Productivity.
Everyone wants it, but it can be very difficult to find or sustain.
This week’s guest has mastered it.
Charlie Gilkey is the Founder of Productive Flourishing, a consulting company based in Portland, Oregon, which helps creatives, entrepreneurs, and leaders to start finishing projects. Charlie is also a speaker and the author of Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. The goal for Charlie and his company is to help people and businesses focus on what matters so that they can finish what they started.
In this episode, John Corcoran is joined by Charlie Gilkey to talk about the unusual way he wrote his latest book, deciding which people in your life to focus on, and why prioritizing things can be so difficult.
In this episode, we also talk about:
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- The Unusual Device that Charlie Used to Write His Book
- Younger Generations Know How to Type at an Early Age
- The Powerful Distractions We Face Every Day that Keep Us From Accomplishing Things
- Prioritizing is Difficult When Every Project is a “Top Priority”
- Past Failures can be Baggage That Affects Current Productivity
- What to do with Naysayers
- Focus on the People Who Believe in You
- Who Charlie Thanks for His Success
Resources Mentioned:
- Productive Flourishing Website
- About Charlie Gilkey
- Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done, by Charlie Gilkey
Sponsor: Rise25
Today’s episode is sponsored by Rise25 Media, where our mission is to connect you with your best referral partners, clients, and strategic partners. We do this through our done for you business podcast solution and content marketing.
Along with my business partner Dr. Jeremy Weisz, we have over 18 years of experience with B2B podcasting, which is one of the best things you can do for your business and you personally.
If you do it right, a podcast is like a “Swiss Army Knife” – it is a tool that accomplishes many things at once. It can and will lead to great ROI, great clients, referrals, strategic partnerships, and more. It is networking and business development; and it is personal and professional development which doubles as content marketing.
A podcast is the highest and best use of your time and will save you time by connecting you to higher caliber people to uplevel your network.
To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected].
To learn more, book a call with us here.
Check out Rise25 to learn more about our done-for-you lead generation and done-for-you podcast services.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran 0:40
Alright, welcome everyone. My guest on this show is it’s truly a pleasure to welcome back Charlie Gilkey, someone who I really respect someone who I’ve learned from for a long time. We were just reminiscing. I actually have known him for least about seven years now, which is just It feels like an eternity and he’s an expert and helping people to start Finishing the stuff that really matters. He’s the founder of Productive Flourishing author of the book Start Finishing, which we’re gonna be talking about here today, The Small Business Life Cycle, which came out in 2012. And I did two episodes back to back, talking with him about that one, and also host of the productive flourishing podcast long before that, in an earlier life. He was a logistics coordinator, while simultaneously pursuing a PhD in philosophy, and also a veteran. Thank you, sir, for your service.
But first, before we get into that, if you’re new to this show, you know, we don’t charge for this podcast and we publish hundreds of episodes, every single one. We talked to experts like this business leaders, CEOs, founders, and we asked them to break down their business and the relationships the key relationships that are the backbone of any business in their business in particular. And so if you find value in this podcast, which I know you will all we ask that you subscribe so you will receive those downloads automatically and you’re going to keep on repeating improving your relationships to grow your business. Now also, before we get into this interview, This podcast brought to you by Rise25 Media which is our done for you agency focused on helping b2b businesses to get more clients referral partners and strategic partners through done for you podcast and done for you content marketing and our company.
There are 20 years in this experience and I firmly believe that a podcast. First of all, it’s so many things in one, it’s business development, networking, client acquisition, referral, marketing, all of these different things. It’s really a Swiss Army knife. But most importantly, it allows you to have a conversation with people whose work you admire, like I’m about to do here with Charlie. So if you want to learn more about that, go to rise25.com. Joe.
As I mentioned, my guest is is Charlie Gilkey and Charlie I was reading up on your background and how you put this book together and I thought this was such an inappropriate way to start things off. You didn’t write this thing on a laptop, did you? You You missed your practicality. took a look at yourself in the mirror and you said nope, nope, ain’t gonna get the job done in a laptop. I’m going to use something else. It wasn’t Sanskrit. It wasn’t a scroll. It wasn’t pen and paper, but it was close. So tell us about that.
Charlie Gilkey 3:04
Yeah. So first off, thanks for having me on the show again, and really appreciate what you’re doing here. And so as I started writing the book, I found like many writers do is like a man I’m distracted is crazy, right? It’s all the things coming to me. And as far as context goes, you got to remember is that I’m not just a full-time author, right? I’m a coach. I do a podcast all the things that you mentioned, I serve on boards. I have the string of email. So I have a lot of different irons in the fire all the time. And it turned out that my laptop was an entry point for distract distraction and interruption. And rather than continuing to lose the battle of willpower, and lose the battle of distraction,
I actually was like, You know what, I just need something that interfaces with my fingers. It gets words from brain into a device that I could use my soul Here is drafting. And so, you know, back when I started productive flourishing, there is, you know, in really nice corners of the productivity web and then so that’s super nice, right? Nice quarters of the productivity web. There were folks that were talking about using an alpha smart Neo to, which is a late 90s. word processor is basically a keyboard with an LCD screen on it. You’re like typing into a calculator, essentially. And it can, you know, it can hold a full book on this thing. And I had used one before it had been my crutch.
Like when I was ever I was stuck and fighting against computers and technology. I would be like, you know what? Neil? was like, All right, I’m writing the book on the Neo and so that meant what that really meant, john is I had a routine I would wake up in the morning, I’d walk to the coffee shop. The only thing in my bag was my Neo and my phone only because I needed to listen to Spotify or music and background but I wasn’t distracted by my phone at the time, given the way that I had hacked the crap out of my phone. So I’d walk down, I’d write for four hours, and I’d walk and I’d walk home. And there were plenty of times, like writers and creators will know what I mean here. Like, I can sense that space between paragraphs, right? There’s that moment where you’re like, You finished a paragraph and like, thoughts would enter true. You’re like, what’s going on? Do I need to check that email? What’s happening there, blah, blah, blah, like all the noise and all the chatter, and that would be just enough to throw me off of the writing game.
But because of the way that we can prime ourselves to orient to our environment and the tools in our environment, that noise went away on the Neo too. And so even if I had to get to the end of the paragraph, and I’d be, you know, struggling with the words and you know, have all the head trash about that, like, I didn’t have anywhere to run to I didn’t have Facebook to jump to I didn’t have Twitter, I didn’t have email. I didn’t have slack. It was just the question was, am I going to get back at it? Or am I going to stop And most of the time is like, well, I’ve only been here 15 minutes and I’m not gonna walk down here 15 minutes and stop, so I’ll keep going. Yeah, and then I’ll keep going. And then at the end of is like, well, I guess I’m done and I’d walk home and then
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