Understand how to PRIORITIZE - #EvansBook ep. 44

Understand how to prioritize. So one of the biggest things I find with entrepreneurs is, is trying to manage your time, balancing your time. It's super easy to get distracted by things. It's super easy to let work time bleed into personal time, to have no time for yourself. And to be constantly stressed out 'cause you're everything from the janitor to the CEO in your business. And one of the things that I find really helpful is giving myself constrictions of time in which I'm forced to work on a certain project and it forces me to only do what's most important because otherwise it'll bleed into other time that then takes away from other things that I wanna work on. So sometimes it'll be a 90-minute chunk and I need to make sure whatever I'm getting done gets done in that 90-minute chunk. And sometimes it'll be a day. So Mondays, for example, I work on my Toronto Dance House of Business. Everything that has to get done for the week happens on that Monday. And so it forces me to really be focused and prioritize on the big things. And it's an important exercise that I would encourage you guys to try because again, otherwise you're going to find yourself working late into every night, not having any personal time because you're just trying to do everything. You just let things bleed where you could find a lot more, uh, opportunity in your schedule, your calendar by making sure you're focused and focused on the right things and having that time constraint really helps. So as it relates to my book is I went traveling, I was in Orlando on my annual Disney trip with the family. I got sick, so excuse any coughing that comes up. I have medication 'cause I have a major ear infection I developed there and starting to feel better. And one of the things I hate about traveling is it messes up my schedule, right? So I came home on a Monday, which meant I missed my Monday Toronto Dance Salsa day. And that's frustrating 'cause I had a lot of stuff that I needed to get done. And so how this relates to my book is that Tuesday's usually my book writing day. We had a mini crisis with Toronto Dance Salsa that I had to deal with. And so that became my Tuesday. So I didn't write on Tuesday. There wasn't anything super urgent for the book. I'm still waiting on my publisher to get back to me about the edits. I haven't really forced the issue mostly 'cause I didn't have time to deal with it. And I need to get on that horse a little bit for the next week. And so being faced with that decision, I've got one day and I've got two things to worry about. Either I do the book or I do Toronto Dance Salsa, or I try to do both of them. And you got to understand the priorities. And so for me at that time, it was, okay, I need to get this Toronto Dance Salsa stuff done. I'll worry about the book next week. And I think you're constantly faced with these kinds of battles and it's worth Sometimes putting yourself in those situations because you'll find that you're spending a lot of time on things that aren't really that important. When something happens in your personal life or you go traveling or, you know, just something comes up that messes up your schedule, you end up doing the things that you have to do, not the things that are kind of nice to do. And a lot of times I found, at least with me, that I drop those things that are nice to do permanently. Like, it just wasn't worth doing. So I think it's worth putting yourself in that situation every now and then. It's uncomfortable and it sucks. But you learn from it and it helps you create a better schedule. All right, I'm going to get onto the questions. First one came in, Federico. Hi Evan, question: in what formats will your book be available? Paper, PDF, ebook, audiobook? Ask because I just got to know Audible from Amazon a few weeks ago and be great to have your book there also narrated by yourself. What do you think? So I've talked about this a few times. The book, we got the approval to get a deluxe ebook version and an audiobook version, which is rare for a first-time author. So that's awesome. I'm super excited about it. I am going to insist that I read it. I hate hearing books from authors that are not read by the author. I think it's one, the author's either lazy or two, they just don't have the voice to do it or the charisma personality to do it. It's something that I think I would be good at. And I can't imagine, I can't imagine anybody else reading my book. I will, and I don't see a reason why the publisher wouldn't want me to do it. I think it just makes sense. But if they don't, I'm going to fight like crazy for it. Just, yeah, I'm going to be upset if they don't. So I'm going to, I'm going to, that's going to be a huge battle if I don't, but again, I think it's going to be something that is just a no-brainer for me to do. So, yeah. So I mean, I'm not in marketing the book mode yet, but when I get there, I'm going to really appreciate your feedback and comments and suggestions on it. Amanda, more content about hustling while you wait would be great. It's so painful to depend on others for your next move. Also, what are the best strategies to build an audience from scratch? For your book deal and promo besides YouTube. So last week my topic was hustling while you wait. You know, sometimes you have to wait for people to get things done and not just sitting on your thumbs waiting, but going out and doing something and taking action to move your, your goals forward. I think what helps there is just to kind of go deeper and give you a little bit more context. I think as an entrepreneur, you've got a multiple number of projects that you're working on, right? You're, you know, say you have 3 different buckets, 3 big projects that you're working on. I'd be looking at Okay. If I'm waiting on one person to get back to me for this project, is there another way that I can move that project forward? So if I'm looking at the book, okay, I'm waiting on my, my editor to get back to me. So what else can I do for the book? Can I research other people who've done great audiobooks? Can I research people who have done great book launches? Can I create more content around my book for my YouTube channel? You know, just building up momentum for that project so that when I get an answer back, I don't have to wait to start all the other things, right? So I can do things in parallel while I'm waiting. The other option is to, if I'm, you know, if I'm waiting on bucket 1 for somebody, then I start working on bucket 2, work on the next project, work on the other thing that you have going on in parallel. Just the point is, I know it sucks waiting on, on people, especially when there's a, you know, a big deal that you're waiting on or a big client or a big media thing that you're waiting on, preparing for a big presentation. It really suck. Entrepreneurs hate waiting. I think people hate waiting in general, but entrepreneurs especially. We are doers. We want other people to be doers and we're frustrated when they are not as much of a doer as we are. It's frustrating. So don't wait, just do something else. And as frustrating as it is, just recognize that you're moving your projects forward in another capacity. Just look at your schedule and say, hey, I'm gonna move another one of my projects forward. And in terms of building an audience from scratch for a book deal and promotion that's not on YouTube, when you are trying to get a book deal, the thing that they are looking especially for a first-time author, is your audience because the publisher wants to know that you're gonna be able to promote the book and they wanna see that you have an audience to promote it to. YouTube is my favorite place to be, one, because of the sheer size of the place, of the audience, over a billion active users every month, which is insane. And two, because video lends itself well to my strengths. I would rather do a video interview than write out an interview with somebody. And so when people ask me to do an interview, I had one earlier, Today, I guess when this video goes live, it won't be earlier today, but anyway, my default response when somebody asks to do an interview with me or a podcast with me is, that's awesome. I'd love to do it. Let's make it a video on my channel. And it helps give them exposure too. So I would think it's figuring out what platform best fits your strengths. So if you're really good at writing, then maybe you should have a blog or maybe you should be on Twitter and go all in. If you're really great at taking pictures and maybe you should be on Instagram, Facebook. If you're really good at interviewing people and you like narrating, you like talking, but you don't want to be on camera, maybe you start a podcast. The point is you leverage your strengths to the medium that best fits the audience that you're going after. And again, what you're really good at doing yourself. So YouTube would be my default because of the size and my strengths. It doesn't have to be YouTube, but the worst thing you can do is try to do everything. It is. That's what, that's what a lot of people do is like, oh, I got to be on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and everything. And you do everything half-assed and you get no results from it. You say, oh, that social media stuff doesn't work. Where it's better to find one thing that you feel really fits your audience and your strengths and go all in on that. And then you can branch out if you need to, but don't feel like you have to be everywhere because that's the path to being mediocre. Next one, Sensation Sioman. Evan, still waiting on Michelle Obama's 10 rules for success. You know, all of the videos that I make, the top 10, the Enespressos, they're requests from you guys, from the audience. And there's a lot of requests. We have— I'm going to load it now. We have 1,257 requests right now, and we're making 4 top 10 videos per week. So it's going to take a long time to fill up. And so I don't know when Michelle Obama is going to come up. I know she's on our list. I know multiple people have requested her. It's coming, I promise. But don't freak out if it doesn't come instantly because we have a lot of requests and I love the requests and keep them coming. And sometimes people get upset when it doesn't come instantly. Like there's a lot of requests and it's a lot of work to put those together, right? Like you guys get to enjoy a 10 to 20 minute clip, but we've got to sift through hours and hours and hours and hours of research to find that best 10 to 20 minute clip. So it's coming. Have some patience. Don't freak out on me. Next, Liev, Liev. I hope I pronounced that okay. Question about delegation. Main question, how can I delegate best as a starting entrepreneur without a budget? So it depends what kind of budget we're talking about. If you're talking zero budget, then I'd be looking at volunteers, I'd be looking at interns. I built my business, the start of EvanCarmichael.com was off of high school interns. I had high school interns and foreign language interns who were helping me build up the website, dealing with authors and customers. High school students have to come for their credit, so you have to teach them and mentor them and give them assignments. Foreign language people come because they're trying to learn English and they want to work environment in English. So there's pros and cons. Like, the pros that they're free and they have to do the work to get the credit that they're looking for. But you have to remember that you can't just give off an assignment and let them do their thing. You have to mentor them and coach them and train them and be there, be available for them as well. Don't just look at it as one way. It's got to be, it's got to be both ways. And that's a, that's an investment of of time. And sometimes the time isn't worth it. You know, sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze. Sometimes the amount of work that goes into training and mentoring somebody is so much that you're not getting a return. And so that's— there's a downside to having free labor as well. If you have a small budget, I'd be looking at using Upwork. I have a team on Upwork. I don't know how many people are on my Upwork now. 10 people, maybe more. There's 16 of us, so probably more. It's basically people who work remotely. The first guy I hired, I hired for 1 hour a day, and that was 1 hour that freed up more than an hour of my time time because he was better at what I was doing. And you can hire people overseas for a really good rate, and for them it's a really good rate too. Like, you think you could hire somebody for $4 or $5 US an hour, and you may think, $4 or $5 US an hour, that's, that's, it's a steal, like these guys should be earning more. But in their countries, that's a really good rate to earn, you know. So some of the people that I've hired used to have to drive an hour to get to work or take the train for an hour to get to work and now take the train for an hour to get back from work doing call center job that they hated and getting paid half of what they're getting paid with me. So you get to work from home, get to make double, and they're doing work that they like. And so yeah, it'd be $5 an hour, depending on the task. I pay more for the video production and the other stuff, but you don't need to have a big budget to get started. You could hire somebody for an hour a day or 2 hours a day or a couple hours a week. To help alleviate some of the tasks. So when you say without a budget, maybe there's room for a tiny budget to free up your time to do bigger things. She continued on, what are the best sources to use? I know about Fiverr, but it takes so much time to find and organize. I use Upwork. That's my favorite place to go. I've done some stuff on Fiverr. When I do it though, I look for somebody that I could ideally transition to somebody being long-term. I just recently got one of my, two of my YouTube videos transcribed on Fiverr and she did a good job. I'm looking at turning that into a long-term relationship so you don't have to log into Fiverr each time to do it. There's some fun stuff that you can do on Fiverr too, which I like doing and surprising people on my team every now and then. But if I had to pick a place to find people to be on my team long-term, I'd definitely look at Upwork. Been on with them for a couple years. I'm not affiliated with them in any way apart from being a really happy customer and definitely recommend it for anybody who's trying to build a team where you don't have to have them close to you. How do I select which part of my activity to delegate first? So for that one, I'd be looking at where are you spending your time that you feel is a low leverage there's no leverage for you. What are you working on in your day-to-day activities that if you could free up that hour and give it to somebody else, it's, it's like, for example, data entry or administrative work, something that is not the CEO. If you look at all the tasks from janitor to CEO, where does the task fall on that plate? And you want to play up here as much as possible. You can't do it if you're a solo entrepreneur. You're not going to be CEO time 100% of the time. That's not going to happen. But you want to play up here as much as you can because that's the high-value stuff that you're among the best in the world at, that's gonna help you grow your business. The challenge is for entrepreneurs, you're spending so much time down here doing the low-paying work that you never have the time to focus on really building something amazing. So the stuff you wanna delegate, especially at the start, is the stuff that's down here that's taking up a chunk of your time. So admin work, accounting work. I mean, accounting is one of the first things a lot of people will outsource and delegate. It could be some of the marketing for your business, anything that, that You can't automate, it needs to be done by a person, but it shouldn't be done by you. And I'd just be looking at— an easy way to do is look at your schedule, look at your, look at a typical week for you and outline where are you spending your time? And then how much of that is high leverage versus low leverage? And the low leverage stuff, maybe you just get rid of it. Maybe that it shouldn't even be delegated to anybody out. It should just be gone cuz it's not high value. And then look to automate it. And then if you can't automate it, then you look to delegate it. Follow that process, then you can hopefully free up big chunks of your calendar to focus on the higher leverage stuff. Tamara is asking, what kind of surprises do you find on Fiverr? I do some fun stuff here. So as an example, I had a— there was a guy who would climb a coconut tree and throw down a coconut, and on the coconut is a message. And so I would send— I would, for example, create one for my programmer and say, "You are the best programmer, Adil," or "Thank you for your programming, Adil." So I sent him this video and he's like, "What is happening?" It's like there's a guy climbing a coconut tree, throwing it down, and then the surprise is at the end that has this message. There are other ones where they'll put a message up on a, on a jumbotron at a stadium, or this guy like deep sea diving underwater and he turns over a shell and there's a message on it. And they just do it through their animation, right? Like they're not actually doing that each time. Although the coconut tree guy is each time, which is interesting. I had a guy dress up, not dress up. He's basically, he's wearing a thong and he rubs chocolate sauce all over him while he sings happy birthday. I sent that to one of my friends. So I love the fun, silly stuff because there's so much boring stuff that happens in, you know, running a business and in day-to-day life that it's fun to have something different and unique. And there's a lot of those kind of fun things that you can do. There was a guy who— you can do it sometimes for marketing too. I had a guy who, um, there's a kid, 8 years old or 10 years old, who would wear a shirt with a message on it as long as his mother would approve the message, right? It can't be something dirty because he's got to wear it to school every day. And he would wear the same shirt for 5 days during a week at school. So I gave him an Evan Carmichael shirt and he wore that to school. I like supporting entrepreneurs, so I like, I like the fun stuff. And for the practical business stuff, I've used it for transcribing, translating videos. I haven't done too much on the business side thinking about it because I prefer to hire people longer term using Upwork. So thanks for the question. You can have some fun with, but you can get lost on Fiverr too. There's so many fun things that you can realize that like 2 hours of your day is gone. So just watch out for that. Can you have simple tips like a simple system on how to start taking care of What to delegate? I notice that it's not obvious to make the first necessary small step and then the next small step to look to find somebody. Could you explain that in simple words? I made a video on Tim Schmoyer's channel and Video Creators about how to hire people on Upwork. And I think that is probably the best thing to look at. I've made a few on my channel too, but that's the most recent one. I think it's probably the best thing to look through 'cause it goes step by step, my process, which is also a weird process. Different than most people. Most people hire for the wrong things, end up with the wrong candidate, end up getting frustrated, and then, then it's like, "Oh no, this person, I'm not gonna be able to hire somebody, so I'm gonna go back to doing it myself," which isn't the right strategy because you can't build something great if you're doing it all on your own. So just because your first hire didn't work out, don't let that prevent you from going out and hiring somebody else. Your process is probably broken. I believe the hiring process is broken for most companies. So that video should help and It addresses a lot more than I could do in a couple minutes here. Question from Two Helpful Guys. Hey Evan, we love the content you are putting out around the book. It's building our anticipation and we can't wait until you put it out. Cool. That's the part of it. I mean, part of making these videos were one, to document the process, to make it easy for anybody who is starting to write their own book to see what goes into it. You know, I'm working with Penguin Random House. So if you wanna work with a major publisher, this series kind of outlines how that works. This is episode 44, so you can go back and see how everything has gone from the start. And also it helps build anticipation, builds excitement for me too. Like, this is a long process before the book comes out, and it's great to have you guys with me and to give you updates every week on how things are going, and it keeps me motivated and excited as well. I think it's a good lesson in that whatever things you're working on behind the scenes, you can let people in on that, and it's, it's good motivation for you and for them, and it's good marketing as well. So whatever next big project you're working on, don't just release the finished thing. But let people tag along the journey, the struggles, the ups, the downs, and it gets them interested. People like that little behind-the-scenes look. So this was my test and it's worked out well. I encourage you to look at it for your own business. And the question was, do you have any tips for delegation when you don't have employees, maybe virtual assistants, outsourcing of some kind? Yeah, I don't think you should jump into a full-time hire at the start. I think it's a big mistake. I think if you don't know how to manage, you've never managed somebody before, and you're a startup and you don't have the budget, that, you know, you put a lot of money into one full-time person, that's a big risk. And it's a big learning curve for you on how to manage that person. I'd much prefer to crawl before I walk, before I run. And I would recommend hiring somebody for 1 to 5 hours a week to test, one, your ability to delegate, two, your communication and being able to pass information on and off, and three, can you get results from that person? Like, does it, At the beginning, it doesn't free up your time. You think I'm gonna hire somebody to free up my time. At the start, it doesn't free up your time cuz of all the training that has to go into it. And so ideally you start with a project that is easy for them to pick up and then you give them more and more responsibilities with time and not just like, woo, a lot of entrepreneurs just dump all of their stuff on their first employee and they get overwhelmed and that person doesn't understand everything and then you get frustrated and it doesn't work out. So something Easy, something small, something short. It tests your ability to manage somebody on a small scale and let them prove themselves. Let them show that they can add value to your business. It is immensely satisfying and freeing once they pick it up, right? To know that this is getting taken care of and it doesn't have to be you all the time doing it is an amazing feeling, but it does take some time to get to. So again, for that, I'd recommend checking out the video on Tim Schmoyer's channel. When the video, this video goes on YouTube, I'll link it up in the description too, so you guys can check it out. That's it. So I'd love to hear your thoughts, your questions about the topic of, of prioritizing. And if you have a, a thought or question about my book, uh, about the book writing process, leave in the comments below and, uh, I'll answer it on next week's video. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.