My Favourite Productivity Tools, Techniques and Hacks

In today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, I want to talk to you all about some of the productivity hacks and things that I do in my day to day running of my business that makes me more efficient now. These are things that I've learned over the years, these are things that I keep needing to remind myself, which is why I think this is a timely episode to record. And so I wanted to share with you the things I do in the hope that it will help you get more efficient. So let's get on with today's Show. I'm Rob DeCosta and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels during the ups and the downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Hey everybody and welcome to this week's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Today I want to talk to you about my favorite productivity hacks and share with you some of the things that I do that make my days as efficient and productive as possible. And most importantly, at the end of the day when I shut my computer, I feel a sense of satisfaction and I feel like I achieved the things that I set out to do. So let's start with the bigger picture stuff because that is a really good starting place and you really need to first of all make sure that if you want to have a productive day and a productive week, then you need to have a plan that says this is what I'm doing today, this is what I'm doing this week, this is what I'm doing this month, this quarter and this year. So my first bit of advice is that everybody, whether you're a freelancer or one person business like me, or running a bigger agency, that you have a vision for your business, which is like a roadmap of where your business is headed over the next year. So that's my first tip and I'm not going to dig into a ton of detail about that, but if you have a vision, you can break that vision down. Let's say it's a year, you can break it down into quarters, into months, into weeks, and then you can translate those weekly tasks into your diary and make them into daily tasks. And that means each day you are taking a little micro step forward towards delivering your month plan, your quarter plan and your years, your year plan. So if you want to have a really Productive day. Then make sure you start with your vision. Now, once you've got your vision, predominantly, you can break your time down into three categories. I've spoken about this before, so I won't again go into a ton of detail, but you can break it down into revenue, strategy and admins. So let me explain what each of those three pots are. So, first of all, revenue is how you are earning money this month. So this is all the client work that you are doing. And obviously you need to make sure you're scheduling time in your diary for that. But if you don't think about your time in terms of these three pots, there's a really good chance that your week will get swallowed up with the revenue activity, the client work, and before you know it, you're stuck on the client service hamster wheel of doom with no time to think about anything else. So, equally important, you need to allocate time in your diary for strategy. And strategy is how you're going to earn money in the future. So this would be business development, marketing, sales, client meetings, networking, creating content and all that great stuff. And it's super important that you block time out in your diary to do that. And the third part is admin. And as an owner of a business, you don't want to spend too much time in this, but if you don't spend any time in admin, then you're going to be running a very disorganized business. So typically you're going to spend 5 to 10% of your time in admin. And this looks like getting your invoices out, doing hr, getting your systems in place, managing your team and all that kind of stuff. So make sure you allocate time for those three things. So we start with our bigger picture vision, we break that down, and then we allocate time in our diary for revenue, strategy and admin. So that's all the bigger picture stuff. And once you've done that, you can then start to plan out your day. Now, my next productivity hack is a really, really important one, and that is a lot of people just create their long to do lists, and every day they look at their to do list and they start working through it and they probably cross off five things and add seven more onto it. And there's never a sense of satisfaction because the list just gets longer or there's lots of things left on the previous day's page. And also there's always that nagging feeling, am I doing the right things? Am I doing the things that will move my business so my advice to you is to plan out your day and assign times to that to those particular items you're going to do in your day. So literally go 9 to 9:30, I'm doing this. 9:30 to 10:30 I'm doing that. 10:30 to 11, I'm doing this. And then 11 to 12 I'm going to walk the dog. And I put all of that stuff in my plan. And a key here is to overestimate how long you think things will take. So that leaves you with chance that you get that phone call that you hadn't planned for. Basically, we need to plan for all things that we don't know as well as the things we do know. So by overestimating how long you think tasks will take, you then can compensate for all those other things that will happen during your day that you couldn't possibly know at the beginning of your day. This is something that has a really big impact on my clients when I work through this with them. And I've clearly had a massive impact on me. I use a tool where I can. It connects with my diary, so it pulls in all of my appointments and then I can plan my day around it. And I think about revenue, admin and strategy when I'm doing that, to make sure I'm getting a balance of, you know, earning money this month, doing client work, but also planning for the future with all my marketing and my biz dev activities. So that's my next productivity tip, which is plan your day down to the nearest half an hour, overestimate how long things will take, and then you can make sure you're ticking every single item off by the end of the day. Now, the next thing I do, which I've spoken about before, is I use morning and evening rituals and this is where I do my planning. So in the morning, a ritual is simply starting and ending your day in exactly the same way that kind of starts your day in a really positive way and then full stops your day at the end of the day, especially when we're working at home, so you feel like you finished your day and you can go and socialise with your family afterwards. And you've got a sense that, that you have completed that and not kind of slowly easing out of your day and never really having that clear definition between when you're working and when you're not working. So my morning rituals are pretty simple. First of all, I always make myself a cup of coffee. That is the most important thing. Then I come and I look at my plan for the day I check my emails to see if any emails are going to impact my day. I then close my emails and delete them down as much as I possibly can. And then I look at the kind of things that I want to achieve. Now, one thing that I would really encourage you to do when you're doing your morning ritual and you're planning your day is say, what are my top three goals that I want to achieve today? So if I achieve nothing else, I'm going to achieve these top three goals. And so, for example, today one of my goals is to record this episode of the podcast. And that would be one of my top three goals that I've identified in my morning ritual. And then the end of the day, my evening ritual is kind of similar thing. Check my emails, check my to do list, start scheduling a skeleton for tomorrow, and then close my computer down, close all my apps, shut my computer down, and that is the full stop to the end of my day. So those are some of the bigger picture kind of productivity hacks that I do in terms of planning and being organized and making sure I'm focused on the right things. Now, talking of focus, that's the next sort of topic that I want to talk about in this podcast and the next set of productivity hacks. So first of all, I said set three goals for each day. The next thing I do, which is super important and you have to be really disciplined to do this is first of all, I use time blocking. So when I'm doing something like this, well, this, obviously it's going to take me as long as it's going to take to record it. But if I'm writing, for example, I will use the concept of time blocking where I will set the timer on my phone or on an app. If you've got one of those apps, you to time and I will set it for 20 minutes and I will turn off all my distractions and I will just work on writing quickly for that 20 minutes to see how much I can get done. I won't edit, I'll just write quickly. Then at the end of that 20 minutes, I'll take a break for five minutes and then I will come back and I would do 20 minutes again, take another break of five minutes, do 20 minutes again, take another Break of five minutes. So I usually time block in hour and 15 minute slots, three sets of 20 minutes. Now, 20 minutes is really a good block of time because it's enough time for you to do some meaningful work and stay completely focused on the task at hand. But it's not so much time that you start worrying that, you know, your phone might be ringing, which is on silent, or email might be pinging in which you've turned off. So it's enough time to do some meaningful work, but not so much time that it's intrusive. And the whole point of time blocking is you keep your head the game of the thing that you were doing and you will find that you are much more effective as a result of it. And then batching kind of takes that one step further. And if you can get really organized, and I must confess, this is always an aspiration for me and one that I don't always achieve. But the idea of time of batching would be that you would do a number of the same things in one go because your head is in the zone of that thing. So it could be, for me, it could be recording a podcast. So instead of like recording one podcast a week, I might say, okay, once every four weeks, I'm going to spend a whole day recording four or five podcasts, one after another. And I occasionally do this, but I don't do it to that extent. But that's my aspiration for this year. And the whole premise of that is that if you've got your recording studio set up and your mindset in, in the space of recording your podcasts, then it becomes much easier and more efficient to do a lot of them. And I certainly do that on a smaller scale with my email. So I will use a time blocking approach that I've just discussed, but I will then try and write three emails in those three cycles of 20 minutes. And so that might be three weeks worth of emails again, because my head's in the zone of writing emails. And on that note, I think a really, really important point to make is there is no such thing as multitasking. So people talk about how great they are at multitasking, they brag about it, it's their badge of honour that they can do 10 things at once. Well, actually no one can. And in fact, if you are multitasking, then you are not paying attention. So, for example, if you're listening to this podcast or watching this video, and at the same time you're answering your emails, you're either paying attention to me or you're paying attention to your emails. You can't do both. And if you're trying to do your emails while you're listening to me, then you're probably not going to do your emails very well. And you're certainly not going to be as efficient as if you were just focused on doing your emails or just focused on learning from this podcast. So there is no such thing as multitasking, just multi distractions. So my encouragement to you is to use all the time blocking and the planning that I've talked about and then just focus on the task at hand and then deal with the other things after you finish that task. So you're going to get really focused by doing that and you'll recognize that there's no such thing as multitasking. Do one task at a time and you'll be much more efficient. And to that end, we also need to remove distractions. We human beings are losing the battle against all the software and the apps that are fighting for our time and the social media channels and your emails pinging up. And people tell themselves these stories that we can't possibly remove those distractions. Well, yes you can. So I would certainly encourage you to turn off the email dialog box that pings up in the corner of your screen when a new email comes in. You really don't need to see that. And that is a massive distraction that will take you from the task at hand and divert you to thinking, oh, I just answer that email. What does that customer want? Much better would be just to shut your emails off like I have right now and just have set points in your day where you check your emails and then manage your customers expectations to say, I check my emails four times a day and I'll get back to you within 12 hours, which is what I tell my clients. So you don't need to have all these things that are fighting for your attention. You need to turn your phone on silent. You need to turn off your email. Except when you're checking your emails, you need to turn off all those other notifications that ping up on your computer during the day that are fighting for your attention. Because as I said, we are losing that battle. So that's my next productivity hack. Remove your distractions. Be brave. Stop telling yourself these stories that you're really important. You must therefore have all these things open because a client might be trying to get hold of you on WhatsApp or Slack or some other chat forum or via email or on your phone. Well, you know, you need to train your clients to have realistic expectations. You need to realize that you're not so important and that you can turn these distractions off. Okay, in terms of getting focus, my next productivity hack is just simply remember that when you say yes to something, you're saying no to Something else. And I heard this phrase on a podcast years ago and it's really stuck with me. And I use it all the time to kind of benchmark the things that I do. If I say yes to this, I'm saying no to that. So consider really carefully what you say yes to. Be willing to say no more often. And that gives you the space to say yes to the things that are really important in your. In your day. Okay, so that's a really great one. That's almost worth writing on a post it note and sticking on your screen. When I say yes to something, I'm saying no to something else. My next productivity hack kind of takes us back to email. And this is simply try and clean out your email box every single day. Make sure you want to aim for Inbox zero, which means at the end of every day during your evening ritual, you clear out your emails and so you're completely empty and fresh for the next day. I know that a lot of us, including me, fail at this and I go through fits and starts of trying it, but it is really good aspiration too. Many of us use our inbox as a storage place and we worry about deleting things because we think we might need them again. But imagine if you were having post coming to your house every day, and rather than opening that post and filing it, or deleting or throwing away or actioning it, you just let it gather until you had a thousand letters waiting for you to deal with them. Well, that's kind of what's going on in your inbox. So try in your morning ritual, clear out your emails to action them, file them, and in your evening ritual, do the same thing so that you are starting and ending every day with Inbox zero, a good aspiration to work towards, even if you don't quite achieve it. And the last point I wanted to make around being focused is that our most precious commodity is our time. So we need to use it really wisely. Which is why I really like the idea of having your top three goals for the day. Keeps you focused, having your vision that you translate down. That means you know you're doing the things that move the needle forward for your business. And the last thing I wanted to talk about regarding your time is the fact that you want to qualify your prospects really, really well so that you only invest your time with those prospects when. When they're well enough qualified. Now, this is something that I teach all of my private coaching clients and my group coaching program members on how to do this because it's really important. Too many of us have run ragged attending meetings with prospects that turn out to be not a good fit for us or they turn out to be too early in their journey. So they're just in fact find mode. And we've now invested a bunch of time educating them to only find out they don't have the budget or they're not ready or they're not a good fit. So you want to use tools to help you qualify those people and educate those people before you invest your time. And that is because our time is our most precious commodity and There are only 24 hours in a day. And it certainly isn't big or clever to be working seven days a week, 10 hour days. That means you're just not working smartly. And one of the ways of working smartly is to qualify your leads better so that you are investing your time in the hot prospects and not the fact finders. Okay, so the next thing I wanted to talk about is delegation and we all need to be delegating. And if you're a one person business or a freelancer, then you might be thinking, yeah, but Rob, I have no one to delegate to. Well, think about a point in your business where you can hire a VA. You can get some really great VA's. Don't need to be local to you, they can be anywhere. My VA team is based predominantly in the Philippines and they can take so much work off your place. All of those mundane tasks, those repeatable tasks that need to be done, your VA team can do them. My VA team, VA team does some of my social media posts. They, they design a lot of my content, they edit this podcast, they reconfirm my weekly meetings, all the things that I am not very good at doing but really are important to be done. So delegate as much as you possibly can. And if you don't have a VA at the moment or you don't want to have a VA, then just start thinking about the four Ds which is, you know, do I really need to do this or can I ditch it? Do I really need to do this or can I delegate it? Do I really need to do this right now or can I defer it? And then the fourth D is do it. So if you just kind of run that across any task, you won't just be racing through a to do list just trying to get everything done. You'll actually be thinking, well actually no, this doesn't need to be done today. Or actually this doesn't need to be done at all or I can delegate it to somebody else. And I've always added a fifth element to the 4Ds, which is an A which for Automate. Because there are lots of things that we can do these days to automate repeatable processes and we want to get smart about doing that. So that is a really important kind of product activity hack, which is start delegating as much as you can. You could spend, you know, 100 or £200amonth on a VA to take some of your tasks off of you. So if you like I say if you're a freelancer and you're thinking you can't afford to hire somebody, then you probably can afford to hire someone to get some of those lower value tasks off your plate, leaving you time to do the high value tasks. I always talk about your notional hourly rate. I've recorded a podcast on that before and I'll link to the show notes so that to that episode so that you can listen to that if you want to. But the idea of a notional hourly rate is what is an hour of your time worth? And if you're doing tasks that are worth less than the hour, then someone else should be doing them and you want to be focused on tasks that are worth your hourly rate or more. So that's my next productivity hack, which is Delegate. And the last topic or the last category I want to talk about is software and tools. Because I know I said earlier that all these apps are fighting for our time, but of course they can help our productivity. So as I said, I use a tool for my daily task planning called Marvin and I'll link to that in the show notes. It's a great tool. It connects with my diary. I can use it on my phone and on my computer. So that's what I use for my day to day planning. I also use Asana as my project management tool. So this is the tool that I use to plan with my VA team and for them to communicate with me where we're at, for me to review documents and be alerted when something's waiting for my approval. So that is really good. And we also use WhatsApp as a way to communicate in a more instant way. And this really cuts down on the number of emails. In fact, I don't send. I would say, you know, maybe one or two emails a week to my VA team. And the rest of our communication is done by asana and by WhatsApp. And this just really cuts down on, you know, Inbox and helps me get to Inbox Xero even more easily. And then the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I sort of talked about before, is my Remarkable. And my Remarkable is a bit of revolutionary tool for me that has helped me completely become a paperless office. And I don't know about you, but I'm pretty disorganized. And what I will do is I'll be on the phone to somebody, I'll find a scrap of paper, write something down, and then I can't find it again. And it drives me nuts. So having the Remarkable, which is basically electronic paper, so it's not like an iPad or something like that. All it is good for for is writing on. And it gives you an experience of writing that is as close to pen on paper or pencil on paper as you can possibly get. And you can file stuff, you can send stuff to yourself. It syncs up with a desktop app. You can translate handwritten text into text and then edit it in a, in a document. So it is really, really good. And I can't say enough about the Remarkable. It's revolutionized my life. So many of my clients have gone out and bought their Remarkable because of me talking about it. I don't have shares in Remarkable. I just think it's a remarkable tool. So that is something that has definitely helped me totally become a paperless office. I think in the past year, I haven't bought one printer cartridge because I just don't print anything anymore. And I can find stuff that's the most important thing. And you can obviously search for documents and create filing systems on there. So tools like the remarkable tools like Asana, WhatsApp, my daily task management tool, are pieces of software that have helped me be more efficient. Now, the kind of apps and software that you want to use have to be something that are easy to use, integrates into your process, your daily processes, and aids you. Sometimes software can offer so much functionality that it is really complex to use. And that's not the kind of software that I think will help your productivity. Okay, so there you go. That is in a short sort of 20 minutes nutshell of all of the tools and the approaches and techniques that I'm using that are productivity hacks that help me be more efficient. I would love to hear from you what productivity hacks that you use. If I've missed one out. So to do, drop me an email or leave a comment if you're watching this as a video and I would love to hear from you, but other than that, please make sure that you hit subscribe if you're watching this on video, please make sure you subscribe to the podcast. I'd love you to leave a review because that helps me reach more people and help helps me help more people. And other than that, I will see you next week on the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.