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In this episode we talked about:
- How can I find more time in the day?
- How can I start building a team?
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Alright, welcome everybody to the productivity Academy weekly Q&A. And this is number 65 and the first one for 2019. If you hear me kind of sniffling, I’m working on a cold, so I’ll try to keep it to a minimum and not drive me crazy. While you’re watching this real quick, we’re going to cover some great topics today to other questions. Well, the two questions that I’ve got right now her about finding more time in the day, which is an interesting question for a
I’ll get to that in a second, but then also going about building a team. So there wasn’t a specific question on this. It’s several merged into one about as far as making like that first hire, taking the first step to building your team and some things around that. So we’re going to dive into that shortly. Real quick, though, if you’re watching live. Go ahead. You can ask questions. If I have time. I’ll answer those in addition to what we’re going to cover right now.
And if you’re watching this elsewhere probably on YouTube feel free, you can hit the subscribe button stay up to date. Obviously, with stuff like this, get reviews, anything about productivity, time management processes stuff, a cover like that. And if you want to come join the free Facebook group and join these live, you can find the link in the description as well. Just click that button and click the link rather. And then you’ve got to answer a couple questions.
Just want to make sure that you really want to be in a group about productivity and business automation, stuff like that. So all right, let’s get on into it. So the first question was, how can I find more time in a day and I said that this was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first being that recently had a course released called creating time and this is based off a part of a talk that I actually gave this fall and detailing you know, kind of an over the shoulder type way of how this actually works. Okay, because no, of course you can’t actually create time.
You know, I’m not going to get into that. But, you know, there’s a lot of ways that you can go in and look at what you’re currently doing. And I know there’s a lot of good examples as far as and stuff I’ve talked about, like time tracking, like, do it for a few days, see what you’re actually doing during your day and see if there’s things you can cut out or move around.
But then I think one of the most importantly is most important things you can do is doing this review and reflection time and you want to answer a couple questions while you’re doing that, things like you know, what’s working really well how can you get more out of that or get more results like that and then how can you start to you know, maybe automate or delegate things you know, and even if it’s just a few minutes that it saves you start doing this on a regular basis you know, really, really starts to snow ball over time.
And so in my example that I gave him a talk and then now in the course and this is true is that you know, you could create literally like 115 hours in a year which you know, 115 hours sounds real life kind of weird but Let’s see, I forget exactly what that is a fight that by beat. So that’s like almost 15 working days, which is crazy. So that’s almost three business ways so it can be done and there’s ways good ways to go about it.
But I find that that is a great way to do it is to really spend some time going in and reviewing what’s working and spending that time start automating things delegating things or get getting rid of things. So of course there’s a system to this and you can figure it out on on your own there’s many ways to go about it, I’ve got creating time course and then you know, everybody probably can tweak that and make it work for themselves.
So anyway, stop those an interesting question because, you know, a lot of times we kind of laugh about that, you know, how can I find more time in the day well, you know, you can’t Yeah, but you can certainly take a look at how you arrange things and how your your life setup and adjust accordingly so, good question.
So another part of this is kind of the second question about how to build a team or how to get started, you know, building a team building something bigger than yourself, you know, and this is a way that you can find more time in the day is if you’re starting to reach that point where you feel like you’re maxed out, you don’t have enough time you’re you’re not spending time correctly, then that might be a good indication that it’s time for you to start building a team and, you know, literally a team could just be you and maybe one really part time person.
I know a lot of the objections that we’ve heard about hiring an assistant of some sort or outsourcing is cost which is certainly you know, factor not understanding how to find the correct people or they’ve tried it gotten burned, you know, had a bad experience and then not sure how to manage or kind of maintain a team okay. And I’m going to talk to mostly the first to the cost, you know, it’s certainly true I can return an investment in more ways than one. And if you literally cannot afford someone, then that’s it, you can’t.
But I think a lot of times, you know, you start thinking, I’ve got to hire a full time person, or I’ve got to do this or that if you right now, don’t have anyone working for you, I think, you know, start off by having someone do some repetitive tasks that you’re doing right now for maybe even an hour or two a week, okay, wouldn’t have to be much maybe literally just an hour to because it gets you in the habit of managing your also now freeing up that our two of those tasks and you can usually get this type of stuff done for very low cost.
Okay, we’ll go into that a little bit more. But I found that that is the best way to do it. Like a lot of things in life. You just have to kind of make take that step at some point. But you don’t want to just jump and we’ll go into that but I do encourage you to take that step while also insurance success by going through the stuff we’re going to talk about.
Right. So one of the things that we can do as far as what you want to do with someone is is kind of go, I’ve got the pre hire checklist, actually, I’ll click the link to that in here. And I’ll do that right now. I think this is something you can regroup and I won’t go into this in detail, but I talked about having an idea of what you want people to do and being prepared for it.
So before you, you know, take that first step, you want to start with the big ideas like, you know, what is it that you want someone to do? And I think people get this confused sometimes and think, well, I’m growing or I’m busy, I just need to hire but there in my mind, there needs to be some sort of a pain point or you need to understand exactly what it is you want them to do. But you can start at the big level and just say like, what, what is the pain point?
You know, write down, try to articulate them, what is it that you would want someone to be doing and then go down and for those areas or pain points get specific, what are the tasks What could that person actually be doing?
And then look into, you know, do you have processes for any of this stuff? Okay.
Because if you hire someone and you don’t have a process for them to follow, it’s not the world. But be aware, you’re going to have to take that time and do that with them either. Maybe if it’s literally in person, you could train them, that’s going to take some time. If it’s remote, you might have to record some videos or work online or do like a screen share with them, or you’re going to just have spend time building the process. Okay, and so, you know, this takes time and if you’re already feeling capped out, this can get pretty stressful. The only thing I would say is, you know, you might have to suffer a little bit to increase your output and your overall productivity and honestly, happiness but it’s worth it. Just be aware going into that that, you know, this can certainly take some time.
Okay, so we talked about, you know, just kind of a broad overview of that, but, you know, what will they do, okay, if you don’t have a process yet just write down what is it that you want to do want them to do? Okay, how about they do it, you know, do they need a computer? They need anything specific to they need software. Another big one is like, how should they communicate with you? And you should communicate this to them. Like when you hire them, or before, you know, do you like email? Do you prefer them to use slack? They have an experience with this stuff.
You want to make sure that you bring this up ahead of time. And then also, what does success look like okay for them to succeed with you, what does that look like? And then vice versa. So in order for them to do a good job, what would you expect and communicating that clearly, right? So I know a lot of people to get stuck on, you know, coming up with, well, I can’t hire, I don’t need anyone or nobody can do what I can do.
And all I can say is you need to really get out of that mindset. You’re not a snowflake, if it’s not, you know, core to growing your business or, you know, a lot of this stuff can be done or made into a process and outsource so just as a shortlist of some stuff like formatting documents creating and sending invoices.
Is social media posting right from templates? You can create a bunch of templates or hire someone who knows how already do this social media responses, right? dealing with the back and forth on their blog, post formatting, blog, post posting, formatting, and creating special or unique images for blog posts, email drafting, okay. You might want to have someone draft an outline, and then you go on and do the editing, email scheduling.
All right, so you don’t have to go in there and be dealing with that all the time managing your appointments, answering your phone again, graphical design of all sorts shopping, right, who said that this had to be directly related to your business, you can start outsourcing some of the stuff that’s tiny, well in other areas of your life, General research, whether it’s for your business or something you’re interested in doing. And of course, the list just goes on and on. But I’ve found that those are some once you can really get started with quickly.
All right, so if I had to give someone I get this it’s like, you know, what should I do? As far as getting started quickly, you know, it’s kind of an action plan would say, you know, identify three specific tasks that you can outsource or delegate, you know, write them down. Literally just get up these paper, pull up notepad and write that down along with the estimated time you think it would take someone to complete it.
Okay, maybe not you if it’s something you’ve been doing for years, you might want to think about that and say, how long would this realistically take someone to do if they had a checklist and they had to do it on their own, then hop on the upward calm All right, and look for keywords associated with that task.
So let’s take the social media posting, if you went on there, you could probably just type in social media that might be a little vague because there’s a lot around social media but you could say maybe even just social media posting and start going from that and you know, can you afford that look around for what people are doing what they’re charging and if so, you know, just bring up that time you know, would allow sorry if that freeing up that time allows you to do things that replace that income then, you know obviously starts to make sense very quickly.
And the other part to this is, you know, you don’t have to hire someone directly for that task in the sense that they don’t have to be specialized super social media guru if you have really good processes you could you can bring in someone who you could train quickly again depending on how complicated or nuanced the entire processes but a lot of times I think people make that mistake of looking like oh, I need to hire a social media expert when all they need is someone who can draft and post or schedule things, you know, using tools like buffer and maybe create some images and you know, you can find one or a group of people maybe to work together to do that for you and save a lot of time and money as compared to maybe having like a professional manager. So right after that, you know, create a post detailing what you need to get done. Again, this would be for upward or other job sites, and then I highly highly suggest using a hiring funnel.
And I’m not going to go into the details here. But you can check out outsource kingpin. If you Google that. That’s through semantic mastery. It’s a really cool way of automating a lot of this stuff where you know, the back and forth and you know, dealing with people who aren’t paying attention to details, and you really do want to weed out a lot of people quickly. If you put out a post you’re going to get a ton of responses.
And this is a way to, you know, really quickly get down to the best of the best so that you’re getting the high quality people and not having to do guesswork or do like face to face interviews with everyone which is can be a huge time sick.
So hopefully that is helpful as far as kind of the first steps about going in and building that team. You know, part of this also then moves into managing and I think that’s a topic for a different time. But I think that this is a great way for people to get started to kind of dip the toes in the water or just go ahead and start building that team and , you know, again, there’s so many areas that you can do this to start saving yourself some time, save your sanity kind of free yourself up to work on some more important places in your business. So now check real quick here for any last minute questions.
All right, I don’t see anything. So that’ll do it for this week. Again, if you’re watching the replay, you can join us live down the description. You can find the link click on that come join us or if you’re watching on YouTube, you can hit subscribe and stay up to date. So that’ll do it. And thanks everybody. I’ll see you next week.
