Reduce your workload with the DADDA Funnel by HireMyVA

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Many of us started a business because we not only love what we do, but we’re good at it. However, to maintain our business, we find ourselves doing things we’re not good at. It is time-consuming to do these tasks because we have to learn something new. What’s worse is that they keep us from doing what we enjoy about our business. There’s hope: the DADDA Funnel: how to only work on things that only you can do.

On August 30th, Dave Braun from HireMyVA will helped us solve these problems by introducing the DADDA Funnel. With this tool, we can limit ourselves to the tasks only we can do so we can be more productive and happier.

Video Transcript

David: Dave is our speaker today, and I’m excited about this because this is something that I am existentially dealing with right now because I am encountering work that I don’t enjoy. And I need Dave’s advice. And if I have problems like this, I want Dave’s advice on this. So, I’m excited that you’re able to give it to us today. I know it’s going to be great, and we’re going to record this and publish it on YouTube for later. But I’m going to just let you take it from here, Dave.

I will add if there are questions that you have while we’re doing it, just put them in the chat. I will watch those for Dave, and that way, Dave doesn’t have to watch.

Dave: Yeah. And David, if something is a question that makes sense for me to answer right then, that’d be great. Just interrupt me.

Okay, cool. Great to be on. Thank you for the honor of being on the fifth Wednesday meetup. Hey, guys. How many of you guys would love to be able to reduce your workload?

Me too. Alright, this is for you. Let me share my screen, and we’ll get going.

Do you guys see my screen? Alright, good. So, let’s get going. So, reduce your workload with the DADDA funnel. Why is it called DADDA? Well, one reason is that DADDA is easy to remember. It’s a good acronym. The other is that it is very effective. So now, what I want you guys to do is, as we’re going through this, take a few notes. You’ll have some questions, but start thinking about your time how you spend your time. Where is it in this presentation that resonates the most with you? And then we’ll have the Q&A session, maybe in the middle, depending upon how you guys want to work this, and definitely at the end. But I love talking about this subject. I’m fascinated with time because it is kind of a fixed quantity in a certain way. In other ways, it’s not.

So, our goal, when it comes to our lives and our time, is not necessarily to fit more into each one of our days. We don’t want to keep jamming and jamming and jamming, and then we have no margin in our lives. What we want is to produce the results. We want maybe more results or maybe the same results with less time. So, given the audience of this, you’re all entrepreneurs, and you get paid for the value that you provide to your clients. You get paid for the results that you provide, but not always for your time or your effort. It’s results. If you don’t produce results for your clients, then they’ll go elsewhere. So, a lot of time management is based upon one-dimensional thinking. In other words, you prioritize your day, and I do this, too. I’ve got my checklist here, and there’s a screenshot of it. Every day, I prioritize. I put one task in front of the other. That’s one-dimensional thinking. What do I need to do first at that particular time that I’m working? The way I do it here is I’ve got the stuff on the left as my priorities. The stuff on the right, up the top, is my schedule. And then the lower right over here is a reminder to me that I only want to check email three times a day. I don’t always stick to it. I think it was the other day I only did it twice.

We’ll talk about this as a great time management principle and how you can get control of that. So that’s one-dimensional thinking as prioritizing. We want to move beyond that. So, this is pretty classical. I think this is called the Eisenhower Matrix, and I think you guys have heard of this before. It’s in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It talks about the urgency and importance matrix when it comes to how we spend our time. Okay, so you’ll see there on the left that the vertical axis is an increasing importance scale, and the horizontal lower right is increasing urgency. That’s a way that we can put our tasks into these buckets. Something that’s maybe very important to do, something that’s really urgent to do. So, really, what this means is how soon does this matter? In other words, how quickly do we have to get this done? We’ve got clients that need something, their site is down, or they can’t get their analytics or whatever it is. That’s something that probably is pretty urgent. But the importance is related to how much does this matter? In other words, if the client can’t get their analytics, does it really matter for their business right now, or could they wait a day? What we want to do with our time is we want to think about all the different tasks that we’re doing and which of those four quadrants most of the tasks fit into.

We want to go from the lower left quadrant, where we have low urgency and low importance, and move gradually to where we’re doing things that aren’t as urgent but have really high importance in our business. And I think I’ve given some examples of that. And if you want some more, we can talk about that. So, it’s more like you guys have heard the phrase, “Working on your business versus in it.” That’s really where we’re talking about the important type of things, longer term.

So, really, the problem is we’ve only got a certain number of hours each day, but what if we want more? What if we want more out of life? What if we want to do more? What if we say, I’ve always wanted to run a triathlon, but I have to make sure I have a successful business? But it’s taken all the hours I have to run my business. How do I fit this triathlon in with the way I’m running my business now? Oh, man, it would be great if I could add SEO if I could add different layers of SEO, if I could start doing ads management, or whatever it is. I want to add those things. But, man, I’m just already up to my eyeballs, and my day is always so busy. How in the world am I going to do this?

What we end up doing a lot of times to be able to fit this in is we shift our hours around. We will say, well, I’m going to work the morning on this and the afternoon on this. Ultimately, though, we get frustrated because something is going to suffer when you have to say no to something. Let me back up. When you say yes to something, you almost automatically say no to something else. So, prioritization doesn’t create more time. That’s part of the problem. That one-dimensional thinking. And even with two-dimensional thinking, we’re still doing a certain amount of prioritizing there. It just doesn’t create more time.

Alright, so I promised I’d tell you who I am. You can see that’s me and part of my family. This is a little bit older picture. I have a grandson. I live in Irvine, California. I’ve been married 40-plus years to the woman in the lower left there. And I was a semiconductor engineer and a corporate executive for 30 years. I managed teams globally in India and China. I did that for a while. I had a great career. It was a lot of fun. I have six patents. You can see them behind me on my wall. I’m proud of those. And I’ve done WordPress for over nine years and a few iPhone apps. When I first started doing web development, I was doing Joomla. Have any of you guys heard of Joomla? Have any of you guys ever used it? Okay. Luckily, you chose WordPress or something else. Don’t choose Joomla. It’s like, I’m really smart, and I had a book. I was going through it, and it’s like it just didn’t click. It didn’t click for me. I remember when I was searching on Google for how to do stuff with Joomla, all this WordPress stuff kept coming up. So that’s kind of why I switched.

And I’ve coached, you know, hundreds of entrepreneurs through a different business that I have with my great business partner and one of my best friends, Larry Broughton. So, we do that as well. We just got back from Atlantic City, a great event where we had a program for 15 disabled veterans, and it was awesome to be able to help them in their businesses. And I also volunteer in a local jail ministry, doing some services here in Orange County. That’s a blast.

So, this discussion is really inspired by a book by Rory Vaden called Procrastinate on Purpose. He talks about five permissions to multiply your time. It’s inspired by that. We’ve adapted it and expanded upon it to what we feel works the best for folks. So, what he talks about in this book is that we’re going to create a new factor to this matrix. The first, we talked about urgency. How soon does this matter? Importance is how much does this matter? But really, what we want to talk about is significance. And I may have said this before, but it really is how long is this going to matter to you and your business and your life? What can you start thinking about that will actually create great significance in your life? So, let me give you an example. One would be if you’re going to service a lot of different clients, you’re going to need to be really efficient with your time. If you’re going to service your most important clients, that means you’ve got to be effective. You’ll be effective, but what we’re talking about is efficacy. You may create a training program so you can create more significance with that and have a longer-lasting impact.

A great example of this is creating SOPs for your business, standard operating procedures that you can use over and over again to train new folks as they come into your team. You’re doing it once, and yet you get a ripple effect of doing that task, having that available as time goes on. So, you’re saving yourself time in the future.

Here’s a question for you guys. How do we normally decide what to do? Is it logically or emotionally? I know you guys are all on mute, but you can unmute yourself and answer that. Logically or emotionally?

David: If I’m honest, it’s probably more emotional for me. Oh, no, someone said something, aaahh.

Tricia: Yeah, even though it needs to be more logical, I would agree a lot of times, it’s like, oh, I got an email, let me hurry up and respond when no, I don’t really need to. I need to have them more orderly.

Dave: Yeah, I think we’d probably all agree with that. I mean, it really is emotional, right? Otherwise, we wouldn’t really have a problem deciding on what to do next. So, a couple of examples are exactly what you said, Tricia. Your emails, right? It’s like, oh, I know that I can put that off because clients don’t need to know right away. But it’s like, oh, that email. I like having a clear inbox. I like to not have anybody depending upon me for anything. Right? That’s emotional thinking. Another thing is, with my to-do list, I print it out. Oh, my gosh, I love crossing things off. It makes me feel good, right? That’s emotional, and that’s okay. But what’s important is to realize is that if we’re going to get a handle on this time management issue, problem challenge, however you want to term it., the people who are really successful at creating more time, they give themselves five emotional permissions to do certain things.

We’ve all heard about somebody who’s been really successful in life and business, has what we want, and we’re like, how do they fit so much in a 24-hour day when I can just barely bring my head up over my keyboard? So, they give themselves five emotional permissions. We’re going to talk about this framework, and as you guys are thinking through this, make sure you write a few questions down, items that you can really hold on to and take advantage of because we’ll have some action steps at the end. But one of the things that I don’t want to have you guys do is be on here and not take anything away from this because that’s a waste of your time, and it’s a waste of my time. To me, that’s the most important. And if you get one thing out of this, one little aspect, a different way of looking at things, that’s going to be a successful time for you guys.

So, really, the question that you need to ask yourself or think through here is, we want you to multiply your time by giving yourself permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. In other words, ask yourself this question: What can I spend time on today that I can leverage tomorrow, a week from now, or a month from now? Okay, so think through that, and that’s like the overall arching thought as we go through this flow. Alright?

So, the first thing that we’re going to do is, as you have these tasks, the first thing in this framework is you’re going to delete it. You’re going to ask yourself a question: is this task something I can live without? Alright, so the emotional permission that you need to give yourself is Ignore. This is one of the revelations that I got from Rory Vaden’s book. Going through our to-do’s and checking them off and all that, it’s all emotional. If we give ourselves emotional permission, it will help us. We’ve got to give ourselves that permission to ignore a task. Because if we have that task written down somewhere if we’ve written it down in the past, at some point, we thought it was a good idea to do it. Well, maybe at this point, it may not be. And so, we’re going to have to give ourselves permission to just throw it away, put it over on the side, et cetera. Now, one of the advantages of doing everything on paper is you actually can throw it away. When you have a task manager, you have to physically go in and delete some of these things.

Okay, so here are some things that you can start deleting that will help you. And as you see these, if you look down at the bottom left here, right over here, you see a blank line. This would be for you to be able to, as you’re writing down, just say, hey, here’s something that I want to make sure I delete in the future that’s not on this list. So, one of the things is redecision. You guys know that every time we decide to do something, we come back and redecide that we’re going to do it. That’s a lot of mental energy and a lot of waste of time. It’s like we need to decide to do it for at least a period of time and then come back and look at it. But if we’re constantly thinking about it, that’s taken up mental energy and bandwidth, and it’s a waste of time. Next is watching TV. What I mean by some of these things is when it is excessive, right? If you’re somebody who watches four or five hours of TV every evening, then I think you need to rethink how you do this. The important thing for this is to use it. You can use it as a reward. Say, I’m only going to watch it on Friday nights or Saturday nights. Of course, unnecessary meetings. Long emails. If you’re going to type something out that’s really long, that takes a lot of time versus having a meeting with somebody. Unnecessary change, intermittent changes on things. Oh, here’s a big one: confrontation emails. You need to pick up the phone with somebody and talk to them. Emails should be shared for information only and not for expressing emotion or that you’re pissed off at somebody, et cetera. And then doing other’s work. There’s a great book, I think it’s One-Minute Manager, about taking somebody else’s work and putting it on your shoulders like the monkey on your back. It’s easy for us to do that. It’s easier for us to have our client say, well, could you do this for me? Oh sure, no problem, I’ll do it for free. So, doing other’s work and then next is gossip and sharing your opinion. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to share your opinion. But just be careful how often you do this because, typically, where you’re sharing your opinion is not something you have control over, and it’s not going to really matter that much. Unreasonable people. Thinking about the next, right? Stay in the present. Stay in the moment. Doing explanations versus experiences. So, one of the things that we try to do is a lot of “show me” instead of describing it. We record videos and send the clients and everybody. Unnecessary double-checking. Custom versus leveraged, right? We all want to create custom things. We’re very creative folks, and we want to do that. But that takes a lot of time and support. And, of course, over-volunteering.

Alright, so after we take our set of tasks and delete them, let’s see if we can automate these things. Can they be systematized? So, we have to give ourselves emotional permission to invest. Investing could be time, energy, or money. Any one of these, what I would call currencies, that you would want to be able to invest. So, some things that you want to invest in are FAQs or creating things in a way that can be searched and found so you don’t have to recreate them. You have to understand how you search. Online bill pay using something like Quicken. Once you set it up, it really helps you keep track of your finances. Make sure that you have backups appropriately and that you sync your changes to something both locally as well as online. And then social media management. Do that with some kind of program like Hootsuite, Social Oomph, or Social Bee. There are bunches of them that keep coming up. Then there’s past client follow-up. Try to automate this as much as you can. Online learning. Create videos for your team, drop shipping, and sales funnel to filter hot prospects. And you can use your active campaign drip, et cetera, for that. And then, anytime you can eliminate “think time,” like using block scheduling so you’re not shifting or doing a short chart. These are some things that you can automate in a way. One of the things that I had tried for a while was having Daphne, one of my virtual assistants, create a meal chart for us, and that helped a little bit.

David: Can I ask a question before we move on?

Dave: Yes.

David: Can you go back there again? What do you mean by automating past client follow-up as a way of saving money or saving time and money?

Dave: Well, you can use, like, ActiveCampaign. You can put somebody in there and tag them and say, you know, I’m just going to check in with them on a three-month basis. And you can create a funnel or flow that will automatically kick off an email to them. But you don’t want to necessarily automate something that’s not going to take a lot of your time, right? It could take you even more time to automate something than it does to actually just do it for a little bit. And I’ve seen people do this. It’s like, oh, we have to automate this whole system because we’re going to have hundreds of clients coming in and all that, and you have one or two clients, and it just doesn’t make sense to automate something until it makes sense to automate until it’s really going to save you time. If you have in your mind saving time as the reason to automate, that will be a good thing to judge to help you make your decision.

Okay, the next thing in this framework is delegate. Can this task be performed by somebody else? The emotional permission you have to give yourself at this point is imperfect because one of the big obstacles for us wanting to or allowing ourselves to delegate is that we think it’s going to get done worse by somebody else. Which indeed does or can happen. There are great areas of our lives that we can delegate to. For example, having an office assistant and a business coach, multipliers almost always have business coaches, accountants, bookkeepers, financial planners, lawyers, insurance agents, real estate agents, graphic designers, and web designers. This is us: web designers. We don’t want to delegate web design to somebody else generally, but there are times when we may want to if our clientele gets big enough that we might want to delegate part of this. I can’t remember the name of the service that does the design for you that I know some of the folks in our advanced form are taking advantage of.

David: Deer Designer.

Dave: Right. And then, of course, like, travel coordinator, agent, house cleaner, nanny, gardener, all these different things you can actually pay somebody to do. Number one, if you don’t like to do it, but number two, if it’s costing you a lot of time. And, of course, if you have the money. Oftentimes, you will have the money when you think about the time that it’s going to free you up. If you get rid of some of these items to somebody else, it will be amazing.

David: Anecdotally, it was a few years ago, my dad told me, “David, for what you charge an hour, you shouldn’t be cleaning your own house. You should hire a house cleaner.” And I felt so much like a loser, like, I can’t even clean my house. Then I realized I hate cleaning my house. Hiring someone to come in to do it not only made it feel good to come to my own home because it was clean but I kind of needed my dad to give me permission to hire someone to do it, in a way, because it was a little humiliating for me. But it was huge. It was a huge help. And he’s exactly right. It helped me have that time back to do stuff that I wanted to do, but also, they could do it quicker in an hour and better than I could if it’s been an hour because they’re just doing it all day.

Stephanie: David, Danielle, and I had that same conversation. To spend money on a housekeeper seemed trite to me. It was like, we’ve got the time; why are we going to spend the money on this? And Danielle was like because I would rather spend my time going out to dinner with you or doing something else. To me, it’s worth the money to have that time back.

David: Yeah, exactly.

Dave: Yeah. There you go. And what you’re doing, a lot of times when you are able to give up some of these things to somebody else, you’re actually trading those tasks for what can be experienced. New experiences, new things. And when you’re looking at this list, yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff, hopefully, one or two of these things that come into your mind, it’s like, yeah, I really need to outsource that, or I really need to find somebody to do that. You can also consider something where you’re outsourcing just part of it. So, for example, let’s take the house cleaner one. You don’t have to have somebody coming in every single week. Maybe you bring in somebody once a month or once every couple of months to do deep cleaning, but then you do it yourself the rest of the time. One of the things that you can also do, which kind of is an automate/delegate, is when it comes to house cleaners, get one of those robots. It might work for your home. We’ve had one for years. It’s amazing how much better it cleans and keeps our house clean, and it does save us time. So, some of these things, when you’re thinking through it, it doesn’t have to be you’re delegating everything, like even a mechanic. Maybe you want to do a few things in your car. Maybe you like to wash your car. It gives you exercise. You don’t have to take it to a car wash, but for certain things from a mechanical point of view, you would want to delegate those. Maybe I used to change my own oil for years and finally got tired of it. But I never would do major things. So, think about these things in terms of a partial delegation. That can work as well. The whole idea is to get you guys your time back.

Okay, so then the next is after you’ve delegated. A bunch of stuff is defer. You can say delay or defer, but it’s can this task wait until a later time? You have to give yourself the emotional permission of incomplete. So, it’s different than up here, where you’re deleting something. You’re kind of getting it out of your mind. Here, this is going to stay in your mind or stay on your task list, but you have to be okay with keeping it where it’s not done. Now, I talked about email. We talked about it. People can wait. You minimize intermittent change, increase your focus, and multiply your time. So down here, like I said, this is a reminder for me to only check three times a day, and I do pretty well with it. But somehow, you have to create a system where you’re doing that. If email is something where you feel like you can get your time back and your focus if you’re checking email all during the day, man, that’s got to really interrupt your productivity.

Meeting talk topics. There are some questions that can wait for a meeting. You don’t have to fire off a whole big email to somebody. Maybe this can wait until we have our regular meetings, which is a great way to make sure you keep communicating with key stakeholders in your life. Sometimes, I violate this because I’m excited about something about my work, and my wife’s here, and I’ll go leave, and I’ll go talk to her about something, and then ten minutes later, I’ll talk to her about something else. Well, what I should be doing is writing those things down and just talking once about it.

Okay. Paperwork. Save doing it until later at off-peak times, or better yet, delegate it. I’ve got a place in my office over there where it’s “to file.” Usually, what I do is about once a month, I go file it in my filing cabinets or throw it away or scan it, whatever I do. But I don’t have something like every single day start organizing stuff.

Shopping. Of course, you can do a personal assistant, but keep a running list. We have ours on the fridge, and whenever we’re on the way home, there’s a store, it’s like, okay, let’s stop off. We rarely make a special trip to the store because that takes time.

Phone calls. One of the things that I do for my clients is I usually have an hour, a couple of hours, whatever it is, once a week, where I contact them about the status of their project or follow up with folks that are in my customer management system. So, it gives me a chance to have uninterrupted focus for them during that time. Paying bills, same kind of thing. Thank you notes. Let them pile up, and then write them all out. So, you’re kind of batching things here.

Alright, so the last part of this is attention. So, you want to give yourself permission to protect your time because it is really valuable. You want to focus your attention on what’s the most significant use of your time. So, these are great questions to ask yourself. And we’ll run through these a little bit quick, but jot something down as we’re talking about these. Is what you’re working on creating the best results for you and for your clients? Is it making the greatest contribution to my family, to my business, to my country? Is it making the impact that I really want it to make? Or is it doing busy time? Is it providing enough value to my clients? Are you making the most out of the available time that you have? Is this helping you to be your highest self? I’ve been lucky in so many ways that I’ve enjoyed exercise, so I’ve been exercising since junior high on a regular basis, but that’s one of the things that’s sacred to me, that helps me to be my highest self.

What about developing and refining systems to leverage others? Are you doing that? So, if it doesn’t fit in one of these things, then really it ends up being a distraction, a temptation, a pressure. And quite often, it could be another person’s priority, not yours. So, here are some potential game changers that you can look through here. We’ll run through them quickly. Regular date nights with your spouse, with your family, with your kids. I don’t know if I have it in here; it may come, but like weekly family dinners, those are amazing. Those create great experiences. Becoming debt-free and staying healthy, I mentioned that. And especially giving yourself permission to sleep and investing time and money into maybe you need a personal trainer, why not? But giving yourself that permission to invest in your media, be careful of that. We talked about that a little bit about what you read and what goes into your mind. And invest in marketing automation. We talked a little bit about that. And, of course, treating people right, having a large amount of integrity, which is doing things the same way, and having a level of honesty in how you deal with your clients.

Bryan and I were talking about how we just today got notice from a client that they’re giving us a pretty significant web design win. We’ve kind of talked about it a little bit in our Curious Ants meetings, but we just got notified today, and we were talking about why they gave that to us, and they didn’t actually consider anybody else, and it’s because of trust. They had a lot of trust in us. And then, of course, your faith, whatever faith that you have, that’s a great thing to invest in. Good early decisions. The younger you are, the more amplified your choices are. MJ DeMarco talks about that in the Millionaire Fast Lane and how the younger you are and certain decisions that you make can have a far-reaching impact. Financial, health, all that stuff. So, think about who you’re going to invest in your life. Who are you going to be mentoring, your virtual assistants if you have some, or people on your team? And then, of course, make sure you’ve got a vision, mission, and core values and know what your strengths are. Those are things you need to be working towards because you have your vision. What do you see in the future? It’s kind of like why you’re doing what you’re doing. And if you don’t have that, it’s easy to get off track. But you want to evaluate the significance that you want to create in life through some of those filters.

Okay, so I want you to come away with this from an action with a little bit of an action plan. So, write down three things that you’re going to start doing. It doesn’t have to be three. It could be one or two. I have three, but it could be five. But don’t overwhelm yourself. Maybe it’s just one. What are you going to start doing? And as I mentioned before, if you say yes to one thing, you’re potentially saying no to another. So, what are the three things that you’re going to stop doing?

Maybe one thing that you’ll start doing is every time you do a new task, you record a video as you’re doing it. And so, you start creating a library of videos, which is a valuable asset if you’re going to sell your business at some point. And one thing that you might stop doing related to that is you’re going to stop just hurrying and doing it, making sure you take the time to explain it. So, what are three things that you will stop doing? Maybe you’re going to stop watching so much TV. Maybe you’re going to stop listening to podcasts that are not really helping you achieve your vision and your mission. So, the next action is after this meeting, or you can do it even now if you want to calendar them or set reminders on your phone. Use the electronic tools we’ve got. Set an alarm that happens like two times a day as a reminder to say, Stop. I’m going to stop putting myself down even. And maybe it’s two times a day I’m going to start thinking about what I can eliminate. Or maybe every day, I’m going to look at my task list through the DADDA funnel.

That’s it. So that’s the last thing. This is the last slide, but I really want you guys to come away with some kind of action. Make this worthwhile of your precious time. We’ve been going for about 45 minutes. Make this time really worthwhile. Maybe this is a place where you’re going to kick off doing things a little bit differently in your business. Maybe you’re going to need to think about what you really want in your life. Maybe you’re going to need to think about, man, I am really wasting my time. For the next week, I’m going to write down everything I’m doing every single day. And then at the end of the week, I’m going to review that and see, wow, where was I really wasting my time?

David: Could you show the slide that has the complete DADDA funnel on it, please? There it is. So, what is the deferral loop in this? Or is that just something that’s not really what we’re worried about?

Dave: Yeah, I neglected to talk about that. So, one of the things that you might say can wait till later: I don’t have to do it today. I think I can put it off till next week. So now, when next week comes, then you have to think to yourself, well, let me put it through this loop. Maybe I don’t have to do it anymore because maybe the client just told me that they’re going to go with somebody else, or whatever that is. Then maybe you can delete it. But then maybe, you know, as I think about this task, I can’t delete it, but know, I can automate. You know, as I think about it, there’s no reason why, like Bryan Valentino on our team, there’s no reason that Bryan can’t do it. I mean, he’s really good, he’s smart, he speaks well, he can record a video, create an SOP for me. Why do I have to do it? And then it could be that, well, I’m going to defer it another week. And then, as you’re like, wow, I’ve deferred this for the last three months. I guess I should probably delete it. So, that’s kind of what that means.

David: I like this a lot. I think one of my action items is that I categorize my Trello board, which I use to manage my clients in a particular way, but I’m going to add a new dimension to my Trello board, which is kind of a tag, or at least allow me to kind of use this system to decide tasks. So, what I’ll often do is I’ll read something on Search Engine Land, I’ll throw it into my Trello board because I’ll be like, this is a great idea, or I need to read this more depth later, or I need to change a process on Curious Ants according to this. And often, I’ll just forget about it. But if I use this system, I can then go through those and make sure there’s something to it. Maybe by the time I get to it, it’s just like, oh yeah, that’s totally obsolete, not helpful. I’ll just delete it. Or maybe I can look at a way to automate it or delegate it to someone else. Or maybe it just needs to be deferred to a later date. But the way I’ve traditionally done Trello is I have a category for doing, which is what I’m working on now, and a category for waiting, which is waiting on someone else’s approval or input or something like that. And then I have a Someday list. And then I have a reference list. Someday is I’ll get to this someday, and the reference is, hey, I need to remember the URL to their website or their branding guidelines. So that goes in the reference list. But if I add this dimension and integrate it with my Trello, I think it’ll make my Trello more effective and helpful because what usually happens is I just keep throwing more stuff into my doing list. And it’s no longer a doing list. Now, it’s a list of mishmash of things that I came across. It’s really the Someday List. But I haven’t used it. Anyway, one of my action steps is to integrate this into my Trello system to make my Trello board actually useful and not just, oh, there’s a lot of stuff on there now. I don’t even know what to begin with.

Dave: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things that I do, and Nathan has talked about, is he plans his week on Sundays, and I do that also. And there’s a lot of stuff that I keep deferring, but it’s okay because I’m making a conscious decision to do, because and then in our project management system, I always have things that I want to make sure I go through this loop, have a due date on Sunday. So, it forces me to look at it, and at some point, if I’m forced to look at it over and over again, at some point, it’ll be like, screw this, I’m going to put it off. Instead of a week, a month, or two months, I’m just going to delete it. Right. Because otherwise, if you have a Someday list and you never look at it or pare it down, then it becomes almost useless. Right? Yeah. Do you have any other thoughts or questions, or does anybody else want to share something, a realization that they had?

Tricia: I like what David was saying. I tend to have the same. I don’t use Trello, but I use Notion, so it’s similar. And I like his idea of putting those in columns and having the doing, waiting, someday reference. So, I think I need to do that some more and get them organized better that way. I think that will help.

David: Well, don’t let it become what it is to me. I mean, that’s progress, right? Good for you. That’s why I like this funnel because it gives me permission, Dave has just given me permission, to delete something out of my Trello board.

Dave: So that’s good. Yeah. And that’s where you start, but I hope you guys start thinking about the things that you’re doing and thinking. How can I make sure I work on stuff that’s going to multiply my time in the future? What is it that I can set up so that the system that I have is going to be quick and easy?

David: Well, thank you, Dave, for giving us this permission to be more productive by giving us permission to delete delegate and defer. I think that’s a great way of thinking of it. And thank you for empowering us with that.

Dave: Yeah, you guys are welcome. And if you guys want to talk more about this in some of our next meetings, we know that’d be fun, too.

David: Yeah, and that’s a great transition because this is the fifth Wednesday meetup where we invite the public. Charles snuck in at the last minute, but this is the regular Curious Ants meeting. But when every time there’s a fifth Wednesday, we open it up to the public. And because SEO is really not just about keywords and links and all that, sometimes the most effective things for SEO are things like productivity. That’s where we kind of take this meetup to kind of stretch and make sure that we’re being as effective outside of the exact SEO processes. But at this time, every Wednesday, members of the colony get to attend the regular SEO group consulting group. What are we calling it now? The group coaching. Group coaching is what we decided to call it. Right. So most of you are in that, and we come together and put our heads together and sometimes cry at frustrations of clients or Google or, hey, what about this idea? What about that idea? And it’s just a good time that we all look forward to brainstorming and bouncing ideas off each other. So that’s what Curious Ants is all about, right?

Dave: I highly recommend it. If you guys haven’t come and joined, at least come for a little bit and try us. It’s really good. David, you do a great job at leading us. It’s fun.

Tricia: I get so much out of it. It’s so helpful.

David: All right, well, that’s all the time we had for today. Thanks again, Dave, for helping us out.

Dave: Reach out to me if you guys have any questions or have any other comments. I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.

David: We’ll put this video on YouTube. I’ll send an email to the meetup so that you can see this. There’s a page on Curious Ants about it where we’ll put the transcript for this video maybe some of the resources we’ve used today. But thank you all for your time. I look forward to catching up with you all soon.

Dave: Thanks, everyone. Bye.