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Sticky Learning Lunches #40: Think You Don’t Need to Attend This Webinar?
This 7-part model will help you to find out what is wrong with your time management.
You will learn:
– Each of the 7 parts of the time management system.
– How each part is essential to creating an effective time management system.
– The holes that are exposed in your time management system by not having any one of the 7 pieces.
– Practical tips to incorporate any one of the 7 parts of the time management system.
– The strengths and weaknesses of your time management system.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Where’s that button? Let’s go. Share screen. We are in sticky learning. Lunch people, good to be here. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch. We’ve got that midweek feeling, which I don’t believe in. We’ve got a handful of people that have arrived. We’re just waiting for the next few people to come in, as always. Abby, hello again, Abby. Good to see you. Colin. Thank you for being here, Fabian. Very welcome as always. Lynn. Good to see you again. Petra, thank you very much for being here Again, Tim, Tracy, Victoria. Beautiful. Thank you so much for your investment in yourself and engaging with the content today. Just a few more seconds while we get those people in the room.
Nathan Simmonds:
Another mouthful of tea. And then we’re gonna dive into today’s content. Let’s get ourselves set up while we’re just waiting for those to arrive. As always, never changes. It’s the same distractions that we always put into our days. Mobile phones, flight mode. Zero outta distraction. A hundred percent attention. Ah, making sure you’ve got drinks, you are hydrated. Couple more people arriving. Jane’s arrived. Good to see you. Thank you for being here, Jane.
Nathan Simmonds:
Fresh page, fresh thinking at the top of the page for today’s learning is hurdle number four. It’s all about the ing and we’re gonna break that down in a minute just to help you with some ideas and habits that potentially have formed and calcified over time, which is actually wasting your time. So we’re gonna look a little bit into this. We’re gonna look, build some skills from yesterday a little bit further, and we’re gonna look at some of those habits that are built over time or Colin’s saying’s. Got no audio, Colin’s, that’s all right.
Nathan Simmonds:
Colin’s gone out and come back in. Can everyone else hear me? Yes or no? Yes, yes, yes. Good. Ready to highlight more areas that can improve on, that’s what we are here for. That is what we are here for. Good. Let’s dive in and do this. Let’s get the intros flying as we always do. And for those that arrive in a minute, they can get caught off in just a second. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, home of Sticky Learning.
Nathan Simmonds:
And we are the leadership development and soft skills provider for the grocery and manufacturing industry. Idea of these sessions is to give you new ideas, new concepts and approaches that are gonna help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Whether it’s right now while you’re at home and or while you are preparing to return back to work after whatever situation you are currently in. Wherever you are around the world. Fingers crossed, staying safe, staying well. This session is all about as part four of our time management and our, uh, our hurdles that we experience in time management.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we’ve already covered, I’m gonna go through the flow chart again just so we’ve got it and we’re embedding this, um, for each of these sessions, top one as we’ve got it is capturing where are we actually capturing the information? Where is that information um, happening? Is it in the meeting? Is it in our email? Is it a voicemail? Is it, um, a, a voice recording process? Wherever that idea is, wherever that action is, the capture point is where it’s dropping into our time management system that we’re looking after.
Nathan Simmonds:
Step two, emptying. We talked a bit about this yesterday in part three, uh, and it’s all about how you empty those capture points and are you doing it at regular points o of time? Do you trust that you are going to those capture points at the right time and making sure that you are getting that information out and you are turning it into the relevant actions or getting it into the right lists and listing sits over here. So making sure you are doing that. Today’s session is gonna be about deleting,
Nathan Simmonds:
Which we’re gonna talk about a little bit further. So these are the first four key obstacles or hurdles that we experience in our time management system and some of us I’m hoping. Let’s, let’s have a quick rundown. What things have you picked up from the first three sessions to notice where your time management is falling down? Let’s see at least one thing from everybody in the room. That means everybody here. One thing that you know, um, or notice from the last couple of sessions where you’ve fallen or you are falling down in your time management system.
Nathan Simmonds:
Next area we’ve got here is storing of all those are coming in. I’ll finish the flow chart off for you. Scheduling, we speak for themselves and then we’ve got action whistle. Stop tour of the time management flow chart. So what have we got? Being more aware of how and where to capture. Beautiful , too many lists. Victoria, amazing. Drill ’em down. Too many unconnected capture points that in itself is amazing.
Nathan Simmonds:
Reduce the ones that you can’t trust. Connect the ones that you can trust. Ignoring distractions when other emails come in. Good, good, good, good, good. Learning how to do that arm my catch point’s. Working. Good question. Not attending the others saying, no, I procrastinate about eating a frog when it’s technology based. Good, good, good, good.
Nathan Simmonds:
There’s been lots of learnings that have come out of these sticky lunches and that’s why I’ve enjoyed doing them so much. But where are we going to next? What we’re looking at today is we’re looking at deleting and that’s helping us to delete some of those distractions which have already come up in that, in that box there, helping us to delete things out that are actually causing us to, um, to stumble or causing us to look in the wrong direction. ’cause again, they’re starting to build up different habits. They’re starting to calcify because they became the norm.
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, and we’re gonna break that down a little bit further. One thing that I wanted to share with you and dive back into briefly from yesterday’s section, I’m just gonna share my screen with you. Can you let me know if you can see it or not? Yes or no? Wait for those to come in just to make sure you’re all with me. Can you see my screen? Good. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to look at today, number one, it’s looking at triggers for emptying. So overlapping where we were talking about yesterday triggers for emptying. So helping you to remember .
Nathan Simmonds:
Whenever you are doing something, whenever you get that information. We talked about this in brief yesterday, is making sure that you have the right amount of time in your diary or in your calendar to make sure that when those actions come in, when those items come into your capture point, that you take the appropriate time to get them and empty them. Okay? ’cause if we’re not doing that, we end up with a a notebook with actions on different pages at different points, and we’ve got actions over here on our emails and they’re getting piled in on top of.
Nathan Simmonds:
If we’re not bringing those into the right place into the right list, we’re gonna lose track of those things and it’s gonna start becoming damaging and making sure that we have clarity on that. So what we’ve got here, and this again comes straight off the white paper, we’ll drop the link in there for the time management white paper.
Nathan Simmonds:
You can get hold of that and you can get all of these tables and forms in there as well. It’s in PDF forms. Do you just copy and paste it out or print it out and just work in the directly. So here, oh, he says, got the triggers in there, what the wrong sheet? Apologies. So making sure that you’ve got the right triggers in there. I’ll talk about this in a second. Looking at the habits of when you are doing those things, is it gonna be when you are picking up that cup of coffee, is it gonna be when you are closing your laptop at the end of the day?
Nathan Simmonds:
Is it um, when you are sitting down with your cup of tea first thing in the morning, what are your trigger points to make sure you are capturing that detail? Okay? So that’s the first thing we wanna look at. Where are your trigger points and where are your habits starting to form? And can you start to have it stack? So what this means is it may be that you, I have my 10 o’clock cup of coffee and at 10 o’clock with that cup of coffee, I’m just gonna make sure that I’ve taken the actions out of that meeting and put them into the right list.
Nathan Simmonds:
Does this make sense with everyone? Yes or no? And then I’m gonna talk about, about this table in just a second. So that’s the important, that’s the first part with the triggers. The second part is one of the things we ended on the conversation yesterday is the number of times you said yes wisely. So what this means is, and we talked about yesterday, no one ever wants to be told no. So when your boss turns up and says, right, I need you to do this, and the last thing you wanna do is say no, because then you’ll be seen as the problem child.
Nathan Simmonds:
Makes sense? So then we have to understand that what we’re saying yes to, what are we actually saying no to by saying yes to that thing. How we stopping ourselves or, or how we hobbling ourselves in this situation and causing more detriment to our workload over here by taking more on, because we feel we have to say yes. So when we think about it in this way, we start to guide, as I said yesterday, maybe what you need to say is, okay, that’s great. I’m more than happy to do that.
Nathan Simmonds:
I need to make you aware of what’s currently going on. I’ve got this, this, and this. And these are the priorities. Because when that person turns up to your desk and says, I need you to do this, they’re telling you based on their map of the world, based on what they believe is most important to them without a concern of what’s important to you.
Nathan Simmonds:
So human behavior, it’s not neglect, it’s not, um, um, it’s not ignorance, it’s human behavior. We’ll do it. Why? Because this is the movie of Nathan Simmons. This is the life and times of Nathan Simmons. Therefore, you are all extras this table here and everyone does it. It’s not just, it’s not just my movie, it’s not the Truman Show or anything. You know, this table here is in then enabling you to track the amount of times that you said yes wisely, that you helped people to see your priorities and help make a decision based on the information they that you gave them.
Nathan Simmonds:
Whether or not you are able to do that work or whether or not that timeline changed. I want this by five o’clock. Let, let me show you what’s going on in my world, okay? And actually you can get that back to me next Monday because people just throw these things out there and expect people to say yes without thinking about the other person.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because when we go into influencing skills and we’re always thinking about what’s in it for me, rather than putting ourselves in the shoes of the other person, say what’s in it for them. And actually when we start to show what’s going on in our world and we can say, okay, well actually we’re happy to do that. You need to know this, this may happen and this may impact what would you like to happen? And then you’ll thinking about or showing, demonstrating what’s in it for them by giving ’em a bigger picture. Then they can make a fully informed decision. This form here spreads over seven weeks.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s the number of times you said yes wisely. Without saying no, without telling someone, I’m not gonna do that. Or without putting your hand up and saying no, speak to the hand about actually how you guided, how you delegated and how you help people to, to reprioritize their work and still supported them at the same time. Everyone with me this, yes or no? Is this useful? Well, I’ll take another mouth look too. This then, you know, feeds into the art of delegation and looking after your relationships up, down, left, right? Supporting people, get what they need and still maintaining what you need as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s super important. This is included in the white paper. So we’re gonna share that. We’ve got the link for that. You can go and download it and you can see all something. You can see all of the exercises and the process of thinking that we’re breaking down. Number two for today, let’s come off there. Unsubscribe. He says, if I can spell it.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many circular emails do you get into your spam emails? Are you getting into your inbox on a daily basis? Personal only. How many spam emails do you think you get into your personal email on a daily basis? Let’s see the numbers. What do we got? Five 30 plus. Crikey, you are Abby, you’re as bad as me. Dozens, yeah, too many. We will sign up to these, you know, these programs or these ideas or Oh, that’s a nice idea. I’ll get a a, a newsletter from, uh, green Parenting Magazine or whatever and it just comes in and you never look at it because you never have time to.
Nathan Simmonds:
And then how many emails at work do you get where you are CC’d into them or you are on a, you know, a, a group mailing but you don’t actually look at the content because it’s old hat or it doesn’t concern you or you know it’s been gone, but you still get the email. How many of those do you think you get? Lynn’s got over 200. Crikey, Lynn, now you are talking about corporate 50 to 75. Absolutely. So in our personal inbox, we’ve got all these spam email coming, all these courses, all these nice to have newsletters.
Nathan Simmonds:
And over here at work, we’ve then got all these other emails that are coming in where we’re on subscription lists or or group mails. And we’ve got all this stuff coming in. But what’s happening is we’re not actually looking at that data. My CTD emails go to a separate inbox and get message saying they have gone there and I will look at one. So it’s great shout, lemme show you my, is this, um, Jane here has shared my CC’d emails. Go to a separate inbox and get a message saying that they have gone there and I will look at ’em once a week. Great prioritization. Amazing. Victoria appreciates that as well. So she’s sending that your sending some Love your way, Jane.
Nathan Simmonds:
But the problem is with this is we get these emails come in and we just, we get, so we do one. So we, we start a company, we get one. Oh yeah, I don’t need that anymore. Okay, just delete, delete. And then how long you worked there? Six months, 12 months, you know, 12 years and you’re now on multiple mailings and you spend half an hour every day deleting all your emails, at least half an hour to an hour going through and deleting emails that you didn’t need to receive that are just cluttering your inbox. And that’s what I’m talking about.
Nathan Simmonds:
This calcification of your inbox and your emails coming in. And I wrote down some phenomenal stats here, which will blow your brain. I found these out earlier today. It is every day, every day in the uk over 64,000 unnecessary emails are sent. No, sorry, 64 million wasn’t even 64,000. 64,000 is big enough. 64 million unnecessary emails are sent on a daily basis. What is going on in the world? But the worst part, and that’s in the UK alone. If everyone in the UK sent one less email a day that would save 16,443 tons of CO2 of carbon emissions, 16,443 tons of carbon a year would be saved if every adult in the UK sent one less email a day.
Nathan Simmonds:
And that carbon equates to 81,152 flights to Madrid. And so you can back this up actually, the person that came up with these stats and did this information is Mike Bernard Lee, sorry, burners Lee, the brother of the man that invented the internet or the white worldwide web. So all these emails that are flying backwards and forwards and that you are clicking and you are not subscribing to, are generating all this kind of this CO2. And that’s actually having quite a large impact on the environment, not just on your time. So what you could be doing is actually getting yourself some free head space to actually clear your email down rather than getting them just get off the list.
Nathan Simmonds:
Sometimes I come through, I just had the advice of unsubscribing a couple of weeks ago. I was worried about missing something. I was on every list and reading everything, especially during the pandemic, I’ve unsubscribed to so many and not missed anything exactly that. So this part, the first part of this exercise, but unsubscribing, you are going to grab four external and three internal for your action from today for all of you, even if you started unsubscribing.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now, your action right now is to go and find four external mail lists that you are on and unsubscribe, get off them. And then you’re gonna do the same with three internal mail groups that you are in and you’re gonna get off them as well because then you know, you are helping to, in your small way helping to reduce the carbon footprint, but you are also helping to declutter your brain and actually get a better focus on what’s coming in.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people here, yes or no have got really trigger happy maybe after holiday or come back from the weekend and you can see all your services you’ve gone delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. How many people have done that? I mean, worst case scenario is me. I go control A and then just hit delete. That’s the quickest way to enter your inbox. And then what happens after you’ve done that? A few days later someone comes up to me and says, oh, did you see that email? And you go, no. How many people have done that?
Nathan Simmonds:
Quick show of hands and the yeses yes, already come. Yes, because your brain is attempting to declutter. You just see all this stuff and maybe it’s from the same sender or the title’s a bit similar or you just missed it and you’re going blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And because, because you know the content is pointless, but this habit is causing you detriment for when that thing you need to be working on. You’ve already rea associated it and deleted it and the action doesn’t get taken since I’m said after holidays, I sort by sending them deleting chunks, agree that I do that as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
But if we help to declutter our thinking, we can get a better focus rather than spending that half hour, 45 minutes in the morning deleting a bunch of emails that we didn’t even need and that you won’t miss the content on, right? Even can go back to the person if, if that mi or that report is no longer needed in the business at all, go back and tell the person to stop running the report. Say Thateveryone, it’s save everyone that amount of time.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you work in a large organization and people are spending, you know, an hour or half an hour every day and multiple people are doing this, deleting multiple emails that they don’t need to be part, how much time would you actually save the business? Quite a lot. I would think. So your first action or idea here is to unsubscribe. Start clearing it down. Just ta And if you are, you know, sign up to multiple emails and you are getting hundreds of these things, yes it will take you a little bit of time to do it, but it is worth doing.
Nathan Simmonds:
It just clears the mind. You know, it is the, the magic of tidying up. I think it’s Marie Kondo’s book, you know, the Magic of tidying. But we do this with our email as well. We live in an intellectually based civilization. Now it’s more about what we’re doing in, in the, the cerebral, uh, element of our body rather than the physical. So our decluttering, yes, is spatial, it’s also cerebral. So we need to clear that down so mentally we feel like we’re clearing down.
Nathan Simmonds:
So get rid of the stuff that you don’t need. If you don’t need to come in, deflect it. In fact, I’m sorry, not even deflect it, just turn it off so it doesn’t come to you in full stop. Super important. The idea is by doing this that we are decluttering psychologically empty the headspace in the question box. Namely two emails that you can get off of immediately. One from your personal mailing list and one from your know the group emails you’re on one from each in the question box, namely two email groups that you can get rid of immediately. While we’re doing that, I’m gonna get number three on the board.
Nathan Simmonds:
Brush party don’t really have group must not have cutting promotions now good cornerstone daily ops stats yet. Great direct reports group at work, they can report to me by exception. Good baby related. My daughter is nine. Yeah, at time’s been gone. Good shout though, Victoria. And you still get the email but you thought, oh maybe that’d be useful. Oh, maybe no, your daughter isn’t getting any younger, um, spamming those I genuinely never signed up to receive.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And you may find some of those being mindful is just making sure that you, when you opt out of them, that you opt out any, any future marketing or affiliate associates or whatever so you don’t actually end up getting five more emails into place. So this is the first element, clear down some of the stuff that’s coming in. Number three is make it easier. So what we’re gonna do is, or another exercise we want to do is wanna start looking at those emails we are CC’d in.
Nathan Simmonds:
So maybe we are getting those internal group ones or you know, people are lessing us know certain things and you are being CC’d in is then start to think about do I actually need to be in this? And what we do is we use the a, BC rule. What does this mean? A, a CC’d email. Nice and easy. So you are acknowledging that you’ve got a CC’d email, you’ve received it, you are CC’d in, okay, B stands for brief quick scan. I have a quick look at the content of the CC’d email.
Nathan Simmonds:
Do I need to take action, do I not? And C stands for two things. Do I care? Is it crap? And if it’s not or if you don’t and it is, then you just delete it but you don’t wanna spend your time. Um, getting caught up in multiple emails. Something that we do at MBM, which is super handy. Darren helps us out with this, which is brilliant. Uh, prime example. So Sarah is supporting me doing this. Um, she knows she’s the the technical element of of this, of this presentation.
Nathan Simmonds:
Testimonial comes in, testimonial comes in from one of the audience here and they’re saying da dah dah dah da and maybe Darren’s having a chat with that person. And the testimonial comes to Darren. Darren then shares it to Sarah and says, Hey Sarah, what I need you to do is can you get this onto the web page and make it look like this on the registration page? Has everyone seen the testimonials on the registration page?
Nathan Simmonds:
Now yes or no because everyone’s phenomenal ones. There’s Stuarts on there, Colin’s on there. Now there’s some uh, Petras on there. It is phenomenal. Okay, some of the responses and the people that are get involved. So Darren gets that from maybe LinkedIn. He sends it to Sarah. Let’s, Sarah and I, can you do this? So Sarah’s got an action, she’s the main recipient in there though I am CC’d in.
Nathan Simmonds:
What Darren then puts in there is it says Nathan CC’d feel good. That’s it. I know all I’m doing is looking at the email, seeing the testimonial, I get the feel good ’cause Darren’s pointing out this is what you need to because he’s telling me what’s what I need to do or feel out of it. And this is why the email’s there. Therefore I know that I don’t need to respond to that email.
Nathan Simmonds:
So if we start doing this as a habit or as a behavior for other people, it makes other people suddenly realize, well do I need to respond? We give them clarity now we give them certain, we make ’em feel included so they know why they’re getting the email that they know they don’t need to take anymore action and we reduce down the clutter for them or any questions or time they’re spending deleting their emails and we make their day more fluid.
Nathan Simmonds:
So every time we get an email that we’re CC in on a, B, c move forward, is this useful? Yes or no? Would this help with some of the ccs, uh, emails you are getting coming in? And look, it’s not an overnight fix. I get it. You know, there’s a handful of people in this training session. There’s a handful of people that are now thinking maybe this way to looking at their emails. It’s not gonna be everybody in your company, but if you start doing it, other people might start noticing how it makes them feel, how it makes their email life better and maybe they’ll start doing it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Okay? Or maybe you go and train your team, say, look, you know, when you’re doing these things, can you just let people know this, this, and this? It’d be really helpful just helping them to kind of make things easier. It’s sparking ideas on auto rules as well. Absolutely. Good. So, you know, you can set up your mailboxes to do some of these things, but if you can also save anyone sending an email, so you haven’t even gotta check that box can also improve it for others.
Nathan Simmonds:
Two if for action cc is just for info. Absolutely. Um, so I only need to respond if two not cc. And you might wanna put that in the email. Just say, yep, you’ve been CC’d no action required. F-Y-I-F-Y-I only. Bam. And give people that clarity and you’re not cluttering up their inbox and maybe they stop cluttering up your inbox. Hope this is useful. What are you taking away from today? I know Victoria’s got some getting some new ideas about auto rules coming in.
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, we’ve got some other stuff. What has been useful from today’s session while that is coming in, I dove straight in as always. I’ve got overexcited dove straight in with the content if you have not registered for tomorrow’s session. Okay, if you have not registered for next week’s session, the time is now. As always, the link in for to future sessions is gonna be in the chat box for you.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now you can click on there and register for those future sessions. Absolutely vital. ’cause we’ve still got another how many we done? 1, 2, 3, 4. We’ve got another three elements of time management. Then we’re gonna get into category management and then we’re gonna get into leadership skills as well. Get registered. The other thing is as well, coaching cards. I’ve got a big passion for these ’cause you know, there’s a, there’s an interesting array of of skills and concepts in here from time management, um, to category management cards. Phenomenal.
Nathan Simmonds:
And also, you know, we’ve got the, the leadership model, which we’re gonna be looking at in a couple of weeks time. Grow coaching cards, mental health conversations. A phenomenal selection of phenomenal questions that will help you get incredible results with your people inside your business. And they’re only five pound a pack, which is ridiculous. So before Darren changes in mind and puts the price up, click the link for the cards and go and get your packs.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now what have we got coming in? Uh, email declutter amazing. Unsubscribe good. The actions first steps and saying yes wisely. Brilliant auto rules and the impact we can have on our environment was sending less emails. Not to mention our time management. It blew my brain when I read that. Um, the auto rule for emails, uh, and I’m CC’d in is very useful. Good, okay.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many times you have said yes wisely? Love this idea. Amazing. Is it helping you to build a habit? We we do it as parents, we do it as leaders or or people intent. And we say things reflexively, re reflectively reflexively. Like, yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I do that. And then you wonder why you’re not getting anything done. Take control of our time. Emails. Exactly that Petra, amazing. Look, amazing session day questions. We’ve got a couple of minutes.
Nathan Simmonds:
What questions have you got for me right now about where we are with diluting content or capturing or listing, um, and emptying in the time management hurdles? What questions have you got for me right now? None. Thanks. It’s really starting to build and gain momentum. Abby, thank you very much for being here’s appreciated. Love the feedback. Starting to see how these link into one to the other.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s gone quiet. As I say, it’s either everyone’s, everyone’s comfortable or the questions are gonna be really long as if any of those come in. Just say, look, you’ve got this, you’ve got the white paper there for the time management side of things. You’ve got the, the future sessions booked in there and you’ve got the MBM coaching cards linked there to get your decks of cards as well. Phenomenal. I mean, really enjoying this session. As always. It’s, I love doing this and sharing this.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you or your team would benefit from a deeper conversation about any of the subjects we’ve covered, any of the soft skills, not my favorite words, any of the skills and leadership, uh, concepts that we share and that I deliver and you would like to have a deeper conversation, a deeper experience of this, whether it’s in a virtual classroom or whether it’s live face-to-face.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now is the time to book in. Uh, we can drop the link in there for the virtual classrooms and to contact us. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s see how we can impact and develop your teams to be the best versions of themselves through the skills that we are sharing. Really appreciate engagement. I really appreciate you all. Um, thank you so very much for being here. Great session that’s built a good picture of how to make good changes.
Nathan Simmonds:
I’m all about it. I’m all about it. Everyone, thank you so much for being here. I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow at one o’clock, um, for the next installment. And we’re gonna be covering, oh, I dunno where we’re going. We might be looking at storing tomorrow, but I’ll g I’ll, I’ll share a bit more detail about that tomorrow. Have a lovely rest of your day and I look forward to seeing you then.
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