One of the most overwhelming rooms in my house is the sunroom. It's effectively our kids playroom. We have three small kids. All of their toys are in there. And so it's usually a huge mess, which is a bummer because I like to sit in that room and drink my coffee and read a book, especially during the Christmas season. That's where our Christmas tree is. And during the summer where I can kind of enjoy our lawn and the beautiful weather from the nice, cool air conditioning of the sunroom.
One day I was sitting in there feeling very overstimulated, and I realized that it would take like five minutes to clean up this room. And so that's what we did. My kids, me, my wife, we all pitched in and cleaned up the sunroom, and it became a very nice place to hang out.
This got me thinking about how a lot of people's businesses kind of need the same thing. It's not that the business is too far gone or that you need to make massive changes. You need to do a five minute cleanup. And that's what I want to talk about on today's episode.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. The show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off. My name's Joe Casabona.
And the problem is that we don't really know how we're spending our time. It's like saying, I need to clean the sunroom, but you can't see the sunroom, so you don't know what needs cleaning. So today I'm going to go through three steps to a clean, calm business.
The first step is find the time. Manage your schedule. The second is know the work, get your to do list under control. And the third is everything in its place. Organize your toolbox.
It all starts with understanding what your goals are. There is a famous stoic proverb that is, if a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable. And I think a lot of solopreneurs start to change things in their business and get new tools and hire new coaches and try AI tools without really understanding what their goals on, what their goals are and what they should be working on.
And so I want you to think about that first. I also want you to remember that solopreneur doesn't mean doing it all yourself. That you started your business to be free, not chained to a desk. That that just because you can work from everywhere doesn't mean you should, and that you have the ability to draw boundaries you need for a healthy work life.
The whole point of this exercise, which I call the Solopreneur Sweep, is to help you find holes in your work so you can plug them up and create more time and space in your business to do your most important work.
Now, if you're listening to this episode and you're worried that you're gonna miss something, don't worry. You can get the entire process in a very easy to follow downloadable format over at streamlined.fm/sweep. That's streamlined.fm/sweep. I will put a link in the description below.
And the whole reason that I came up with this framework in the first place, I came up with this method in the first place and is because I am where probably a lot of you are now. I felt like I need to do everything myself, and if somebody wanted to meet with me, then I should accommodate them because they might give me money. And I was trying every tool under the sun.
And In November of 2020, that led to a panic attack. Now, if you're a longtime listener of the show, you know that story, so I won't rehash it here. But I knew something had to change when my daughter was the one taking care of me at 3 years old.
So I built a system that helps me save 12 hours per week through automation and delegation. I do that for lots of people now. So let's actually get into what the Solopreneur Sweep is. And you may have heard me talk about this over previous episodes. I want to do a full deep dive here. I also have a video walking through this, so if you want to watch the video, I will have that in the show notes as well.
But the first step is to manage your schedule. You should make a list of all of your meetings from the month and then determine are they grouped or disjointed, sre they together, or do you have, like, small pockets of time between meetings? How do people book meetings with you? How many do you actually need to have? And how many of those meetings could actually be asynchronous messaging?
By identifying those things, you're seeing how many times throughout the day am I interrupted by meetings? And so you can make your schedule better and more conducive to blocks of deep work by identifying when you work best and then completely blocking off those times. I do this in the mornings, so nobody can book meetings with me most mornings.
Then, you want to pick three to four blocks during the week where you're willing to have meetings. So maybe that's between 1 and 3 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe it's between 11 and 1 on Mondays. But you want to control your schedule by being very intentional about how and when you meet. Because there's nothing that kills momentum like a bunch of disjointed meetings or knowing you have a bunch of meetings coming up. So if you can sequester them all into one block of time, that's going to make the rest of your work week work better.
Then you want to set up a scheduler like Cal.com to only allow meetings during the times that you have determined and you need to be vigilant about keeping those times. You can also suggest more asynchronous communication when it makes sense. Somebody joined my mailing list recently and they wanted to grab a quick time on my calendar to chat. So I sent them a video using Tela saying, hey, can you tell me a little bit more about why you want to meet? I try not to have, you know, I want to be respectful of both of our times and so I'd love to know a little bit more about why you want to grab a time on my calendar. I think that's a perfectly reasonable boundary to set because your time is your time and if you don't respect it, nobody else will.
So the goal here, confine your meetings to specific days or time blocks. I would say have at least two days where you don't have meetings. For me those days are Mondays and Fridays. Mondays is where I catch up on a bunch of stuff. Fridays are my best work days because I know I have the ability to catch up on anything I didn't get done the rest of the week. And it's going to be seven to eight hours of uninterrupted time. The kids are at school, my wife is home or the kids go to my father in law's and so I know I have that time for me.
The second step is to get your to do list under control. And so again, I want you to think back over the last week of work and write down everything you did. Then determine if the task was something you planned to do or something that got put on your plate. Because this is another way that we lose productivity. Someone emails us and says, hey, can you just do this real quick? And yeah, it'll take me five minutes. But now you're out of the thing that you were working on and it's going to take you time to get back into it.
So, were the things that got put on your plate urgent, paid, worthwhile? And if it's none of the above, then you could respond to those emails when you are responding to email and say, hey, I can't do that right now, I'll have some time on Thursday, or I might have some time tomorrow.
And the really crucial bit here, this is something I really, really, really want solopreneurs to understand. You do not need to respond to email immediately or within the hour, or even within the day. You do not need to. Nothing bad has ever happened because I didn't respond to an email as fast as somebody thought I should have. So unless you are the head of state or the CEO of a massive corporation, which, spoiler alert, both of those people have other people checking their email, you do not need to respond to email right away.
So that urgent thing, if it's truly urgent, then someone's going to have a different way to get a hold of you. But I'm going to guess it's not really that urgent. But the things that got put on your plate, were they urgent, paid or worthwhile? And if they weren't, you could have done them some other time. And I want you to think about that moving forward.
The things that you planned to do, were they tasks that only you could do? Were they tasks that accomplish a goal of yours, or were they tasks that make you money directly or indirectly? Because that's the type of work that you should be doing in your business. The goal is not to sound busy. The goal is to make money in your business. So when you're working on something, I want you to think about that. And it doesn't have to be, you know, this podcast does not make me money directly most of the time. Sometimes I have sponsors, but it is making me money indirectly because I get coaching clients from this podcast. So it's worth me doing.
So once you have those two things, here's how you can have a better, more productive week. You plan it. You be intentional about the things you're going to do. So you sit down and you write. You write down all of your upcoming meetings for the week. And then you decide here if some should be moved or canceled. I did this recently. I moved a couple of meetings on Monday, on a Monday. They were doctor's appointments actually that I made. I moved them because it was the only uninterrupted day I would have that week because Friday I had things to do at my kids school. And so, and by the way, that's another reason why I don't have Friday meetings because now I can spend more time with my kids when I want to. So I moved those meetings.
I noticed on a Tuesday that I had a 1 o' clock and a 3 o' clock and so I asked the 3 o', clock, hey, can you move to 2 o'? Clock? And now I freed up some time in the afternoon. Don't be shy about doing that because you want to respect your time.
Once you have your meetings and you have an idea of the blocks of time you'll have throughout the week, make a list of all the things you have to do and do some light prioritization. Just like high, normal, low, you know, this is the thing, these are the things I definitely have to get done. These are the things I'd love to get done if, if I just have just a home run of a week.
And then also consider how much time you'll need for those tasks because you want to look at the open pockets of time you have throughout the week. And for each day, write down three and only three things that you will do each day. Make it three tasks because more and you might overload yourself. You might end up working too late. Write down the three things where you say, if I get these things done, I will have a productive week.
Now, if you do download the slides over at or the the process the whole thing over at streamlined.fm/sweep, you will see an example of how I plan my week in Obsidian with the major tasks and the tasks by day. And the trick here, right, maybe you heard this subtextually, I'm telling you to do 15 things max, per week, right? You have three tasks per day, you have five days, you want 15 tasks per week. I had a list recently where there were 21 things on that list and guess what? Six of those things got cut from the team. They were the low priority things and they were still on the list because hey, hey, if I just crushed that week, I could do them. Which by the way, I did crush that week. So I, I ended up doing all but one, which I was pretty psyched about.
But setting the tasks by day forces you to prioritize what tasks you really need to do. It helps you understand how productive you're being, right? If on Monday and Tuesday you didn't get anything done, you can adjust for the week, but it also saves you the mental energy of having to figure out what you're going to do after you get to your desk by knowing before you can essentially hit the ground running because you are not wasting time going, oh, what, what should I do today? You've already figured that out.
Plus, you start to understand what you can automate, delegate, or just straight up remove from your work, from your plate. Because knowing the tasks you're working on from week to week helps you get a high level overview of what you should be doing versus what you should not be doing.
So again, I have some some tips and tricks over at Streamlines.fm/sweep that'll walk you through all of that. Plus it'll give you some methods for something I call task journaling.
The third thing to do is organize your toolbox. I want you to make a list of all the software tools you use and for each one ask four questions. Do you use it? Do you need it? Do you like it? And how much does it cost to use annually?
As you do this, I want you to think about the job each tool you use has. Make sure it actually has a job and that it does that job well. You can think of each tool as like an employee of your business and it should be tasked with doing something that helps you do your job better. So I want you to make that list.
And then I want you to do the same thing for all of your hardware tools. How do you like using the hardware that you have? Does it help you? Does it work well and not waste your time? I recently got rid of a camera because I spent more time fighting it than using it. It was causing other issues on my computer and so it hurt me more than helped me. So I ended up removing it from my hardware stack.
You want to make sure that your tools help you work better like I said. So once you have the list, look at this assessment and eliminate tools that you don't like, use, and need. If there are tools where you don't like it, you don't use it and you don't need it. Gone. You've just saved yourself some annual subscription.
For the tools you don't use or need, get rid of those too. If you don't use it and you don't need it, it doesn't matter if you like it. And then for the tools that you don't use or like but need, you can see if there's a better fit. I switch tools maybe too often, but when I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive, it was amazing. I stopped liking Dropbox, but I needed some cloud syncing service because I automate a lot of things, and my VA and my editor need to access them. Google Drive was much better, and it ended up saving me money because I was already paying for Google Workspace or whatever it's called now.
Ffor the tools where there's overlap, determine if you can get rid of one of them. I helped my client Laura do this right. We did a case study back in December. I'll link that episode in the show notes as well. But like, she was using two or three tools that all did kind of the same thing, and she didn't realize it. She was paying for tools where the free plan would have been fine. And so we helped her save a ton of money and time by not needing to switch between a bunch of tools.
So once you do this, once you quell the tools, once you Marie Kondo the tools, does each tool you're left with fulfill a job that needs to be done? And if not, what's missing? The goal is to understand what we actually need the job for each tool so that we can eliminate and simplify our setups. Because the easier our setup is to use, the more likely we are to use it and the less likely we are to fight it. We want to make sure that we're not wasting time and money with tools that are supposed to help us.
Okay, so that's the whole process. Summing up. You want to find the time and manage your schedule. Number two, know the work, and get your to-do list under control. And number three, organize your toolbox so that you have everything in place.
Once you go through that, the next step is to have a system in place to make sure that you are continuing to have a clean, calm business. The hardest part of cleaning the sunroom isn't just cleaning it up, it's keeping it clean. So at home, we have a schedule for cleaning it and our children know what's at stake when the sunroom doesn't get cleaned up, they lose screen time and they lose the toys that they didn't clean up.
Use this information to create more time and space in your business. Take the next step and automate. Delegate and remove what you do not need to do. Make sure that you're doing your highest leverage work, the stuff that actually brings in money. And remember what's at stake if you don't. For me, it was a panic attack and it was a wake up call. I pray that you don't have a similar experience because you're feeling overwhelmed in your business. But that's it for this episode.
If you want to get the entire process in an easy to understand format that that breaks down everything. You can head over to streamlined.fm/sweep to get that process and I'd love your feedback on it too. So you'll find the feedback form over on that same place, streamlined.fm/sweep. I will link to everything in the show notes as well, but that's it for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.