Episode 107: The Power of Planning: 7 Types of Planning that Will Increase Productivity & Profits 1

Brad Dobson: If I write them with intentionality, where I say I am going to do this tomorrow. I have the date on the page, this is the plan for tomorrow. The more intentionality I put on it, if I actually put the time of day that I’m going to do something, or how long I’m gonna spend on it, it’s an actually, an excellent chance that I’ll get it done. There is two reasons for that in my mind, one, is that over night my mind is doing sort of background processing on that, and the other one is that the day that I’ve planned, I don’t have to make decisions, those things are just already in my mind, they’re already on paper, and low and behold they get done magically.

Minette Riordan: Have you ever said to yourself I don’t have enough time?

Brad Dobson: I am so overwhelmed.

Minette Riordan: I need more clarity.

Brad Dobson: I don’t know how to do this.

Minette Riordan: My to-do list is miles long.

Brad Dobson: I’m exhausted.

Minette Riordan: There has got to be a better way.

Brad Dobson: Hi there, I’m Brad.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Minette. Not only have we said all these things ourselves, but we’ve heard our community of creative entrepreneurs say them over, and over again.

Brad Dobson: That’s why we created the Structure and Flow podcast. I’m structure.

Minette Riordan: And I’m flow, and this is the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: We believe that doing more, and working harder are not the solution to your productivity challenges.

Minette Riordan: We believe in more play, more fun, and more profit. Join us as we explore the interplay between structure, and flow, so that we can bring more grace, and ease to your creative business.

Brad Dobson: Hi, and welcome again to the Structure and Flow podcast.

Minette Riordan: You did it again. You almost said Path to Profit.

Brad Dobson: No. We’re the Structure and Flow podcast now. Today, we are gonna talk about planning. The power of planning, and seven types of planning that will increase productivity and profits for you.

Minette Riordan: Absolutely. This is pillar number six in our nine pillars of productivity. We are making our way through these pillars.

Brad Dobson: Nine pillars.

Minette Riordan: And I hope that you are enjoying the series as much as we are, and as I think we’ve shared in the last podcast, we’ve been on our own personal journey lately to improve productivity without sacrificing lifestyle, right? This is not about getting more done. It’s about getting more of the right stuff done, and really looking at what we can let go of, and planning is an essential part of successful business growth, and I learned this kind of the hard and painful way, and now I’m totally addicted to planning, not to planners. Well, maybe I’m addicted to planners too.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, probably. I can’t live without planning.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: My mind works that way. I need a plan. Not to say I don’t like a lot of unstructured time. Perhaps, too much unstructured time, but I thrive on having a set plan out in front of me, and part of that is because my mind tends to be able to see … Once a plan, once something is in place, I can see out in front of me how that’s all going to … How that’s all gonna happen.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, he bugs me a lot if we skip our weekly planning meeting, right? ‘Cause when you don’t plan, guess what happens? It creates overwhelm. It creates distraction. It’s too easy to get off track from your goals, and I think it’s Brian Tracy, he has a great quote that he says, “That ten minutes of planning can save you two hours a day.” And that’s not our quote of the day, but it could have been because it’s a phenomenal quote. You want to read the quote of the day?

Brad Dobson: This is also by someone called Brian Tracy. Is that a different Brian Tracy?

Minette Riordan: Same Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!

Brad Dobson: Oh, okay. See, she’s more well read than I, so … Yeah, I think the term …

Minette Riordan: Maybe more addicted to books than you are. I don’t know if it’s a healthy thing.

Brad Dobson: The term rudderless comes up when I talk about trying to work without a plan, but that’s …

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: That’s the shipping reference. I come from a long line of sailors.

Minette Riordan: Well, and you also have a picture on your door over here, it says, “I’m not afraid of storms. For I am learning how to sail,” and that’s a great analogy for business as well.

Brad Dobson: Right. We just segued from …

Minette Riordan: Planning, frogs.

Brad Dobson: From a quote to saying another quote, to this quote.

Minette Riordan: Okay, it’s Friday afternoon when we’re recording this, and we’re probably a little punchy after a full week of work. You’re gonna get the interesting side of that in Minette today, and the randomness of our brains.

Brad Dobson: That’s all right. We do have a plan for this. We do have a plan for this process.

Minette Riordan: Okay, let’s get to our plan.

Brad Dobson: Here is the quote.

Minette Riordan: All right.

Brad Dobson: “A clear vision backed by definite plans give you a tremendous feeling of confidence, and personal power.” That’s from Brian Tracy in the Gift of Self Confidence.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, and before you do planning you have to have clarity of vision, but that’s a conversation for another podcast, but as you can tell I’m a big Brian Tracy fan.

Brad Dobson: I didn’t know that.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. Well, he’s got some amazing content out there around productivity. But today what we want to focus in on are five key areas of planning, and some of the different types of planning. I know it sounds overwhelming, but it’s actually really not. But we look at our business from the perspective of annual planning, quarterly planning, monthly planning, weekly, and daily planning. And inside each of those five categories there is a few key steps, and we want to share this process with you, and actually if you would come and play with us on Facebook in our free Productivity for Creative Business Owners Facebook group, I’ve got a great visual, a little kind of mini infographic about these different areas of planning that you can go snag. It will pinned right at the top of the group, so that you can have a visual reminder of this.

Minette Riordan: ‘Cause if you’re like me, and you’re just listening to this, and maybe driving, or going for a walk, or doing the dishes, or making dinner, you can’t really take notes at the same time.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: We wanted to make it easy for you to have a visual checklist of these different types of planning. Let’s start with annual planning.

Brad Dobson: I like annual planning.

Minette Riordan: Me too.

Brad Dobson: Longterm, it’s fun to talk about this stuff. It’s certainly important, but you don’t want to talk about it a ton, but … And typically people do this December timeframe, maybe January, but January is already a little bit too late.

Minette Riordan: Yep.

Brad Dobson: Start getting your mind around it in December. You need to understand where your business is going, what your goals are for the year, what products you’re gonna promote throughout the year. Maybe you have large scale projects that you … And when we say projects that could be anything. It could be getting a new talk off the ground.

Minette Riordan: A live event.

Brad Dobson: It could be if you’re opening a storefront, a virtual storefront, or a physical storefront. It could be a lot of … Yeah, a live event is a great one. We have experience with live events, and if you’re not planning on a one year timeframe for how the promotion goes, you’re gonna be behind from the start.

Minette Riordan: But it also includes your online promotions, so if you are a digital entrepreneur, and you’re selling online courses, online products, online services, have a clear promotional calendar of when you will be promoting and selling what. Because you don’t want to exhaust, and wear out your email, or your fans and followers on social media by constantly selling to them. Also there is prep work required for every single online launch, whether it’s one email, or an entire launch campaign, there is work involved. And we found ourselves over promoting, and wearing ourselves out. That we weren’t giving ourself a break in between, and we were probably wearing our list out as well.

Minette Riordan: And so we got really clear this year about our promotional calendar, and when we looked in January … Actually, we did start in December. When we looked last December at what was coming up for the year, we also looked at letting go. We talked about this in goal setting as well. We let go of live events for this year, and are really focusing on building our online community, so that annual perspective can help you make sure that you’re not creating too much work, or taking on too many projects during the year.

Minette Riordan: It also helps when for example I get requests almost once a week to participate in people’s telesummits, or to be a joint venture partner on someone else’s promotion. Knowing what my own promotional calendar looks like allows me to very quickly say, “Oh, yes. I’d love to participate, and I’m happy to cross promote with you.” Or, “No, I can’t do that ’cause I’m right in the middle of a promotion.” In fact, I just had that happen last week, someone asked me to participate in a summit, and it’s right in the middle of our own launch of the Creative Business Accelerator.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: It helps you make different decisions. Before we move on from annual, I want to add one piece to that. As you’re listening to this, it’s … I think it’s the first week of July.

Brad Dobson: Somewhere around there.

Minette Riordan: And right at the beginning of July, and six months has passed. This is a great time to review your annual goals, look at your business plan, and look at your promotional calendar for the rest of the year, and see are you aligned? Are you on track with your goals? Do you need to do some course correction? Maybe you slacked off a little bit, and need to ramp up and reenergize. Summer Solstice energy, it’s a great time of year to kind of capitalize some of that summer fun, and look at where can you bring a little more play, a little more fun, and a little more intentionality into your business, so that you can stay aligned with your annual goals.

Brad Dobson: Right. The two types of planning from the annual planning bucket were business planning, and a promotional calendar.

Minette Riordan: Absolutely.

Brad Dobson: Then we like to talk about quarterly planning.

Minette Riordan: I think you like this one in particular.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, it’s a great timeframe. It’s sort of a mid range timeframe. Stuff outside of three months, yes, live events, you need to, clearly you need to be on top of those from a long way out. But three months is generally about the right time for a meaty project, and also longer than that is a bit too long in terms of what you can predict. And of course quarterly also flows with the quarterly statements to the tax folks, and that type of financial thing.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, so for us that quarterly planning, we really look every quarter at what are the projects that are most active for us right now, and once we know what those projects are, each of those quarterly projects has its own project plan. And I think we talked about this a little bit in the last episode about goal setting as well, where when you look at the things that are active for you right now, are there too many of them? When you take on a meaty project, one meaty project is enough if you’re a solopreneur working on your own. With Brad and I, we might maybe have maybe two active at a time, and we don’t consider the podcast as another project. It’s something ongoing that we’re doing. We look at a project as something like the launch of our Creative Business Accelerator.

Brad Dobson: Right, right. Yeah, definitely. And those are new things, and once again we have our own approach to it, but maybe it’s …

Minette Riordan: Well, can you talk a little bit about how we plan a project? What are the elements that we look at? And some of the things that you learned in your years as a software engineer about project planning. It’s really about understanding the scope of the project, the time, the tasks.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I think that’s … It’s really crucial for something that is gonna take you, or your staff, or a combination of people, anything more than a few days, or let’s say a week, you really need to have some sort of plan around that where you’ve broken down different tasks, and have made a best effort estimate of how long those tasks are gonna take. It really helps to know when you break those tasks out, what tasks are dependent on other tasks?

Minette Riordan: Mm-hmm.

Brad Dobson: We have a lot of cases where I’m dependent on Minette for perhaps marketing copy, or the title of something so that I can get it on a landing page. There is always examples of things like that where people need to rely on each other, and doing the planning ahead of time for the project helps you understand those. Helps everybody get on the same page about what the project deliverable is, in terms of just actually what’s going to come out of the end of this thing, so that you don’t have this feature creep, and scope creep that turns into … Turns a nice little project into a giant hairball.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s so true, and it’s starting with the end in mind. Getting really clear in the vision of what the project is, what’s the successful completion date? And start with the date and the project description first, and then work your way backwards, and it will help you stay on track, and stay focused by understanding the step-by-step process, right? You don’t have to know every step of the process, but you do have to know what are those measureables that you’re gonna stay accountable to, to make sure you’re making consistent progress towards the projects.

Minette Riordan: And remember that those projects are clearly aligned with your annual goals as well. We’re talking about these five times of the year, and the different types of planning that you do at each time of the year, but everything flows from that annual business plan.

Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So that’s quarterly planning, project planning. After that we’re gonna talk about monthly planning. We use this for monthly things, and our editorial calendar. We use it specifically of our editorial calendar, so that we understand what blog posts, and Facebook posts, and podcast topics we’re going to record, and how we’re gonna go get those ready ahead of time, so that we’re not sort of recording one hour before the podcast is due because it takes a while to process the podcast, and so on, and so forth. And it allows us to block out time ahead of time for everything that needs to happen during the month.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, so when you take the combination of that annual business plan, and the project planning, and then you start to chunk your year down month to month, one of the things that we love to do that really helps us create an editorial calendar ongoingly, and with effort, and ease is by having monthly themes in our business.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: We did a whole show with Alan Brown when we talked about theming your days. But in your business from an editorial perspective, one of the ways to set yourself up for success is to first go and do some research on what’s most important to your ideal clients? What are the biggest problems that they want you to solve? And what are the questions that you get all of the time over and over for people? Your editorial should consistently focus on solving problems for your ideal clients.

Minette Riordan: If you’re wondering how you could possibly plan a month or more in advance, we actually like for our editorial to be done two months at a time, right?

Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm.

Minette Riordan: So that we’re not ever scrambling, or wondering what to talk about, or showing up at that blank screen not knowing what to write about. We hear that a lot, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to talk about.” It’s easy when you stand in the shoes of your ideal client, and think how can I show up in service to my clients today? What is the question that I can answer for them? Or what’s one small problem that I can solve? And you build your editorial calendar around the needs of your ideal client, and then you align your editorial calendar with your promotions as well.

Minette Riordan: Over the last two episodes, all transparency here, we’re getting ready to do a big launch of our Creative Business Accelerator, so you hear me mentioning it a few times. We’re working on the launch. This is what we’re working on. Hopefully, it’s making you curious. What is a Creative Business Accelerator? And so this intentionality of content, and knowing where we are going, not only makes your clients, and your perspective clients feel like you really get them, you really see them, and you’re really solving problems for them, but it also helps to support your promotions ongoing.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. And I think that’s really crucial … Is that the things that we’re listing here at different times of the year, whether it’s annual, quarterly, monthly, or so on, they should work together.

Minette Riordan: Mm-hmm.

Brad Dobson: When you sat down and you planned out your promotional calendar, and perhaps Thanksgiving, or end of school, or start of school is a huge time for you, or whatever it is. Maybe you’re doing coaching around spouses that are lost to the football season.

Minette Riordan: Or World Cup right now.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, right. You know that … You know how that works from a promotional perspective. You know that in the months coming up to that event, and around that time you’ve got all sorts of promotions. Well, now you can align your editorial related to that, and you can align your projects related to that, and maybe you have a super busy time of year, and a less busy time of year. Well, don’t do big projects in the super busy time of year. We’re guilty of that where we forget about … Oh, we’re gonna be really busy.

Minette Riordan: How busy the kids are.

Brad Dobson: Right, exactly.

Minette Riordan: That we’re gonna be gone every Saturday. The band competitions, and drumline competitions, right? Don’t take on big projects when the rest of your life is full and busy.

Brad Dobson: Right. It’s a sweet spot when you can pull these things together, and see how they can work together, they can support you, they can support your clients because, hey, you know you had four Facebook posts, or four Facebook Lives in a row related to this one topic, and it aligns with your promotion, and it’s timely, and all of those things. It’s important to think this out ahead of time, rather than just doling those topics out, that content out throughout the year with no intentionality.

Minette Riordan: Absolutely. And so the second part of the monthly planning is my favorite time management tool. Excuse me. Which is time blocking, and I am not certainly the first person to talk about time blocking. If you just Google time blocking, many, many productivity experts point to this as one of the essential factors of consistent productivity without wearing yourself out, or without working under the gun.

Minette Riordan: When you align time blocking with your editorial calendar, what does that look like? What do I mean? That means that Brad and I launch a new podcast every Tuesday, right? And in order to do that, we have to look at our calendar, in the weeks before that we need to know what the topic is, and we need to have done our planning template, and we need to actually record the podcast, and then after the podcast is recorded there is still work to be done. Brad does audio production on it, and then our VA gets the transcript, and does the posting in the social media. There is this long process involved with every single step of launching a live podcast, or a recorded podcast every Tuesday.

Minette Riordan: We go through our calendar and block chunks of time to do all of these various steps. We are in the middle of a Monday Motivation email series. I write four at a time. I write a whole months at a time. I’ll block out, Mondays and Wednesdays tend to be my days that I block out for doing that kind of creative work. I literally write into my calendar the time that I need to do a particular project.

Minette Riordan: Now like Brad, I like to have a lot of creativity and flow, and sometimes too much structure can feel boring. I totally get that. Often times, I just block big chunks in my calendar, two to three hours at a time, and they simply say work time, or project time, and I have a list of things I can work on during those different time blocks. ‘Cause I have multiple projects usually that are active at the time. It’s not about saying at 9:00 on a Tuesday I’m gonna force myself to sit down and write a blog post. It’s saying that at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning I’m gonna sit down, and work on my business.

Minette Riordan: And using these time blocks can increase momentum, and increase productivity. And there is a beautiful mindset piece for me that happens when I combine the editorial calendar and the time blocks. For example, I know that on Tuesday at 9:00 I have to sit down and write a blog post. I already know what the topic is, and I probably reviewed that on the Friday before. Certainly, the day before. My brain is already working on the content without me having to take any action. Maybe I’ve done a little research or reading. Maybe I have some ideas. I tend to go on a lot of walks, and take my phone, and I take tons of notes when ideas appear, so I capture them in my phone, and by time I actually sit down on Tuesday morning to write the blog post, it just goes blah, and flows out.

Minette Riordan: People think that I’m super productive, and I do … That I work a ton, but the truth is I’m doing a lot of work in my creative brain, in my creative off time, so that when I sit down at my computer I’m completely ready to just spit out a blog post, or a podcast.

Brad Dobson: Cool stuff. She’s better at it than I am.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. We work very differently. We did a whole episode on Brad’s focus blocks. I don’t remember when that was, somewhere in the ’90s.

Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm.

Minette Riordan: We’ll have to look that up, and we’ll put it in the show notes, but Brad does it with his focus blocks. It’s a different way of approaching the time blocking, but blocking time in your calendar to get your most important work done means that nothing falls through the cracks. Included in time blocking should be things like paying the bills, doing your marketing, making sales followup calls. If they’re blocked in your calendar, you’re more likely to get them done.

Minette Riordan: And if those time blocks are slipping by without you actually doing the work, then there usually is some mindset stuff going on around why aren’t these activities actually getting done. Sometimes they’re boring, sometimes they’re hard, sometimes they’re terrifying. Like making collection calls, that’s never a fun conversation to have with a client, but is it necessary to the successful running of your business? Absolutely, so make time for it.

Brad Dobson: Let’s talk about weekly planning. I think I have a different approach to this than Minette does.

Minette Riordan: Oh, he’s way better at the weekly stuff.

Brad Dobson: I ascribe to a sprint based approach, which is terminology from agile software development, where we work in what’s called sprints, which are just short one week, or perhaps two week long activity time blocks once again, where we have a set amount of work that we’re trying to get done in that sprint. And we have a goal for that sprint, and it … My project tracking tool called JIRA is already set up for that, and I can just drag and drop a bunch of work items into a sprint, and then get those done.

Minette Riordan: Well, you could do with Trello or your Google Calendar, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, you could.

Minette Riordan: There are lots of free resources.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, JIRA just has a little extra stuff related, directly related to agile, but I use that ’cause I’m a software guy, but I think it’s a super effective way to chop up your time where … Well, I don’t know. I guess, it’s just because you have weeks, and weekends … It’s like what am I gonna get done this week, I think, is a good chunk of time.

Minette Riordan: It’s looking at what’s the most important next step to get accomplished this week, right?

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: Really looking at what’s gonna move my business forward this week.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and where do I want to be when I start again on Monday, or Saturday.

Minette Riordan: And I think that, that leads beautifully into daily planning as well. And we also have a little bit different approach to the daily planning. We both tend to sit down, when we’re doing what we know works for us, we sit down on Monday mornings, and we plan the week ahead, and actually we usually plan two weeks at a time, and we review our plans every week, but we plan a couple of weeks at a time. We know what projects are coming. We get really clear on what’s due to each other, or to our awesome virtual assistant Leslie, so that the expectations are clear.

Minette Riordan: I think a big part of the point of weekly planning is making sure that as business partners we’re totally on the same page, and so that we’re working in alignment, and not at odds with each other. There is projects I’m doing, and he’s doing that don’t require each others input or content support, but there is many, many projects where we’re going back and forth. That weekly perspective is super helpful.

Minette Riordan: But then when it comes to daily planning, which is our final category, and our seventh strategy, Brad and I have two different approaches. Why don’t you talk about your journaling, and then I’ll talk about Big Six.

Brad Dobson: Well, I think I use the journaling and the Big Six at the same time.

Minette Riordan: Okay.

Brad Dobson: My tendency is to … I want to back up for one thing.

Minette Riordan: Sure.

Brad Dobson: For the weekly, it’s true for any of these, but specifically for the weekly. In that Monday morning planning, I’m not a happy camper when things come out of the blue that I didn’t know about, or …

Minette Riordan: And I’m really good at doing that to him. Sorry, honey.

Brad Dobson: And so then … That’s okay. I think I’ve done it to you before as well. But that’s a really tough way to work when you’re sort of in firefight mode all the time because … And of course unexpected things come up in the business all the time, but the fewer of those that you can avoid by just simply talking about things, the better.

Brad Dobson: But on to daily. Yeah, so what works for me is a combination of Minette’s Big Six items, which is figuring out the main things that you have to get done.

Minette Riordan: And I’ll share more about that in a minute.

Brad Dobson: Right. What I like to do is to write those in my journal the night before, and if I write them with intentionality, where I say I am going to do this tomorrow. I have the date on the page, this is the plan for tomorrow. The more intentionality I put on it, if I actually put the time of day that I’m going to do something, or how long I’m gonna spend on it, the better chance … In fact, it’s an actually, an excellent chance that I’ll get it done.

Brad Dobson: There are two reason for that in my mind. One is that over night my mind is doing sort of background processing on that, and the other one is that the next day, or the day that I have planned, I don’t have to make decisions. Those things are just already in my mind. They’re already on paper, and low and behold they get done magically.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, and so it’s pretty amazing how it works. Let me just share briefly about the concept of the Big Six, and six is not a magic number. For some people it’s three. It’s never more than six, and this is how you manage your to-do list. I personally have a running to-do list. Brad has a running to-do list. That to-do list isn’t always the same as the six things we’re committing to getting done, to moving our life and our business forward.

Minette Riordan: That six could be a combination of personal and business related, and they should be directly related to your goals, and the projects that are currently active for you in your business, or in your personal life. Right now, one of the Big Six for me is … I would say three of them are really personal right now. Three of them for me are get exercise every day, meditate every day, and track my carbs and calories every day.

Minette Riordan: I am just recently really committing to doing a ketogenic diet. I’m supporting Brad, and my daughter in doing that as well. And so I have an awesome app called Carb Manager that I have to remember to track, right? It’s really important to be tracking, and I can’t do the work that I need to do to show up in full service, and alignment with my clients if I can’t bring the physical energy. Fully half of the things that I’m committing to every single day are personal, and then the other three are business focused, and they tend to be sometimes really small things. They don’t have to be huge chunks every day, but it’s the next steps to move a project forward.

Minette Riordan: For example, today my most important thing to get done today is to outline the video content for our upcoming educational video series that we’re launching, and the other most important thing was to get the podcast planning templates done, so that we could get these … A couple of podcasts recorded back to back. Those are the things that are going to move me forward. That doesn’t mean I’m not getting to other things on my to-do list. It means that I’m putting focus and intentionality on the things that are most important in order to improve productivity, and profitability.

Brad Dobson: Great stuff. Just to review. Let’s go through this quickly. Annual planning, you want a business plan and a promotional calendar at least. Quarterly planning, you’re doing projects, project planning. Monthly planning is your editorial calendar, your time blocking, where you’re carving out sections of your calendar for the next month, and perhaps editorial themes. Weekly, maybe you’re doing sprints, maybe you’re doing a Monday morning planning session to figure out what’s going to happen that week, so that everybody is clear, and daily your Big Six, link to your goals, what it is you’re going to get done that day, or perhaps you plan out the Big Six for the next day.

Minette Riordan: And remember you can come join us in our Productivity for Creative Business Owners Facebook group, and there will be a link right at the top to download this little checklist of what planning you should be doing when. ‘Cause remember as Brian Tracy said, “Ten minutes of planning can save you two hours a day.” I don’t know about you, but I’d love to get two hours of my day back.

Brad Dobson: It’s true. I believe it. Totally.

Minette Riordan: Yep. And in the show notes we will put a link to the Facebook group to make it really easy for you guys to find. You can always go to PathToProfitAcademy.com/podcasts, with an S on the end, podcasts, to make sure that you find all the show notes, and all the great resources that we’re sharing. We always include links to books, and resources as well.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff, and coming up next we will be onto the … I think it’s the penultimate pillar? Or maybe, which one? No, it’s the seventh of nine pillars of productivity.

Minette Riordan: Oh, the seventh. Not the penultimate.

Brad Dobson: And that will be systems and how they can support you, and your productivity, and your flow.

Minette Riordan: And we know creatives, you really dread talking about systems, but I cannot tell you how systems will liberate you and your business, and actually create more flow, and more creativity. We’ll see you on the next show.

Brad Dobson: Bye guys.

Brad Dobson: Thanks for listening to Structure and Flow. The productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. To find out more about this episode, and others, go to PathToProfitAcademy.com, and click on the podcast link.