Are you juggling or managing? (business and personal productivity)

Read Time: 6 minutes

Welcome to BE THE EXPERT! In today’s issue:

• Are you juggling or managing your business?
• Descript launches some great new features
• Threads is gaining steam

Are you juggling or managing?

It’s Monday morning, 8 am, and you’ve just sat down at your desk.

Do you know exactly what you should and will work on in the next hour, day, and week to move your business forward?

Are you set up to focus on each of those until completion?

Fast forward to Wednesday. Are you still working on that plan, or is it more typical that you would be off on other tangents and activities due to circumstances (issues, overwhelm, distractions)

The answers here play a major part in how successful you’ll be.

In this issue, I’ll show you how to go from juggling to managing your business.

Juggling

Most of the clients that come into our agency programs are enticed by the idea of systemization and when I chat with them I can see why.

They struggle with the same things I did: too much to do in too little time.

Many also have entrepreneurial ADHD: too many ideas to execute at the same time.

Then throw on top of that the tsunami of marketing aimed at all of us: “THIS tool / course / mastermind / coaching has ALL the answers you need to make it simple!!!”

It’s not uncommon at all for me to see folks trying to work on 10 different major projects (funnels, website, email campaigns, content, course build, 1:1 clients, promotions, ads, etc.)

Those are the jugglers (I’ve been there, and sometimes STILL there…)

Trying to do ten things simultaneously results in EACH thing taking ten times (or more) longer to get ALL the way done.

This is what I see the most in our incoming clients: partial progress on lots of things. They’re putting in the time and doing valuable work but seeing very slow momentum since few of them get all the way done.

Let’s suspend our disbelief and see what it COULD look like to effectively manage our time and business.

When I first started online, one of the things I wrote about was putting together a productivity system for my business.

I’ve read all the main books on the topic (Getting Things Done, The Power of Habits, The One Thing, 4 Hour Work Week, and many more over the years)

They are great, but where they all fall down is they are largely focused on personal productivity not overall business productivity.

So what I did was marry personal productivity together with the systemization I talk about a lot.

For example, in The One Thing, the point is to find the most important task at any given time and put all of your focus into it until it is completed.

Sounds great, but what is the most important task? Especially when you have 10 things that are ALL important?

Is there a way for multiple important tasks to be done at the same time?

That was the root of a full-business productivity system: finding the most important task in the right order AND putting in place systems, tools, and team/automation (now AI) to be able to have multiple tasks in progress at the same time but personally being able to focus on ONE at a time.

Once you have a process in place for figuring out the most important things to work on right now, it enables the most CRITICAL mindset shift we need to develop:

Being able to mentally set aside the nine other important things while we work on the MOST important thing.

None of us are stupid. We all know we should be working on the most important thing but we get distracted and “multi-task” when other things show up that SEEM more important.

Managing

The key to moving from juggling to managing is to look at business productivity first, then personal productivity second.

You could be a task management ultra-ninja level 9000 but if all the tasks you are completing are for the lowest priority area of your business, what’s the point?

So, before we get to personal productivity, we must look at business productivity.

Business Productivity

To keep myself and later our clients focused, I created the Expert Business Roadmap, which includes the 9 essential elements all online businesses need for success.

This showed the pieces to focus on in the right order. Acknowledging that ALL of them are needed but need to be put in place sequentially gives permission to ignore all the others until the current one is done.

In other words, you work on one until you have a minimum viable product before moving on to the next. ALL are needed, but they can’t all be built simultaneously.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Expert Business Blueprint – your high-level business plan (Mission, Market, Outcomes, Business model)
2. Productize Your Expertise – Define (but don’t yet build) your products/program, your signature system and core offer
3. Fire Up Your Sales Funnels – Build your initial sales funnels to test your offers, get early feedback, and revenue (BEFORE spending all your time building your programs)
4. Power Up Your Web Presence – Build a basic website for your business so when people see your funnels and want to see if you are “real” you have a professional and useful business website.
5. Turn On Your Social Channels – Establish and brand your social media profiles so you are present on all the main social networks.
6. Start Your Content Engine – create, publish, and repurpose content across all channels
7. Green Light Your Traffic – Implement paid ad strategies to guarantee people see your content and funnels.
8. Engage Your Autopilot – Begin automating repetitive activities.
9. Team Build To Win – Leverage freelancers, service provides, or fractional teams to get more done in parallel.

Why are those items in that order?

1. You need a rough business plan as your north star.
2. You need to decide what you are going to sell (productize)
3. You need a mechanism to sell it (funnels).
4. You need an HQ (your website) where people can find out more.
5. You need social channels so you can build brand awareness
6. You need content to attract your ideal customers.
7. To grow faster, you can use paid ads to get more traffic.
8. To grow faster, you can automate
9. Or hire people (fractional or full-time)

See how they work together, in order?

Hopefully, you can also see that it does not make sense to work on the later items before the former is in place.

It doesn’t make sense to spend time on ad campaigns without proven sales funnels to point them to.

Building a website doesn’t make sense before you know who your ideal customers are and the offers/products you’ll be selling.

Yet I see a LOT of people working on all these at the same time (thus never getting any of them all the way done)

The Expert Business Roadmap helps you determine the focus of your business each month or week.

If you are missing any of the nine essential elements, or any of them are not working well in your business, focus on the earliest one missing or not working FIRST and exclusively until it gets to your minimum viable level.

Say you are just starting, and you don’t have funnels, a website, or social channels yet. Which should you focus on exclusively?

Sales funnels. Of those three, it’s earlier on the roadmap.

You have permission to ignore the others until your funnels are built to at least a minimum viable product.

Hopefully this takes a big load off your shoulders.

All the other items are NOT forgotten, just put aside until it is their turn.

Personal Productivity

Now that you know your focus for the month or week, you can establish a personal productivity system to manage your days.

Since this issue is already getting long, I’ll cover that in more depth next week, but for now, we need to time block our days.

We definitely need to focus on the most important tasks, but we also need to keep the lights on.

I try to break my days into a few time blocks, then within those, work on the most important tasks for those blocks:

• Business Growth
• Operations
• Learning

Business growth is content, marketing, new products, etc.

Operations are client delivery, support, systemization, etc.

Learning is what it sounds like.

So, I try to time block my day so I have a few hours for each buckets.

Then, within them, I like to start with what Gary Keller wrote in The One Thing, the focusing question:

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?

You’ve answered the “One Thing” question at the business level, the most important element of your business to work on.

Next, you ask the same thing for WITHIN that area.

So let’s say it’s sales funnels, now the question becomes, what’s the ONE THING within sales funnels I should be working on?

Is it copy? design? tech setup? analytics?

PAUSE. Read the focusing question again.

What would make EVERYTHING within this topic easier?

Instead of picking a granular item like design, what if instead, you spent your time looking for a sales funnel template that was a good match for your needs?

Finding one would make “everything” within that area easier since it would have design, copy, and tech all in one.

There’s real power in asking that question constantly.

Take Action

Using this simple process, each month, you decide what major area of your business (from the roadmap) should be the focus.

Then, within that, you determine the one thing to work on that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

Then within that, you work on growth (net new things to make it better), operations (keeping it running), or learning (learning HOW to make it better) on a day to day basis until you reach the minimum viable metrics for that area.

Set aside (for now) all the other areas and potential things you could work on.

Not because they aren’t important, simply because they aren’t the MOST important…

Saturday Spotlight 💡

Content Spotlight:​

Delegate Everything In Your Online Business

Tool Spotlight:​

​Descript​ – Descript is the AI-powered, fully featured, end-to-end video editor that you already know how to use.

We use and include Descript in our ​Content Engine​ program and they just ​released​ some awesome new features:

First, we’re introducing Descript Rooms, our integrated, collaborative recording studio. We’re talking reliable 4K multitrack recording and an effortless guest experience, and of course it’s seamlessly integrated into Descript—so pretty much as soon as you hit stop, you’re ready to start editing.

Second, because we know that most podcasters record with Zoom, we’re launching a Zoom integration that lets you import multitrack Zoom sessions in a click. Descript is the only place you can do that, so if you record your podcast on Zoom—or your webinar or whatever—you’re going to want to edit in Descript.

Finally, we’re shipping an all new Underlord feature: Automatic Multicam. It uses AI to switch between visual layouts using your branded templates. More on that below; it’s super cool.

News Spotlight:​

​Threads Officially Announces Analytics, Adds Post Drafts and Scheduling​ – Social Media Today

Thread has just about all the standard features needed and I’m seeing social media scheduling tools starting to suppor it. As soon as ours does, we’ll be adding this as one of the channels we publish to in our content engine programs!

As Threads ​continues to grow​, and has seemingly seen an uptick in interest over the past week, Meta has ​announced​ a range of new features for the app, which bring it more into line with other social platforms on analytics, post creation, and more.