Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share 10 life hacks.
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
Check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
10 Life Hacks From Flea Market Flipper
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about life hacks. Hopefully how you can get more productive in your daily routines.
Melissa: It's a little different kind of episode than we usually do. So we're kind of excited to just kind of discuss some things that have worked for us.
Rob: All right, guys. So we are talking about life hacks, how you can get more productive in your daily routines, how you can get more out of your business. Just some things that Melissa and I use in our day to day life that really help us get results that we get. So figured that hopefully you can take some good knowledge, take some good information from this, and this is not set in stone.
Melissa: This is what works for us, what works for us. So this is something that we have discovered that helps. And yeah, so that we just thought maybe we could share, maybe you pick up one thing that was like, oh, that's maybe a good idea. I can try to do that too. Or, you know, or you're like, no, those are all dumb ideas, but whatever.
So we thought we would share and hopefully, you can find something that's helpful.
Rob: And we broke it up into 10 categories. So hopefully, like we said, you guys can take away from this and hopefully implement one or two things. If it works for you, if it sounds like it would work for you, try it out, see if it will work.
Melissa: Yeah. So. The first one is exercise, so obviously this is one that, is important. We all know exercise is important, but I think a hack that, what would be a hack that we use, like we do it first thing in the day, and I think that does help, or at the end of the day, as long as you make it a commitment to do it, and you can do something as easy as walking.
Like walking does so much, if you just commit to moving during the day at some point, whatever time works best for you, but just going for a walk, even if you don't want to, you know, come out a whole big exercise routine. Walking helps so much and we implemented walking. When was that? When Brody was born.
I don't know why we didn't do before him. But when Brody was born, we started walking to our downtown every day. And it's been a habit that stuck with us now for seven years. And we love it. It's our favorite part of the day.
Rob: Yeah, it's really cool. So I drop the kids off at school in the morning. I come back and that's the first thing that Melissa and I do to start off the day is to get a walk in and then get a jog in and then also another walk in, to cool down and then walk back to the house.
One of the other hacks that I don't know if we listed this in here is we listen to motivational stuff. We listen to podcasts. We'll listen to books. We'll listen to anything that we can while we are either walking or while we are running to help keep us motivated. That's one of the things that we do and this has been our daily routine for the last what seven years is doing this every single day without fail.
It's not only healthy for us, it keeps us more healthy. Melissa and I by no means are these, exactly by no means are that way, but this actually, we know this is healthy for us to stay moving for our joints. As we get older, it's just so much nicer to be able to do this stuff.
Melissa: All right. So, number two. So, we don't have any like, well, I do have one nutritional supplement.
Eating decent does help, like it does help how you feel, obviously, and I said decent, not like perfectly, because you don't eat, we don't eat perfectly, but we do, like start the day with a protein shake, and then choose, for the most part, good foods, and that helps with your energy a lot, so, and this is kind of a, this is later on, the next one, it goes, I guess we can go, it goes right into it. Eating some of the same foods that you know are healthy, that it's, it's easy.
It helps you avoid decision fatigue. And that's the third one is, if you can avoid decision fatigue by choosing some of the same things, it helps so much. Like how many decisions do you wake up and you have to do in a day? So we avoid that by, we wear a lot of the same clothes. We eat a lot of the same food.
So we already know kind of those things work for us.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, for us, it's probably, I mean, I know myself personally, probably 80% of what I eat is healthy. And then the other 20%, you know, I could go without, I love sweets. So. But the rest of like my meals, I try to make sure that they're healthy.
Just like, today, like yesterday, I mean a protein shake in the morning. That's my breakfast, a salad in the afternoon, with chicken on top of it is our, our lunch. And then for dinner, and we can do that at multiple restaurants around in our area, we can do it at the house. It's very easy to do that.
And then for dinner, vegetables and chicken. And then that's where I go a little bit south is when after dinner, I like to have a dessert. I had ice cream. I actually had a Coke float last night after dinner. So it's not all perfect and trust me, I don't look like I'm chiseled. I don't look like this amazing, what would you call it?
A health, not a health, but a, somebody who works out like crazy. That's not me, but I feel like trying to make as many good decisions, decisions as you can in your health and your eating and that kind of stuff. It goes a long way. One thing that I have found out, Melissa and I are both in our early forties.
One thing that we have learned is I have definitely learned I can't eat the same way I ate in my twenties. I can't go to fast food restaurants and feel good because of the fast food, the fried, that kind of stuff. Not, I'm not saying that I never do it, but trust me, I cannot do it as much as I did in my twenties. Very few and far between will I go to fast food restaurants and eat the fried stuff that I try to stay more healthy with it. But this is not about cutting everything out that you love It's about still that equal balance of stuff that you love But also trying to get a little bit more healthy on some of the other stuff as well
Melissa: So definitely it messes with or it affects your ability to work and your ability to do things is how you feel and your energy like protecting your energy is super important. But also not like I used to be very obsessive about food And so to take that away and not be so obsessive and to know that I can make healthy choices without being obsessive Is is super empowering.
So, so yeah, so that's what I wrote eat decent will help you feel better. Absolutely. And then like we said, number three was avoid decision fatigue. So, cause that is super important. That you, and we do that by doing a lot of the same habits and it just, I think that helps a lot.
Rob: We know after I drop the kids off from school, we're going on a walk and a jog. And we're listening to some great information podcast or a book or something like that. So we know that we don't have to think about our morning routine, protein shake, take the kids to school. That's just what we do. So that helps us not having to make those decisions in the morning, which you probably have routines as well, but are they the healthy routines or can you make any changes to make them more healthy routines or anything like that.
So that's just kind of what we're trying to get you to think about how you can, you can make some, some decisions.
Melissa: And just a little side note, which is kind of funny cause I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there. You, and if you're listening to this, you probably, you probably listen to other entrepreneurs podcasts and stuff.
And some people talk about their morning routine and how like they have to have like a certain morning routine every morning they get up at two o'clock and okay, so like they get up at 4:30 in the morning or 5:00 in the morning and they do their exercise and meditation and stuff. That is not us. I'm just gonna say that's not us like we get up. We have to be out the door by 7:30 and we are up at 7 with our three kids and getting ready, getting lunches made. We got it. We get it done every day. So that's us. It's a little crazy in the morning, but, but that's just what works for us. That works for us. We're not doing the whole, four o'clock morning meditations and stuff.
Number four is something that you value a lot is not caring what other people think.
Rob: It is. It's so cool. It's hard because I feel like what we are in our society is definitely worried about what other people think about what you wear, what you drive, what vacations you go on. It's more towards what other people are thinking about you.
And one of the, one of the guys that we listen to, Alex Hormozi, he actually talked about this on a podcast. I, it was today or recently, talking about you, you shouldn't really care about what other people think about you, to make the decisions on that. Now, I know a lot of people who will go into debt on wearing the top brand clothes, driving Teslas, the nicest cars.
Not to say that you can't drive a Tesla, you know what I mean?
Melissa: And you can't, not to say you can't have nice things. Exactly. It's what you value. That's what you value. Exactly. That's different. That's just not us.
Rob: It's not. And it's more of wearing what, what we feel is comfortable. What works for us driving.
I mean, Melissa and I drive, a 21, 22 year old cars. Not to say that I couldn't go down and buy, four hundred thousand miles on it. Not to say that I couldn't go down and buy a Tesla. That's not the point of it. The point is I like what I drive. It's very practical for what I do. And trust me, if I wanted a Tesla, I could go buy a Tesla.
It's not the end of the world. But I'm not worried about what other people think about my car. Our cars break down. Like right now on the side of the road, I have our excursion, which is a 21 year old vehicle that it had a injector that went bad on it and we can't drive it right now. So I'm in the middle of getting that fixed. But it's one of those things that I'm not going to go buy a brand new car. I'm going to fix it because I like the car and you like to fix, I like to fix stuff. I like to do that stuff. So and maybe you just reflect on yourself right now and think of, am I doing, what I'm worried about other people are thinking about me or am I making decisions, worried about that. And maybe try and not do that as much if it is one of those things that you're doing, because at the end of the day. To be honest, I mean, it doesn't really matter what anybody thinks about you. That's, that's not something that is going to do anything but drop your bank account lower, because you're trying to keep up with the Joneses and that kind of stuff.
And that's one of the things, if you can get away from that as much as possible, I feel like that's empowering as well.
Melissa: One thing that goes along with that too is the, like, maybe you're not sure what people are going to think if you're diving into your flipping business. They're like, oh, that's not a real thing.
Like, you won't be able to do that. Like, you've tried all this stuff and you can't make it. And you start to listen to those voices that are in your head or voices that are your friends or whoever family telling you that. Or, you know, maybe you've posted stuff online and people are like, don't do that. You know, and so, is it something you want to do though? Is it something that you know that you can put energy into and make it happen? So sometimes you would have to not always listen to what other people are saying or thinking and do stuff for you. And figure out what it is that you want to do and, and not saying be like, and also hold your values and all that stuff. Like not saying go off the deep end that way. But, but you have to, you know, think about, you can't think about what other people think of you and let that drive you.
And one other part of that is I tend to let a, because we put ourselves out on the internet, like I tend to be more, and I'm the one who does our social, so I read all the comments and all the stuff.
And so they get to me sometimes, like you have to have a pretty hard shell if you were going to put yourself out there. Most people are amazing. A lot of people are great. There's a lot of great comments. We have a great community. But then there's always going to be those negative people that are out there like there's people that we even got an argument one time because they're like we have 20 great, you know podcast comments or YouTube comments and then there's one that's like I can't stand your voice or you're too loud or or tone it down. And i'm like, well, maybe you should tone it down a little bit. Maybe you're too much and it's like well, that's who we you know, that's who you are. So you're not gonna please everybody.
You're not gonna please everybody and so, yeah, be yourself and there will be people who love it. Love you for you, and there'll be people who you're not for. And that's okay, 'cause there's, I don't even know how many people are in this world. Like a lot of people, so billions, right? Yeah. Like is that billions?
I don't know. There's a lot of people. So there's gonna be people that you, that find you and enjoy what you have to say and the people who don't, that's okay. They're not your people. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that was just kind of a side note on that. So number six, I think five, oh, sorry, five. Number five.
Was, it is kind of a time hack that we do, and it's something that has helped me a lot is actually I grocery shop online. So this is kind of a time hack for me I don't know if we have one for you, but I grocery shop online and it helps a ton because it saves us money, too. It's a money hack and a time hack by grocery shopping online I don't go and buy the extra stuff if I was wandering the stores that I might go by instead I'm I know online I pick what I normally buy and because it's the same kind of stuff, I'm avoiding the decision fatigue.
I'm just buying what I need, buying what we always get, and then maybe I'll add another like one extra recipe and so I need something else in there, but it's the same stuff so it's easy. I have my cart saved pretty much and then it's only an extra two dollars for me to go pick it up and it saves me so much time.
I don't have to do the shopping and it saves me money and I also don't do delivery though because it's an extra $25. So I'm like, I can't do $25. I can do an extra $2. $2. Makes so much sense to save time. And then, but yeah, in the grocery store for us it's, it's only a couple, it's just a down the road, so a mile down the road.
So it's hard. But I used to feel bad about having somebody else grocery shop for me when, but then I'm like, two bucks. For two bucks, I can have somebody do it and then to be honest, they load it in my car.
Rob: You'll save money 'cause when I go save money and save time, when I go to the grocery as well, I will just start throwing stuff in the cart that I see in the aisles.
And just throw more stuff in. If you have it systematic of you're ordering the same things over and over, because it's what you use, what you go through, it is way, way cheaper and takes you a lot of time to be able to do this, order your stuff online and then go pick it up or have it delivered. So yeah, such a good or great hack.
We've been doing that for a while now. You guys might've already taken advantage of that as well. If you haven't look into it, look into your local grocery store. Yeah. And see if it's possible.
Melissa: It could be. We go to Aldi and they have it with Instacart and it's amazing. All right. So this one actually goes with, with time.
So it's a time hack for you, but it's a listing hack too is what I put down. Cool. So it's batching your listings and batching your picture taking and getting your stuff ready to go. So.
Rob: Absolutely. And for some people, it's overwhelming, or you get analysis paralysis and you don't get started. One of the things that you can totally do is get stuff batched. Take seven pictures, take three pictures of three different items and take multiple pictures Get them on your phone, so you're ready to go to list it. If you batch it, then you can actually list it in three days. Get all the drafts done. It saves time overall. In one day, absolutely. It's quicker to do that on something.
So this is a time hack that will save you, but it will help in more ways than just time. It will totally help your business if you can batch, get stuff ready, and get seven days worth of stuff listed, three days worth of stuff listed.
Melissa: You work for a day, and then you have all your drafts ready to go, and then it's, it's a lot faster.
Rob: So that's one of our time hacks on how we do it is trying to batch stuff as much as we possibly can. And that timeframe so we can do it.
Melissa: Yeah. All right. Number seven is more of a physical and mental hack is take off on Sundays. So this is also spiritual for us because it's something that God commanded what was to rest on the seventh day or could be the Saturdays for you or whatever day it is for you.
But to take one day and rest. Which is so hard for me. Like it is very hard for me. I see like, okay, well it's an extra day for us. I need to work around the house. I need to do this, do that. It's so hard for me to rest, so, and that's not very hard for you to rest . No, but we do try to make it a priority.
I also am working on it and I go through phases where I can do this easily and then sometimes not, is turn, like, not go online, not go on my phone, not open it, not go on any social apps or anything. And, until like the end of the day when I'm trying to plan for the week, that's, but. I'm, I'm a work in progress, but it does, it definitely helps to take off a day at the end of the week or to prepare you for the next week.
And it just makes, cause you can't go, go, go. Like I've felt burnout before. Like you can't just go, go, go, go, go.
Rob: So absolutely. That's one of the things that, yeah, we try to do that as much as possible. We do go to church on Sundays. So it makes it a little bit easier for that routine that we built is to take more time off, relax a little bit more, try to rejuvenate or try to relax and, yeah, rejuvenate your batteries and get yourself back ready for the following week.
And that's how we do it. So it works really well for us. Maybe try it. Maybe you might be working seven days a week right now and you're really, really burned out. Try to take one of those days off and just try to relax, try to watch TV, try to, I mean, whatever, exercise, do whatever you possibly can.
Go for a walk. Try to to see if it will help you.
Melissa: So. Which kind of actually goes into number eight, we're almost there, is also goes into like the mental and physical rest, but don't over plan your social schedule. So that's a big one. I feel like our culture is very much get, like, we have three kids, so get them involved in ten things, get them, like, do all this stuff, and we are not really about that.
Like, I want the kids to find something they love, and I want them to be involved, because I, like, I was very involved in soccer and horseback riding, and I think it's important for them to find something, but at the same time, I don't think they need to be doing 10 things at one time, like all the time.
Every second of the day is planned. Yeah, so we try not to, like, the kids do one thing at a time for the most part, and then we have like, one night a week we have our Bible study or whatnot. And so, we try not to over plan during the week. We do some more stuff on the weekends typically. But I think it just gets very tiring if you try to over plan too much stuff during the week. So.
Rob: We have a friend who has stuff planned out six months, eight months, a year in advance, and she tries to get bookings from us to be like, all right, hey, we're going to do this this night. And we're like, you know, we don't even know what's going on next week, much less eight months down the road from right now.
And she constantly tries to do that, which is just hilarious.
Melissa: And there's nothing wrong with being organized, because that is an area that we could be better at is, and I'm working on that, is being organized, but also to not have something planned every second, every day, I think, and then you don't have, then you don't have time to actually, if you need a time to just sit and relax for a second, take a break that you don't have that.
So, anyways. Yeah. So that's kind of something that we, we try to not to do. And then number nine is we turn off notifications for social media. You have never had, you barely go on social media. That's not an issue for you. For me, it is an issue and it's a balance because it's work and, you know, and fun.
So it's like, or work and, I wouldn't even say fun. It's just mindless scrolling is what it is. Cause it's like, you don't, I go on there and I'm like, I don't want to think. And so then you just start mindless scrolling instead of actually doing what I was supposed to do. So I turned, a couple years ago, I turned off notifications on my, on my phone for personal.
I do have some business ones on there for two apps, so, which I should probably take off too. But then I can be more intentional and I don't like, look at a notification and have to answer. That's not, like, that you don't have to answer. You go in, like, okay, I'm, I have time right now, I'm gonna go in answer, answer comments or reply back to any tags or whatever it is.
And you have that time that you do that. So instead of it owning you, you own your time that way. So I think that's, that's a time hack.
Rob: So turn some notifications off and see if it helps you in your business or get, be more productive if you're not constantly getting bombarded with notifications and then jumping into the apps and doing stuff like that.
Try it, see if it works. And maybe you have to start with one day a week. You turn the notifications off and see if you can gain some hours back. I know somebody else that we follow somebody, one of the, our other, I guess it would be a coach, one of the other podcasters and mentors that we have.
He just went to two phones. He got, he has two phones now. One that has his, he uses for phone calls, for text messages, and listening. And Voxer. I think he has Voxer. And Voxer. And he uses that phone. And then all of his other social media presence and notifications and all that stuff are on another phone.
It's a separate phone that gets all those notifications. And he leaves those at, that phone at his office to where he can separate himself with his family, with his friends, with his other life. And then the notifications. And he's really big in social networks. That he knows exactly what's going on, but he limits it to while he's working to be able to do that work, catch up on that stuff.
And he says that's been huge for him to be able to do that, which is pretty cool.
Melissa: Yeah. I thought of one to actually piggyback on that one. It's kind of a bonus one for this one is also, we turned off the news. We did that years and years ago. And I think that's so important for your mental health.
So we turned up. We don't watch the news. I figure if something's going to happen, I need to know about it. I'll know about it from Facebook or TikTok. So, but between one of those, somebody will tell us about it. But the news, yeah, it just is all negative. You even stopped listening to some of your talk radio.
He used to drive a ton for work and after he come back and these were even like, yeah. People that you might have some of the same viewpoints with, but then you're like, it's really just all negative and I can't, I just can't listen to it. Everything's negative. It doesn't matter like what your views are.
Everything is slanted towards just negativity and attacking whoever and they're like, it's not cool. Like I don't like it. So you just turn it off. So we don't listen to talk radio or the news. So last one is probably your favorite one is keeping vacations planned so we can work hard. And then take a break.
Take a break. So you like work hard for a segmented time and then take a vacation.
Rob: So I remember my childhood, my dad was a painting contractor, so he had his own business. My mom sold timeshare, but yeah, she got sick I think when I was 10 or 11 and she quit working. But I remember my whole childhood.
We only took one vacation a year and we went to, my parents had like a trailer, but it was in a retirement community. It was really, really cool. It was a vacation. It was a vacation park. Yeah. On the beach. So they rented it out throughout the year and we went down there once a year for a week. And we spent that time and I think about that like now, what Melissa and I do, what we do with the kids and the stuff that we plan out and my mind, if I had to work for 12 months.
Exactly. 51 weeks for one, for one to get one week of vacation. It would drive me crazy. I would go insane like that. And I feel like what we've done with ours is we break them up into spurts. Like right now, why we're recording this episode. We have a conference in two weeks.
Melissa: A conference is our vacation.
Rob: It is, though. Well, it is. It's relaxing. It's rejuvenating. Melissa and I, we have a babysitter for the kids who will take care of the kids. Melissa's mom does that for us and it's time that we spend together as a husband and wife and we get away and we get to listen and invest in our business, but we're doing that in two weeks.
A week and a half ago, we had a conference with our students, we brought everybody together. So splitting stuff up and trying to break it. Even if you get away for one night, to go to a hotel with your spouse to go to do something with your kids as a family, just going away one day and maybe it's once every two or three months and you're working towards that.
That's been a huge hack for us to be able to not only just get out of the daily grind that you're working on and it gives you more motivation to work harder in those short spurts to where you can get away and rejuvenate yourself or reenergize yourself, on the business, on what you're doing, that doesn't make it so hard that the monotony of the same thing over and over and over.
Melissa: I remember, back a couple, several years ago, our favorite vacation was Thanksgiving vacation to go to my grandparents, but just because it was so relaxing. They just let us, you know come to the house and you want to stay a couple days, you want to stay a couple weeks? It's fine. So we would just go and hang out with them, and it was just, it was our favorite time to go and so we'd always look forward to like, okay, we need to work hard.
That was when I was training and you were doing the reports. And so we like we got to work hard because I didn't get paid time off. You didn't get paid time off either did you? So we have to we had to always kind of. So I guess that's what kind of set us up for that is we had to work a little extra harder and save a little bit because we had to still be able to cover for those week or two that we would take off for vacation.
Rob: But it started out with like four days and we loved it so much it grew into like five, six, seven days. We did stay two weeks one time. And then we had the end, towards the end of it, we would go there for two weeks and hang out with her grandparents. So much fun. We just had such a blast.
Melissa: I was like, you could kick us out if you're sick of us.
Rob: In the middle of nowhere, Tennessee is where they were. It was, it was just relaxing. It was fun. It was a lot of fun to be able to do that. So hopefully these have helped you guys. This is kind of how we live our life. And give you guys kind of behind the curtain of what we do. And maybe none of these will work for you and maybe you're perfectly confident.
I mean content, content in what you're doing. Which is okay to whatever works for you. You do you. That's the biggest thing. Don't worry about what other people are. Other people are thinking of you. But like I said, if this helps you even with one of these things that we've told you, that's, that's all we're trying to do is give you a different look and maybe a different thought process on how you're doing your day to day to hopefully get you more efficient or just make it more enjoyable, make your life more joyable with what you're doing.
Melissa: That's a big point to you because I mean it is all about being productive and getting the work done, getting, bringing the money in, like making sure you're profitable in your flipping business or whatever, you know, so other side hustle you're doing but in the end of the day you, you still have to enjoy what you're doing and have fun.
Like that's a big part of what we believe in. Absolutely. Absolutely. So thank you guys so much for listening. We appreciate you so much.
Rob: You guys rock we cannot wait to see you on the next episode.