I’ve got bad news for you.
You might not be able to become more productive for your business anymore.
- You’ve implemented all the lifehacks.
- You’re using all the right time management techniques.
- You’re batching your tasks.
Overall, you’re a damn ninja.
And there are no more minutes, seconds, or hours left to save.
If you’re as obsessed with productivity and efficiency as me, you’ve hit that wall.
There’s a point where you’ve done everything right, and then you get stuck.
But you still want to be able to grow your biz, right?
So what do you do when there are no more ways to save time on your tasks?
You get rid of them completely.
BLAMMO.
I know, you’re not a magician, you don’t make things disappear. But robots do!
Yes, my friend – you can automate all the shit you don’t want to do. Love ya, technology.
About Workflow Automation
Automation is one of the two main ways to save time for your business. With it, you set up or complete a task once, but the activity is performed over and over again.
For example, email management can take a shit ton of time. Finding the important emails, sorting out the newsletters, etc. And then after you read them, you have to move them out of your inbox to the right folder or wherever you put old emails.
Nope, nope, and nope.
You can automate all that with apps, settings, and integrations.
It takes a little bit of work up front, but you can set up rules and filters and other fancy email settings that automatically do all that for you.
For example, if you’re a freelancer you could create an IFTTT recipe to automatically “star” any emails from clients so you can immediately find them among the rest of your inbox clutter, and respond right away.
I like to think of it as delegating to robots. I always loved Rosie from The Jetsons, and dancing, so I usually picture a Rockette-style kickline of Rosies somewhere, managing my inbox and scheduling my social media posts.
Automation is best for tasks that:
- Need to occur at certain times: If something needs to happen at an exact time, or in relation to something else (for example, a confirmation email sent immediately after a form submission), automation helps ensure that happens when it needs to.
- Have low customization: Automated tasks are mostly identical each time they occur. So they’re best for kind of mindless tasks that are the same each time, like answering the same common question from customers.
- Are short but frequent: Some hidden time-wasters only take a few minutes, but you have to do them over and over again. These “tiny tasks” are usually simple and easy to offload to an app or integration.
Overall, it’s highly awesome.
Here’s why:
The Benefits of Workflow Automation
Automation can sound kind of boring, I won’t argue that. And I won’t blame anyone who’s overlooked it for that reason.
We’re creatives!
Damn the man! Save the empire!
(Okay, yes. I’ve watched Empire Records more than once recently. But it was JUST Rex Manning day!)
And things like productivity automation and processes sound very corporate and handed down from the man.
They also sound very complicated. And time-consuming, which I admit they can be at first.
But here’s why you’re making a mistake by passing it up:
Put the work in once for endless results
Automating your to-dos is the kind of thing where the more work you put in up front, the more results you’ll see in the long run.
It has a super high ROI.
Think about it. It may take half an hour to set up email rules and filters, which is more than a lot of people want to add to their already lengthy inbox time.
But even if that only saves you 5 minutes per day, that time cancels itself out in just over a week.
Think about how much time you’ll save over the course of a year!
I’ll even do the math for you: it’ll save about 22 hours – almost an entire day of your life.
Perform tasks on someone else’s schedule (without sacrificing your own)
There are times when tasks need to be performed on someone else’s schedule. For example, an opt-in confirmation email has to be sent as soon as the subscriber opts in. It just does.
But imagine if your email marketing provider couldn’t automate this. You’d have to constantly be on the lookout for new subscribers so you could send a confirmation.
Ughhhh.
That sounds awful.
Automation lets your business run on someone else’s schedule without being always on yourself. “Run by robots.” 
Spend more time on the work you enjoy
How much do you really enjoy things like checking email, scheduling social media posts, and collecting analytics?
That kind of stuff isn’t probably at the heart of why you started a creative business.
Automating administrative tasks lets you spend more time on designing, writing, coaching, creating courses, or whatever it is you do.
What you love – and what makes you money.
It helps improve accuracy and efficiency
Like I said earlier, those “tiny tasks” are some of the best to automate. They’re also some of the easiest to be forgotten.
Automating things like creating invoices and updating your finance spreadsheet eliminates the opportunity to forget or procrastinate them. It also ensures things are accurate and consistent from time to time.
How to Decide What to Automate
Once you’ve decided to take a few tasks off your to-do list, how do you decide which ones to do?
Not everything is great to automate (rhyme!).
Here are a few things you might want to consider:
What tasks eat up your time?
The simplest way to prioritize automation is by looking at what takes up the most time. Imagine being able to save several hours per week just by automating one task.
It may seem intimidating to jump right in and tackle a huge task, but hey – eat that damn frog.
Use RescueTime or Toggl to perform a productivity audit. See what apps, tasks, and people you spend the most time on. Then see where you can cut corners without sacrificing quality or accuracy.
For example, you may see you have a ton of back and forth emails with one particular client. This might be a sign to try to automate some of the communication between you two. If you’re always updating each other, maybe a project management tool will help. You could turn on email notifications so that as you cross things off in there instead of your to-do list, your client would be automatically updated via email.
What do you just really hate?
You’ll also want to unload the tasks that bring you down.
If you have invoicing, figure out a way to stop invoicing.
If your actual fear of unread emails has you hiding under your blanket in the morning, do something about it.
Sarah Morgan says that when you have the business blues, ask yourself what you least enjoy and how to change that.
Reading that line however long ago was an a-ha moment for me. Automation is the perfect solution.
You don’t need to really sacrifice anything – it’s win/win/win – and maybe even another win?
You don’t have to do this thing you hate anymore. But clearly it benefits your business somehow, otherwise, you wouldn’t have started it in the first place.
So now shit still gets done, your business still grows, but you still get to focus on things you actually like – instead of the stuff that makes you hate running a business.
What’s your Kryptonite?
We can’t all be good at everything.
(Except Meryl Streep – Meryl Streep could play Batman and be the right choice.)
If you’re not good at something, don’t make yourself do it all the time.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve your skills, but we’re busy bosses. Set aside time for education and personal development, and operate a lean biz at all other times.
For example, I love design, but it’s not my specialty.
I love spending hours fiddling and tweaking placement and layout, rearranging the color palette, and stuff like that. And when I have a lot of time, I can put together something half-decent.
But I normally don’t have a lot of time.
So in addition to keeping graphics basic in general, I created saved templates in Canva for Work with my favorite custom layouts. The fonts, colors, and my blog’s name are already there for me. My favorite stock photos are even pulled into the area for my custom uploads already.
I put a few hours into these templates one rainy Sunday, and now I can create new blog post graphics in 5 minutes or so each time. Not because they’re sloppy, but because I’m basically just changing the text. I’ve already canceled out the time spent on them, several times over.
Automate It
Seriously, you are wasting so much time by not automating things. I’d say I feel bad for you, but that sounds condescending. So instead, I feel excited for you, because you’re about to transform your workload.
To take the next step automating your business, download my free workbook to figure out what tasks you should offload. Then check back here for the next post in the series!
Can’t wait to get started with automation? Download this free workbook to decide what to automate first.
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