The Naperville Area Chamber of Commerce held our first General Membership Luncheon in quite some time last month. Joe Chura, Chief Innovation Officer of Cars.com, Founder of Go Brewing here in Naperville, and Entrepreneur was our keynote speaker.
Thanks to Joe Chura, my alarm now goes off at 5:00am. Yes, I am not great at waking up early in the morning (hello snooze!).
One thing I don’t want us all to snooze on is our business and our desired mental state throughout the day.
Joe spoke to a sold-out crowd and had some great pieces of advice to share with the crowd.
One piece of advice he offered that resonated with me was starting the day on offense.
Joe spoke about waking up early and having quiet time to work on yourself. You can use this time to work out, read, or simply have quiet time as you prep for the day. This way you truly start it on your terms. Rather than waking up and racing around to get everything together necessary to get out of the house, starting the day on the offense makes sure you are productive.
When asked how he can do this, Joe talked about accountability. Having someone come by your house to wake you up. Set early appointments or find something that forces you to rise early and will hold you accountable as you get into this new routine. Starting your day after an intentional calm gets you positioned to swim versus treading water at the beginning of your 9:00 am workday. We all know it’s hard to come back from an unplanned or crazy morning and this can surely help.
This is just one piece I took from his presentation. He also left us with some great reads to motivate and inspire as well as some helpful suggestions on productivity tools that work for his business(es).
BOOKS:
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
- Building A Story Brand by Donald Miller
PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS:
- Slack: Slack is a new way to communicate with your team. It’s faster, better organized, and more secure than email.
- Spark: Apache Spark™ is a multi-language engine for executing data engineering, data science, and machine learning on single-node machines or clusters.
- Fantastical: Fantastical is the multiple award-winning calendar app with powerful features including intuitive natural language text parsing, beautiful full calendar day, week, month, quarter and year views, tasks, time zone support, and much more.
- Monday: A Project management tool that centralizes all your work, processes, tools, and files into one Work OS. Connect teams, bridge silos, and maintain one source of truth across your organization.
I encourage you to head over to our NACC Members Facebook Group to share and discuss the takeaways you uncovered from Joe Chura. You can also share your accountability ideas (anyone up for a 5:00am group thread? I will say, I have hit snooze one too many times this week).
Let’s not snooze the day away, but seize it!
Business Forward
Kaylin