3 Automations Every Manager Needs

Management, whether it's managing yourself or managing other people, it's a very tiring thing. It's a duty that many of us have, but it's hard to ignore how much willpower, attention and bandwidth management in and of itself requires. That's why I really hate to see managers, including myself, spending our time on things that, well, really a human doesn't need to be doing. So in this YouTube video, I want to go through three different automations that I think just about any manager could benefit from. The automations I'm going to walk you through are ones that are pretty universal, so you can apply them in one workflow, but then kind of wash, rinse and repeat to also apply them to other areas of your business life, organizational structure, whatever. In fact, if you're a member of our free Facebook group, you've probably seen us post comments or discussions around the theme of automation in management again and again. And for those of you in that group, you probably are going to find a few of these somewhat familiar. And if you're not a member of that free Facebook group, check out the description below. But with that, let's dive into our first Automation I think just about any manager could benefit from automation. Number one is what I'm going to call one spot delegation. It's basically the idea that you go to one spot and you can delegate just about any miscellaneous task. The term miscellaneous is important here, because this is usually when I see managers or business owners or leaders, things that aren't the best used of their skills, something off the wall happens and no one's job is really to fix that weird issue, so the manager or leader takes it on. But wouldn't it be nice if we had some kind of automatic way for us as managers to acknowledge an issue and say I should really give this to so and so who can take care of this. Even though it's not their core job per se, they're the best suited and I'm going to delegate this issue or emergency to that person. The only way that kind of delegation can happen in a fast paced, maybe higher stress moment in the business, in my opinion, is to have an automatic way to delegate it. To give you an example of what this might look like, we here at ProcessDriven use a tool called ClickUp for our task management. And the way I've set up this kind of automation for myself is by creating a form view. In this form view, I'm able to quickly fill out a few things, whether I'm on my phone, on my computer, at the Gym doesn't matter, or anywhere with the Internet. I can fill out this form, fill out a few pieces of information, and voila, the task is out of my hands. The form in this case, plus some accompanying automations, will automatically assign this task to the person I select, automatically set the proper due date, and automatically keep me updated on the progress of that issue. Because I created it. The example I showed here was of course me using a form view in ClickUp. But I just want to be clear and say that any task management system should allow you to create some kind of similar automated workflow. The magic here is to make sure that whatever you use allows you to create a form or something like it that you can access from anywhere. Even if you're not on your home device, even if you're not on your desktop, you should be able to quickly create an issue and delegate it off of your plate. By making this process super easy and dare I say automated, it makes it a lot easier for you to respect your own time and make sure tasks are reaching the right person and even if it's a one time emergency or something like that. Okay, so that is automation number one. What's next? The second automation I have is actually not around task management at all, but more around communication. One thing I've learned by managing a small team and kind of learning throughout that whole process by making mistakes, is that communication is even more important than you think it is, or I think it is. Every time something goes wrong, it comes down to communication. So when it comes to communicating, it might be surprising to realize that there are a few ways you can actually automate that communication. In fact, my next two automations are both around the idea of communication. For this tip though, I want to focus on the communication that you personally are writing to a subordinate, to a co worker, to a peer whomever. In this case, what I'd like you to do is consider automating things that you say frequently. I know that sounds basic, right? Our goal here is to take common phrases, sentences, messages you might write and template them in some way. The best part here is that you can usually lock things up and line things up with quick keyboard commands. So rather than writing a long paragraph explaining why you're giving feedback, you can have a keyboard command that automatically pulls in that same response every time. The beauty of thinking about automations in this micro communication based function form is that we can create keyboard commands that when we type a few letters, it expands our text out to explain paragraphs or emojis or concepts in a much Longer form than we may want to write. I don't know about you, but whenever I have a communication malfunction, it's usually because I'm in a rush. I jot down something that I think makes sense, but I don't take the time to really spell it all out. And so there's confusion on the other side, especially if you are a remote first environment. With these kind of text expansions, we can write something that is brief, that still saves us time, but make sure that our automation is working in the background to make sure basically the stuff we say comes across nicely and we're giving all the obligatory disclaimers without having to spend time manually typing out our thoughts the same way again and again. So in terms of tools for how to do this, how to implement this, one easy way is to implement email templates. That's a bit obvious here, so I'm not going to count that as our tip. The second way to go about doing this would be to use a tool like textexpander. And this is actually something I use pretty much all the time here at ProcessDriven every day. I use Textexpander all the time for things like writing my email address, address, offer names, URLs, and yes, also for adding things like disclaimers and explanations at the bottom of messages I write. Even though I'm not having to spend as much time writing these all out, I can intentionally think about how I want to communicate and be very thoughtful while also saving myself some time. So as the second automation I think any manager needs, it's some kind of automation that allows you to template your communication, whether it's email communication, which pretty much any tool has that built in, or in my case, text expander or tools like it to allow you to basically shorthand any form of communication that you want to use. So that is my second automation for any manager, really any person out there. For our third automation I want to talk through today, what I want us to think about is one of the most time consuming parts of management, especially management that involves project. The biggest time waste I see in my own project management journey is reminding people, you know, going around saying, hey, did you do this yet? Are you going to do this? This is going to be late. Make sure you do this, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. All of a sudden you feel like you are just a professional nag and that's just not a fun place to be. Despite it feeling unpleasant for both parties that this kind of pestering and prompting around due dates and deadlines, it's important and it does need to happen, particularly for ones where the deadlines come up quickly and they could be very high stakes if a date is missed. But my question here is if we're going to look at automations, how can we have this stuff happen? These reminders go out without it taking up a massive amount of the manager's time? In this case, what I would look for is a reminder system that you can automate again. Just like the first example, if you have any kind of task management or messaging system that you use in your business, almost always you will be able to build some kind of system like this into it. In fact, in our business we have a reminder based automation system in two different pieces of software we use. In our project management system ClickUp, we have an automation that says whenever a due date arrives, send a comment automatically alerting the manager and the person assigned the task without anyone having to think about it. These reminders are going out and making sure due dates are brought to people's awareness and are ultimately satisfied. In another tool we use called Missive, which we actually talk about a lot up here in this other video, Missive is our email communication tool and for us it's really important that our emails are responded to within one business day and if one business day arrives and that email is still set open, we actually use rules automatically in Missive to prompt people to hey, make sure things get resolved. Both of these systems work in the same way and basically reduce that kind of mental load of the manager. I don't need to go in and check all the emails and see how long have they been sitting. Do I need to follow up with Susie? No, the automation is doing that for us. So that's the third type of automation I really think any manager could employ, regardless of your tech stack. And that's just automatic reminders about deadlines or what I like to call them promises to the outside world. Now I know by now some of you who maybe don't want to have a really complicated technology stack are thinking, oh my gosh, do I need all these fancy tools in order to actually practice any of these automations? Well, I want to throw one more automation at you, a bonus one that is going to be for anyone out there who doesn't want to get super fancy with their tech stack but still wants a little bit more automation in their life. This fourth bonus tip is around an automation that people don't really think of as an automation and that's called recurrence. Recurrence is basically a feature that you'll find in pretty much any calendar. So like Google Calendar or Outlook or in any task management system. And a recurrence allows you to have a task or an event or a something repeat automatically. Now I know this isn't traditionally what people think of when they think of automations, but but the reason I want to put this in here as a bonus tip is because I feel like most people do not take advantage of the power a recurrence can have to help remind you of things, to help remind other people of things, and to prevent you from having to remember things. Reduce that mental load, which again is a huge weight on any manager. If you are looking to get started in automating any workflow or systemizing any workflow and you don't want to get too fancy in your tech stack, make sure you take advantage of recurring tasks. One example of a recurring task might be something like this. This is a task that I actually have for myself and every single person on my team that we just recently started, which basically prompts everybody to spend one hour every week learning something. I know this sounds so basic right now. How exactly does a learning routine have something to do with management? Well, let's think about it. A lot of the time I at least spend as a manager is in problem solving or navigating people to resources. And if I can invest in my people and myself to help us better navigate things on our own, all of a sudden our management burden can be reduced because people's independence has increased. So as basic as this sounds, if you have any task or calendar system in your life or in your business or in your organization, especially if multiple people have the same system, you can implement this immediately to start getting those things that are on your to do list onto the right person's to do list and ultimately try to decentralize some of that power and memory weight among the whole organization. Now I recognize I have just thrown a whole lot at you. Three different tech tools and one like kind of techy solution. And if you're like most managers or even like myself, any leader out there, it tends to be a bit of a lonely place. You don't know what you don't know. You don't have people to bounce your ideas off of because you do have that leader hat on. So if you are someone who found this video helpful, I mean like and subscribe, that would be great. But beyond that, check out the link in the description below to join our free Facebook group. You can find more videos and thought provoking questions like this video for free and you can connect with other business leaders like you who are looking to be more systematic, automated and ultimately more efficient in their day to day business operations. If that's something that's interesting to you, check out the link in the description. But otherwise, thanks for watching and enjoy the process.