Episode 108: Using Systems to Support Productivity

Brad Dobson: How you prepare for giving a talk? So let’s say that you have your signature talk, and you give that once a month. Do you always prepare the same way? Do you always have the same slides? Are you constantly tweaking it? Are you someone like Minette who has a slightly different talk every time, with a slightly different offer, and never gets the opportunity to optimize one great talk.

Minette Riordan: That’s not true. 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’s 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 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.
I’m just like thinking about our whole conversation before we even started the recording today. About yes, I did, no you didn’t.

Brad Dobson: The wheels are already off.

Minette Riordan: The wheels are already off and we hadn’t started, which is kind of pretty funny given that this is the Structure and Flow podcast. We were definitely not in our structure. This is episode 108 where were talking about the dreaded S word, systems. Yep, my dear creatives today we are talking about systems.

Brad Dobson: And we had a system to prepare for this podcast.

Minette Riordan: We did, and we had a system break down.

Brad Dobson: Apparently it broke down.

Minette Riordan: So I guess it doesn’t really matter what the break down was. But it was mostly about what are we gonna call this episode about systems, right? Because I started to do the podcast planning template, thought I had shared it with Brad, clearly I hadn’t, because he’s the systems guy. I sent it over to him and said, “Hey dude, I think you should prep the content for this particular episode of the podcast, because he loves systems.”

Brad Dobson: I do, I do.

Minette Riordan: He geeks out on systems.

Brad Dobson: Systems are the best ever.

Minette Riordan: And I’ll never forget one of my first mentors and coaches, an amazing woman named Kendall SummerHawk. She always used to talk about how systems will liberate you. And I used to resist, and then I realized she’s right. That the more systems we have in place, the fewer decisions we have to make, the easier it is to grow, and scale your business. The more simple it is to create automation in a lot of different places. So that’s kind of where were going in this episode, is how systems can improve productivity. But also create more time and spaciousness in your calendar to do the creative work that you love.

Brad Dobson: Oh for sure, definitely.

Minette Riordan: And you found an awesome quote, you wanna share the quote.

Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- this is from Bryan Logue.

Minette Riordan: I don’t know who that is.

Brad Dobson: Me neither.

Minette Riordan: But it’s a great quote.

Brad Dobson: “Leaders, if you’re too busy to build good systems, then you’ll always be too busy.” And that’s the truth. If you’re just … And that’s what were gonna talk about generally. I guess let’s just get into it, if you are repeating the same task over, and over, and over, and you don’t have a way to offload that, optimize it, create a system around it that others could help you with, or that helps you; you’re wasting your time, and you’re spending less time in your zone of genius, or your zone of excellence. Which is where we want you, and you’re spending, you’re doing way too many decisions, and you don’t have enough brain power to put you into the flow state that you wanna be in.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, its so true. And so Brad’s reference to the zone of genius is a reference to one of our favorite business books “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. We’ve mentioned it many times on this show, and it’s particularly pertinent to the conversation of systems into structure and flow. So in his book he talks about how there’s four different zones, and it’s really important as an entrepreneur to get really clear about which of your tasks fall into the zones. It’s the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, the zone of excellence, and the zone of genius. And we have our clients do this at least once a year. Where they literally have to sit down and make a massive to-do list of all of the tasks items, all the different things they do in their business on a consistent, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis, and then mark them according to which zone they’re in.
And there’s usually a lot of dismay. In year two there’s usually some excitement because they’re moving more into competence, and into excellence, and Gay Hendricks talks about how we won’t truly feel fulfilled in our life, and in our work until we’re spending most of our time in our zone of genius.

Brad Dobson: Right, so I kind of want you to walk away from today with some actionable stuff, and I think the easiest way to do that is to just look at low hanging fruit. What are the easiest things in your life right now, in your business especially. But your life counts as well when it comes to systems, in terms of things where you’re wasting time doing the same thing over, and over, and over. Where is that low hanging fruit that you could either offload to a service, offload to an automation system, offload to someone else that you pay for? What are those things?
So I had some examples that I worked through where … Down here where, just to trigger your mind about what might be something that you could work on. Setting up travel reservations. Do you use the same airline, hotel, rental car chain every time for simplicity, and to get more points? Or are you always looking for the cheapest one, but maybe spending a lot more time agonizing over the decision about travel, or about how to organize that travel? Or could you have a travel agent do that for you and completely eject it from your life, and just have it handed to you on a silver platter, for a fee, of course?
How you prepare for giving a talk. So let’s say that you have your signature talk, and you give that once a month. Do you always prepare the same way? Do you always have the same slides? Are you constantly tweaking it? Are you someone like Minette who has a slightly different talk every time, with a slightly different offer, and never gets the opportunity to optimize one great talk?

Minette Riordan: That’s not true.

Brad Dobson: How do you handle your billing? Are you-

Minette Riordan: I used to be-

Brad Dobson: Do you have a billing automation system? Do you do the same thing every time, or do you hand do billing all the time? Or for those of us that work at home, I’m sure there’s a lot of people that are listening that are like that. How do you go to work in the morning? What does that mean for you? Do you get up, and shower, and workout, and put on work clothes? Or do you sort of do the different thing every morning, not sure when you’re gonna have breakfast, not sure whether you’re gonna watch a little morning TV.

Minette Riordan: So how is that different then a routine? How does that fall into the category of a system?

Brad Dobson: Well whether you write it down or not … Well the morning thing, yeah that’s a routine. But it helps a ton to have a routine that’s ritualized that you don’t have to make decisions about. So rather than getting to 9 AM and you’re still making decisions about what shirt to wear, all of that is flowed more simply. Whereas things like the travel reservations example, or the signature talk example, those are things where you could actually write down the steps that you wanna take each time, and just repeat that.

Minette Riordan: So from a more business focused, practical perspective some other examples of where we have implemented systems are the processes for posting a blog. For all the steps of producing a podcast, and getting it listed. Brad has written step by step processes, with screenshots of where things go, and how to do it. So that whether it’s us doing it we can do it faster, and it makes it really easy to pass it off to our VA. It minimizes the number of mistakes that are made, and minimizes distractions as well, and maximizes our productivity, and efficiency. So when Brad’s doing financials he has a checklist of the things that he does on the tenth and the twenty-fifth every month, and he just goes through his little process.
And I wanted to also add about this piece about not making decisions. One of the funny stories is about Steve Jobs, who I think had one color of shirt, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. Well same clothes every day.

Minette Riordan: Well I think he had multiple shirts, but they all were exactly the same shirt.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, not the same physical clothes every day.

Minette Riordan: But he never had to make a decision about what to wear, that was not something that was important to him. For those ladies out there listening, you might not even be able to imagine what that looks like. But I’ve been thinking about it for the podcast, and for my Facebook lives, because it’s a pain in the butt to go up and stare at my closet, and it maximizes the amount of time it takes to get ready to do the video recording. And really who cares if I show up in the same shirt, or three shirts. Like I have a few colors that are perfect for doing video. They’re colors that I like, they look good on screen, right?
All of these different things. I’ve already made those decisions. They can go in a separate part of my closet, they always at least one of them is clean at a time. I don’t have to think twice about it. So this is about getting more done in less time, by having simple systems in place.

Brad Dobson: That’s a fantastic example. You think about the difference between going up to your closet … So you’re gonna either go give a talk, or you’re gonna get on Facebook live, or you’re gonna do a YouTube recording. Whatever it is, and you go up to your closet, now there’s you number one, who has a uniform, and there’s three versions of it. Two of them happen to be clean, and that includes your shirt, your lipstick, your-

Minette Riordan: Jewelry.

Brad Dobson: Jewelry, those types of things. You walk up there, you put them on, you walk down, and then you do a great job of creating whatever it is you’re gonna create in terms of talking.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: And there’s you two which goes up there and spends fifteen minutes to half an hour trying to figure out, put together a different uniform that’s not really a uniform, and you’re all frustrated by that. And by the time you get back downstairs to give the talk …

Minette Riordan: And this is true for guys or girls, right?

Brad Dobson: Well, yeah.

Minette Riordan: I mean I watch him sometimes do the same thing. I don’t have anything to wear, all my t-shirts are worn out.

Brad Dobson: Yeah exactly.

Minette Riordan: So it’s making sure that you’re prepared for these important things that are happening. And then I would add to that the part about the space to do it. Like right now we’re doing this in Brad’s office. We’ve been saying for months we’re gonna set up a studio, and we haven’t done that. What I did do was carve out a corner of my office for doing my Facebook live, with the tripod is set up, the light is set up, it doesn’t move. Well the housekeepers coming today, she has a tendency to move things, and then I have to reset it. So, it’s one of those annoying things, it’s like okay, just let her know. Like we put tape on the floor, we put tape under the tripod, and she’s an amazing housekeeper and she cleaned it all up.
So just making sure that you let people know not to move things when they’re set up, and in place, right? So now it literally takes my five minutes to get set up to do a Facebook live. Where before I was fluxing around for thirty to forty-five minutes, and frustrated because I was trying to clear a space, and get the backdrop set, and do all these different things. So what a consistent waste of time. So now I have a system, and I have a place for doing everything seamlessly, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and it’s not just a consistent waste of time, it’s a consistent waste of mental energy and that perhaps is more important.

Minette Riordan: Will you go back up here and talk about automation, because automation is such a valuable part of systems. People get really freaked out thinking that they can’t afford to hire lots of people. The truth is that much of what we’re talking about can be done simply through automation. We’re big fans of hiring support in your business, and it’s more affordable than you think. We can talk about that another day. But today let’s focus on automation, and how automation is just another form of a system.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and we use these to a great extent. All of our campaigns and so on, and so forth, emails are automated through Ontraport, or Meet Edgar for our social stuff. And certainly those cost money, and there’s development involved in them. But the automation in them is tremendous. But there’s a lot of things that you could automate that maybe you haven’t thought of with free tools that are out there. I probably paid fifteen dollars for a plug in for WordPress to do site backups, I think there’s free ones. I got it scheduled, it goes off every Sunday night. I got two different sites that it backs up, it sends me an email. I never have to worry about backups, and I could change that schedule.

Minette Riordan: So for those creatives who are listening can you just say what do you mean by backing it up, and why that’s so important.

Brad Dobson: Sure, well anything with software can go wrong.

Minette Riordan: Often does.

Brad Dobson: And you can lose data, you could lose your blog post, or you could lose your site, or whatever it is. And if you have a backup, then you can pay someone to restore it for you, and with some sanity, and maybe you just lost a week, instead of the whole thing. We use a transcription service called Rev.com. We use it for this podcast, but it’s tremendously effective if you have, once again, a signature talk, perhaps a Facebook live, that you want to repurpose. You want to get that information on paper, or digitally on paper, out of the video. You just send it to them, it’s a buck a minute, and low and behold you’ve got that transcription and you could turn that into an ebook or something like that.
Book keeping for us is a huge one now. Of course that costs money, but it’s in my zone of incompetence, and in that zone of incompetence so clearly we just pay people to help with that.

Minette Riordan: So how is that automation. So can you talk about how QuickBooks is the part that you’re using to automate that. So, because a book keeper is not automation.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, so we use QuickBooks online, there are other probably cheaper tools, things like FreshBooks.

Minette Riordan: FreshBooks.

Brad Dobson: But most of the account transactions are just automatically sucked from PayPal, or from our credit card processing, or from our bank accounts. And so just magically everything shows up in QuickBooks, and then the book keeper just has to do the-

Minette Riordan: Sorting.

Brad Dobson: Sorting and aligning the transactions to make sure that-

Minette Riordan: Mint.com is another great example of auto mating personal finances.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, it’s a way to just have a great view of things, without having to go through all of your statements individually. So finally there’s a tool online called Zapier.com, Zapier, and they’re kind of amazing. They make online tools talk to each other, and it’s relatively easy, or you could have someone do it for you to just do all sorts of automation. So they give the example of it pulling sales invoices out of a tool called Zero, and giving you a weekly digest of sales invoices. Similarly, you can set it up to automatically post from WordPress into Facebook. There’s things where you could have it parse through your emails, finding specific ones, and send them to a Google spreadsheet. Just the list goes on.
You would be amazed by the things that you can automate with this, so that you’re not having to manually do them, and that’s really what we’re interested in. Is finding those things that once again are low hanging fruit, that you can automate, you can optimize, and just lead to less decisions, and less monkey work.

Minette Riordan: So my favorite thing that Brad has done with Zapier, there’s a lot of good ones. But Zapier also is how we connect Ontraport, our SRM and email tool to Kellen Lee, right?

Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Minette Riordan: So that my calendar is super neat, and organized, and it’s really easy for people to schedule time to talk to me. But my favorite thing that Brad has done with it is we us Slack, it’s another great communication tool that we love. And every time we make an online sale, we get a little caching, in our Slack inbox, and it’s such a fun reminder mindset and technology combined to remind us that money is flowing in on a regular basis. So there’s ways that you can use some of this automation and reminders for different things.
As we’ve been talking about, we’ve been implementing some new personal renewal rituals into our schedule. We use the alarm on our phone as another form of automation to remind us of different activities. So you have access to the tools, many of them are free, or very low cost, that you can be implementing in your business to keep you on track, and on task. And systems are the number one way that you’ll be able to grow, and scale your business. When you are ready to start hiring a virtual assistant, if you already have the system in place, it makes the onboarding process of new hires so, so simple. That you’re not scrambling trying to train them, and figure out what it is that you want them to do, or having to repeat how to do something over, and over again if you already have the system in place.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and for folks that really dread it, and I gave the example of the travel agent, and what you’ll find is when you talk with a travel agent, they will set up a system for you from day one. They will ask you, “Do you want aisle seat? Do you want window seat? Do you want middle seat?” I don’t know anybody that wants a middle seat. They’ll wanna know your favorite airline, airport, do you wanna go out in the morning? What kind of car do you want? All of those things, they’re building a system for you. So that when you come to them and say, “Hey, I need to get to Denver.” They don’t have to worry about all those little things, and asking you those questions again. So it’s not really any different than that, and there’s just opportunities for this just inbound. Look for something simple, don’t get overwhelmed by oh, I’ve got to automate everything, and all these online tools.
Just look at the things in your life, and your business that you’re repeating that clearly aren’t in your zone of excellence, or genius. And even if you can’t figure it out for yourself, ask somebody. They can help you. Just what can I do to make this work better?

Minette Riordan: Yeah I love that, and I’m thinking back to the example of something that many of us are doing, consistently in our business which is writing a blog post. And you can implement a system, because normally, not only do you write the blog post, and you share the blog post on social media, and you find an image, and maybe you’re going into Canva and creating a graphic. If you have a simple checklist of all of the steps, you don’t have to do them all a once. But you won’t forget any part of the process to make sure that you’re driving the traffic that you want, creating consistently awesome content, and sharing it in all the right places. If you have a simple, just a five point checklist in place that you read, and check off every single time you write a blog post would be another really practical example of a simple system that once it’s in place, then it just like frees your mind up, right? Of some of that space of oh my god I gotta do this, and I gotta do that.
I wanna talk for a minute, I wanna bring back in our four different productivity styles, and if you haven’t taken the quiz yet you can do that at pathtoprofitacadamy.com/upsquiz. And we wanna look briefly at how each of the four productivity styles, excuse me. React, or approach systems differently. You wanna start while I grab a sip of water.

Brad Dobson: Apparently she reacts poorly. Yeah, so the unique productivity styles once again are commander, contemplator, conductor, and creator. And they each have their own world that they live in. They’re all creatives, don’t mistake the creator as-

Minette Riordan: The only creative type.

Brad Dobson: … The only creative type. So a commander prefers to create, and then delegate systems to others.

Minette Riordan: Actually then that’s not me, because I don’t like to create them. I like to work inside them once their created.

Brad Dobson: Interesting, maybe you’re getting better.

Minette Riordan: Yeah I am getting better.

Brad Dobson: The contemplator can’t function without clear systems and processes, that’s clearly me.

Minette Riordan: And he loves to create systems and share them with others.

Brad Dobson: Yeah definitely.

Minette Riordan: So from my perspective, every creative business owner needs a contemplator on their team. They bring so much value. So as you start to think about hiring, and looking for partners and collaborators, you wanna find people with complimentary talents. So the productivity style assessment can really help you know who you need on your team.

Brad Dobson: Right, and that goes hand in hand with the rocket fuel definition of integrator, versus-

Minette Riordan: Visionary.

Brad Dobson: Visionary, and you want your integrator to be someone who is happy with systems.

Minette Riordan: Yep.

Brad Dobson: The third one is the conductor. The conductor wants others to create systems for them. But enjoys working within the systems once they’re created. Which I think sounds a little bit more like Minette.

Minette Riordan: It does, and the thing is that conductors are super focused on people, and relationships, and their conducting, right? They’re moving people around, they’re really focused on harmony, and peace, and balance. And so they don’t have time, or they don’t think about systems that could actually improve their ability to increase connection with others. So just like a conductor of an orchestra has the score, the score serves as a system, right? As a structure in which there’s all this amazing flow and creativity happening. So I would invite you, if the conductor is you, to think about where could you implement systems that actually allow you to support people even more than you already love doing.

Brad Dobson: Right, and so finally is the creator that we mentioned before, and they resist systems. We hear you out their creators, you don’t want them, but you really need them. They believe too much structure will inhibit creativity, and that’s kind of what this show is about is hopefully, turning the corner on that and showing you that truly it can support your creativity just more so than not having it.

Minette Riordan: And there is a principle out there called the principle of creative constraints, which is all about how having structure, and limits, and constraints increases creative output, and creative thinking, and creative imagination. So I encourage you to go check out the concept of creative constraints. If you don’t believe me that creators will benefit form systems. I’m a good example of that, is thinking back to the early days of when I started my publishing company, it was very deadline driven. I knew exactly when I had to get my magazine to press every single month. But around that were all these different things that I had to do, and I had systems, but they were all in my head. And the first time I hired an office manager she was so brilliant at helping me get all those systems out of my head, and onto paper.
So if you know that you have routines, and systems, and structure in place, but you haven’t made the move to really clarify, and document them. Now is the time to do that. So making sure that you’re documenting your systems is an important next step. You may already have them in place. You may have great routine, you may have structure that you’re not even identifying as structure, or system. But go ahead and get it documented. We cannot articulate enough. Like I can describe a system to Brad and he’s brilliant at actually documenting it in a way that other people will get it too.

Brad Dobson: Cool stuff, I think that wraps it up for systems. Hopefully that helps you. HopefullY you got some take aways.

Minette Riordan: Remember, systems will liberate you, we promise.

Brad Dobson: That’s right, and in the next episode, episode 109 we’re gonna talk about another pillar of productivity. We are closing in on all nine of them.

Minette Riordan: Yep.

Brad Dobson: This will be your tasks, how you prioritize them, how you list them, how you get them done.

Minette Riordan: It’s gonna be a fun one to talk about tasks. It’s one of the places I see people get really overwhelmed with these massive long lists of tasks. We’re gonna give you some ideas of apps to use to manage your tasks, as well as how to prioritize tasks, and how to let go of the ones that have been lingering on your list for a really long time, and that you’re probably never gonna get to anyway.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff.

Minette Riordan: Alright, we’ll see you next week.

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 pathtoprofitacadamy.com and click on the podcast link.