E18: Time-Saving Business Hacks

EPISODE 18

[0:00:00.3] AW: Hey there. I just want to let you know, before we get started with this upcoming podcast episode, that I am closing enrollment for TRANSCEND the Membership Community on October 15^th. What does that mean for you? That means I’m not enrolling any new members in our business community after October 15^th.

October 15^th is the last day to sign up at the current rate, which is $147 a month. With that, you get weekly meetings on the first, second, and third Thursday of the month, you get a community of members of BIPOC entrepreneurs who are working on building a business and leading a legacy. You get access to me for office hours once a month, you get my direct email, you get support in your business at a great rate of $147. Now, if you wait until after October 15^th, you will be able to sign up again, come December 1^st, but it’s going to be a little bit more costly than it is now.

If you’re sitting on the fence, you’re waiting to start your business, you’re waiting to get that expert advice that you’re looking for, stop waiting. This is your sign if been looking for one, to go ahead and join now because, when I open up the enrollment again, it’s not going to be at the same price that it is now. If you’re interested, go to transcendthemembership.com and go ahead and sign up, and I’ll see you inside.

Get an accountability buddy. I have been recently meeting with a good friend of mine, Ariana, who you’ll hear on the podcast in a few weeks, and we have been meeting on Fridays just to go over our week, set our goals, and to do the things that we haven’t finished for the week.

Now for her, she’s spending her time looking forward to the week ahead and recounting the wins and the learning moments from the week prior, getting caught up on things that she didn’t do. For me, by the time we get together on Friday, I’m playing catchup for all the stuff that I didn’t get to in the week but it helps me to stay accountable, to have a set meeting time, to know that this is the hour and a half I’m going to meet with Ariana and we are going to review our weeks together.

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:02:07.8] AW: You’re listening to the TRANSCEND Podcast. I’m your host, Asha Wilkerson, an attorney by training and an educator at heart. This podcast is all about empowering you to build a business and leave a legacy. Here’s the thing, the wealth gap in America is consistently increasing, and while full-time entrepreneurship is not for everyone, even a side hustle could change your financial landscape if you’re intentional about using your business to build wealth. I’ve run my own law firm for over 10 years and, in that time, I’ve helped countless California businesses go from idea to six figures. On this podcast, we talk about what it truly takes to build a sustainable business and find financial freedom. Let’s dive in!

[DISCUSSION]

[0:02:53.8] Welcome back to another episode of TRANSCEND the Podcast. Of course, like every week, I am so glad that you are here. This week, we’re going to be talking about business hacks to save you time and money. Now, I don’t have any get rich quick schemes, I don’t have any things that are going to save you hundreds upon hundreds of hours and minutes, but I do have some tips that will make you work more efficiently and that will actually save you some money, so let’s get right into it.

The first one that I have really implemented in my life is to batch produce your content. For me, that looks like batch writing my emails that go out to my list every week, batch writing social media content, and also planning ahead to think about what are the things that I’m focusing on for the month and what are the pieces of writing, or the videos, or the speaking engagements that I’m going to do that correspond with that?

I have found myself all over the place and, sometimes, I still find myself all over the place if I get away from this batch producing thing, but it allows me to just sit down for one period of time or maybe two days, a couple of hours over two or three days, to really just get settled for the month.

Now, the key for me is to do that ahead of time. We’re in the month of October now but when I do it, I did all this stuff in September looking forward to October that was going to come and then, in October, I feel really good because I’m on top of it and I feel like I’ve got my stuff together. Then, at the end of October, I do the same thing for November. Batch produce your content. Pick a day, pick a time.

[0:04:32.8] Now, that leads me into my second time saving hack is to time block your calendar. I just learned about this really – I don’t know, within this last year and it has been a game changer. I have to admit, I don’t always do it. Like right now, I’m actually struggling with time blocking my schedule but when I was able to do it, I think in semesters now as an educator, I was able to do it last semester, life just felt so much easier.

What is time blocking? Time blocking is actually putting blocks of time on your calendar where you’re deciding that you’re going to do this particular type of work, or batch produce your content, or record all your podcast episodes, or do the work to serve your customers, or do the accounting that needs to be done in your business, so time block your calendar.

What it does for your brain, because I’m a person who probably has undiagnosed ADD. My mom is a lifelong educator and she told me, “Yeah honey, you have it, just not enough to actually take any medication for it.” What does that mean? That means that I’m easily distracted, especially when I don’t want to do something. When something is not fun for me, I will look for everything else that I can do but that one task and I end up dragging out that task longer than it needs to be, driving myself crazy.

[0:05:48.6] When I time block, I know that I am going to, on Monday mornings, write my content for the month. On Friday afternoons, I am going to write my email content for the month. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m teaching and so I do all of my school stuff on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the rest of Mondays and Wednesdays, I can do my law practice, TRANSCEND type stuff.

Again, not great at it right now in this particular semester because I feel like I have things for both sets of my lives or both worlds that I’m in, on every single day but, last semester, when I was really able to separate the two, it made life so much easier, and also, when something comes up, a task comes up or someone ask me to do something, I can say, “I can’t do it right now, but I’m going to get to it on Tuesday” or if it’s a Friday, “This, I will be able to handle next week.”

It helps me with my own overwhelm and the workload that I carry but then also helps me clearly communicate to the people that I’m working with that I don’t have to tell them, “You know, this is the day that I only do XYZ,” but I can look ahead and say, “On Tuesday that’s my day for that.” I am telling myself that and then when I can correspond with my customers or colleagues I can tell them exactly what day I would be able to get to their request. Again, one is batch produce content, and two is to time block your calendar.

[0:07:11.0] Now, number three is to hire experts to do the things that you’re not good at or the things that you don’t like to do. Now, sometimes, I know when you’re starting out, you’re pinching pennies – I shouldn’t say it like that. That has a negative connotation. You were very conscious and mindful about the money that you are spending and that is great but I will tell you that there are certain task that you really should just hire experts for.

If you are not an expert at building out your webpage, then maybe you just hire someone to do that for you, especially if you don’t enjoy it. So these are task that either you’re not good at or you don’t enjoy. I am not the best of course at building out webpages but I kind of enjoy it and it also helps me write the content and think about it and I have to be a part of that process, so that is something I handle myself but, let’s say setting up the backend of the webpage.

I don’t care about that at all, all the apps and widgets, not my thing. I would rather not have to deal with it so I have hired somebody to come behind me or come before me and make sure that everything is updating properly and that my website is in good shape and in good condition. What else do I hire? I hire a bookkeeper because I don’t like doing the bookkeeping for my business. I don’t have the skillset to do it and I, truthfully, don’t really want to learn.

It’s not something that is in my wheelhouse. What I’ve done is I’ve hired a bookkeeper to go through the transactions every month and to give me an update on what’s going on. Now, I still look at the money coming in and going out but, in terms of the bookkeeping part of it that will lead to filing the tax returns, I’ve hired someone to do that because it just makes life easier.

[0:08:44.5] What else? My VA creates the images for my social media content. I can do it, it takes me forever. I don’t particularly enjoy it so my VA, Jess, is awesome as it. She is great, she enjoys it and so I offload that to her once I have written the content. I’m trying to think of what else you can offload – anything else. Maybe it’s scheduling the meetings and coordinating that kind of thing.

Whatever you can do to hire an expert to do the things that you are not good at or the things that you don’t want to do will free up your time and it’s certainly money well spent, because then you’re not occupying your brain space thinking about these things that you have to do and maybe don’t know how to do.

That also includes things for legal services, accounting services, registering your copyright and trademark. Unless you absolutely want to do it and have the time to research and know that you can do it correctly, get somebody else. Your business will grow faster and it will free up your time. It will be a good use of your resources.

[0:09:43.0] Now, the fourth one is a good one to me. It’s get an accountability buddy. I have been recently meeting with a good friend of mine, Ariana, who you will hear on the podcast in a few weeks and we have been meeting on Fridays just to go over our week, set our goals, and to do the things that we haven’t finished for the week.

Now for her, she’s spending her time looking forward to the week ahead and recounting the wins and the learning moments from the week prior, getting caught up on things that she didn’t do. For me, by the time we get together on Friday, I am playing catch up for the all the stuff that I didn’t get to in the week but it helps me to stay accountable.

To have a set meeting time to know that this is the hour and the half I am going to meet with Ariana and we are going to review our weeks together. Get yourself an accountability buddy. I also have other people on my community that I talk about when I’m getting ready to launch the one-on-one coaching or revamp TRANSCEND the Membership.

I talk about what does that look like? What platforms should I be on? How should I be talking about it? Who are we learning from? And we’re sharing advice and tips and tricks that we have learned together. That accountability piece is really, really key.

[0:10:53.5] The fifth and final one for this episode is to pick a method to your madness and then stick with it. I am so guilty of downloading all these different sheets and checklists, and studying this method, and trying that method, and it’s a lot. One of the problems that I realized is that I am always looking for that next fix, but if you don’t actually implement the strategy or the program that you are working on right now, you don’t really know if it works or not and chances are it probably does.

I would say pick a method, pick a time blocking method, pick a strategy to do your social media content or your email writing content, and then carry it out. Stick with it for a month or two and then determine whether or not it’s actually working. There is resistance in our brains when we are doing stuff that’s uncomfortable or that’s new.

Our brain is trying to keep us safe and our brain spends less energy when we’re doing things on autopilot. That’s why it’s really hard to start a new habit or to break an old one because, once we get into autopilot, it’s really easy. Our brains don’t have to expend that much energy to get us to do it, so we are trying something new, it can be an energy drain.

You might feel tired, you might feel frustrated, you might feel that mental block, but it is really important to give yourself enough time to try and carry out the method or the strategy to truly see if it works for you. Chances are it probably will and, once you’ve tried it for a month or so and you decided that it just isn’t your cup of tea, then maybe find something else, but so many of us give up before we even really get started.

[0:12:30.4] Let’s do a recap. Business hacks that save you time and money: batch produce your content, block your schedule, hire experts to do the things that you’re not good at or the things that you don’t like to do, get an accountability buddy, and then pick a method and stick with it and see what happens.

All right, short episode for you today. That is what I have, let me know on my Instagram what business hacks save you time and money. What are the things that you like to do? What do you like to implement to make your work week go a bit more efficiently?

All right, I will see you in next week’s episode. Ciao.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:13:11.3] AW: If you want to learn more about how you could build a business and leave a legacy, check out our online community, where we dive deeper into these concepts and I literally pull back the curtain to show you how I help entrepreneurs just like you build a sustainable business that leads to financial freedom. You can find out more at the wiklersonlawoffice.com.

[END]