Time Hacking Radio

When you work from home and live in a noisy, virtual learning environment, you need to put systems in place to handle phone calls.  In my case, I was simply sending people to my voicemail.  This is cool, except that when you plan to be a "Google Guaranteed" service company, one of the ways your company is evaluated is your responsiveness.  

In preparation for a responsiveness test, I made a HUGE leap.  (Huge for me anyway.) I hired a virtual phone team.  I was under the false impression that this was a cost-prohibitive leap and BOY was I wrong.  

If you want to see what sort of tools I've been using and content I've been absorbing check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com.

If you have a podcast and would like an amazing editor, check out my personal favorite here: https://www.fiverr.com/jay717

While on this quest, I'll be asking people about what they do to solve some of their own time-eaters.

My personal focus is getting time back in my day.  I ask myself "how can I earn more time each day?"

The framework I'm working on:

1. Automate Operations
2. Automate Sales
3. Automate Marketing

The operations are going very well, everything else is improving.

If you're interested in the cool things I like, check out resources.timehackingradio.com.

If you're thinking about starting your own podcast please go see my amazing podcast editor: https://www.fiverr.com/jay717

There are some specific things in my life that I am trying to overcome.  I'm letting you know about my flaws here so you can understand what I'm working on.  Here's where I need to improve:

1. Kind of Lazy
2. Selfish with my time
3. Not a natural connector
4. Not organized
5. Super forgetful

If you are wondering about some of the tools I'm loving right now, check it out at resources.timehackingradio.com.

Also, if you need help editing your podcast, check out Jay.  Here's his link: https://www.fiverr.com/jay717

I am absolutely NOT an expert in time hacking.  Things are a work in progress and I am in the process of solving things.

That being said, I want to be sure that I am representing myself properly in this podcast, which is how I decided to experiment on myself.

I have been taking inspiration from two amazing books, Make Time by John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp, and 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers.  Both books encourage an experimental spirit.

Here's how I'll be doing things:  

• Roll out a new experiment every week.
• Give myself at least a week to try a new experiment.
• No more than one new process each week.
• After a solid effort I'll give you an update on the before and after of each trial.

Things I want from this process:

1. More time to do things I want to do like...
2. Spend more time with my kids...generally hanging out.
3. Spend more time with my husband.
4. Grow my chimney sweeping company.
5. Get my health back in check.
6. Systemize my house cleaning.

If you're wondering about my progress, you can follow me on Instagram @denimautomation where I'll be sharing some insider content.

Check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com.

In an effort to turn my business into a generationally awesome organization and to solve some major time issues, I found coaches and mentors who know business and could help me solve some of the challenges I was facing.

My advice when looking for a business coach:

1. Get a coach immediately...preferably someone who is part of a mastermind group
2. Be a part of a group that isn't specific to your industry
3. Listen to Podcasts
4. Read
5. Listen to Audiobooks

Check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com.

If the business operations are carried out in the same way as they were carried out when the business first started, then definitely there will be some processes and operations that need to be enhanced and automated. As a business owner for more than 2 years, I am thinking about the things that I had to change about myself when I first started my business. I had to think about new ways to solve my challenges. Most of my challenges were related to getting more time. I wanted more time in my life. I like my kids. I like hanging out with them. And that's my primary motivation to spend more time with my kids and less time working in my business. It doesn’t mean I don’t like working on my business, but working in my business is sometimes tedious.

My Awful Business Routine

When I first started working in my business, I had a mindset that business was like some sort of badge of honor. I used to get up at 5:00 AM, start working and keep working all the way until dinner time. After feeding the kids, I go back to work and consider this as my life. I believed that was cool. I was living with a false belief that I had to be involved in everything and busyness was cool. But sooner I realized that it was awful and a horrible way to live. With this daily routine, I was not moving forward and not much forward momentum happening in my business. Sooner I found out how to free myself from the equation. It wasn't until I figured out that I was the problem and I needed to not be involved in many things in order for the business to grow.

How did I start to change my Business Routine?

As soon as I realized that I did not need to be involved in everything and busyness was not cool, that's when I was able to start growing things. I started asking what can I get rid of today? So, I started solving what should not be part of my life. This is when I realized that I can earn time by implementing a new system that runs without me.

When my mindset and the sole focus shifted from doing everything by myself to finding new methods to run the business without me, then I started thinking and questioning what can I earn? What can I do to run my business without me? I started looking into how to write standard operating procedures (SOPs). I also bought a book that says how to write standard operating procedures. I read it and started to implement it, but the big issue was that I hated writing. It takes me an immense amount of time to write. In this stage, I realized that as I am horrible at writing, so I don’t have to write standard operating procedures myself. So, instead of writing, I started filming what I was doing. After that, I sent those recordings to my technical writer friend who turns them into step-by-step written PDF documents, and then I just edit those documents. With this approach, I created my SOPs. Now I could easily send those training documents to anyone who needs them. This way, I have performed the work efficiently, eventually saving a lot of time.

I have also started spending time listening to the mentors and letting other people listen to what I really liked. One of the guys that I started listening to is an online marketer named Russell Brunson. He is fabulous and brilliant. He said one thing out loud that our job is to come up with the big ideas and to find someone to do it. That is just what you have to do. You don’t have to do all the little stuff. This is the moral of today’s story that we have to start thinking and questioning our way of doing business and then find the time-efficient solutions and the right persons who can do those tasks efficiently. I hope this approach helps you too.

Do you want to know what tools I love?  Check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com

In this era, running a business demands you to employ time-efficient processes and automate the hectic time-consuming or repetitive processes. In this podcast journey, I am sharing and exploring the best solutions for time hacking for solving things in our daily schedule when running our business. In my last episode, I shared how I had a mind shift and started trying to operate my business efficiently. So many things solved when I just started asking what is the best tool for this job? Once I start thinking that I found Housecall Pro, which is my go-to scheduling service and solves many of my business challenges.

Soon after that, I started to re-evaluate how I was doing everything. As my mind shifted, I started thinking of shifting or rearranging many other things. I started asking the question, what am I doing that I don't have to be doing? The first and most obvious thing for me was scheduling appointments. As we are a small company, I was answering phones and doing the scheduling from my house.  We had an online booking function, but few people knew online booking was an option.  For me, answering phone calls was not an issue. I am totally fine talking to our customers and answering questions. But it seemed silly to me to spend hours on the phone every day when all people wanted was to just book an appointment. It seemed like I was in the way.  So it was time to time hack:

Operations: As I had to remove myself as the medium for scheduling appointments, so I started looking at things I could do to change how people booked their appointments. We had the online booking setup for booking appointments, so I knew it’s the way to remove myself from the middle. So, the operations part was done, as the customers could simply book an appointment online.

Sales: Working from home involves a certain amount of chaos. I have two bigger kids 13-year old and 10-year old.  I also have a 3-year old kid. The bigger kids have started doing schoolwork from home due to this pandemic. It’s always challenging to operate a business and keep a balance in the house. To handle the sales part of scheduling, I decided to put on my message; “hey, I will give you a call back if you have a question and just let me know what your question is here. But if you just want to book an appointment, you can do that without me. You can go to our website and click the book now button, and from there you will be redirected to our booking software”. This strategy worked!  I would see that I missed a call and then like ten minutes later, the appointment would just pop up. Customers wouldn't even leave a message because they just needed to know how to book an appointment. To make the online appointment process run smoothly, I had to spend time on the website because I had to explain and write things out a little bit to explain what services they were buying. I totally simplified it and made it a language that people could understand.

Marketing: The marketing part of scheduling was just adding the message on my voicemail and diverting the customers to the online booking portal that was automated and I didn’t have to be part of it.

The moral of the story is that you should start asking yourself what am I doing multiple times a day that I don't need to be doing. You should start seeing like I'm spending two unnecessary hours on this tedious task that I don't actually need to be doing. Then you can start to work on how to solve that gradually. I hope this episode was helpful to you and I hope that you can find a really awesome solution to whatever you are doing that you don't need to be doing.

Want more ideas?  Check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com 

My list of resources: resources.timehackingradio.com

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