Category: Blog

Thank you all for showing up. It looks like we’ve got the chat function figured out. In interest of time, we’re going to jump right into it because today we’re talking about time management. Thank you all for joining. We’re going to talk about three phases in this seminar today. There’s going to be philosophically about time management. There’s going to be talking about calendars specifically. Then we’re going to talk about some really practical implications of things that I’ve learned in the last 10 years of owning my own business about how to maximize my time. Let’s start philosophically. When we think about time management, we want to think about the why on some of those things. Why do we want to manage our time? Why is that important? But the first philosophical thing that I want to talk about is, and this may be a surprise to you, is really rest. And so I’m a big believer in rest, and our goal should not be just to maximize the time that we have to work, but working effectively within that time. And so what does that mean? It’s not just like, can I have more hours to get stuff done?

 

But can I be more effective in those hours that I do have? And I’m a big believer that if you are taking breaks and having rest, you’re going to be more effective during the remaining hours that you’re working. And so I wanted to anchor our conversation in that because I think it’s something that a lot of people overlook when they’re thinking about time management. A couple of other things about rest. One of my favorite authors in a podcast, or I really enjoy, is Blair Enz. He’s the author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. And he said, Time off for the entrepreneur is not a reward for hard work. It’s a recharge time required for your creativity and energy needed to do your job. Prioritize it ahead of everything else. Now, That may not work for everybody. You could be under a deadline or something. There could be other issues there. But in general, I find that I’m more ready to work Monday morning if I’ve taken Sunday off. I’m more ready to work every morning if I have the evening off with my family. And ready to work means I have the energy to do it, I have the focus to do it, and I’m not getting close to being burnt out.

 

So rest gives us the energy to work, and we work better rest, and rest gives additional meaning to work. Because I love my work, and many of you probably do it as well, but what are things that add meaning to that work? And things that give us meaning to that are things that happen outside of work. Rest, doing things that we enjoy, like audiobooks or gaming, like Michael mentioned in the chat, is that it helps add value to what you’re doing in your work and helps you stay motivated. Finding time off. There’s some biblical basis for this, but I’m also a big believer in just one full day off a week. For me, that’s Sunday. Very rarely will you find me doing anything Adelsberger marketing related on a Sunday. Occasionally, I have customers who are churches, and so that prevents that. But having a day off that I avoid doing any work allows me to disengage, and I feel ready for Monday morning when it comes because I’ve had to recharge my batteries. Days that that doesn’t happen, some days that I don’t get off or I may be too busy with other things, I can feel that really heavily the next morning.

 

Then I think a similar principle applies through your day for your normal work day. Going nonstop will have diminishing returns at some point. And so whether that be checking out for lunch or having a networking lunch that maybe is a little bit less of an effort or less stressful for you, or using a to take small breaks throughout the day, which is something I’m a big believer in, giving you a couple of opportunities to get throughout the rest of the day, which will help you to do more work in the long run and better work in the long run. The next part of the philosophical component is, why are you managing your time? I’m a big believer in introspection and thinking about why we do things and how we feel about certain things. Why are you managing your time? It can help motivate you to make the changes that you need to make. A couple of reasons that you might be thinking about why to manage your time. Maybe you have too much work to do. There’s too many demands facing you. Maybe you have big projects to work on, so you need times of dedicated, focused focus to ship a product or finish a writing assignment or whatever it may be, and you need to find more time for that.

 

Maybe you’re struggling with work-life balance and you want to be there more for your kids and your family or your friends. And so maybe managing time, that’s maybe your motivator. And maybe you’re trying to build a different future for you and your family. So maybe you’re working before or after work or at lunch breaks to achieve a goal beyond your normal work. And so when we think about why we’re managing our time, it’s an anchor that we can go back to to say, I’m making changes in how I’m doing this, or I’m cutting out distractions when I’m doing this so that I can accomplish and establish these things that are important to me. The next component is a classic time management question: what’s important versus what’s urgent? Now, one thing I want to start with is, who defines that for you? Some people, like myself, I get to largely define that for myself because I’m an entrepreneur and I don’t have anybody telling me what to work on and when. But for example, people on my team, I help define what’s urgent and what’s important for them. And so How do we separate that out?

 

Well, urgent is like it’s on fire and it’s in your front lawn and you need to take care of it before it burns the house down. A decent portion of my day is dealing with urgent things. Important is generally something more important in the long term. In the business world, I compare this to working on a business instead of working in the business. For me, working on the business is the thing that helps deliver long long term value. So in building a network and building connections and helping promote the business or working on the business, this webinar, for me, is working on the business. This webinar for me is working on the business, and I have dedicated Mondays to almost exclusively working on our business. So our staff meetings are on Monday. My one-on-one with my team is on Monday. I wrote most of this webinar on a Monday because that’s time I’ve set aside to just work on the business. The rest of the week, I could be working in the business. That could be writing copy for a website or running a strategy session or writing a strategy report. The big component there is if you’re not making time for the important and you’re only working on the urgent, you’re limiting your long-term potential.

 

That may look different based on what your role is. You might have a role that’s just saying you need to work on what’s urgent. But ideally, and I am in a good workplace, everybody gets an opportunity to work on important things so that over the course of time, they can all improve. And then also, just a little soapbox. I’m really tired of people who say they’re too busy for stuff. I’m as busy as most human beings, if not more so. And when you say yes and then don’t follow up on it, it’s not because you are too busy, it’s generally because you didn’t make it a priority enough. And so when you think about something urgent and important and you think about your commitments, it’s all about what you prioritize enough to keep your word. The next section on the component of philosophy is knowing thyself. Thinking about when you as a person, when do you work best? I work best in the mornings. I can get a lot done before noon, and then I’m more tired in the afternoon. I try to shift meetings to the afternoon so that I can get better work done in the morning for myself and for our business and for our clients.

 

So when do you work best? You might be a late night person and an afternoon person. I have worked on rearranging my life to get me better working hours in the morning so that I can get more done. And I also know that if I don’t go to bed by 9:30, I’m going to be in a bad spot the next day. So I have initially cut out many things in my life to make sure that I can do that. Also, Also knowing yourself, what does rest look like for you? Is that going for a bike ride? Is that going for a hike? Is that watching a movie? Is that cooking a meal? What does rest look like for you? And can you figure out what that is and the most restful things you can do, then work that into your schedule? Another thing about knowing thyself is, what are distractions for you? Now, we’ll talk more about distractions in a moment. But the question is, What are things that are preventing you from optimizing your time? There’s a lot of them in this current culture. Then the power of no and yes. So yes, it’s a classic that every time you say yes to something, it’s a no to something else.

 

When you think about what you are doing and you’re saying yes to everything, you’re going to end up saying no to other things because you are capitalizing on the time that you have. You only have so much time. That’s a classic thing, but a lot of people need some instruction in that. Then finally, when do you need a break? Burnout is a real thing. I’ve dealt with burnout before, and I work a lot. Can you do maintenance on yourself to help the burnout be delayed, or can you examine what is causing that burnout? A lot of times, for me, it usually goes back to, I’ve had too many things required of me that I’m trying to accomplish, or I’ve gone too long without breaks and I’ve pushed too hard. And so trying to examine those opportunities to say, How does that work out for myself? It’s hard to give you a blanket statement on all those things because it’s going to change a little bit for each person. The next thing is we want to know the difference between proactive and reactive on your scheduling and on your time management. Management. Throughout the course of the day, regardless of who you are or what your job is, your schedule is likely to be torn to shreds before too long.

 

And so at that point, you become reactive to what’s happening around you instead of proactive. And my goal each day is to push back that event horizon as far as possible. How can I get as much time where I’m in charge of the schedule, where I’m being proactive and working ahead of things before people start getting a hold of me and changing my priority list. And so I start early in the day. I have a ridiculous schedule. I don’t recommend it for many people. But when you think about how to start The earlier you start, the less likely people are going to bother you. And things like turning your email notifications off and making sure that you block time off on your schedule to get things done. And then I also encourage you to build buffers into your time management zones so that if something does start to go wrong, you can have time to get back on schedule. When I used to work in a real physical building in a company, I was usually the first one in the building. Besides feeling like you’re cooler than everybody else, you also have an opportunity to be proactive on your day and be ahead of everybody else.

 

Then the communication around that can be really helpful as long as you work together with your people. The last component on the philosophical thing is we’ve talked about why we wanted to have management, but we should also think about what our goals for each day are. Sometimes in some of our works, and I know some of the people in the chat in the attendee list, some of our goals, sometimes it’s hard to know if we’ve been successful on any given day. That can be demoralizing for me as I’m sure it can be for you. Each day in my daily planner, which we’ll take a look at in a minute, I set out three goals for that day. I try to remind myself, if I’ve accomplished these three things that I’ve done well for that day, and that same mentality can apply to the entire week, what are some of the things that I have to accomplish this week? Knowing that if I accomplish them, I’ve done good work. Then taking that out, we like to think about things in a 90-day framework. What will make this quarter successful? Last year, we started developing our EOS framework.

 

If you haven’t heard of EOS, it’s a great book for leadership development and for working on your organization instead of just in your organization. Eos wants you to break it down and look at a 10-year goal in 90-day increments, which seems like a lot of craziness and planning, but it’s really not. It gives you an opportunity to get We started there. We have company goals in 90-day increments now. We haven’t hit all of those, but that helps us get to the future that we’re trying to get to. Something you should think about, is this calendar? Is schedule helping me to be more of who I want to be? Then take that information and go back to our reason for managing our time. And then hopefully, you’ll make sense of this. Is this calendar reflective of the fact that I’m going to drink some water? You’re free to put questions in the chat. Chris is going to help us manage those. And then we’ll move on to the next segment, which is the super exciting section of calendaring. Calendering is not fun. I don’t know that anybody gets super jazzed about it, but we’re talking about time management, so we have to do it.

 

I think of calendering in two components. The first one is the calendar versus schedule. Now, I use two things to manage my time every day. One is my digital calendar, which we use Google Calendar within our company. Then I use a written schedule every day to help block out those individual moments of tasks that we need to work on. For our digital calendar, what goes on there? That’s for things like appointments and maybe some regular scheduled block lots of time, things that are super crucial and urgent that if you don’t put on the calendar, you could get disrupted from, so finishing a report on time. But the more things are on that, you might start to miss the value of it. This is actually what my calendar looks like next week. And normally this calendar is a lot more chaotic because it has all of our team members on it and my personal calendar and my wife’s calendar. But as you can see, most things on here are appointments except for a couple of components. Internal Mondays, like I mentioned a little while ago. Internal Mondays is when I put that time on the calendar on repeat every Monday, and we do our very best to not have any client meetings during those times.

 

Very rarely does it happen. If there’s some specific need, we will do that, but it’s very rare. And so we’ll have our staff meeting. I’ll have a one-on-one with some of my team members. I’m recording podcasts that day, and reviewing ads for future webinars because there’s two more of these coming up in this series. But the other time block on there is K-A sales time. And so this is a pretty sensitive period of time, although I’m actually going to be out for part of it for something for my children. But that is time that I have locked in so that I make sure that I’m doing the things that I have to do, which is business development for our company. I’m spending a couple of hours on that every week, and I work on doing that there. But the rest of those things are appointments where we are going to someone’s office, we’re having a Zoom, we are having meetings with outside people. We try to keep all of those things on the calendar. Krista, who is awesome and helps us manage all of our projects in our timeline, when she’s trying to schedule a new strategy session or a new meeting, she can access that and see where our meetings are.

 

So it’s very clear there. I also don’t want to get confused here about what I have to be at and what I need to be doing, if that distinction makes any sense. I have to be doing sales development, but Krista It shows that Mondays and Tuesdays, if we absolutely had to, we could schedule something, but we try not to. But I have to be at that kid’s appointment. I have to be at that industrial strategy session. And so the rest of that time is left open, and I manage that on a time-blocking microschedule. What does that mean? We love time-blocking. If you’ve got a to-do list, which we’ll talk about in a second, you need to be able to take those tasks and put them on time. Because if you don’t have time dedicated for those tasks, nothing is going to happen. For me, each day I use this, it originated in the best self journal, which is a paper journal that I can recommend to people. But I got a remarkable tablet I built a few years ago. I really love it. If you’ve been in any meetings with me, you know that I really love it.

 

I’ve created a PDF version of this document, and there’ll be a link in a second where you can download some of my best self journal files or my knockoff best self journal files. The print book is awesome. I just do everything in this remarkable journal. And so what you see here is there’s an opportunity for gratitude and goals for the year, longer term goals, usually 90 day goals, but then three big targets for the day. And if I’ve done all three of those things, I will know that I’ve done well that day. The thing I really want to focus on is the time blocking. So this was actually my time blocking for today. And so when I got up at 4:15 in the morning, from 4:30 to 5:30, I was working on webinar prep. I was rehearsing this, working on my slides, making sure that everything was good to go. And then I went for a run and did what I call my full English breakfast because I like to name things. And so that’s a list of things that I do for myself in the morning, read my Bible and pray and read a journal or read some education material, and then get ready to go.

 

And then I’ve blocked time throughout my calendar to work on specific projects for specific customers. I know that after this, I’m going to be wiped. I’m going to be pretty exhausted when I’m done with this. I’ve locked in time to go for a walk and get a little bit of rest before I dive back into work for specific customers. Sometimes I get more detailed than this. I would say exactly what it is I’m doing for ATA, but I didn’t want to put that on there because I was sharing this today. Then I use this next to the annual celebration. I had a note about DNS because we have some website going live this week, and so I needed to just make a moment to go check in on those. If you don’t have something booked, if you don’t have time for it booked, are you going to be able to do it? Well, likely not. My encouragement would be to make sure that you are time-blocking. When I switched to this type of time management, it allowed me to really structure things in a better manner. The other thing this allows you to do is to book time in your day for long term strategic important tasks above some of the urgent tasks.

 

And the earlier in the day, the better that’s going to be because you’re still being proactive to your schedule instead of reactive to your schedule. And then one note here at the bottom, I always have time at the end of the day for email and planning. We’ll talk more about this in a second, but I’m a big believer in planning the next day ahead of time. And so I always book time at the end of the day to try to do that. This is a QR code that will take you to copies of some of the files I use on my remarkable PDF. It could be something that you could use and print off or look at as an example. So feel free to take a look at those. Now, the other thing about calendaring is that I also believe in work-life balance and calendaring. When you are working, you can book when you’re not working. There was a time in my life where we were crazy enough that I would book time for each of my kids on a regular basis so I could spend one-on-one time with them because of just how crazy everything else was.

 

Some people think that’s weird or disrespectful because you’re like, Do you really have to book time for your kids? Well, yeah, you book time for things that are important to you. I make time for my family and I make sure that that’s part of my daily schedule in my calendar. If I slide back here, you can’t see. Here. After five, this is booked for the family. We’ve got something we’re doing tonight as a family. I didn’t want to put that on there, but I will book things for my family on my calendar so that I can make sure that I’m taking time for them. Time management also applies to your private life as much as it applies to your work life. It’s because you have a lot of meaningful things in your private life and you want to make them a priority as well. I’m going to head into the last section here, the practical Q&A in the chat. I see one question came in. Michael, I’m not super sure how agile works exactly. I’m familiar with the process a little bit. Eos is not as changing. It’s like setting goals every 90 days and then reporting on them.

 

An accountability structure is probably a better phrase for it. Traction is the name of the book. I’d highly recommend it. While I drink some water, just a couple of promo pieces here. We’ve got a podcast that you might enjoy called the Content Machine Podcast. They’re a lot shorter than what I’m doing today. They’re usually 10 to 15 minutes. If you would like to sign up for free marketing advice from me, the co has office hours and they have a bunch of local experts who do different types of expertise that you can join and ask them questions for free. Every month, I’m usually on the second Tuesday, I think I am. But you can go to the @theCo.com to find that and sign up for those. Then also, my company does marketing. If you are interested in maybe some marketing strategy or a new website or videography or branding or something of that nature. We’d love to talk to you about that. Remember to put questions in the chat, and there’ll be a little bit of time for Q&A, and we’re in the last leg of this here. The last leg of this stool is the practical elements of time management.

 

And one of the big things is task management. And so to manage your time, you have to know what you have to do. Now, some people’s lives may be a little bit more complicated than that, but a lot of times you can get really close to knowing what you have to do. So taking time to plan out all the tasks for a project and putting those on a calendar somewhere is a key component to having successful time management. And I suggest you have a tool for doing SmartTask that we use. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, but Asana or monday. Com or don’tForgetTheMilk, I think it’s what it’s called. But you can also just use the Notes app on your phone to create a checklist. Now, that doesn’t do recurring tasks, but a lot of those tools can have weekly, daily, or weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or yearly recurring tasks, which can be really helpful for things like, Oh, don’t forget to pay the taxes, or, Hey, it’s the first First week of October, have we started our internship recruitment process? And then remembering that a year from now. Having those tools and having those tasks laid out helps you to keep on top of what you need to be doing and allows you to build a schedule. I found those things.

 

I spend a lot of time with my task manager where I’m saying, Okay, I’m going to be able to get these things done today. I’m going to have to move everything else to the next day, or I’ve got to reprioritize this and say, Okay, these got to move, or I’m going to have to skip lunch. I’m going to have to work on these things. So make lots of notes or schedule them as needed, but keep in mind hard deadlines. But if you don’t have some task management software, you are going to be in trouble. The second thing is to plan the night before. A good morning starts the night before. If you want to have a good day, you have to have a good morning. If it’s a good morning, you have to really start the night before. My successful Thursday started last night at about 8:30. I know that sounds a little weird, but if I watch TV too late, if I stay on my phone too late, if I have caffeine or sugar too late, it’s going to affect my sleep. And if I affect When I sleep, I’m going to have a hard time first thing in the morning, getting up and working and running and doing all those things.

 

And if I don’t work out and run and do work in the morning, the rest of my day is not as optimal as it could be. And so planning your night The night before, you start to make lifestyle decisions that help you have a better set up for the next day. But then also, I plan out my day the next day before the end of the day. It doesn’t take me but 10 minutes to look through my task manager and say, Okay, these are the appointments I have in my calendar. Then I go through and I fill out that journal with time blocks. Tomorrow is going to be great because I have no appointments tomorrow. That just means I’m going to get energy. I’m just going to crack out work all day, which I’m excited about. Occasionally, you get an opportunity to do those. I don’t get them very often. I’m going to get a lot of important work done tomorrow and not so much as essentially urgent work. But if you can plan your day out the night before and then do that, and you did that every day, you could conquer the world.

 

I have days where I fail to do that, and that’s why I haven’t conquered the world yet. Then when you’re thinking about prioritizing that day, we’ve talked about being proactive versus reactive. Mark Twain has a great quote. If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first. Now, it’s a humorous quote, of course, but also a huge amount of wisdom in that. Because we’re able to be proactive when we’re doing things first thing in the morning, also, I like to learn about willpower and how those things work. You have more willpower at the first thing in the morning at the beginning of the day. If you have a really difficult thing that you need to do during the day, maybe it’s like writing a report that you don’t want to write or emailing a customer that you’re mad at or doing something of those natures or something that requires a lot of strategic thinking, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. You’re fresher, you’ve got more willpower, you’re ready to conquer those things.

 

If you’ve got two hard things to do, the sooner you get those big ones done, the better you’re going to feel about your day and have more opportunity to be successful in the long run. Then the second thing is clarity brings power. This is our company theme this year. But if you know what your goals are for the day, if you know, if you’ve set your time blocking what your three goals for the day are, you’re going to know what you’re trying to accomplish. And you’re not going to waste time debating about what should I work on next because you’re going to have a list of things that you need to work on. Clarity is something that’s going to be super helpful in helping you manage your time clearly. But this is the biggest warning. Distractions are death, at least unnecessary ones, anyhow. So when you think about distractions, you need to put your blinders on. Now, this is a little bit funny. For a long time, growing up, I remembered this random beer commercial about a horse of blinders on, and I could never find it, could never figure out what it was.

 

One day, I found it. This is real quick. Let’s see if it’ll play. Here we go. I submit to you Miller’s record. Miller The Great Tasting Beer that’s less filling. Miller Genuine Draft, a beer with genuine flavor that’s cold, filtered, smooth. Clear beer. Well, Miller clearly has a history of progressive decision making, and I would ask the king of beers what he would say to Why won’t my opponent debate this issue? Is it because he’s a horse or is it because he’s got blinders on? No peripheral vision. Look at me. Both sides. Choose taste. I love that commercial because it’s funny. It pokes fun at an existing brand. But also blinders are awesome. You need to put your blinders on if you want to manage your time well. What does that mean? One, I don’t understand how people have a ping on their emails every time they get an email. That’s senseless to me. Why would you want a noise every time you got an email? There’s so many distractions in the inbox that are not things that you have to do. And so think about that process. Do you really? Do you really want to get a buzz on your phone every time you get a Facebook comment?

 

Do you really want to get a text message alert every time you get a text message from everybody that might send you a text message? My answer to that is no. There’s a great book I’d recommend. It’s called The Attention Merchants, and it’s all about the way our attention works and how it’s been so divided in our current culture because of all the forms of technology around us. But being able to remove things that take you out of your work as much as you can is one of the key things you’re going to want to do to be successful. Distractions are death. So can you hide your email inbox? You know what? I have to hide my inbox and my desktop set up here because I know that if I keep seeing my inbox, I’m going to want to respond to every email that comes in. I don’t need to do that the second they come in. I need to be able to manage them and look at them over and over. Over time. The other thing that’s really helpful to me is when I hide my phone from myself. I know this sounds dumb, but if I put my phone outside of my immediate reach when I’m working, as silly as that sounds, it really cuts down the amount of times that I pick up my phone to look to see if I have a notification.

 

And some of that is just a lack of self-control within myself. But I found that if I just put it out of reach, I can be more focused on what I’m doing at the moment. Speaking of phones, one of the nice things that Apple has done in the last couple of iOS updates, and they probably have something similar to this in Android, is called focus modes. I can set my phone to a work mode that only allows my employees, and I can set exactly who I want to be able to reach out to me at any given moment. I get a bunch of junk calls every day, and I refuse to answer them. So if it’s not saving my phone, I don’t answer. And then my team is able to text me and reach out to me because I absolutely need to get to them. And then a couple of other people that may have specific reasons for needing to get out and reach out to have access to me as well. But most people, it won’t buzz or anything. And it allows me to stay focused because I have a lot of people trying to text me and email me and call me.

 

And then I check my phone every hour or every 30 minutes or every couple of hours, and I make sure that I get back to people in a timely manner. But it prevents me from working on a subject and then being torn away from that instantaneously. That’s something that we really need to work on as a culture. Screen time has been introduced in iOS, and they may have something like that on Android, but it’s like a truth-telling statistic. It’s like, How much time did I really spend on this app today? And many of us, it’s going to be disappointing on how much time you’re actually spending on that statistic. So I’d encourage you to turn on screen time. On my computer, there is a great plugin that works with the Pomodoro method called Strict Workflow, and it allows you to block out websites that are distracting to you during your on working cycles. Things like that are… You need to go back to knowing thyself, what are your individual triggers that prevent you from being effective time management-wise? It’s not just like, Oh, I really like this, or it could be a good thing. There could be nice things about texting your friends in the middle of the day.

 

But if it’s preventing you from getting your work done, they can wait a little bit because we have other reasons that we want to get our work done. Maybe we want to be able to get done so we can go home to our families or we’re working on a better future for ourselves. That’s why anchoring it is why it’s so important. Then finally, I like paper and digital, and so our time blocking is done on my remarkable tablet, as I mentioned earlier. Then I use the digital calendar for shared activities and appointments. Using both of those and keeping those both up to date is one of the things that I think is super important and gives you a chance to be successful in the long run. That is the webinar on time management. If you have additional questions, now would be a great time to ask those. If you don’t, we have two more webinars coming up in November and December. Those are on our website. One is on brainstorming and one is on 90 day content planning. We’d love to have you join us for both of those, but I don’t see any additional questions coming in.

 

Here’s a question that’s come in from Timothy. How would you recommend discerning when you work best? I think depending on what your type of work is, maybe how that affects you. You should probably Just over the course of a week, try to do your main work task for, let’s say, writing is really tiring to me. If you want to try to do work tasks, try it at different times throughout the week and see if you can sense any difference in the delivery of that test from you. If it’s design work and you find that afternoons are better because you’ve had coffee and you’ve had lunch and you’ve gotten fully awake, but test it. Make notes on it. Be like, How did this session go? Did I feel like I was successful in this or did I feel like I could have done better? Or more likely, comparatively, this afternoon versus this morning, I did a better job writing. If that’s true over a course of time, I would work on structuring that to optimize for that. Do you ever find that using tools or notes leads to scope creep? I’m not sure if I understand your question.

 

Do I feel like the tools get out of hand and they’re too much to manage? Depending on how frequently I have to use them. I’m in a position where I have come to fully grasp that if I do not offload the information from my brain to my phone or some digital device, it will disappear. I have a pretty good memory, but I have just decided that if I don’t make a reminder on my phone, if I don’t make a note in my notes, I may as well just not even worry about it. The great thing about that is one, it’s written down somewhere and you can stop having to think about it instead of trying to remind yourself every 10 minutes that I have to write that down. I would be careful about the tools that you’re using. The best tool is the one you can use. If you are trying to start up a super fancy task management software and you are not dedicated to it or the friction of using it is too high, you’re going to fail. That’s a great question because it illuminates something that I didn’t really talk about.

 

It’s like, you need to have a tool that you’re going to use. Finding that tool that you’re going to use because it’s easy and it’s accessible and it’s not going to be too much of a distraction is some good rubrics for helping pick that tool. Too fancy of a tool or too complicated or hard to use, you’re not going to use it and it’s going to be unsuccessful. Then you’re going to be like, Kevin told me to do this, and it’s failed. It’s his fault. No, I would encourage you to find something that is useful is easy to use and works with the way you work. We’ve had this issue in our team some, where we’ve instituted tools and not everybody’s been jazzed about using them. We try to work through why that might be. But at some point in our company, it’s like, this is how we do things. If you work for yourself or in a smaller organization or you’re just organizing your own stuff, you have a lot more freedom in that. And there’s a lot of task management softwares. And so maybe even just start with a notes app on your phone and see if you can find out what you like about those things and then try to use them, try to find a tool that does those things better.

 

Thanks for the question. All right. Well, it looks like we’re going to get out of here early. Once again, thank you all for joining, and I hope this is useful. Feel free to shoot me emails if you have questions. And then a great way to keep up with our company is through our Content Machine podcast that’s available on all major podcast platforms. And then feel free to sign up for office hours and get some free consulting or just call us and we can talk about doing business together. So I appreciate all of your time, and I hope you have a great day. Thank you for your attention. I sincerely appreciate it.

One of my favorite podcasts, the Cortex Podcast, does an annual State of the Apps episode. And I’ve imitated this on a few occasions because I think it’s interesting to know what other apps people are using for different things. Now, I’ll say my overall app ecosystem has been fairly stable this year, but here are a few of the apps that we use daily at Adelsberger Marketing to keep the work flowing. Of course, all of ours are done through G Suite and the Gmail app. There have been moments when I have thought, is there something better out there? But not really taking any time to investigate it. Google Calendar keeps us all on the same page for scheduling. With our team continuing to grow, I wish I could get Google to make one change to the calendar, and that’s to let us pick how events are stacked, because right now it seems to make the smaller events stack on whatever other events are on top of the calendar, and it gets hard to read. All of our file management is done in Google Drive. The tools set up can be frustrating, but we figured out a way to make it work for us.

 

It’s crucial to all that we do. We not only keep client files in it, but all of our internal documentation as well is in there. File backup is now taking place in two places. One, we have Backblaze set up on everyone’s computer who does creative work. And then Backblaze is a latent backup software that slowly backs up your computer constantly so that everything is eventually online, but it doesn’t drain all of your internet at the same time. This year, we rewrote our storage standards to better help us protect clients’ projects and future proof our operations. We have also started moving our ever growing stack of cold storage hard drives into AWS, which is Amazon Web Services for the uninitiated. This year, we rewrote our storage standards to better help us protect clients’ projects and future proof our operations. One tool that’s been key to our workflow in the last two years is Picter. It’s a review tool that allows us to make sure that we’re getting good comments on creative from staff internally, but then also allowing customers to leave detailed feedback remotely. It’s not a perfect tool, but it has been really helpful for us.

 

And a side note about Picter, Picter came to us through AppSummo, and I have a hard time not buying everything AppSummo has to sell. It regularly has some really interesting software for amazing lifetime prices. This isn’t sponsored, but it’s a great place to find some affordable software to make your life easier. Slack is our internal communication tool of choice. It is the industry standard for internal chats, and truly, it’s just as important to our company as email. Our company works to keep internal communications in Slack so that everything in the inbox is actually from outsiders. And of course, we are using Zoom, but we’ve expanded to using it for webinars this year, and it’s worked really well. We’ve tried different time trackers in the past, but we’ve converted solely to Clockify now. Our passwords are managed in 1Password. We love 1Password. It’s been a great tool for the entire team to use and a great tool for helping us to use really strong passwords on all of our accounts. One small change in the last year is that while I used to be a big Evernote fan, personally, I’ve switched to Notion for a lot of my notes.

 

Notion has become a very popular app in the last couple of years, and it’s obvious why if you use Evernote. It seems that Evernote has stopped investing in features and has become very annoying with marketing. Every time I log in to the app, there’s a “Are you sure you want to skip this once in a lifetime offer?” For something every time I get in the app? It’s the same offer every time and every time I say no. Notion’s flexibility has been really great to play with this year, and the ability to nest information inside other information in different formats is really useful, and I anticipate it becoming a more important part of my daily life. This year, I also got into audiobooks for the first time, and so Audible has been used on my phone a lot. This year, I got The Lord of the Rings by Andy Serkis, and it is top notch. It’s really hard to beat. My weather app of choice is Carat, but I’ve also installed a second weather app because I live in Tornado Alley, and it’s called Radar Omega. It’s a once a year subscription fee, and it gives you professional grade radar and allows you to map storms and track them.

 

Much like the tools that TV weather people use, you can plot a storm by speed, and it will give you times where it will get to towns in its path. Yes, I am a giant nerd, and unfortunately, we’ve already used this several times this year. Then a fun app that I like because I’m, as mentioned, a giant nerd is Flightradar24. So Flightradar24 is a fun app that allows you to see what planes are flying overhead. And so if I’m out for a walk or I’m out playing with the kids, or I hear a jet fly overhead, I like to look up on my phone and see where it’s coming from and how fast it’s going and what model it is, and the kids enjoy it, but I do it for myself. The kids just happen to like it as well. And then finally, one game that I spent too much time on this year is called Retro Bowl. It’s a relatively straightforward football game, but it’s way more complicated than it lets on at the start. It’s a point-and-click football game on your phone. And football on mobile is really hard to do, and Retro Bowl crushes it.

 

So do you have an app that’s made your life better this year? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com, and thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast and we hope to catch you on the next one!

 

Here at Adelsberger Marketing, we believe in themes over resolutions. I’ve done a whole podcast about this. I’ve written about this every year for a long time. Each new year has a new theme, which gives us a focus to cover for the entire year. Two years ago, our theme was, “Faster Alone, Further Together.” It consisted of our team’s capabilities and an admission of my limitations. I’m not able to accomplish all the things we need to do as a company. I am limited by time, but also skills and then the ability to prioritize things. We need a team to accomplish all the things that we have to do and to do them at the level at which we need to accomplish them. And for us to continue to improve our offerings, we need our team members to do that. We need team members that are specialized in different things and focused on those things. If we want to run this marathon called business, we can only do it as a team. Our team has done well and our business continues to grow. And the natural evolution of a growing firm is an increase in complexity. When complexity increases, clarity diminishes.

 

More team members and more clients equal less clarity and less preventative measures are taken. As a result, our theme in 2023 was, clarity brings power. We get everybody on board with a clear vision, and then we align everyone towards the same goal with the right direction. That’s going to increase our clarity and that’s going to allow us to win. So by providing clarity, it helps us to know all that we need to do and how we need to do it and allows us to go and do it. Heath MacMillan, one of my friends, and he works at the TCAT in Jackson, said to me that “Clarity brings power, but power brings action. When the spring is compressed, it has tremendous amounts of power and is ready to act. And if you have power, you are bound to release that in action.”  So our theme this year is to “Chop Wood and Carry Water.” Chopping wood and carrying water are two things that are no longer fundamental to the lives that we live. But in a different time in our society, that was what you needed to do to survive. It was the basics. It was the everyday activities that allowed for survival.

 

You had clarity about what you needed, and you went and got it. My hope is that over the last few years, the alignment of our team and the increasing clarity and the building of infrastructure in our company will be like that spring that has been compressed, now released into motion. Now it’s our time to act. We have been steadily building a head of steam over the last few months with new clients, and now it’s time for the business to run at full speed. We’re going to take the fundamentals that we’ve built into the work and practice them every day. Everyone, because of clarity, will know their job and know that it’s time to do the work. We’ve built the tools to do the things, and now it’s time to use them. I’m going to be working to remove roadblocks for the teams to be successful and increase our sales effort. We’ve been sharpening our acts, and now it’s time to chop down the tree. Chopping wood and carrying water isn’t fancy. It isn’t glamorous, but it’s vital to survival. It’s the building blocks to success. It is the fundamentals of business. We have power, and now it’s time to put it to work.

 

So we’re going to go work to make 2024 the best year in Adelsberger Marketing history!

Classic problem. Business owner or leader is so caught up in doing the things that the business does that the business owner or leader fails to work on the business and fails to improve it over time, and that has consequences. It’s hard to do to work on the business instead of just in the business. As an owner or a leader, you have fires to put out. You have customers who need to talk to you. It’s the classic urgent slash important grid, and you stay in the urgent grid. But how do you move to the important things? Many people regularly fail to work in the important grid. The urgent is bright and shiny, but the important changes things in the long term. And can be the key to success or failure. So how do you do this? How do you focus on the long term and important changes you need to look at in your business? Let me introduce you to Traction by Gino Wickman, which is the book behind the EOS or the Entrepreneurial operating system. This book is a step-by-step manual on how to get, as they say, a grip on your business.

 

Some business books are largely theoretical or stay at a 50,000-foot view. Traction does not do that. Traction takes you from day one all the way through implementing an entire operations system in your business that will allow you to make plans and execute those plans too, above the hustle and bustle of everyday work. This book tackles everything from mission statements to 10-year vision casting. It has become one of our most common recommendations to people when we’re speaking about how to run a business. We ran a business for approximately eight years before we introduced ourselves to EOS, but I think it’s going to be a huge difference maker in the road ahead. Eos breaks a business into six key components: vision, data, processes, traction, issues, and people. Each one of these components are things that you’ll work on during the course of implementing EOS and running EOS throughout your entire company. Vision is the overall picture of where you’re going. It’s the 10-year picture of what you want to accomplish. People is making sure that people on your team are in the right seats on the bus, and frankly, that they’re on the right bus. Data is what you look at to know how you’re doing as a business, what you should score, and how you’re scoring, and how to improve that metric that means the most to your business’s success.

 

Issues are things that come up that need to be discussed with the team and have to be improved on and you get to talk about them weekly. Processes are the way that you do business, and this is going to be an area that you look at your systems and improve your systems. Traction is where you take the vision, the processes, and the issues, and you turn them into action steps that make a difference in how you run your business. This book does a great job of going from a 10-year vision to details like how to run a meeting to get to the 10-year vision. It is clearly written by someone who’d been in an entrepreneur’s shoes but had figured out how to structure things in a way that made progress to get traction, or as they call it, to go from vision to traction. One thing is that you’re going to think that you know about your business until you start EOS. It’s going to reveal things to you that you didn’t know about or things that you thought you knew about your business that are wrong. This book may need to be on my reading list every year.

 

In the next episode, I’m going to talk about our first year with EOS, what we’ve learned and how it’s worked out, and hopefully what we’re looking forward to in the next year as well.

In fall of 2022, I began the work of implementing EOS as a structure for our business. Eos is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It’s a framework for improving your business and getting work done on top of the chaos of client work that you might already be doing. I tell people all the time, it’s really easy to work in your business and not on your business. And as the leader of the business, my job is to work on the business and create a better future for my entire team. When we went to implement EOS, we already had a vision and mission statement, but we didn’t have core values. One of the things I had to develop was our core values, and that was something I initially drafted and got feedback from the team. We then developed those into talking points, and I got graphics designed around them. We work to talk about this every single week at our team meetings, although I’m not perfect at that, and it’s something I have to continue to work to integrate into our work culture. The second big change this has brought to us was a restructuring of our meetings. Typically, we have two meetings per week, the first meeting being a staff meeting, and the second meeting is what we call our catch-up call.

 

Eos and the demands of EOS meetings caused us to change some of the content of those meetings to be more structured around the EOS model. While we don’t have a quote-unquote leadership team at the business of our size, everyone is involved on the EOS team because the size of our team, which changes some of the dynamics of the book. During our staff meeting, our weekly longer meeting, we review all of our projects. That is something we’ve always done. But in addition to that, we’ve started sharing our scorecard and reviewing issues and reviewing our rocks for the quarter. Our scorecard is an enormous tool for transparency in our company. We choose to go over revenue numbers. We talk about utilization rates, which is an important number in our industry. We talk about the leads that have come in and when we’re having the leads come in that we need. We also have things that are holding me accountable as well, like how many networking events I’ve attended. The transparency that we have brought, I think, and based on feedback from the team, has increased the feeling of ownership from team members that they have in the organization.

 

Anytime leadership is silent on a matter, people will fill that void with their own narratives, which may be based on fact, or it may not be. I do it, and our team will probably do it. Everybody does that. So it behooves leadership to fill those silences and to speak on important matters. We’ve had a few months this year where we’ve lost some clients or clients haven’t paid on time, and so our revenue numbers have not looked as good as I would like to them to have been. And that affects some of the internal culture things that we do, like profit sharing and fun things. But instead of the team just knowing that those things didn’t happen, they have a much better understanding of what’s going on and what’s affecting those numbers than they did in the past. The understanding that has been brought from that transparency has relieved some of the burden on me for those roles, but also, I think it helps the team feel better about where we are as a company. Another component that has been really helpful for us in this first year of EOS is implementing the People Analyzer. The People Analyzer is a tool that EOS implements for you to review with all of your employees, and it starts with three questions.

 

Does the person get it? Do they understand the culture here? Do they understand what it means to work here? Do they want it? Do they show the drive to get the work done? Do they show drive to grow? Do they show drive at all? And do they have the capacity to do it? Are they capable of doing the work or capable of learning how to do the work? And then following up on that, you get a plus or minus rating for each of the core values of the company. Has this person demonstrated the core values in the last quarter or have they not? Each quarter, we go through those questions together, one on one with a staff member. In fact, we even do it with our interns near the end of their time as interns so that they can experience what an evaluation is like. During these sessions, I’ve had our staff grade themselves before they come to see me, and it’s been a growing tool for me to see where my team feels strong and where my team feels weak and what I can do to adjust that and help them to be successful.

 

The final big component of EOS was defining one-year goals that fit into our 10 year goal. We broke those out into 90-day increments, and through the first half of the year, we’ve done a great job of hitting those. We’ve hit some snags in the third quarter goals, and they’re bleeding into our fourth quarter, which is not great. But we have some goal, we have accountability structure around it, and it allows our team to make progress on things that we wouldn’t likely have made progress on in other ways. We’ve had goals in previous years that through lack of leadership on my end, we have failed to maintain and implement over time. This structure that EOS brings to the table is a stronger set up for success. The shared accountability, the shared weekly structure, it allows it to not be ignored or swept under the rug in ways that other things could have been. So as we complete our first year, we’ll be pushing to accomplish a few things, and I will be setting up our themes for next year and working with the team to pick out rocks and figuring out how they fit into our work for next year.

 

I would highly recommend Traction and the EOS system to anyone who runs a small business or a small organization, or a big organization for that matter, if you’re interested in getting better instead of doing the same old thing. Have you implemented EOS? I’d love to hear from you and compare notes. Honestly, there’s a lot of things that we could do better with it, but I’d love to hear about your experiences with the EOS. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast, and we look forward to catching you on an episode in the near future.

 

Is it marketing or is it sales? This is a classic question that I run into all the time in my world. In this episode of the podcast, let’s dig into what the distinction is between marketing and sales. What’s the role of marketing and what’s the role of sales and why does it even matter? Well, let’s start with what is marketing? Marketing is the effort of getting someone’s attention and motivating them to take your call to action. We believe in a large definition of marketing. It’s anything that interacts with your customer. Unfortunately, that definition alone leads to some blurry lines. Really, practically in most organizations, marketing is all the external factors that help a customer become a customer or help a customer stay a customer. Sales is enabled by marketing and contains the actual transactions that move a business forward. Many times in the B2B world, there’s a relationship that is managed in the sales department, like with an account manager. Why are these distinctions important? In an organization, depending on how large it is, knowing who’s responsible for what is important. It helps people focus on the right activities, and it helps people be evaluated based on what they’re doing.

 

It helps us know what we’re tracking and who’s doing what. But it is a collaborative relationship, and when it’s not a collaborative relationship, there will be issues. How can marketing and sales work together? I view marketing as enabling sales. So marketing should be listening to sales, but sales should be also listening to marketing. It’s a little bit like a marriage. In a healthy marriage, the husband and wife talk and they lead together. Sales might say, ‘Hey, this messaging is not working,’ and marketing shouldn’t be like, ‘Well, I know more than you.’ Sales might say, ‘I need a brochure.’ But marketing might say, ‘instead of a brochure, what if we built a website?’ That way we can control it and make A and B testing and things of that nature. It’s important for both parties to play nice with each other. Let’s talk through the life cycle of a brochure and how might the two work together. Sales might say, ‘We need marketing material.’ When we go out to the marketing place, marketing should respond and say, ‘Absolutely. Let’s help you make that so that you have all the tools you need to be successful in selling.’

 

Marketing and sales should then be able to collaborate on creating that for sure. Sales should be able to say, these are common objections that we face. These are our customers’ common needs that we can fill. And this is the gap in the marketplace that we’re filling. Marketing should be able to say, okay, if this is the objection or this is the gap, this is how we can say that in a manner that helps people see the need if they’re not immediately aware of it. Then marketing can put it all together in a package that allows us to quickly and clearly communicate who we are, but in a way that intrigues the end customer. Marketing can then handle the design, the photography, the writing, the printing. Then sales has this new tool that they can go and use to sell more stuff. Over time, there should be updates to this, and then sales is going to be able to say, Hey, this is working well, or This is not working well, and this is why we think that is, and this is what we hear from our customers. It’s a collaborative relationship, and that should be the same across videography, websites, marketing strategy, all of those types of things.

 

This is similar how we work with our customers. Our customers are doing the sales and we are equipping them to make those sales happen. What happens when conflict arises? Conflict might arise because sales might feel like marketing is not bringing them good leads, or marketing might feel like sales has unrealistic demands or is not using what they need or make. An important thing is, as a leader above both of those, is that you help them work out those conflicts and work together to solve the problems of the business. When each department knows what they’re responsible for and what each is getting graded on, this can mitigate lots of tension. Are you in marketing or sales in a small organization? I do both of those roles for my team, but my team helps me build all the tools that I need to go enable sales. So are you in marketing? Are you in sales? I’d love to hear from you about something from a marketing department or a sales department that has made your job easier. If you’ve got a great one, send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for tuning into the Content Machine Podcast.

 

I hope to see you on a future episode.

 

If you’re a social media marketer or a marketer in general, generating content can be a challenge, especially over the long haul. The internet is a content-hungry beast, and we’ve got to keep feeding it. With all the customers that we work with, we have to always be generating new ideas for content and then implementing them. Here are some thoughts on how you can also generate content in an ongoing manner. The first and most important thing about content generation is understanding who your customers are. Who’s the target market? Every business’s target market is different and without a good understanding of who these customers are, and in the business we call them personas, you’re going to be spitting in the wind. The first step is to take some deep thought or maybe do some persona exercises on who your customers are and what they care about. As we look about what they care about, let’s think about a few things here. One, do they have a relationship with the organization? Or the people at the organization, do they want to see behind the scenes? Do they feel like they’ve got privileged information or are they just there for a deal?

 

Making a list of what’s important to our customers will give us an opportunity for a starting place when we start to generate ideas for content. In a second vein, we want to think about what we want the customer to know. Most businesses start here, but we put it in second place because what the customer wants is the most important part. When we think about what we want them to know and what are things as a business that we want to make sure they know about, that list is different. Gary Vanderchuk’s methodology of a jab, jab, jab, right hook, the jabs are what the customer cares about, the things that are entertaining, the things that satisfy them. And the right hooks are the things that we want to promote. So what do we want them to know about? Maybe it’s what makes us special, what makes us different than our competition. Maybe it’s some new product for sale or a club or a membership opportunity or some way to contact them like an email list or a text messaging service. The things that we want to promote are many, but we have to understand that they are not necessarily exciting for the customer.

 

And then when we think about those two things, we also have to think about what is the level of awareness that this customer has of our goods and services. Are they a current customer and a friend of the business? Do they need a little education on who we are and why we’re important? Are they not aware of us or that our service exists? Or maybe they’ve never heard of us and didn’t know that someone sold what we sold. Depending on that level of awareness, we may need to approach the content we’re creating differently. And then we have to think about is it organic social or paid social? Because the platform affects the content as well. But when we think about whether our customers know us or not, we should be trying to think about how that content reaches different segments at different times. We need not just to focus on experienced customers, but we also need to reach out to new customers and introduce ourselves in different ways. Finally, I like to think about a list of emotions that we can evoke. There’s a long list that we use, including things like being interested, happy, sad, and insightful.

 

These different emotions can help us think about ways that we can interpret the needs of our customers and the things that we want to promote. So instead of just saying we offer X, we want to imply it in an insightful and emotional response. We might say, did you know what X can do for a business and this is what we have done to someone’s business and how we’ve helped them? Or this is why we don’t do this because of X or Y. Pairing the emotions with the content can help you see through a way to make the content more relevant. Having content that can be approached in a different manner can help it be more engaging. Are you producing content? Are you a content producing machine? What’s your favorite piece of content you’ve ever produced? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and stay tuned for more great episodes. And we’ll see you on the next one.

How do you stay up to date with marketing? If you’re leading an organization that is not a marketing organization, how do you stay on top of your marketing? Are you investing in a staff person who’s keeping up with marketing? Is it their sole responsibility? Are they having to do all the areas of marketing or are they focused in just one area? Or do you not have someone in marketing and are you having to try to learn marketing for yourself, even though you might be really good at something else like banking or insurance or roofing? There’s been a new concept that’s becoming more and more popular in our economy called fractional work or outsource work or part time work for chief financial officers and chief marketing officers. This fractional CMO or part time CMO or outsource CMO has become more and more prominent and it’s something that we are doing more of because more and more companies are deciding it’s not worth investing in a marketing person full-time for a couple of reasons. When you hire a full-time marketing person, you want them to do everything. And it’s very difficult to do everything. Very few creatives are capable of doing many things very well across lots of disciplines.

 

Marketing strategy is different from graphic design. Graphic design is different from videography. Videography is different from social media and social media is related to but different from copywriting. Previously, small and medium-sized companies would expect someone, whether they thought it out loud or not, they wanted someone to do all of these things and to do them all well, and that’s just an impossible task. We’ve worked with several companies where we either augment an existing person’s ability or advise those marketing managers to a higher level, or we come in and fill the need completely because we can provide marketing strategy and with our team delivery of that strategy. Additionally, because of our experience in the marketplace, we have a lot more experience than a lot of people who start in these positions because many times these companies hire younger people to fill these roles and we bring a touch of experience and expertise from different industries and cross-pollination from our different accounts. When you hire internally, the hiring and firing of staff members brings a lot of cost and a lot of trouble that can come with it. You have to be thinking about, I’m not just hiring this person for a few hours, I’m hiring them 40 hours a week with salary and benefits and time off and drama and things of that nature.

 

So how do you compensate for all that? The great thing about a fractional CMO is a fractional CMO is responsible for providing value, not punching a clock. You can fire them and hire them, and well, there’s no severance, there’s no insurance, and there’s no drama. David C. Baker pointed out that perspective and seeing the bigger picture are hugely important values that consultants bring to the table. You are dug into the details of your work. You’re looking at the map with a magnifying glass, and we’re standing back and looking at the entire mountain. Outside consultants give perspective that insiders can often miss. Marketing consultants are available. Like I am, you can call me. But the question you need to ask is, is the focus of your organization enough on marketing? Are you properly equipping someone to do the marketing if you’re internal? Or are you spending enough time learning so that you can stay up on top of what’s new in marketing? Because someone has to do it if you want to thrive as organization. So if you’d like to talk about hiring a fractional CMO and maybe that would be us, I would love to set up a Zoom with you.

 

Give me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com or send us a DM. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. Stay tuned for more insight and future episodes.