How to Leverage Your Time & Avoid Burnout
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Today I want to talk to you about how to leverage your time and avoid burnout by using two of my favorite ways to do that. I've been using these two ways and focusing on them this past year and these are things that you can start implementing in your business right away.
There's no reason for you not to start leveraging your time, and this is something I think is especially relevant with the holidays quickly approaching.
The first thing that I have been focusing on in my business is small automations. If you've been in my community for any length of time, you know that I'm really big on systems, workflows, and automations. When I'm saying small automation, what I'm talking about are things like a welcome email when someone opts in to your freebie, or maybe that looks like if someone has expressed interest in your service, whether you're a wedding photographer or a web designer or a coach, having an email template that is automatically sent after they send you an inquiry email. Those are each automations that I set up by using HoneyBook, Acuity and Kartra. Each of these are client relationship management tools. You can also do this with things like 17hats or Dubsado.
Personally, I use HoneyBook for a lot of these small automations.
Just to reiterate, when I'm talking about automations, I'm not talking about huge systemic marketing funnels that if they click on this, they get put into subset marketing sequence B and all these crazy things. I'm talking about the small leveraging automations.
Another example of a small automation is if someone books themselves for strategy session- that person puts in their information, picks their time. One, not only am I not doing a ping pong of emails, I've already leveraged my time by having a scheduling tool in my business, but I'm also leveraging even more by connecting Zoom to Acuity Scheduling and so when a person books and says, "Yeah, I want a strategy session." Or "Yes, I want a discovery call." That person also automatically gets their call link for our time together in their email and they click on it when they're ready to join the call.
There's these small automations that we can, for one week at a time, focus on a different one. Maybe it's creating an opt in, creating that welcome email, or maybe it's creating that questionnaire that automatically sends after they've inquired. Maybe it is setting up those small booking automations.
Depending on wherever you're at in your business, there's small automations that you can add to help you leverage your time so that you can focus on those client relationships.
You can have more time to actually dialogue and get on those calls and that's what we're all wanting to do. We're all wanting to book more clients, we're all wanting to increase our income and our impact.
Another way that I leverage my time in my business is by reusing and repurposing old content. Because we are high quality people, we're driven. The content we create is really good and it doesn't need to just be seen once for a launch. Many ways to repurpose and reuse your content exist. I'll name a few here, but if you're really wanting to learn more about that, you can register for the MYC course. And also create content in advance without getting burnt out as well. There's all different types of ways to leverage your time with how you reuse and repurpose your content.
One way to leverage your content is by using loopers. Loopers are a part of a social media scheduler that loop your content so you don't have to go in and reschedule every week what content you want to get visible. Now, some platforms don't allow you to do this anymore. Twitter has put in rules and regulations about how you can only use the same exact tweet once. For platforms such as, Pinterest, it will loop repinning that same pin over and over and that saves you about 15 minutes each week. Scheduling out pins if you use something like Tailwind or Buffer or something like that. And so another way you can repurpose a great blog post is by mentioning it again.
When I used this example for you right now, I mentioned HoneyBook automations. I have a blog post that very specifically and in a detailed way outlines how I create an automation in HoneyBook. Click here to read the full blog post! I’m repurposing it even though I'm talking to you about how to leverage your time today, I wrote a quality post that will last for a really long time and it's still beneficial.
There's two ways, again, to leverage your time. One is by using small automations and the other is by repurposing and reusing your old content.
BONUS:
I want to drop one more valuable way you can use old content by creating a trip wire. Essentially, when somebody opts in and they get to that thank you page offering something else at a low price point, maybe like $7 or $12, maybe it's an old workbook that you use with clients, you can frame that as a $12 option. That's a trip wire and it's something you might've used with your clients. Now if somebody else is wanting to learn how to serve their clients, they can use this workbook. There's all kinds of ways we can reuse and leverage our content so it gets more life and more purpose and more profitability out of it.
I want to address how to know when you're leveraging and when you're automating. Before you start leveraging or automating anything, you should really feel good about your core offer, your ideal client persona and your brand messaging and be consistent about it. The way we do that is by practicing the offer in Facebook groups or we practice on social media. Once you feel really good about that, that's when you need to start adding in these little automations. These are things that I could have a VA do, but I don't need a VA to send out the Zoom call link because I've already automated it with an Acuity Scheduling and I've already got Acuity Scheduling embedded in my website.
There's these little things that we can start doing and maybe it looks like starting by getting a scheduling tool, setting up your calendar availability and putting that on your website, that's an automation. People can book themselves into the calendar slots that you've given to them. One small thing at a time is really important. I'm a huge proponent of systems and automations in your business, but you don't want to automate the actual people part of your business. The way you want to automate things in your business is so that you can leverage time with your people. Whether that's your clients, your pre clients, whatever you want to call them, potential clients, leads, warm leads, warm list. You want to be able to have time to actually organically dialogue with them. These are things that empower you and enable you to do that. Leveraging your time looks like taking action and building these small automations or finding ways to repurpose stuff.
You don't want to do that until you're actually very clear and feel really confident. Otherwise, it ends up feeling very futile.
For those of you who are interested in small automations and learning how to do that and when to do that and wondering, “how do I leverage this thing in my business, drop down small automations?”
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If you're interested in learning more about how to repurpose and reuse your content, I have a super affordable, reusable course,
