The Art of Less Doing Webinar - This Wednesday at 6PM EST

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photo credit: Pedro Vezini via photopin cc

If you have trouble managing emails, getting tasks done, managing your time, making time for personal activities, or having the ability to travel disrupting your life, this class can help.

Less Doing provides tips and tools for optimizing, automating, and outsourcing everything in your business and personal lives. Everything from dealing with email, to more efficient fitness regimes, to outsourcing everything is covered. Reclaim your time and your mind.

The first part of the class will be spent discussing various processes and tools to get more done in less time. This will include email filters, virtual assistant services, mobile applications, etc...part of the skill you will learn is integrating several of these services together. During the second part students can offer up their specific issues and we can work through solutions.

If you haven't been able to make it to one of my Skillshare classes in New York, this is your chance to learn the fundamentals of Less Doing.

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Essential Vs. Optional

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Just because I'm always focusing on trimming the fat and pairing things down to their most basic and efficient elements does not mean I do not enjoy the optional things in life. As a matter of fact, everything I talk about on the blog, the entire framework of optimize, automate, and outsource, is meant to free up your time and your mind so that you can do the things you really want to and not just the things you have to.

If you have a half hour of free time during the work day because you used the principles of Less Doing to get your work done and you feel like blowing off some steam on Facebook, by all means, eat your heart out. I don't want you to ever feel guilty about doing the things you want to do because you "should" be doing something else. The important thing is being able to separate the essential from the optional. This applies in several situations, see my previous post on how I manage email by eschewing the dozens of folders many people have for a simple "Optional" folder.

Let's apply this to a personal situation of mine, blog reading. I follow over 150 blogs and power through over 1000 news items each day. Why? Because I love being in the know on the latest trends, coolest gadgets, and latest psychological studies on productivty. When I meet with my Acheivement Architecture clients and they ask for a software reccomendations, odds are one of my blogs covered it and I can retrieve the answer. How can I possibly get through all these feeds each day? By making sure I cover the essentials and if I have time (which I always do, thank you Less Doing) I work my way through the optional stuff while making phone calls or watching tv. Optional by definition means "avaialable to be chosen but not obligatory" so treat it that way.

When I pull up my RSS reader in the morning on my iPhone (I like Reeder since it syncs with Google Reader and my iPad) and there are 200 new items, there will usually be 20 essentials. Which means I can read them, post them to my blog, tweet them, and email them to people I think would be interested in them, all while walking my dog for 15 minutes. Then throughout the day I'll get through the other stuff but if for some reason I can't, I know that I'm not missing any of the essentials and that gives me real piece of mind.

In Google Reader it's very easy to organize feeds into folders, simply by choosing feed settings and then putting a check next to the folder you've created. Most RSS readers offer similar functionality.

As usual, I like to be able to provide these principles to other things like email, errands (though you should never run errands), even nutrition. Don't over complicate your life by creating so many boxes and organization systems that just getting through the system is a chore in itself. Two "boxes" are all you need, Essential and Optional.

The Get It Done Guy Podcast

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(download)

This week I got to interview Stever Robbins, a serial entrepreneur, executive coach, productivity freak (self proclaimed) and voice of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast series Get It Done Guy Podcast. 

We talked about some of his greatest successes and productivity tips, as well as ways that he Optimizes, Automates, and Outsources in his daily life.

No You Can't Just Do It Yourself

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I was speaking with a friend the other day about using a virtual assistant and he asked "What kinds of things do you have them do?" I started telling him about some specific-to-me tasks that I like to outsource but than mentioned that I also have them do some very basic quick tasks like google searches and phone calls. He looked at me and said, "Why don't you just do that yourself, wouldn't it be quicker and easier than typing up an email?"

The short answer is "HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLL NO!!!!"

Could I call up a local store and see if they have an item in stock? Of course I could, and it would probably take about 3 minutes to do it. However, that three minutes for each task will add up and at the end of the day I might have lost an hour on tasks that "will only take a second." More importantly, a three minute task will undoubtedly break your stride in whatever you are working on, which has a multiple effect on depleting your productivity. I want you to be able to focus on only the high level tasks that can only be completed by you so taking even a minute away (which really means you have to take the time to shift gears from what your're doing, maybe look up the number for the store, call up, wait on hold while they check, then once the call is over, shift gears back in to what your were doing before). There was a great episode of The Simpsons when the Itchy and Scratchy movie was coming out. Bart was up to his usual mischief and Homer started to threaten to punish him. Bart starts saying "Ok Homer, but than you're going to have to think of a punishment, then you're going to have to make sure I do the punishment, and then...." basically over complicating the task to the point that Homer gets exhausted and gives up. All of this to say that tasks that you think will only take a minute actually do significant damage to your efficiency. So don't do it. Even something as simple as a google search can be done better by someone else if your search personalization or syntax doesn't produce the result your looking for.

The next important point is that by writing down a task in an email, it becomes more actionable, trackable, searchable, and concise. It's a skill set that you'll use in other areas of your life and work. It's also nice that you can write an email while doing many other things. You can write emails while walking down the street, while sitting next to a sleeping partner, while eating. It's much harder to use a phone in these situations. 

Finally, in a world where we are going a mile a minute all day every day, sometimes the only time we can decompress is when we lay our heads down on our pillows at night. This is the perfect time to write up the 10 tasks that you want done that have been bugging you all day. This kind of brain dump at the end of the day is really good for your psyche, your mind, and believe it or not, your quality of sleep.

So stop doing these tasks and start delegating.

The Inagural Less Doing Podcast

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I want everything to be as easy and efficient as possible for you. Now you can get great tips for optimizing, automating, and outsourcing your life through podcasts. I hope you enjoy, and keep watching this space for more. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. My favorite app for streaming podcasts to the iPhone is Downcast.

Make sure to check out FollowUp.cc and thanks to Claire Bird for making my awesome intro music.

Tested: Virtual Employee Services

Outsourcing

I have spent, years, literally, testing different virtual employee services. This is the result of my search. In full disclosure, after this exhaustive search I determined a winner and have since partnered with them to help market the excellent services they offer. The partnership website is Outsource Everything. I have helped them create a better presence and consult with them to continually improve their already impressive offerings. So to reiterate, I found the best provider and then partnered with them, not the other way around. I have worked with over a dozen providers, everything from the big names you get at the top of your Google searches to individuals found on Elance. Sometimes I would sign up for the service, and sometimes I would use a friend who was an existing customer as a proxy to run my tests. The goals of Less Doing are to optimize, automate, THEN outsource. The point being that you can sometimes avoid outsourcing all together because you've already optimized and automated as much as possible so whatever is left must be a little tricky. You need great support to outsource to.

The Testing Process

The first part of this process was figuring out what to test. The most obvious of course, is language skills, both verbal and written. Depending on your needs, this may not be the most important thing but for most people it's essential, especially if you're going to have your VA be your representative when speaking to clients, vendors, or even friends and family. My favorite way to test language skills it to use expressions like "The Whole Nine Yards" or even telling someone to "Rock and Roll." The responses are usually amusing to say the least. Nowadays, testing specific computer skills is pretty pointless because they all have basic knowledge of excel, word, pdfs, etc... and if they don't, it's very easy to learn. The real hardcore testing comes when they need to use deductive reasoning and quick thinking to come up with a solution. Keep in mind however, that another personal, virtual or not, will never be you nor are they supposed to be. Set aside the three to four weeks of testing I've done which each service and lets focus on some basic tasks that I put every VA through as a test. The items in parenthises where not shared with the assistant.

  • Contact my doctor at the following number XXX-XXX-XXXX and get me an appointment as soon as possible, my schedule is the Tungle link in my signature. If they say the need a referral contact Dr. John Smith down the street and get the necessary referral. (the number provided is my own, I answer and act like a difficult secretary, changing appointment times, mispelling names, and I ask for a referral. I don't give specifics on the second doctor, just a name, meaning they need to find him) 
  • Call Dr. Flanagan Veterinarian regarding my dog Fido. They prescribed something for his knee a while back, I think its called Fluoride. Find out what it is and send me the cheapest place online to get it, preferably Amazon. (I don't provide doctors number, the medicine is called Glucosamine not Fluoride and I want them to send me the link directly to the product page, not just the store that sells it)
  • Here's a link to a document with 10 blood test results over the last two years. Make a spreadsheet charting each variable over time. (Will they create proper columns and rows for all the data with such little information?)
  • Call this tenant at XXX-XXX-XXXX, they are late on their rent, please be firm but nice when you call them and tell them they are late. (The number is mine, I'm testing two things, how many times they will try to contact me before giving up, and when they finally get me, how they interact with me on the phone. I do this task twice, the first time when they finally get me on the phone I'm very nice and say I simply forgot. The second time I get very rude and see how they handle it.)

Now keep in mind, in a given month, I will give a virtual assistant an average of 157 tasks to complete, and my test set is 21 tasks over the course of two weeks but these will give you an idea of what I've put the companies and individuals through in order to give you a confident result.

Outsource Everything

In the end, I found an amazing pool of talent in a company located in the Phillipines. The assistants have impeccable English and they understand Western culture. They can work on whatever shift you like, so you can have someone on your work schedule or you can have someone who works will you are sleeping. They also offer bookkeepers, call center agents, web designers and even writers. They also work on one week contracts so you don't need to commit to a month if you are unsure. You get a dedicated assistant who you always deal with and they will learn your habits and methods. As with any kind of new employee, they require at least a few days of training in order to better support you, but that process is a learning experience for you as well. I am really excited about this new partnership with Outsource Everything since it will allow me to offer a superior service as well as allow me to constantly tweak the offering with all of the tools of Less Doing to make it better everyday in every way. 

My Guide to Working with Virtual Assistants

I recently published an eBook on Amazon, "The Definitive Guide to Working with a Virtual Assistant" It's a quick read but provides all the essentials you'll need to maximize the relationship.