomorrow on the vlog, on you podcasters. I'm gonna talk to you guys next week on your podcast platforms. I'm humbled as always that you've chosen to give me your time and listen to my roundlings I don't take that lightly and I'm very thankful for it. Roll them in, be safe this week and I'm gonna chat to you next week. Hey so that was a fun show hope you enjoyed this if you did enjoy it take a second to hit the like button hit the subscribe button if you want you can even smash that like button tell a friend spread the good word and I'm gonna see you tomorrow. I'm out.