EFP 57: How Successful Are Routines For Entrepreneurs?

Can you work a 7-day work week non-stop?

That’s what Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, set out to discover and document through his blog. He only last two weeks, but some of his discoveries are pretty interesting and we wanted to cover the topic of routines for entrepreneurs on our latest podcast.

Does Routine ACTUALLY Help You?

While Joe’s happily a creature of habit, Justin thinks a set work routine can stifle creativity. We’ll get into these points and more as we dig into six points about the effect of routine on your business as an entrepreneur.

Are you stuck in a rut…maybe that’s a good thing?

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“I’m being a bit of an unsubscribe nazi, for sure…” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

“Through consistency of action, you can build habits that stick” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Our new Marketing Apprentice position just went live!
• Can you keep up with a 7-day work week?
• Consistency of action and forming habits
• Work less, produce more?
• What effect do outside influences have on your business?
• Even God rests one day a week…
• Can this fit YOUR business (customers, employees, etc.)

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Thanks for three new 5-star reviews!
• WPRankTracker 3.0
• Bruce Almighty Answers Emails
• Our new Marketing Apprentice position
• Joel Gascoigne’s experiment with the 7 day work week
• Fixing Tabbed Gmail
• EntrepreneurShowdown.com – Great new podcast with an interesting format. Check out the interview with James Schramko!

So…do you like the idea of a 7 day work week? What kind of schedule and routine works best for you? Let us know on Twitter, drop us a voice recording, or leave us a comment below!

 

Voiceover:                           Welcome to the Empire Flippers podcast. Are you sick and tired of gurus who have plenty of ideas but are short on substance? Worried that e-book you bought for $17.95 won’t bring you the personal and financial freedom you long for?

                                                Hey, you’re not alone. Join thousands of others in their pursuit of niche profits without the bullshit, straight from your hosts, Justin and Joe from Empire Flippers.

Justin Cook:                        Welcome to episode 57 of the Empire Flippers podcast. I’m your host, Justin Cook, and I’m here with my biz partner extraordinaire, Joe “Hot Money” Magnotti. What is going on, buddy? How are you doing?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yo, yo, yo.

Justin Cook:                        We’ve got a great episode lineup this week. We are going to be talking about Groundhog Day and whether doing the same things over and over will help to accelerate your business, based on a great post that Joe and I had read. We want to discuss basically the work-life balance, so hope you enjoy it.

                                                Before we do that, let’s get right into our updates, news, and information. First thing we got, buddy, we got three new five-star reviews.

Joe Magnotti:                    Hit me up, Justin.

Justin Cook:                        All right, so the first one is from Nate, says, “Love it. Justin and Joe show the most relevant and helpful information for entrepreneurs without the BS. They have great guests and keep the shows fun. I’m hooked. Yeah, buddy.”

                                                Trent [Deersman 00:01:11], who we had on the show, said, “This interview is filled with gold nuggets. Okay, I’m a bit biased ’cause I was the guy just interviewed, but Justin did a great job.”

                                                We’ve got Michael in the Derby City, says, “Super mentors and great guys, content. I’m a bit older. I believe your demographic, but I have to tell you that being in my next chapter, you guys really helped me stay on track and focus.”

                                                Well, thanks, Michael, Trent, and Nate. We really appreciate the five-star reviews.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, thanks, guys.

Justin Cook:                        So our second news and update, we’ve got WP Rank Tracker that we purchased a while back, and Joe has been furiously working on the software. Tell me about it, buddy. What’s going on?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, so we have a developer in Bangladesh, of all places, that we are working with on features and functionality of the new version, which is gonna be version three, and I hope by the time you guys listen to this, that will be released. I have an early beta right now. It has a couple of bugs that we have to scratch out, but it’s cool.

                                                We add graphing. Oh, we added some other little feature enhancements that kinda make it easier to sort through your keywords and graphically represent those rankings of keywords, positions of keywords, so check it out.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, you showed me it yesterday. It looks pretty sexy, man. I really like the graphs. I think it’s just helpful. It’s nice to get a quick view on what your keywords are doing, where they’re at.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah. So, now, if you do have version 2.8 or before, you will have to manually upgrade. I’ll be contacting all of our customers and asking them to upgrade manually. After 3.0, it will automatically update via WordPress. It will give you that upgrade warning, something like that, but unfortunately, the old versions didn’t have that tied in, so that’s another new feature.

Justin Cook:                        So you added that in. That’s cool. Hey, so I know nothing about this. I [inaudible 00:02:48]. I have no idea, so where did you find this guy from Bangladesh, and why not the Philippines?

Joe Magnotti:                    Well, he was given to me by the guy that created …

Justin Cook:                        He was given to you?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yes.

Justin Cook:                        He just handed him over to you, said, “Here’s your little guy. You go work with him.”

Joe Magnotti:                    Well, one of the things, when we negotiated the deal to buy WP Rank Tracker was to get the rights to access to the developer so that we could go ahead and add features, functionality, and change all the stuff.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, buddy, that’s right, and he’d done a good job ’cause we really like the software. It’s really cool, so … next part I wanna talk a little bit about is cutting down on email, man. Holy shit, it’s ridiculous.

Joe Magnotti:                    You know, I’m not raising the white flag and just canceling everything in my inbox because I’m pretty on top of that stuff, but I’m getting tired of staying on top of it.

Justin Cook:                        [crosstalk 00:03:32] These guys have declared “email bankruptcy”. I’ve actually got those emails before where someone said, “Yeah, I’m just, I’m done, man.” The message goes out, says, “I’m done. If I didn’t get back to you, I’m really sorry, but I need to start over.”

Joe Magnotti:                    I’m tired of spending four hours a day just answering emails. I feel like that scene from “Bruce Almighty” where he tries to answer all the prayers, and then finally at the end, he like Control+A, “Yes to all”.

                                                I don’t know if you remember, but it’s a very funny scene. We should link to it in the show notes, and just, on that, we’re changing how we’re doing stuff, unsubscribing stuff-

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, so what are you doing specifically? You’re unsubscribing to email lists. What about the stuff that you still wanna get? I mean, do you stay subscribed a bit, or are you just like, “I just wanna focus on the things I really need to focus on?”

Joe Magnotti:                    I’m being a bit of an unsubscribe Nazi, for sure, but things that I need but I don’t have to read, I just need to search for when I need them, I’m filtering. I had a lot of filters set up before, but now, I’m absolutely, every time an email comes in, if I think I need it in the future, I’m just gonna filter that stuff so it doesn’t go through my inbox.

Justin Cook:                        Joe comes to me yesterday, says, “Hey, Justin, buddy, we need to talk.”

                                                I’m like, “Oh, what’s going on, buddy? What’s the deal?”

                                                “Yeah, man, you keep signing us up for software or subscriptions with our info@empireflippers.com.” He said, “Just use your personal email address, buddy. Please stop giving me … I don’t want these emails. I’m done with em.”

                                                Another thing we did is we added, basically put everything together in Zendesk, so all, IntelliTheme, any Empire Flippers tickets, and the “contact us” form now goes through Zendesk, so if they’re relatively repetitive questions that we can have our team get back to people with, we’ll have them do that. If it’s something that’s much more specific or for Joe or I, we’ll answer that as well.

Joe Magnotti:                    We’re still gonna give you useful tidbits of information when you contact us. That’s not gonna be the thing here, guys. It’s just all about getting you better answers because you and I, Justin, we were missing stuff. People were contacting us via the contact form, and we weren’t getting back to it at all.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, some people are so happy ’cause I wrote this five-point email back, and then others are like, “What’s going on? I haven’t had an email in four days, dude. What’s going on?”

                                                So last point we wanted to cover is we’ve got a new position opening up. So we did our first internship, and we are now moving on to phase two, where we’re gonna be bringing out a second intern. This is particularly a marketing intern position, and by the time this podcast goes live, we should have the blog post up where you can go check it out, check out the position, and apply actually.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I’m very excited about that ’cause it’s someone that I can ping that works for you about different stuff that I wanna get done on the marketing things.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, buddy. So the idea is, we want to reach out to other people to have on our show as interviews, maybe do some pre-screening, right? ‘Cause I love some of the interviews that are pre-screened, ’cause you can really get the meat of things. Also looking for opportunities for us to be on other shows and helping with content and supporting our community, so I’m really excited about this. I think this’ll set us up really well for 2014, which is kind of our, from now through the end of the year, that’s really our goal.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I think we should mention too that we’re looking to expand our workforce in other directions too. I mean, I’d like to hire a PHP programmer on staff who’s local here that I can meet with and go over stuff, but I want a high-end developer-type guy, you know? And we’re looking for a new HR manager, another, again, a high-level HR manager that really has experience.

Justin Cook:                        “Again”?

Joe Magnotti:                    Okay, so the last one didn’t work out.

Justin Cook:                        That was painful. Yeah.

Joe Magnotti:                    But yeah, sometimes that happens here in the Philippines, and we’re willing to admit our mistakes and go back, so yeah, we’re looking to expand the team here in the Philippines, and I think a staffing manager, an HR manager can really help us with that because I’m tired of writing job descriptions and putting ’em on Job Street and setting up interviews and then finding out we have three donkeys and one good person. We need someone to handle that stuff.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, we really, we have some hiring needs too, so if we can get that fixed, that would be great.

                                                All right, enough of the news and information. Let’s get right into the heart of this week’s episode.

Voiceover:                           This is the Empire Flippers podcast.

Justin Cook:                        All right, Joe, so before we even get into this episode, we should talk a little bit about why the idea for this came about. So, you had introduced me to an article by Joel G, and I’m not even gonna bother trying to say his last name ’cause I’m gonna totally dock that up.

Joe Magnotti:                    Hey, man. I’m Italian, and I’m struggling with it myself, but yeah, Joel made a great article on the seven-day work week, and I actually got to his article through the [Flippa 00:07:54] blog, but yeah, it was very interesting.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, well, we can go in the show notes, you can take a look at joel.is, but the basic idea was he wanted to experiment, and like lots of hackers, right? Life hackers, they like to experiment with [theirselves 00:08:05] and their bodies and their situations and their work schedules and that kind of thing, so he said, “What if I follow a new routine? Seven days a week, I’m gonna do the exact same thing every day. I’m gonna have the exact same schedule, and I’m gonna break it up between work that I do, working out, leisure time, but it’s gonna be the exact same schedule seven days a week,” and he tried it out for a couple of weeks.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah. I mean, you’re gonna work a little bit, but you’re not gonna work eight hours a day, seven days a week, right? You’re gonna work a little bit less, but are you able to accomplish more because you’re working all the time, on a consistent basis? And you know me, I love consistency. I love routine, so for me, it was really appealing to see what he does.

                                                I’ll kinda talk about my routine later on, but yeah, I mean, I kinda liked the way this concept was going.

Justin Cook:                        I could see how this would be right up your alley because every single day, it’s the Groundhog Day we talked about at the top of show where you’re doing the same exact thing, and that routine can kinda get you in order and also make you kinda maximize your work time. Didn’t work out so well for him though, unfortunately.

                                                So he did it for two weeks and said, “Ah, I can’t do it,” and there’s a couple of reasons for that. We’re gonna kinda go through some of those. We have six points really, that we wanna talk about with this, but the first point is, can you keep it up?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I mean, Joel struggled, right? Working out every day, he got a minor injury, a muscle strain, so he had to take some time off from that, and he also said just mentally, he was kind of fatigued with working every day, so I definitely could see how doing it, the same thing day in, day out, not only would it bore you to death a little bit after a while, but also, it would lead to either fatigue or some sort of injury.

Justin Cook:                        The other point he mentioned, or he mentioned in the post was that even though he would try to do the same thing on the weekend, it just wasn’t really the same. Something psychological about what he was doing on Saturdays and Sundays, it just didn’t feel right, and I kinda get that ’cause you were raised on the weekend, you got the weekend coming up, and I see where he’s coming from there.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, and it’s like those crazy diets, right? I mean, we’re social animals. If everybody else is eating normal stuff, and you can only eat green vegetables, then it gets very hard to go out and eat with them.

Justin Cook:                        Awkward, yeah. It’s like, “Well, I can’t go there. I can’t go here,” and the people that stick to those diets, they have to find workarounds for that, so they generally, they get a feel for what they could eat when they’re out with their friends, with business associates or whatever, and they can really stick to it because they’ve opened it up a bit, and they know what works and what doesn’t.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, so, and the other part in “can you keep up” is the backlash too, right? So if you do it for two months and then burn out and then wind up not working at all for a month, then that’s not very successful.

Justin Cook:                        So this is a little off-topic, but I think it’s related. Have you heard of the polyphasic sleep cycles?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yes.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, so what is that? It’s like you’re awake for an hour and a half, and then you sleep for 30 minutes, right?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah. I think Thomas Edison used to do something like this.

Justin Cook:                        That sounds absolutely outrageous for me. I know some people have been able to keep it up, but what I’ve heard about this is, so you’ll be awake for an hour and a half, this is crazy to me, and you basically have to drop everything wherever it is, whatever you’re doing, you have to drop everything and take a nap for 30 minutes.

                                                So you’re having a great conversation with friends or your wife or your kids or whatever. “Okay, nap time. Daddy’s taking a nap. Mommy’s taking a nap,” right?

Joe Magnotti:                    That sounds ridiculous, but I think that this is more doable than-

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, oh, my God, yeah, way more doable.

Joe Magnotti:                    Especially if you try to do most of your work in the early morning. He said wake up at 4:30, which I think is a little bit hardcore. I mean, I think you could start working at 7:00 AM and then the gym by 3:00 PM, and you would be able to get enough free time in every day and enough work in every day that if you did it seven days a week, it would be okay, and you’d be able to regularize your schedule with other people because you’d have those nighttime hours in order to go out to dinner with people and socialize and all the normal stuff.

Justin Cook:                        As we talk through this, Joe, I’m thinking about this, and honestly, it wouldn’t be a great experiment for you, I think. I mean, you’re kind of habitual in that way anyway where you set up a schedule. Much more of an experiment for a guy like me who is not that way, right?

Joe Magnotti:                    Right.

Justin Cook:                        So really interesting.

                                                Our second point we wanna talk about is, does it build solid habits? And that’s one of the reasons he wanted to do it, because he knew that through repetition, through consistency of action, you tend to build up habits that can stick, right? And that’s ultimately his goal was to build habits that stick.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, well, they say if you do anything for 30 days, then it becomes a habit, right? You know, when I first started going to the gym, my goal was just go every day. “I don’t care what you do there. Just go every day, and spend an hour there,” and then once I did that for a month, it did become a habit. It didn’t matter what was happening, how bad I felt or whatever I did, I went to the gym every day.

                                                So I think it does build solid habits. That’s affirmative answer. I don’t see how you could argue that it doesn’t build solid habits. It’s just a matter of, can you keep up longterm? Are you gonna burn out on those habits because of boredom or injury, that kind of thing?

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, and also, I mean, there’s also the possibility of picking up some bad habits in there too, right? So yes, you’re gonna pick up some habits, but maybe it’s not necessarily good. Maybe you pick up the habit of not spending enough time with your kids or whatever it is, right? So …

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, and I think that you could get tired with this kind of schedule, right? And the habit could be that you focus on doing the menial tasks and spending more time on those tasks.

Justin Cook:                        “I need to put my two and a half hours in.”

Joe Magnotti:                    Right.

Justin Cook:                        Or, “I need to put my time in.” That’s not [crosstalk 00:13:46]

Joe Magnotti:                    And that’s not good for an entrepreneur, definitely.

Justin Cook:                        And what if you need, like you’re not feeling very inspirational at that point, right? You need to sit down and record a podcast, and you just had a fight with someone, I don’t know, and you’re just not in the mood, but it doesn’t matter. It’s your time to record to a podcast.

                                                I mean, there’s some value in forcing yourself to do things, but I don’t know, sometimes when it comes to creative work, I just don’t think that would be as applicable. I don’t see how that would be the best time to be doing it. You can’t optimize your kind of mood.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, no, I totally understand what you’re saying, and I think that’s right, but I think it does teach good habits for entrepreneurs, and the fact that you’re not able to just walk away from your company or from your work and expect it to be total passive income. That’s just a misnomer. It’s very rare.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, I think that’s rare in general. We weigh on that bit. The idea of passive income is, I think, wrong. It’s the lexicon everyone uses, but the real idea of passive income, I think, is a fantasy. It’s a unicorn people chase.

                                                I was talking a little bit about the third point, which is work less and produce more. So the idea is, is that you actually, you’re not working eight hours a day. In fact, you might only be working four or five hours a day, but the goal is to make those four or five way more productive hours.

Joe Magnotti:                    I have to say, I really think that this has been a huge influence on my life. When I put a deadline on stuff, even a daily deadline, I get so much more done. I tune everything else out. I tell people, “Don’t bother me.” I put other things to the side, whether that’s email or instant message or just telling people, “Look, I can’t talk to you right now because I need to finish this. I know I have an hour or two hours, and that’s all I have before I’m leaving to go to the gym or before lunchtime happens, and I wanna get this done before then.”

                                                So I think that those kind of schedules will help you with those kinda tasks. Now, for the creative sort of thing, maybe a little bit ’cause it forces you at least to get the content out there, and then maybe you can work on making the content better. Yes, if it’s a video, of course not, but if you’re just writing a script or thinking up ideas, it forces you to get more ideas out there that you can work on refining later.

Justin Cook:                        So we talked recently. We did a whole podcast episode on Tim Ferriss, right? And one of Tim Ferriss’s big ideas is the idea of elimination, right? To basically cut out things in your work that are meaningless tasks, the things that aren’t actually providing any impact in your business but you tend to do just because of whatever.

                                                So yeah, I think one way to do that is to obviously cut down your hours, ’cause now, if you only cut down to four or five hours a day, you’re kind of limited to the important things. I mean, you don’t necessarily have to be. You can still screw off and do the silly stuff, but I don’t think that that’s required to do it. Do you know what I mean? I think you can do the elimination and automation steps without cutting down to the four or five hours a week.

                                                So I think, I worry that it’s just, it’s kind of an excuse to work less, right? It’s like, “Okay, but I’ll work seven days a week, but I’ll only do four or five hours,” right? And you don’t necessarily need to work long hours all the time, but let’s say you’re working nine-, 10-, 12-hour days on your startup, and there are some things in there that you can eliminate, go ahead and eliminate them and fill in those extra hours with, I think, effective work.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Justin. I mean, definitely, we’ve both been saying that, especially in the beginning of your startup, cutting down on work hours is just not really a possibility. You have to put in those extra hours in order to build your business to a point where it can take off on its own.

Justin Cook:                        It can be a thing though. It can be a thing where you cut down on your work hours temporarily as a test to really see what you cut out. It’s kind of your method for elimination, but I think you probably need to then extend that and not fill it with fluff but with effective work.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, and then I hope that if you are cutting down on your work hours, you’re filling in those hours with something useful personally. I mean, if you’re just sitting there watching TV, I’d rather have you working, right?

                                                So if you’re learning a new skill or developing yourself personally or whatever it is, I hope your investing those hours in something good in your life.

Justin Cook:                        So I like his fourth point. He talks a little bit about how outside influences affect your day, affect your life, right? And this goes back to the Saturday/Sunday thing where, you’ve got friends, you’ve got family. They wanna go to Sea World on Sunday, and trying to stick to your hardcore schedule is less possible, and more work-related, if you’re dealing with clients a lot on Saturdays or Sundays, that may be difficult when they are not at work, especially if you’re like B2B or something, right?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I mean, the example he gives is, if you need something done and you send out the email on Saturday morning, expecting that sometime during your workday Saturday or sometime during your workday Sunday, it’s gonna get done and it doesn’t, and now you can’t act on that until the other thing is done until Monday, that’s a problem, so it really makes you have to shift your priorities and work around other people’s schedule, which is definitely one of the problems.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, I think this is especially important if you’re dealing with clients or partners or whatever, and they’re on a different schedule than you, but your work requires you to communicate with them. If you are a programmer, can live in a cave and work your own hours, that’s not so big of a deal, but it is when you’re dealing with partners and clients and customers and that kinda thing.

                                                So our fifth point is to discuss whether a day of renewal is needed. That’s kinda the conclusion that Joel came to. He thought that maybe a six-day routine with the one day of rest is probably the best approach, both for your body, for your mind, psychologically, to kind of have that rest or recover day.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I have to absolutely agree with this one. Being a guy that works a lot, checks my email a lot, I feel that Sunday is my day off. That’s it. I go for a massage, I don’t work out, I go see a movie, I eat whatever I want. Sunday is my day, and that’s it. I’ve even tried to take away the checking of a little bit of email in the morning and checking a little email at night. I still do a little bit of that sometimes just to make sure that Mondays are not crazy, but yeah, I think the one day of rest thing is absolutely needed.

Justin Cook:                        I think that fits in with the fourth point too, on outside influences. So you’ve got friends, you’ve got everyone else, “Hey, let’s go fishing on Sunday,” or whatever they wanna go do. It gives you that chance to go do that, get your mind away from everything, and just kind of relax.

Joe Magnotti:                    And it also makes it more special because now, when I was in my early 20s, the weekend started on Friday. I mean, really, Friday was like a half day sometimes, you know?

Justin Cook:                        Yeah.

Joe Magnotti:                    And I would take it easy all the way until Sunday night, and now, because I’m really just resting on Sunday, I love my Sundays, and I respect my Sundays, and I look forward to them, so I think there’s something to be said about that.

Justin Cook:                        So our last point is, we wanna talk about the fact that you need to consider whether this actually fits your business, right? And for some businesses, this isn’t even remotely close to possible. If you’re on the phone all day during the work week and you have to be calling other people during their work hours, I mean, then it seems to be a very difficult thing to do.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah. I mean, especially if you wanna keep the same working hours. If you have some sort of, you don’t have people doing the frontline support with your customers, if you have other reasons why you have to have a modified schedule where you could be on-call at any time, I could see the seven-day work week getting out of hand, where you’re just always the guy on-call, right? And you don’t want that to be the case, but this is a tough question: “Does it fit your business?” for me because I think most online entrepreneurs, in the beginning stages, it might not fit them actually so well.

Justin Cook:                        If you’re doing a lot of reaching out, you’re doing a lot of connecting with people and trying to … sales, you’re promoting sales for your business. You’re gonna have to go where your customers are, be available when your potential customers are available, so you’re kind of, I mean, that’s what you have to do, especially while you’re hustling, getting your business rolling.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, and I mean, it’s nice that you would be working on your business seven days a week, but I think I would rather see a more normal schedule, something that fits your customers and your business development relationships better.

Justin Cook:                        As you get further along, and I think Joel has been in that situation, he is in a position to where he can test things like this out.

Joe Magnotti:                    Right. He’s the CEO of Buffer, so I mean, that’s not a small company, and it’s a pretty cool job to have and try something like this out, so my hat off to him. Too bad it didn’t work out, but I think that kind of mid-level, upper-level management or when you’re kind of a medium-sized company as an entrepreneur, that’s the time to try this kind of modified work schedule.

Justin Cook:                        All right, well that’s it for the heart of this week’s episode. Let’s get right into our tips, tricks, and our plans for the future.

Voiceover:                           You are listening to the Empire Flippers podcast with Justin and Joe.

Justin Cook:                        So our first tip, I’m not really sure this is a tip or a trick, but basically, we wanna talk a little bit about tabbed Gmail. So if you’re a big Gmail user, I don’t know if it’s rolled out to you or not yet, but you should see that they have multiple tabs in your inboxes, right? Social and …

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, so Eric comes to me the other day, and he says, “Hey, did you get the tabbed Gmail browsing?”

                                                And I said, “What are you talking about?” And I didn’t realize that because I use the multiple inbox lab that tabbed browsing, I’m sorry, tabbed Gmail, by default, is disabled.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, I don’t have that either ’cause I use the multiple inboxes. So yeah, I was waiting for the rollout, and I never got it, but …

Joe Magnotti:                    But yeah, I really, I have to say, I don’t like it. I tried it out, and the way that the tabs work, they’re not very well definable. Yes, over time, I guess it will learn kinda like priority inbox would learn what messages are important and which messages are not, but you might miss a bunch of messages. They might go to the wrong place.

                                                So you have like a social tab. You have a forums tab. You have a promotion tabs, and that’s the big one, the promotions tab. I’m worried about emails that people are signed up for, that actually look forward to those emails, going to the promotions tab and-

Justin Cook:                        Not getting ’em, yeah.

Joe Magnotti:                    Not getting ’em.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what this does for deliverability for marketers and for startups and that kind of thing. I mean, I think it’ll definitely be painful.

                                                I read an article about, explaining basically how to either disable that. Obviously, you could use multiple inboxes, or you can actually disable, go back to the old version, or I think if you want to use the tabs, what you can do over time is then teach it which emails you want to go in which bucket, right? So, and that’s probably the best way to do it. I’ll actually link to that in the show notes, so if anyone wants to check it out …

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, it’s a pretty good article. I liked it too, and I have to say though, disable it.

Justin Cook:                        What, just so they get our emails? Is that what you’re saying?

Joe Magnotti:                    No, not just ’cause you get our-

Justin Cook:                        “Just so they can read my emails, baby!”

Joe Magnotti:                    No really. I swear to you, I live and die on email, and I get a lot of email, and I do not think that this is a good form of email. You’re gonna lose stuff, you’re gonna misplace stuff, you’re gonna not realize important stuff is gonna go to the wrong tab and you’re not gonna check it, and you’re gonna miss it.

Justin Cook:                        All right, second point I wanna mention is a new podcast called entrepreneurshowdown.com. Basically, it’s a couple of guys that are interviewing a bunch of people, and they ask fantastic questions. I was on the show with them. They were talking to us a little bit about some of the content we did.

                                                They’ve got a really unique style to it. So they do three rounds, right? For round one, round two, and then they do the main event, where they actually talk to the content producer. What I like about the show is they ask more in-depth questions, and they don’t spend a lot of time talking about, “How did you get into online marketing?” And all the kinda lame questions that make the rounds. It’s about a specific piece of content.

                                                I just listened to the one with James Schramko, I thought was pretty useful, and he gives some great, I’d say, business advice, and they keep trying to … it’s funny ’cause they kept trying to bring it back down to like, “Okay, people starting off, what should they do?” And I think he’s probably not the best person to ask for that ’cause he’s a little more removed from starting off, and he can give some advice, but it’s hard ’cause he’s got a ton of income streams, and it’s not really the same thing.

Joe Magnotti:                    So is this the one that’s kinda like that ESPN show? I can’t remember it’s name.

Justin Cook:                        Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. So yeah, the latest one was with James Schramko, and it’s a really good show, so I’ll link to that in the show notes. You can check it out. It’s definitely worth a listen. They’re a new podcast, but I think they’ve got some serious potential, so …

Joe Magnotti:                    Cool.

Justin Cook:                        Give it a listen.

                                                Anyway, that’s it for episode 57 of the Empire Flippers podcast. Thanks for being with us. Make sure to check us out on Twitter, @empireflippers, and we’ll see you around.

Joe Magnotti:                    Bye-bye, everybody.

Voiceover:                           You’ve been listening to the Empire Flippers podcast with Justin and Joe. Be sure to hit up empireflippers.com for more. That’s empireflippers.com.

                                                Thanks for listening.