It may be all of those things, but it is also true. When it comes to productivity – accomplishing the right things at the right time – it is as much a battle of the mind and heart as it is a battle of the to-do list. Establishing a regular gratitude practice can go along way in shifting your mind and heart to a place more conducive for productivity. How you ask?

1. Gratitude Quiets Fear

One of the key reasons we fail to get started on accomplishing what’s on our to-do list is fear. Fear holds us back in ways we are not even aware of. It’s continuously whispering to our subconscious and stifling our motivating.

“You’re not good enough. …
You don’t know how to do this. …
Everyone will find our you’re a fraud. …
No one cares about what you’re creating anyway.”

Establishing a regular gratitude practice cultivates a voice, one of confidence and courage, that becomes louder than that voice of fear. When we take a few minutes to pause and consider what we are grateful for, we are reminded of the truth about ourselves and our situation, a truth that fear wants us to forget. We are reminded that we have been given a unique skill set and gifting to add value to the world around us. And when that voice becomes louder than the voice of fear, we waste no time in getting started.

2. Gratitude Focuses on Accomplishments

One of the major downfalls of to-do lists is they cause us to focus only on the tasks and challenges that still lie ahead of us while causing us to forget everything we have already accomplished. This leaves a project feeling incredibly daunting which oftentimes paralyzes our productivity because we’re left wondering where in the world to even begin.

Establishing a regular practice of gratitude encourages us to focus on what we have already accomplished. It reminds us of the mentors and teammates and hard work that has helped us to this point. When we stop to remember the challenges we’ve overcome we remove one more major roadblock to getting started.

3. Gratitude Calms Chaos

We live in a world that seems to only move faster and faster with each passing day, month, and year. Our to-do lists get longer, the work gets hard, and impact feels smaller. When there is so much to do and to be every day it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel like your life is pure chaos. When we reach that point we can’t think clearly enough to even make a to-do list let alone accomplish it.

Establishing a regular practice of gratitude cultivates peace that calms the chaos. Such reflection reminds of what is important, reminds us what we value, and reminds us what we are working for. When we mentally can find a place of inner calm amidst the outer chaos, getting started on our to-do list no longer feels daunting.

When was the last time you took a few minutes to reflect on what you are grateful for?

One of the first questions we ask potential new clients is “What are the major pain points in your business right now?” Without exception, one of the top five, usually the top three, is their email inbox.

Now don’t get me wrong, email can feel like treading water at times. It’s defeating to stay up late to get your inbox emptied at midnight only to awake at 6:00am and see it’s already overflowing again. But, there are a few ways to ease the pain of email. Here are three foolproof tips we work through with all of our clients:

#1 Stop Using Your Inbox as Your Task List

I need you to trust me on this one, it doesn’t work! What inevitably ends up happening is your open and read an email three, four, five times before actually doing something with it. So, find yourself a good to-do list system and put your tasks there, don’t leave them sitting in your inbox. We LOVE ToDoIst for this purpose. Bonus: With their gmail integration, you can create a task from an email in about two clicks!

#2 Stop Using Email to Communicate with your Team

“What?! You want me to stop sending emails to people on my team? How will I ever communicate with them?” Yes, yes I do. Let me introduce you to a brilliant tool called Slack. Think of Slack as a virtual office, conference table, and water cooler. It’s one of the fastest growing tech companies right now for a reason – it’s brilliant. It is a more organized, work friendly version of group messaging. But, instead of long, hard to follow email threads that inevitably contain a lot of fluff, you can communicate only the necessary information in a central place for the entire team to access. (More in depth post on Slack coming soon!)

#3 Start Using Filters

Setting up email filters, especially if you are a Gmail/Google Apps user, is not the least bit hard. It takes a few extra seconds, but saves you hours down the road. Example: If you like to get several email newsletters or deals from your favorite brands, set up filters to have those emails automatically go to a folder. Then, create yourself a task to check those folder once, twice, three times a week. Or maybe you put an hour of “read email newsletters” on your calendar each week. Either way, the auto filters keep them out of your daily vision so they’re not distracting you from emails that actually require a response.

Which of these tips are you going to start using? Do you have another tip that has made you an email inbox ninja? We’d love to hear it!

“If I could only find the time to ___________________.” How many times have you said that in the last week? If you’re anything like most of us, it’s likely at least three to five times. So, what would you say if I told you there is a simple way to find the time you’ve been looking for?

THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO THE SOLUTION

Step 1: Consider this: How much is an hour of your time worth? Take a few minutes to think about it, I’ll wait.

Step 2: Consider this: How much would a simple way to get five or ten hours of your time back each week be worth to you? Take a few minutes to think about that too, I’m patient.

Step 3: Consider this: What would you do with that five or ten hours of time each week? If you need some ideas: you could spend it with your kids, take your spouse on a date, cook dinner, meet a friend for coffee, exercise, write a blog post, attend a networking event, sleep, read for professional growth, or ___________________.

IT REALLY IS POSSIBLE TO FIND MORE TIME

I have some great news for you – this isn’t just a hypothetical exercise. It really is possible get back five or ten hours of your week and the solution really is simple. So simple that it can be stated in four words: hire an administrative assistant.

You’re probably thinking, “Hire someone? That sounds expensive!” Or maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t know how to delegate things.” Remember – I said the solution was simple, not easy. But, if you hire an excellent administrative assistant, he or she will teach you how to delegate, and soon you will see that an hour of your time is worth infinitely more than you are pay him or her. And therefore, hiring someone isn’t expensive, it’s cheap. You can engage in a profit-producing activity with the five hours of your time each week that you used to spend on returning emails, scheduling meetings, scheduling social media posts, or booking travel arrangements.

If you’re ready to have a conversation about hiring an administrative assistant, we’d love to talk! Send us a note today.

Adventures succeed regardless.

– Simon Sinek

One of my biggest frustrations about business is that at the end of the day, money is required. Yes, that sounds a little silly, but it’s very true. Sometimes I wish that doing work that matters was all that was required. But, I will tell you one thing: when I stumbled into entrepreneurship I unknowingly stumbled into seeing work as an adventure rather than a venture & even though that often means a lot of sacrifice I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I was explaining this concept of dreamers, starters, & maintainers to someone recently when that was their response. So, I thought I’d share it here with you.

A few years into this business I couldn’t figure out why I would get bored after working with a client for a year or so. My motivation decreased & I had to work harder at doing excellent work on projects that lasted longer than a year. I was quite frustrated by this until I discovered there are three different types of people: Dreamers, Starters, & Maintainers. I don’t even recall when or how the realization came about, but it was a game changer for me.

The Dreamer.

Harriet Tubman wrote “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” But what happens after that dream has been thought up?

Dreamers are those who have the unique gift of thinking about new ideas and changes they wish to see, yet do not know where to go from there. Ask them to create a plan of action & they might go into a panic. Even worse, ask them to stick with one dream for 1 year, 2 years, even longer & they will almost certainly want to shrivel up in a corner. Dreamers thrive on just that: dreaming.

The Starter.

Starters, then, are those who can begin the process of making dreams happen. They have the ability to create systems which allow for these new ideas to take place. Once they have reached this point, however, they are not always good at seeing it through and fail to reach the next steps of the process.

Ask a Starter to sit in endless brainstorming meetings just coming up with ideas & they will probably wonder what in the world the point of that is. But, ask them to keep maintaining a plan they created a year or more ago & they will also wonder what the point of that is. Starters thrive on just that: starting.

The Maintainer.

Without maintainers, nothing would have any sort of sustainability. Maintainers are those who are not best at coming up with new ideas or figuring out what needs to be done to make things happen, but are great at following directions. They continually maintain the systems and processes put in place before them & therefore are critical supporters of any dream.

Ask a Maintainer to develop a plan of action or come up with a brand new idea & they will likely stare at you blankly. But give them a series of steps to follow & they will carry them out with over-the-top excellence. Maintainers are often overlooked as they have one of the less “glorious” positions in an organization, but without the any organization would eventually fall apart for lack of follow-through & persistence.

Have you found these principles to be true in your work? Which category do you think you fall into?

What they do: Harris is a Master Illusionist and Storyteller. A lot of people hear the word magician or illusionist and it scares them a bit. But, Harris is truly a storyteller whose medium happens to be magic. He uses his to shine light on the lies the world tells us and help people find the ultimate Truth.

How we help them: Our primary responsibilities in working Harris is handling his event booking process. We create all of his contracts and facilitate the process to get them signed, sealed, and delivered. We then advance all of his shows in terms of travel, lodging, host communication, etc.

We also keep Harris’ schedule on his website up-to-date, handle shipping of merch orders, and other random administrative tasks as they arise.

Throughout the time we’ve worked with Harris we have helped to refine his event booking process, improved the information gathering portion, systematized the filing of event related records, and more.

We love working with Harris because he is always full of new ideas. The clients who invite us to truly partner with them, welcoming our ideas for changes or improvements, are what make our jobs fun.

Read Harris’ story for yourself at www.harrisiii.com

• Did you know that Thomas Edison created 3,000 different ideas for lighting systems before he tested them to see if they would actually work? He KNEW going in that most of them would fail.

• What about the glorious Post-It Note – did you know that was the result of a “failure?” Spencer Silver developed a new adhesive for 3M that stuck to objects but could easily be lifted off. It was first marketed as a bulletin board adhesive so the boards could be moved easily from place to place. There was no market for it. But Silver didn’t discard it. One day Arthur Fry, another 3M employee, was singing in the church’s choir when his page marker fell out of his hymnal. Fry coated his page markers with Silver’s adhesive and discovered the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the page. And in a moment of brilliance, the Post-it Notes were born and a failure became a booming success.

• Sometimes the greatest successes are at first rejected. Albert Einstein was expelled from school because his attitude had a negative effect on serious students. He also failed his university entrance exam the first time around and had to attend a trade school for one year before finally being admitted. AND he was the only one in his graduating class who did not get a teaching position because no professor would recommend him. And yet, today we call him a genius.

• Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a newspaper because “he lacked imagination.” Yes, Mr. Disney himself.

• And did you know that Thomas Edison had only two years of formal schooling? He was also totally deaf in one ear and was hard of hearing in the other. He was fired from two jobs – his first as a newsboy and later from his job as a telegrapher?. And yet, after all that failure he went on to become perhaps the most famous inventor in United States history.

The point? Failure is relative. Failure is not final unless you allow it to be. And failure that leads you to the next right step or inspires you to some other greatness is no longer failure, it’s a stepping stone, a stop along the way, a catalyst for greatness.

Dreaming is essential to progress. It may not be practical or reasonable. You may have a hard time getting people to listen to your ideas. You will encounter resistance. Often. But know that you are a gift to this world, because your dreams may be the very solutions this world is desperately searching for.

Some of these questions have undoubtedly crossed your mind as you think about the complexities of hiring a virtual assistant. And yes, virtual work requires adjustments in the tools we use. However, the basic principles, and even many of the systems, of working with an assistant apply across the board. So, don’t get hung up on the “virtual” piece.

With that in mind, we thought we’d share 7 quick tips for getting started with a (virtual) assistant:

1. Delegate Responsibility: If there was only one single tip, this would be it. Don’t hire an assistant simply to free up your time – she brings more to the table than that. Hire an assistant to gain back mental margin. That is necessary for you to spend more energy doing what you do best. And the only way to gain mental margin is to delegate responsibility, not just tasks. Yes, this takes some investment on the front end, but it will pay for itself five times over.
2. Define Your Communication Style: Pick your poison – phone, email, text, twitter – spend some time thinking about how you communicate best. Ask your assistant to help you establish some guidelines for each communication medium. i.e. – a weekly phone call, using text only when a quick answer is helpful, etc. After you define your style, establish regular rhythms to stay in touch.
3. Get Personal: Spend some time getting to know your assistant as a person, not just your assistant. If you are working with a virtual assistant but also have an on-site team, group texts are a good way for the assistant to stay in touch with the daily life of the team. A fancier tool you might helpful is Slack (a completely searchable group communication tool) (link: https://slack.com/r/042ff40x-042htysj)
4. Start the Introductions: Take 5 minutes and make a list of the people in your world that your assistant will need to communicate with on a daily or weekly basis. Then, send them all a quick email introducing your new assistant. This will give her credibility in their eyes and prevent them from being confused when they hear from her.
5. Don’t Just Speak for Yourself: If there is anyone who has worked with you in a similar role in the past, connect your new assistant with them. That person can download nuances you probably aren’t even aware of – how you work best, preferences related to work, quirks in your personality, etc.
6. Empower Her to Say No: Being the bad guy isn’t fun for anyone. But, that’s part of your assistant’s job. Give her permission to say no on your behalf, to product your time and schedule. This can protect your relationships when you don’t have to be the bearer of bad news. We can also all be our own worst enemies when it comes to our schedules, so let her stop you from that.
7. Define Expectations: This goes both ways – you need to define yours but also give your assistant permission to define hers. Make a habit of asking “what are the expectations?” anytime a new responsibility is delegated. This is particularly important in relation to schedule – communicate “off” times and establish an “emergency” protocol.

Have you found any of this principles to be true? What tips would you add to the list?