In This Episode…
I’ve mentioned in previous episodes how progress sometimes needs effort in the opposite direction to the one you are heading in.
It takes time to invest in your business and sometimes you have to stop working in your business so you can work on it.
In this episode I share how I’ve been taking time out to develop new task management systems to work with my new VA,
Episode Transcript
Hi, and welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast . It’s your host, Michael Tipper. Who else would it be?
Today has been a day of progress, although not quite so dynamic as yesterday, as you will no doubt have heard if you listened to yesterday’s episode.
It has been one where I have got a lot done.
Now after the normal flurry of activity for the best part of the morning, I allowed myself the afternoon to start putting together the process to allow me to work more effectively with my new virtual assistant.
So far, I’ve been tasking them with by email and managing them by email, which I know is an inefficient and ineffective way to do it. So today I’ve been commissioning the use of Trello, which is a project management tool for working with small teams.
I have been doing some research and going on to YouTube and looking at how others are using the tool to manage their teams.
I’ve been understanding how Trello works. I’ve been understanding how to make it work with teams. And then I have been looking at how can I design and optimise it for use with the work that I want to do.
That’s taken quite a bit of time to understand.
So far we’ve been two days in now with my new virtual assistant, who’s doing a really good job and we have used email to manage the work that she’s doing.
And so I have back fitted what we’ve done into the Trello model, just to understand how the flow of it will work myself.
I’ve been able to create a couple of training videos, to point out to my new assistant, how it’s going to work and how, what we have done would have looked like in this new mode.
So it’s taken quite a bit of time.
I probably spent five or six hours on this today, more than I’d anticipated doing. And so sometimes it feels like a step backwards because I want it to be moving forward.
But what I’ve realised is that this investment in time is me working on my business so that in the future, working in my business will be far more effective and far more efficient.
Once this mechanism is up in place, I’ll just be able to throw tasks and throw projects towards the system we are creating. My virtual assistant will be able to take them, put them into Trello and then we’ll have a way of managing them.
She’ll be able to manage her workflow. I’ll be able to monitor the progress and be able to input when necessary.
So it’s taken quite a bit of the day and it’s been quite mentally taxing because I’ve had to think through the differing scenarios.
That’s partly because of my detail orientation – I have a tendency to overcomplicate things.
So being able to step back and try and simplify has been a real challenge. And I suspect I’ve probably overcomplicated it all this time.
But what I have told my new assistant is that this is a way that we will evolve together. And at the moment how we operated to start off with this week, maybe very different to how we’ll operate it in three, four, five, six weeks time.
Things will have evolved and we will have developed into using it.
We need to move forward with a growth mindset. It’s about recognising that we’re not going to get the answers right immediately every time. It’s about recognising there will be mistakes and there’ll be problems.
We’ll have challenges and we’ll need to overcome them. But by keeping at it, we will eventually mould this to fit into the way that we want to work.
So that’s today’s episode.
Until tomorrow.
