If you're overwhelmed by a chaotic business that's stealing time from your family, Streamlined Solopreneur is for you. Hey, everybody. My name's Joe Casabona, and I've been there. And on this show, I will show you how to turn chaos into clarity, so you can stop checking your email at the playground.
One of my favorite lines in 30 Rock, a show full of one-liners, is uttered by Jack Donaghy, who is Alec Baldwin's character. I am the Sisyphus of Reaganing. I am the Sisyphus of Reaganing.
Reaganing in 30 Rock is where you have a day where you make no mistakes. It's the perfect game of business, and it's a deep joke. You need to know a little bit about US politics during that time, which is like circa 2010. You also need to know who Sisyphus is.
And Sisyphus, if you don't know, was condemned to pushing a boulder up a hill just to have it roll back down after a life of hubris in which he tried to cheat death. Futile labor for all eternity. I often think about how running a business can make us feel a bit like Sisyphus. Have we condemned ourselves to futile labor after having the hubris to escape the grind of a 9-to-5? I don't think so.
For one, we didn't incur the wrath of Zeus. And unlike Sisyphus, we're not actually cursed. Our problem is completely fixable. We just need to know what to fix and how to break the cycle. The way I see it, you can get the boulder to the top of the hill, so to speak, through three fixes. Documentation, automation, and delegation. I call it my DAD Framework. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Let's go through each of these one by one, and then at the end of the episode, I'll tell you how you can assess your business for how well you're applying the DAD framework.
So, let's start with documentation. Having SOPs means you're not reinventing the wheel or struggling to perform routine tasks. It's taking the things that you do and writing them down. And there's a lot of benefits to writing them down. I mean, for one, it will make automation and delegation easier, right? That is why I put it first. But it's also that when you document a process, it is easier to perform that process.
How many of us have sat down at our computer, we have to perform some sort of task, and it takes us a few minutes to figure out what we're trying to do or where to start. I know for me, starting a new project is the hardest thing to do. Once I build the momentum, I'm good to go. But getting started is the hardest part for me. And so when I document and have SOPs, which are standard operating procedures, I have a clear starting point, and it makes the friction of starting less. There is less friction in starting a project for me.
Now, this is good if you do routine, like everyday tasks, right? Because you do have it clearly documented. And like I said, it'll be easier to automate and delegate later. But it's really good for those tasks that you don't perform very often.
So, I was talking to Charlotte Crowther the other day. I have hired her to do my signature framework. If you want to get her insight on signature frameworks, we had a great conversation on this podcast about it. So, I will put that in the description and the show notes. It is episode 486. So if you go to streamlined.fm/486, you'll also find the episode there. It's called, Stop Explaining What You Do and Start Showing It.
And one of the big reasons that I hired Charlotte was because I have a really hard time just showing more than telling, right? I can do a lot of things, and I want to be able to do all of those things. And so Charlotte is helping me work through that with a signature framework.
But while I was talking to her, she asked me if I had an SOP for one of my newer Done for You services. And I said, to be honest, I don't. Part of the reason I don't is because I'm not 100% that people actually want this, or enough people want it for me to continue offering it. Part of it is because I really haven't done it enough. I've done it a few times, but I haven't done it enough to feel like I have a good SOP. But honestly, part of it is just a human reason. I haven't taken the time to do it yet. I don't have a clear picture of what it looks like in my head.
So, what did I do after my call with Charlotte? Well, I sat down with my handy-dandy notebook and I thought through the last time I did the Done for You automation service for a client. And I had the broad strokes, right. We went through everything they did for a particular process. That's right. We go through, write down all the steps.
This usually involves me talking, interviewing the client, and then they talk through it, and then I ask them questions to tease out all of the steps, not just the steps that they remember at the time. We write it all down, organize it into buckets. Oh, this is for communications, this is for client work, this is for content creation.
Then we prioritize which/what are the highest leverage things that I do, what are the most time-consuming things that I do, what are the things that I don't really need to do. And then after we organize and prioritize, we start to automate the processes.
That's why they hire me to do the automation side of things. And so I'll look at the tools that they use, or if they don't have tools, I'm going to recommend tools that will get me access to those tools, and then I'll start automating, and I'll document for them how the automations work. I didn't have that formalized until she asked me, and so it's really unclear. Right.
And already that process has helped me figure out how I can best offer the service and communicate to people who might hire me what they're in for. Right. Because this is another kind of really important, this is like a slight sidebar off of documentation. But when people hire you, they need to be clear on what are, what pain are you alleviating or what thing, you know, there's the vitamin versus painkiller thing. What is the outcome of your work?
And for a while, for me the outcome of my work was like you'll save time, right? Or like you won't check your email on the playground. But that's not, that's not a concrete thing. Right. I should be able to say at the end of a done-for-you service, when we're done, you're going to be able to record your podcast and then never think about it again. Or when we're done, you're going to have a system that makes sure that you don't let potential clients fall through the cracks. Right? Something like that.
So, anyway, that's, there are a lot of reasons documentation is important. You need to be clear on the work you're doing so that you can then organize and prioritize those tasks. Because if you don't, then you're just putting out fires all the time. But as I've said now it's the third time, so it's time for us to move on to the next segment.
The next part of the DAD framework. Documenting will allow you to see what you can automate. And number two is automation. For some tasks you can make the machines work for you, ensuring that your business keeps moving even when you're not at the desk.
So what does this look like? How do you automate something? I have, I'm sure, other episodes and emails and frameworks for how to automate. This is perhaps a future episode. Write in at streamlinedfeedback.com if you'd like to hear more about automation. I'd love to know what your questions are around automation. That's streamlined with a “d” feedback.com.
So, what automation really looks like though, is getting machines to do work for you. This doesn't necessarily mean Zapier, right? It could be setting up a filter in Gmail so that anytime you get a newsletter, it goes to your newsletters folder. It could be using text expansion snippets so that you are not constantly writing the same email out over and over and over again.It could be zapier, right? It could be when someone fills out a form on your website, they get added to Notion. But Notion has forms and email support now too, so it can all be done in Notion.
Automation is not a specific tool. Automation is this basic format. When this happens, I want this to happen, or when this happens, I want that to happen. So, when someone fills out a form on my website, I want them to be added to Notion. When someone books a discovery call with me, I want them to be added to Notion. When I write a blog post, I want ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn version of that for me.
Those sort of things are tasks that you can and should automate, right? I mean, it gets heavily edited before I post to LinkedIn. But when I add a new newsletter like this to Notion, a couple of things happen. My VA gets an email telling her to publish that newsletter to my blog and to substack. But the text of the newsletter also gets sent to Zapier, where it has a complex prompt telling ChatGPT, turn this into a LinkedIn post. Using this framework, do not add anything, only use my words. Try to find good hook and then send it back to Notion and let me know that it's ready to go to LinkedIn. And then I'll do the manual posting to LinkedIn, right? I could probably sign up for some service like Taplio or whatever, buffer, whatever, to have it automatically posted.
The idea behind automation is it is doing the little things that take five, ten minutes out of your day that don't seem like a lot, but it forces you to break concentration on bigger tasks. It makes you switch contexts. It's these little interruptions throughout the day that happen, that then you're like, oh man, it's like 5 o' clock and I don't feel like I've gotten anything done. Automation can help with that.
And then the last, the third one, the last D in the DAD framework is delegation. When you can't automate, delegate. You don't need to do everything for your business, nor should you. Now I have a whole episode on working with a virtual assistant delegation. But here's what I recommend when it comes to delegation:
The documentation is going to help, right? Document all your SOPs and then you can give them to a VA. I recommend recording yourself doing the tasks right. It also depends on the level of VA. That's why this is like more than just a part of a 20-minute podcast. But let's say you're getting like a basic level VA that is there to do some of the stuff for you that you don't really need to do, but also is not like a part of the strategic side of your business. Right? Record yourself doing the task, have your VA write out, like transcribe and write out the steps for the task.
Then, you are building a handbook, you're building the SOPs with the help of your VA and your VA can do the task, right? If you do hire like a few levels up of a VA, they probably have more autonomy. So you can just say you can give them certain tasks without a lot of instruction. You are going to pay more for that, but it really depends on where you're at in your business and the type of work you need done. But that's the delegation side of things.
When you have these three things in place, everything becomes clearer. You know what to prioritize because you've already prioritized it. You can spend your time wisely because you've automated the things that you don't need to do, that robots can do, and you've delegated the tasks that robots can't do. And as a result, you're not constantly putting out fires or working long hours or checking your email at the playground because you have properly put systems in place to manage the expectations of your clients, manage your business better, and you have a clear plan for the type of work that you should be doing.
And I know what you're thinking. Joe, this all sounds fine. I get it. It can be hard to know where you're struggling the most or what you should work on first. Yeah. What should you prioritize? Right? And so that's why I put together, it's called The Overwhelm Diagnostic. You can go to streamlined.fm/overwhelm to take it. It's a six question quiz, but these are the things that you should think about, right?
So, first you gotta be honest with yourself. How often are you maintaining healthy work boundaries? The original way I worded this question was how often are you working past the time that you intended to work? But, my friend Kat pointed out that sometimes when people get overwhelmed, they shut down and they don't work at all. And so maybe they never work past their intended working hours because they never started their working hours.
So, shout out to my friend Kat Mulvihill for that. So how often are you able to maintain healthy work boundaries? Working neither significantly more nor less than intended. You need to think about that because if you are working way more or way less than you intend, that's something that we need to fix, right? If you're working way more than you intend, it's probably because you're doing everything yourself. And so every little interruption that comes up comes across your radar and you get email notifications to your phone. So, every time you get an email, it's like you need to stop what you're doing. If you're not working enough, this happens to me constantly, especially when I finish projects. I finish a project, there was a lot of mental energy expended on that project. I don't know what to do next and so I just do nothing. And I know this about me because I've taken stock of this. And so now I build in a few hours, maybe a workday to do smaller tasks between projects. But you can't do that until you know how you work.
So that's the first question. How are your business processes documented? Is there no documentation? Are they just like notes in a bunch of places? Is there like a little bit of documentation for like some of the big things? Is it well documented? That would be great, right? But I suspect there's not because here's the thing, right? A little documentation could mean it was well documented a year ago, but things have changed, and the documentation hasn't been kept up.
This is the, this is like maybe my VA's number one task. She does a lot of the kind of day to day business stuff for me or the day to day, like publishing stuff for me. And so when something changes, I have to communicate it to her. So, I create a video telling her how it's changed. She updates the handbook. And actually we're working on a project now to review the entire handbook and see, oh, what can we eliminate.
So, what do we need to update? That sort of stuff.
So, that's how are your business processes documented? How much of your routine work is automated? It could be nothing. Maybe you don't know where to start. It could be a few tasks. Maybe it's everything you can possibly automate.
When you try to delegate tasks, what usually happens, right? So the premise of this question is you are delegating, but there is an answer here that is I don't delegate, right? I don't delegate. Or it's never right, or it's right sometimes, or it's always right. I'll tell you, for me, it's right. Most of the time it's not. It's more than sometimes, but it's not always. And I think that's just the nature of communicating and changing things.
The last two questions, right, have to do with how you're spending your time and how you manage your time. How often does urgent work interrupt your planned tasks? And if you took a two week vacation, what would happen to your revenue? I think a lot of business owners, especially solopreneurs, feel that it would stop. So, you can take this assessment over at streamlined.fm/overwhelm. If you do, you will get a plan based on your score.
So, there are like kind of four potential outcomes based on your score. You'll get a, it's like a blueprint. It identifies some areas that I commonly see based on your score, and then it gives you more advice. I touch on a lot of it in this episode. It goes deeper in the plan, though.
So, streamlined.fm/overwhelm. The link is going to be in the description too, and I'd love to hear from you. What do you think of the DAD framework? Where do you struggle the most in your business? Hit me at streamlined/feedback.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.