Episode 18: The Important Difference Between Productivity and Efficiency

Episode 18: The Important Difference Between Productivity and Efficiency

Brandon Schoen:
Your time is so valuable. Your time and attention is the only resource that you have that you can't get back more of. The money, you can always make more, but really focus on conserving your time and be more efficient as opposed to productive, which I think is where we're moving towards.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody! Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners where you are in the house. Learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners. You're in the right place and we're ready to get started today. Are we not Brandon?

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it. You guys excited? I'm sure this one's going to be exciting.

Brandon Schoen:
This is always going to be exciting! Today we're going to be talking about some really exciting stuff, productivity versus efficiency. What are the differences there and really all of this to help you get time and energy back. So you can grasp this in all the different areas of your business, but really it's exciting stuff, guys. So let's dive into productivity versus efficiency and Parkinson's law. We're going to talk about Parkinson's law to him,

Brandon Condrey:
And that's gonna be part of it. You guys go learn about Parkinson's law. Don't fret. Yeah, but before we do that, let's do some quick housekeeping as always subscribe, leave a review. Pretty please. That's the price of admission is that Mr. Schoen's written here.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. I mean, we're not charging you guys for tickets to come to these podcasts where I feel like we're giving out some awesome content here. So if you guys are inspired, if you've got a new idea, if it's changing the way you're thinking, helping you set new goals, whatever it is, share it out, but also subscribe and leave that review. That would be awesome. That would help us out so much.

Brandon Condrey:
Speaking of reviews, we've been reading you a couple at the beginning of the last few episodes and I think it's fun. So we're going to keep doing it. Yeah. So this one from Mirik Zimslosky hope I got that right. Great resource to pivot during this pandemic, the Brandons have revealed a genuine pearl in helping people jumpstart their cleaning business, especially now in this COVID situations. Thanks Merrick. We've got all kinds of COVID things that we've talked about in the past that I'm sure we'll have more in the future. Cause we're still in the middle of it and there's no vaccine it's not going away, but I'm glad that you finding it helpful.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. We got another five star by the way. These are all five stars. Veronica, Sam, thank you so much. She says, Whoa, what a podcast. This is so cool. And I found out that Sandia's Schoen and Condrey were on this. I began listening and it is exceptional. I mean, no one will prevent me from listening excessively to this. So I thought that was awesome.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Thanks Veronica. I mean she specifically mentioned Sandia's Schoen and Condrey. So I feel like she must know us locally, perhaps, maybe who knows. And then another one from Mark 634 my favorite podcast. I anticipate each release. This podcast is the best. Thanks Mark. I anticipate all these reviews. They're so awesome.

Brandon Schoen:
I love being someone's favorite podcast. We've had a few of those and I'm really grateful and happy to hear that we're actually on your list. So yeah, guys, so let's dive into productivity versus efficiency. We've got a lot to cover today, a lot of fun stuff, but really.

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it. Yeah. We're just going to talk about one chunk at a and we'll wrap it all up at the end. There you go. So we'll start with productivity. So let's define productivity. Yeah. Productivity strictly speaking is an economics term. It's commonly used in manufacturing. So this factory made one unit per hour and then we tweaked some stuff and they made 1.5 units per hour. So the productivity went up right. And you'll see economists reference productivity as well. Like productivity from the 1970s has gone up a lot, but we just haven't stayed flat. That's a lot of people's argument for why minimum wage should be increased across the board. So that's not what we're strictly talking about. It is. We're talking about it in the sense of how is your cleaning business going to be more productive or are you going to be personally more productive around the office? So productivity is getting more done in the same amount of time, right? So you're a manager, you have an office, you have to respond to a certain number of emails or pay a bunch of bills. And if you can do it faster and still with the same quality, then you became more productive.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? Yeah. And I think we kind of get in this trap because it sounds so sexy. It's like, Oh, how can we be more productive? And I think both of us have experienced this in the past. Just there's so many things to be productive with.

Brandon Condrey:
Any of you listening have gone down the entrepreneurial rabbit hole, you will have done the same stuff that I'm about to tell you. And I know Brandon, So you start reading books, you're listening to podcasts about business things, getting into it. And then you're like, cool, I need to be more productive. Like what can I do to be more productive? Because I want to have all these life goals. This was kind of back when I had a full-time job. And I was trying to like do the side hustle thing. Like how can I just do it all faster, faster, faster. And so I had done all kinds of wacky stuff. So you start with like reading the 80 20 principle, which is great. And the 80 20 principle is effective over the place, but then you try to 80 20 or side hustle. It doesn't work like when it's on 80 20 is great for bigger scale stuff, but smaller things like you, it's more of a macro thing and not a micro thing. Right. So, okay. You're going to read that book. Great. Next? I was like, okay, I'm going to get one of these journals. There are so many of them all over the place. And I think I started with John Lee Dumas entrepreneur on fire. He has a journal called the freedom journal and that was the first one I bought. I liked it cause it looked like a Bible has gilded edges and fancy script and stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
And so I bought that one and I used it and it was okay for a while, but I just didn't keep up with it. And so in my mind it was like, all right, this is not the right product if, to keep hunting for a better product. And so I think I went through three or four of these journals. I found one finally from Michael Hilton that I used the most consistently out of any of them. And for the life of me, I can't remember what it's called at the moment. But if you look up Michael Hilton productivity journal, it will come up. All the journals basically share the same sort of common threads. And so you're going to plan out your day. There's a little journaling part. I'm going to talk about sometimes it'll prompt you. Like, what are you grateful for? What are you happy for? This is just kind of gets you in the mindset of like I'm working, I'm going to do stuff. And I was like, cool, all right, you're in the mindset now, what are you going to do today? Like, what are your top three goals? And some of them involve, this is my vision for the year, laid out in the front and I'm working on part a. And so today it's all about chunking it down into smaller bits and pieces, which is great advice. Like you're going to take a big project. It's super overwhelming, make it smaller, like do the first part and then do that and do that. And it's just so like, you don't get overwhelmed with how big the scope of something is. And again, those works. But what I found with the journals is that if something went off course in my personal life, like my kid's sick, I didn't sleep last night. Something like that. If I got behind a couple of days now, it was just like, there's this, this insurmountable, like I'm so behind, like how do I get back on track with this thing? And so I gave up on the journals too. And honestly what I do now is I have a mole skin that's blank. And when I use it, I use it. And when I don't, I don't, and then I don't feel guilty about it. I'm not following someone else's formula that they designed that I'm supposed to fit into. Like those were great for those people. And I'm glad that people get value out of it, but like, it just, I could never find one that worked. And so I was just constantly tweaking stuff all the time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I I've done a lot of those too, man. I think like, just like you were saying, a lot of entrepreneurs go through that because we're always trying to be more efficient. Right. We're always trying to optimize things where I was trying to get more done, work smarter, not harder, that kind of stuff. So I actually have kind of gotten into that more recently too, in the last couple of years I have a blank journal and I'll usually just list out like my top three wins I want for the day or my top five wins, whatever I can, but I keep it small. But, but yeah, man, so we're, that's like the productivity concept. It's like, how do you get more done in that same amount of time kind of thing. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
So you said work harder, not smarter. That's what everyone, everyone knows that phrase right. Productivity in my mind is just the first part. It's the work harder part. So like the phrase is work smarter, not harder. Productivity is the opposite of that. It is just working harder. It's do more in less amount of time, do more in less amount of time. Right. And if you transpose that to the cleaning business, and you're trying to push that onto the cleaning company, it's like, okay, I know that you guys were doing four houses a day before, but now I'm going to need you to do six in the same amount of time and unless certain amount, unless you tweak some other system, that means they're going to be cutting corners, missing things as complaints go up or worse, they don't hit it on the time thing. And now they're working 10 hour days and really pissed at you and everyone's going to be burnt out. So that's productivity. So like it's a double-edged sword. It's good to do more stuff if you can tweak it. But it's also going to be like, well, just now you're just frantic. You just have to run around the office, doing stuff all day long to keep up your productivity and it's okay to not be productive. It's okay to like take a break. And you know what, instead of trying to respond to 800 emails a day, we're just going to sit at this whiteboard and just have like a brainstorming session. Brainstorming sessions are not productive at all. Like you are not producing anything, but it's cool to do like it's, we're going to work on the vision or the bigger something or some other side projects. It's okay to do that. So you don't feel like you have to be just like rushing, rushing, rushing the whole time.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And so the flip side of that is from and productive. Is this other word that we don't talk about as much, but I want to definitely start talking about it more and incorporating it. And we're going to do this whole process right now of streamlining our business and making it more efficient, which is, which is the other word we want to talk about. And that is yeah. Efficiency. And that is really like doing more and getting more outputs with less. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
So definition of efficiency is we're talking about it is getting more output from the same amount of input.

Brandon Schoen:
Or less inputs even.

Brandon Condrey:
Which is resources or less inputs. Yes. So like you're gonna, let's go back to the cleaning example. We're going to clean four houses a day. We actually did this for the longest time. We did four houses a day and then we made a jump which made the company way more profitable, like overnight. And we went from four to five houses a day in the same amount of time. How did we do that? We didn't force them to skip stuff. We made it more efficient. And the way that we did it was we made cleaning teams only stay within certain neighborhoods. So instead of driving across town, 20, 30 minutes, we're talking about five minutes across the street in the same neighborhood. And so that was just kind of a, let's go look at all of our customers on a map and see where they fall and then tell them that they're getting a new team. And you know, customers may be upset about that, but like, look, they've all got the same training it's going to be, it's going to be great. Right. And so that's, that was efficiency. So we're using the same tools, team, resources, area. We just rearranged how they drive in between point a and point B.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I love that. So it's like, when you think about efficiency, it's all resource utilization doing more and getting more outputs, more results with less inputs. And that's really the question. How do we get the most for the least? And it's a beautiful thing, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, exactly. And this is something that people will focus on a lot more. So like big companies are doing this. Amazon is huge into this, like the most efficient use of an Amazon, you know, fillers time, like someone who's packing the boxes in a warehouse is that they just stay at the station and the boxes come to them. And the way that Amazon does that is they have these robots that drive over to the warehouse and go pick up the thing from the shelf and bring it to the person to grab and put in the box. And so Amazon could be determined to be like an evil corporation, depending on your opinion. And they're forcing people to package a package every 17 seconds or something ridiculous like that. But the point is, Jeff Bezos is very efficient and he's now the world's richest man by like a huge margin. Right? So he did that with efficiency. That was the original conception of Amazon was that a bookstore is inefficient to ship this stuff all over the place, store it. So no one's going to come look it on the shelf, maybe once in awhile and instead put it online. People can search for it. We'll send it to you when it's needed. And then we didn't have to pay for retail space, boom efficiency.

Brandon Schoen:
Boom. I love it, man. So yeah. Instead of thinking about how we could do more in a given hour or a day or a week or a month, which is all about productivity, we're actually wanting guys to think about how we can be doing less, but getting more results out of it, which is kind of a crazy thought, but it's real. And that's all the work smarter, not harder type mentality. Right. So sure. Removing some of the resources, removing the waste, some of the things that you're doing that maybe you don't even realize are wasting time in your day, making things more efficient and trimming those processes or adding, you know, districting your teams so they can drive around shorter amounts of time, things like that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So this is a great segue into this book that I want to recommend to you guys. And we'll put a link for it in the show notes, it's called 15 secrets successful people know about time management by Kevin Kruse. It has a really long title, but is it a good book. And so one of the particular points I highly recommend everyone read it in general. It's very helpful, but this is definitely one that I picked up when I was trying to do the productivity side hustle thing. And so one of the things that I remember specifically was this sort of touch it once mentality. So to be more efficient around the office, if you pick something up to try and figure out what it is like, for instance, I'm terrible at this, I'm still terrible at this. I'm not trying to tell you guys that I'm perfect, but like my desk right now is just covered in papers, which is normally how it looks. But every now and then I'll get fed up with it and go through the pile. So when you pick up the piece of paper, you're going to try and touch it once instead of touching this and be like, I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to put it in this other pile. If the thing, the task is going to take you less than five minutes to do, just do it right there. Like if it's paying a bill, like writing a check and stuffing in an envelope that takes 90 seconds, just do it. If it's going to be like, we need you to reply to this and give us some information. Okay, cool. Then if it's going to take more than five minutes, what you do with it is stick it on your calendar. So you don't forget. And then put it in the pile that says this stuff's on my calendar. So I've tried to pick this up at home too. Like one of my issues when I'm doing a home improvement project is that I spend half my time looking for tools because I picked up the screwdriver and I put it somewhere over there and then I didn't put it back. So in the touch at once mentality, like I got the screwdriver, I did the screw. I'm going to go put it back where it goes. So the next time I need it, I can find it instead of trying to touch the screwdriver a hundred times and moving it around my work bench. So we'll put a link to that. There's a bunch of good tips in that book, but that's just a quick efficiency hack if you will, is to touch it once.

Brandon Schoen:
Got it, man. Also, are we going to, are we ready to get into Parkinson's law?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, let's do it. So yeah. This is kind of part of the flip side of productivity and efficiency.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So I'll just tell you guys the definition, because I actually learned this just this year. I didn't know what Parkinson's law was, but we were going through, I want to say it was Profit first with Mike Kruse, which was all about saving more money. How do I save more money in your business? And now we're going through clockwork, which is how to save more time in your business. But both of them Parkinson's law applies to both. And it states the amount of time we give to something, a task, whatever it is, we'll expand or contract with the amount of time that we give it. So one way to think about efficiency and being more efficient is actually giving something less time for you to do within whatever you're doing, because the task will expand or contract with the amount of time that we give it kind of like a visual you might think of as the toothpaste, when you have the toothpaste and totally full you're going to use more of that toothpaste. Right. Cause there's more of it. And you're just like, ah, there's a bunch of toothpaste, but when it gets down to the very end of that toothpaste and it's all smashed up and you have like just a bit left in there, then you're going to be more conservative with that toothpaste. Cause you're like just squeezing out a little bit at a time. And it's the same with money. It's the same with time. It's it's, that's how the Parkinson law works.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So, you know, Parkinson's has some limits there. Like, you know, the examples are okay, Hey, office manager or office assistant or a VA. I need you to come up with a copy of the flyer that we're going to put out. I need it by the end of the day, if I didn't specify anything, then like, cool, I'm going to spend the next eight hours making this like the best copy I've ever done. But had I gone back to them knowing that the copy is not that complicated, it's a one-page thing or it's a door hanger or something, Hey VA, I need this door hanger copied back or a first draft of it back in two hours. So they'll get it done. This is the 80 20 thing too. Like they'll, it'll be 80% of what the all day one would have been. And you can put the final tweaks on it at the end. So you gotta be specific about how much time you're going to allot task for yourself and for other people. But you have to be realistic. Like Elon Musk, can't call up Tesla and be like, Hey guys, I know it takes us a day to make this car, but I want you to do it in 30 minutes because of Parkinson's law. Like you can't, you just gotta do it in 30 minutes. Right. There's just no way it's going to happen. Like there are certain limitations to it, especially on the manufacturing side, you know, be realistic. Like if I need you to, Hey assistant, come organize my desk and tell me what's in all these piles of paper and do it in the next 10 minutes. Like that's impossible. I'll give you a couple hours for this. There's a lot of stuff back here, but it is, if you start noticing it, if you've been telling people, I need this, sometime this week, they might spend several days working on this task and like refining and doing drafts and going over and over and over again. But really the problem was you didn't tell him, like, I just need you to get me a version of it and we'll go over it together, do it on Wednesday and you spend three hours doing it, whatever it is.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah so really, getting back to the Parkinson laws, just it's stating that task will expand or contract with the amount of time we give it. So yeah, if you're even for your own things that you need to do in your business, like if I need to develop a marketing campaign for the cleaning business and I say, well, I'm going to mark that on my calendar 10 hours instead of doing the 10 hours actually limit that time and be like, I'm going to see if I can do it in two hours. Right. And so it sounds crazy, but I will most likely still finish the marketing campaign in two hours as opposed to 10 hours, because I've limited my time. I've gotten the same result, if not more results with less input. Right. And it's the same thing you're talking about, right? No, Julie given it to a team member or yourself, anything you got to accomplish, start to do that and actually limit your time. If you think it's going to take 10 hours, give yourself two hours to do it and make it happen fast. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
So once you've got the mindset, productivity is doing more in the same minute time efficiency is doing more with less resources. The resource could be time. It could be cleaning material or chemicals. Like we're going to use a microfiber. That's going to use less chemical because it soaks it up a different way. Like all those things would be efficient. And then if you look at all that through the lens of Parkinson's law, just start playing around. Like, no know one of the bad ones for me is that payrolls are every other Wednesday, but I don't have it allocated on the thing. So payrolls are all day. So whenever I'm into it, I'm like, okay, I'll go through and edit the spreadsheet. And then something will come up because I'm not focused on it. And I'll deal with that. And then inevitably what ends up happening is I submit parallel on Thursday and it's late. And so we also get paid, but I just wasted so much time. So instead it's just like I set up a calendar that's payroll is going to take 90 minutes on Wednesday morning and just be done with it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And another example of that would be just like team meetings or quarterly meetings. Like a lot of times we'll allot a one-hour timeframe to a meeting when really it probably could be done in 15 minutes.

Brandon Condrey:
Or an email or not a meeting at all.

Brandon Schoen:
Or not a meeting at all. Right. Exactly. Getting all those things done without having to schedule that meeting waste the whole hour. But if you have a meeting like that and you say, Hey, we're going to do this meeting in 15 minutes. Well, as opposed to an hour, now, people are probably going to create an agenda. You're probably going to be more organized people. Aren't going to go off on tangents talking about all this stuff. It's like wasting time. It's going to get done in 15 minutes. So now in 15 minutes, you've limited yourself, but you've gotten way more results way more outputs with being less resources, basically less time.

Brandon Condrey:
If any of you have worked in a corporate environment. You know, these meetings that just take forever, because everyone's just going to air their dirty laundry and talk about whatever my wife works in a hospital system and they have lots of doctors that need to be on meetings. And they also have patients that need to see. So one of the doctors she had told me actually created this Google form. So if you wrote them and requested a meeting, his assistant would automatically fire back. The seamless says, Hey, I'm really interested about this meeting. I just want to get more information. Can you fill out this form? And so the form was, what do you see my role being in here? What materials do I need to prep beforehand? Yada, yada, yada. And at the end of that, he says that more than half the time, he just doesn't go to the meeting. Like he'll just reply to them and be like, I mean, I mean, I can get that to you right now. Like I can just email you the thing that you're asking for. I don't need to be there to present it. It's already in this document. So boom. I just see myself going to this meeting. And so that's efficiency. Like it's thinking about it that do we really need to sit down for an hour and a half and like have this all hands meeting. We do all hands meetings once a month. We're doing them over zoom right now because of COVID and those take like half an hour and we are very, we follow a format. We're going to tell you about this stuff. You guys got any questions? Cool. We'll deal with that next time. Or I have that answer for you right now. Cause it's really quick. But the idea is not to let it expand to be this beast.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And another one that just comes to mind is this working with our mentor, he's super into efficiencies and processes and systems and things like that, which is great. But just like you mentioned earlier, Brandon like a certain tool or piece of equipment could do that same thing, right? Like in the cars, the teams have the less equipment, they have the less stuff they have to haul around,

Brandon Condrey:
Less things to break. Right? The less things to source an order. Yep. Yeah. You just try to do it minimalist,

Brandon Schoen:
Right. Minimalist. And just like even in the houses or we, we refined the processes and the systems to where they're getting more done. If not the same amount, with less time, less tools, like things like that, driving around less different houses and wasting less time, things like that. So there's all these ways you can think about how to apply this to your business. But I think bottom line start constraining the time that you would want to get things done and start limiting yourself and getting more done on the other side of it.

Brandon Condrey:
So that's your homework is like, look at productivity versus efficiency all through the lens of Parkinson's law. Like how much time does it realistically need? So it doesn't get out of control.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just start thinking about in your business where certain tasks, maybe we could be expanding, contracting them, the resources you're giving them all that. And you know, if you're giving time to them, like really think about that guys, your time is so valuable. Your time and attention is the only resource that you have that you can't get back more of money. You can always make more of, but really focus on conserving your time and being more efficient as opposed to productive, which I think is totally where we're moving towards.

Brandon Condrey:
So that's the episode guys, as always, we're still doing our masterclasses on Thursdays. So you can get more information about that. That's Profit cleaners.com/masterclass. It's a webinar. We're going to give you some free nuggets of info. There's a Q and a session. It's good stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
It's good stuff. And exciting news as well as you guys, we're starting to branch out. We're on Instagram. Now we're on YouTube. We're just about to launch our YouTube channel. So subscribe over there. We're going to be posting lots of cool behind the scenes videos and our cleaning business. In addition to the podcast, some, the clips of the episodes. So one more thing is we're also launching some courses here soon. So if you guys haven't come over to Profit Cleaners and just to check out the courses, go to Profitcleaners.com/courses, check that out. We got the latest course on there, which is million dollar local cleaning business marketing toolkit for 10X growth. That's our very first course, we're hoping to launch more in the future to help you guys out, but please like let us know your questions, concerns anything we can help with hello@profitcleaners.com. And I think that's pretty much it for today's show

Brandon Condrey:
that's it guys. Keep it clean,

Brandon Schoen:
keep it clean

Brandon Condrey:
keep it clean and efficient.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean and efficient. Take care guys. Bye.

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