Build Processes in ClickUp | LIVE Example: Newsletter SOP Creation

Hello everybody. Welcome back for another workflow Wednesday. I'm Layla. If you don't know, I don't know how you're watching this video, if you don't know that, but I run the Facebook group that this is live streaming into. If you're watching this on YouTube on the replay, you probably want to join the Facebook group so that way you can join this conversation live. In this particular workflow Wednesday, I decided to be a little bit selfish and I'm actually going to be going through process work that I have to do for myself and do it live on camera in front of all you. Because one of the things that have come up this week, there's been a few conversations with clients that have been really eye opening. One of them was that there are certain people who get really paralyzed by process work. And I've actually seen a few people this week who really got stuck in the weeds and felt driven to get over detailed and felt really, really just overwhelmed by the idea of mapping their processes. And that's a whole type of person, usually the perfectionist, the person who really wants to get all the details right from the get go, they end up going so slowly through getting the processes out of their head that they just never do it. And so for that person, for those people, I wanted to do this live here to just demonstrate about how long I take when I'm going through this for myself and why going light and fast through each iteration of the process is what I find most helpful. For those of you don't know when I'm kicking off a client project, a lot of the times or almost every time really, the prep work is to do a little piece of process mapping and this can paralyze people and this can thrill others. But hopefully today I'll demonstrate kind of what that looks and feels like on the regular. The other kind of client conversation that is inspiring today, which I think is an interesting one, is around people who do custom work, whether they're an agency, whether they're a custom bespoke anything. And they're thinking, you know, I my services do not lend well to being process driven or process centric. So I'm still trying to kind of figure out how exactly do I apply processes and becoming process driven to my type of business. And my response to that was, well, there are so many things besides your service that can be so if you are someone who's running a completely custom business and that needs to be that way. First of all, we need people like you. There are people who need custom services and you need to exist. But there's ways that you can still build out processes and that's mostly on function or focusing on the things that either don't change every time, which might be your sales process or focus on back office. If you have a lean mean machine humming in the background, you can focus that custom energy towards client work. Like there's no, there's no problem with that. But you really need to get your back office if you're in a custom business solid because every little thing is going to eat away at you and you already have a really time intensive service. So today let's dive into some live process work. And if you are watching this live, I would love your feedback or your thoughts around whether this is a helpful demonstration to you if I'm getting too into the weeds or what have you. And as always, if you have any thoughts or questions as we dig into this, let me know. So the process I'm working on today is one that I am embarrassingly unprocess oriented about. I think there's a misconception that people who do a certain thing for a living are going to have everything nailed down for themselves. I mean, do you really want to work with. Let's just think about like an example here. Do you really want to be coached by an Olympic athlete who was just born like super, super inclined to physical fitness? Or would you rather be coached in your fitness journey by someone who was overweight for a while, then slowly got themselves back in shape? I know which one I would find more approachable and I feel like that applies to process folks as well. Just because I know what I should be doing doesn't mean I am making all of the time to build everything out as a process all from in the get go. Just in one week I'm sitting down and building all my processes. That's not how it works for me. To get to the point here, email newsletters are an area where I've decided that it's just not a top priority for me. Most marketing really is not a top priority right now because I've been focused so much on YouTube and figuring out how to do videos there. That's been my experiment for this quarter. And so email stuff has kind of been on the back burner really. This spring I was like, you know what, I should probably have an email list of some kind. And so I made a quick account on a tool and I did the thing that I tried to talk about last week, but the audio didn't work. So sorry for that. But I did this thing and I don't know if any of you can relate to being on either side of this equation, but I basically had this box filled with shiny ideas and I said, hey va, can you please create a process for how we could do email newsletters? And you know how it goes. You're like, you could do it. Sure. This is before I realized how I could have done this better, but I really stressed out the VA I had at the time, I'm sure by just saying create something and go for it. And my video last week, which did not record properly, so I might rerecord it at some point, but I just didn't have the patience. Last week was about how we can make that handoff better in the future. But one of the ways that I alluded to in this video that you probably did not get to see is by actually doing some of the thinking on our own. So what I am working on today is making my newsletter process a little bit clearer, a little bit better, and then being able to delegate this, if not fully, in part because I do enjoy doing the newsletters on my own. But there's a lot of pieces that do not need to all be me. So let's look at the current process I have. I drafted this up in. I've been time tracking myself. So let's see, it's been. It was about 10 minutes including getting this live stream up. So very quick draft here of my current process for my weekly newsletter. Now the first thing I want to ask about this process is is it actually necessary? So in this case, I think so. I jumped up from monthly to weekly because I just thought it was a better cadence with all the videos I was putting out to get them actually out to people when it was timely. And so that's a good first question is just, is something necessary? Can I just remove this whole thing and not worry about it at all? Because the less we have to build processes for, the easier it is to build processes. In this case, I do think it's necessary and that's why I wanted to bring it today. So I'm going to cross that one off as a yes, this is necessary, at least for what I want right now. Now let's look at the actual process I have right now. I literally have a task. This is embarrassing to admit, but you know, I'm human too. I literally have a task and I'll share it here called weekly email. And I'm using Mailerlite. Don't judge me. It's basic. It's enough for me. And this is it. And I copied this into my demo area. So the actual one has a little bit more context, but barely any. And it has a recurring due date to be on the. I believe it's the Monday before the Friday email goes out. So give myself a few wiggle days there, but that's that is it not fancy at all. And one of the opportunities that I see in this workflow from the get go is this task needs to become soped. I need to have a structure for how I want to do this. And that probably needs to include. Let's just zoom in a little bit and start talking about what we want to build here. I want to build an SOP to explain how to do it. I also want to probably have an approval stage in here because if I'm going to not do it myself, I probably want to at least have my eye on it, at least at the beginning to make sure that that final work before it goes out is good SOP approval. I mean, it needs an assignee. I think that's kind of assumed. Let's just put it in there. Assignee baked into the template I'll build. I think I also want to reconsider. The due date is Monday for a video or for an email that comes out Friday. Is that good? Maybe I could make the initial draft due Monday. Draft on Monday and then review on Wednesday. And I'm just experimenting things here. But if I think about building out a task, these are kind of the decisions I'm going to be able to make. So I want to try some stuff and see how it feels. What else could go in that task that would actually make it helpful? Links that'll be in the sop, but I want to make sure I have links out to Mailerlite and my. I have an SOP on Mailerlite, so I'll make sure I have that linked SOP for Mailerlite. Eventually I have to switch from Mailerlite, but that's a whole chore. So I'm going to focus on getting this down to a science first. Due dates. I got that Assignees approvals. It would be great if I could start booking these in advance. So that's something to consider here. Should the task be for one week at a time or should it be for one month at a time? Because a lot of the times these newsletters are promoting my YouTube content, which I do schedule in advance. Usually a few weeks, sometimes even a few months, depending on how honored I am or how much time I have. So which Is why you're probably seeing some YouTube content that's like new feature and it's actually like three weeks old. Sorry, I'm still new to YouTube, figuring that all out. So I might just put a question about this timeline. Do I want to do that in bulk or one by one? I don't know. But that's all a bunch of opportunities around that task. Trying to think if there's anything else that would be helpful there. You know what would probably be helpful? Those of you who are in marketing in this room probably, probably laughing. But I feel like it will be valuable to build, start a layer earlier and think about like an overall content strategy. Right now. The newsletters that I have going out, they include a lot of the times they feature the most recent video or the video that's coming out that day. But sometimes they also include and this is like also a little bit of a plug. They also include templates I'm testing to give out for free to the people announcing anything that's new, new services, new features, new team, anything like that. And sometimes just like my behind the scenes thoughts, things I'm working on. So maybe there's a way that I could actually build a task earlier. Again, I'm just experimenting here and I might actually do a little cyber stalking on this. Maybe I could build a task earlier that's a content plan for maybe a month at a time. Since I'm just doing YouTube and I just did develop a content plan for YouTube, I could probably pull off of that and build kind of a dialogue so there's a logical sequence of what the emails are for a month. I know I tried to do that one point, but I fell off the bandwagon. So maybe I can think about this step a little bit more and add something earlier. Okay. Content plan, which probably would be done by me task. Maybe it could be done by somebody else. All right. Once I have the task to go do Mailerlite, the current process is I make a copy of a previously sent email. Not very sophisticated, right? I literally tell everybody, don't just go to your outbox of your emails and find things to make templates for your client communications, like create an actual template. That way you don't accidentally copy old information over. Yet here I am in Mailerlite doing the same thing just to go through the status quo all live. Got that? And then write the email. So that's changing things. I have no structure on that. So I was a client of me. I'd sit there and say, you write how, what, what's in there. Is there a framework? And I know and I would see this if I was working with a client that copy a past draft. There are so many variants of the emails I've sent out. Which draft, again, template template is needed here rather than just a copy of past draft when there's tons of drafts to choose from. So, template, I need an SOP for what we are including or at least a structure. If my template's really good, maybe I don't need an SOP because the template itself kind of makes it clear what you need to write. Where once I write it, I schedule it. Oh, and I love this piece. I schedule it and then I see the typos. I don't know if anyone else has this problem. I write a ton. I am writing all day, every day. And I'm a fast writer. I am not an accurate writer and I hope my intent comes across. But a lot of the times, the reason I do so much talking stuff is because my brain or my voice can operate and think through things faster than my fingers can. And so, yeah, typos are not my friend. So this is, this is definitely a problem. This needs to be resolved and I need to have a revision process of some kind or review process where either it's myself or someone else giving this some time to review. And I know personally I struggle with proofreading my own stuff. I just start reading it at a pace of which I would speak it and then I miss obvious typos. All right. And scheduling probably need to clarify SOP because I know I have them going out on Friday. I also know if I were to look at Mailerlite and pull up my historical records, I pop the time around a little bit. It's 9, it's 8:45, it's 9:15, it's 11. So I needed to decide on that time and that's just something that I need to work on. I did use colors here, which I don't normally, but again, we're keeping this simple today. What are we up to? We are at 15 minutes or so. So I drafted this in 10 minutes and I revised it in 15. This is about how long this should take you. Probably less because I improved and drafted to draft. I mean, this should be a 20 minute little piece and I'm just doing one process at a time. So I did use colors up here, as you can see, to kind of point out who's doing what. And in this case, a lot of this stuff's doing but being done by me. And this is an opportunity to get more stuff onto my team's plate. At least some of the drafting. I love doing the writing, so that way I can tell kind of a unique story of what's going on. But I probably don't need to do a lot of this. So trying to think of what some of these things and probably about half the writing and definitely all of the scheduling and maybe some of the proofreading could all be done by my team. Maybe I just do the team. Maybe I just do the bulk of the writing or just pieces of the writing to make it feel like I want it to feel. Huh. That just feels good even just looking at it. Okay, so I have that. Let's keep. I could either redraw this process map to draw the new version, or I could keep revising it using red. Like I'm doing. I'm kind of feeling like the red is how my brain wants to work today. So let's just go through it one more time and see what else I could be doing better. If this was. If this was my own and I was just sitting here and it is my own, but if I was just sitting here and doing this kind of. This is my favorite task. Doing like Friday afternoons as my own process improvements or maybe on a Sunday morning over coffee is. I might go to Google right now and search email newsletter best practices or look up entrepreneurs that I know that are in marketing and maybe see what they suggest for email newsletters. Especially for this content plan, I'm definitely going to need to do a little bit of research to know what to even try to put in there in there to make it feel all connected. But a lot of the stuff I don't need any outside insight for, so I'm just going to keep flying through. So. So content plan. I know this needs to have a date, and I know I need to do more research as to what it should include. What's nice about all these tasks that I'm documenting right now is this is a routine task. So this is going to be a recurring task, which already makes it so much more valuable to me because by having it be a recurring task, once I do this, once I write this stuff down, I can truly delegate it and just know it's going to get done because I have cool people who do things when they are too. All right, so we've got. I need to figure out what to include research. Okay. Content plan date, routine task. We talked about the SOP approval assignee. I don't think there's anything else in there. Maybe I can take advantage of the proof features built into Mailer or built into ClickUp. So that's what I'm using for the reviewing process. Something to think about. Okay. One other big thing, and this is less applicable to back office functions like this, but I just want to see if there's any steps I can combine or eliminate. Not really. This is pretty darn clear. But I do want to change the order of this. So we're going to have to add a process in there. Let's go down here and figure out what we'd want to add. Maybe after the writing. Right. Maybe we'd want to do a test email. Do I want to send two test emails, one to one person, one to the other, to have them both proofread it? Do I care that much? Test email number one. Maybe I will do two. I'll do test email number one and test email number two. This would go to my team and then the second one would go to me. So that way I'm testing more for content, maybe a final look because I'm not the best editor anyway and, and then the scheduling and then hopefully we will not have the C typos feature. You know what I would like to add on here, and I know this is the opposite, opposite of simplifying a process, but I don't really have a set process for reporting on how these things go, how the newsletters go, because this is kind of a new thing that I just started experimenting with kind of haphazardly. I was never super intentional about knowing like who's in what area. So while it might not fit into this process, I think this could become a data point that goes into like a monthly metrics report. So I'm going to put that over here. Not that it's a connected process, but just that it kind of feeds into it a little bit. Oopsie. Let's zoom in and I'll just make that like our monthly monthly metrics report, which I do have right now. I'm also doing that all myself, but I wonder if I could start delegating maybe the marketing metrics to some of the team that could then pull those in and just bring them to our meetings. That could be pretty cool. Monthly metrics report on maybe some opens clicks. Yeah, cool. And the only other thing I can think of that's kind of a big picture setting. Delete some of this stuff so it's less messy would be perhaps checking if there are any automations or segmentation I should make. So I'm using mailerlite I think Mailerlite is a fantastic first email newsletter tool for someone who has a very small list or doesn't need a list very, very much like most service businesses, if you get 10 clients you are booked. So I don't believe that you need to get the most sophisticated platform out there. That's just my own opinion. I'm not a marketing pro, so take that with a giant chunk of salt. But that's my approach right now. But it does have built in automation and segmentation around things like did someone click? If so, add them to this list. Did someone whatever, if so, add them to this list. I think it could be interesting. Just as a side note because this comes up when I'm working on these processes is to take a second to go review my overall account automations take to track key URLs. So for example, I could set up an automation that says if someone clicks on the link that goes to my services page, add them to the group saying they're potentially interested in services. So that will not go in this process unless I want to have it be a recurring thing. I check often, which I don't think I do, but I will add it to my team's ideas area. That's been such an important area for my team to keep track of ideas because I come up with a lot of them and they can't all be done. So. So knowing what ideas need to be done right now and knowing which ones like this one could be maybe done down the line, I will dump that into the ideas area and then we will rank them and put them into sprints for future, future periods of time. So these two things not going to worry about right now. Let's get into this. All right, so now that we're here, I started experimenting. I'm going to flip over to ClickUp because I know you guys appreciated seeing kind of the live working session before move all my so many screens. I have five screens staring at me right now. I'm going to flip over and we are going to go into ClickUp and actually build out this process. Now flip back and forth between the actual map that we just made and between this and we can kind of go through it that way. So let's see Layla, we have to go through and for now I know I have the mystery of the content plan since that is most likely not going to be part of this template, meaning that'll be a separate task with a separate recurrence frequency. I'm also going to cut that out of this and make that a to do for later. I can either add it to the ideas if it's not an immediate to do, or just do it. As soon as I finish this, we'll see what I see, what time looks like. All right, so I think I'm going to make this better of a title weekly newsletter in Mailerlite. Cool. So description. What do I want to put in here? I want to put an sop. I want to put approval steps, assignees, drafts. All right, let's just go. I'm in the demo area right now, but once I finish this task, I'll template and bring it over. I just like to work in the demo area in case I accidentally flash my screen to the wrong area and you're like seeing way too much stuff, especially on lives. All right, so step one, let's just start with what we have right now. If I was actually doing this, most likely we'd have. Here's a thought. Do I want these to be subtasks or do I want them to just be checklist items? I don't know that I need a lot of complication here. So this is my initial thought. Maybe let's just hold off and I'll just draft these in the description and we'll decide momentarily here. So let's just do it this way. Task Copy a past draft. Right? Write the email. Test email number one, test email number two, schedule email and not see typos because that will not happen anymore. Okay. So the decision as to whether I want to start building these out as subtasks or checklists is going to depend on how complex the task is. And the reason I caught myself here is because this is actually a really simple task. My whole SOP for this is probably just gonna be one page. If I were to use Word or something, it would be about a one page sop. And I don't think I need. Do I need specific due dates for each of these steps? So copy past draft. Test email number one, schedule email. I don't know that I do. It'd be nice to have it scheduled in advance. I really don't care when it gets done. So I'm just gonna put them all as either a checklist or use custom fields. I'm feeling the custom field bandwagon right now, but let's see. Copy past draft. Okay, let's start writing the SOP for this. So step one. Login to Mailerlite. I would link to SOP doc about Mailerlite, since I have one just explaining how you get your account access for that. What's the URL? All that stuff. I'll link to that. Step two, I think I want to correct myself here and in real time. I'm actually going to pop into Mailerlite and I will pick the template and I'll even name it our template. Imagine I'd done that. Locate the name of template template in Mailerlite. Click Copy. Now, I might include a screenshot here to show what that looks like. Step three, if I can type, I'm looking back. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. You're not seeing what I'm typing there. There you go. Now you are just typing out step one, two, and three. Looking back at this, I'm just trying to see like in this area. Oops. Which I'm just erasing rather than drawing on. Is there anything else that I need to add into here? It'll probably be under the other steps. So that's that. Step three, Write the email. Write the email using the template as a starting point. Draft. Place the text with language appropriate for this week's content. Now, this is still. Step three is one that I'm really not sure if I want to delegate or if I want to draft that myself. See, once I set up my template, how strongly that strong that feels because like I said, right now, this is just for my YouTube content. So that's pretty cut and dry. Click Save Draft. Now, if I was just doing this for myself, I would probably go through and I'd pull open Mailer Light and I'd actually. Why did I keep flipping wrong one? If I was actually doing this, I would probably open up Mailerlite and just grab a screenshot once again to show where that saved draft is. Save Draft and then look for the Send test email button again. I would probably grab a screenshot of that and send it to yourself. Review it for typos and make any changes that are necessary. We are cruising through this. Step five, when all typos and errors have been fixed, send a second. Here's a question. Do I want to send a second test email or do I want to do something else? Let's pause here. One thing that I could probably create here to make this easier is to review it for typos and make any changes that are necessary. I think I could probably create a checklist to tell people, like, what do we want to check on here? Typos is one. Checking broken links is another. Checking images are the correct images are another. I could probably build a quick checklist here. I mean, not to say that anyone's stupid and they're not going to notice. But it's so hard to sometimes know what you should be looking for. So I might add a checklist here, then make any changes that are necessary. Review it for using the edit mailer edit or let's say troubleshoot check. Review email checklist and make any changes that are necessary. Add screenshot all right, when all types of errors have been fixed, look for the send send test email button. And here's where I have some optionality. Do I want to have them send the email to me and then it just gets thrown into my inbox? I'm pretty good. I've now got a good strategy that helps me stay at inbox zero pretty regularly. But there's a potential this could get lost and most likely if I have any revisions I'll be having to jump back into this task. Anyway, one of the ideas that came up in the workflow mapping which this is where it helps to kind of know the tools that you're using and what they're capable of is I know there's a proof feature built into ClickUp and it works for images, it works for PDFs so it doesn't work with HTML right now and it probably works super nicely with just attaching this. But I know that this person and I'd have to experiment it, go through it once myself, could somehow get their actual email in into into ClickUp for me. So I think that's, that's what I'm going to try as my beta process here and export as PDF. I'll have to check create a subtask comment to this task in a comment and assign the comment to Layla saying proofread. That way I can actually use the built in functionality within ClickUp to give revisions and approvals. Now I'm going to take my camera off here just momentarily and I'm actually going to pull in an image. Here we go. And I'm going to show you what that looks like because I think that could help us both decide. So I just attached this image. I did it directly to the task details. I could have also done it in the comments. So here's just a big old image that was the first one that I clicked on and this proofing feature, I think it's highly underrated. Like I said, it's only PDF and images right now. I'm sure it'll be HTML and other formats soon, but I could go in here and I could assign fix this example. I would like to do example. Otherwise she comes in Here she's like, what? What I have to fix and I can go in and revise all these different pieces of the document. So that way I'm not actually going in there. And I don't feel like this is micromanaging to me. To me, this feels just like a quick recommendation and then putting it back in their plate to make the changes that are necessary. So I can either assign things to anyone, someone has to resolve it, or assign it specifically to one person. I can pin this as the COVID image too. So that way we always have the picture of the actual article as the overall cover image of my task. That is very large now, though. So we're going to get rid of it. All right, cool. So now we've set up the proofing content. We're going on. We're going on. And that's Test Email Test 2. Do you see? Hopefully you're seeing how we just turned these steps. Bam. All of these ones are now in this task. And it's 30 minutes in. I've been talking as I've been doing it. Yes. I haven't pulled all the screenshots I'd normally like to, but this didn't take that long so far. So I know I want to add more structure to the writing step, but I think I'm going to jump into scheduling next. All right, so here we are. Schedule email. What step are we up to do? To do step five. Step six. I'm going to make this bigger. I'm just trying to keep the font a little bit larger for those of you watching. Alrighty. Step six. If I can type this morning, Schedule email. Using the schedule again, I'm running some of this stuff from memory. So if I was actually doing this, I'd have Mailerlite open in one tab and click up open the other and do it as I was documenting it. But I feel pretty strongly that my memory is correctly on this and once I do it, we'll see. Scheduling my using scheduler button. Our content schedule is now here. I have a choice. Do I put the content schedule, the time and date and the recurrence in here? I've done this before and here's the problem. I changed my mind and I think it would be more beneficial to me to link to my content plan or my overall content schedule, wherever I might have that, whether that's a ClickUp doc, whether it's the task where I actually planned it, wherever that stuff's going to live. I also have an SOP just on Mailerlite. Like I said, if I had my SOP for newsletter stuff, maybe that would be there. I think I want to link it somewhere just so that it's not hard typed in here in case there's multiple iterations. We change it and the one version ends up with off being off. So I'm going to use a link there instead. And now all these things I'm going to click through and if this was just me, I would go in here and I would create a task for all the things I need to go do if I can't do them in this moment. So that way I never miss them. I would just create a task. I'm in my test space. These are all ridiculously named. But to make sure that I went in and added all of these things. Once I added all the things and you saw this only six steps. This is not very bad. I would go through and try to use this process. Now before I do that, I want to handle some of the custom field pieces that I wanted to add here. We knew that in our draft one of the pieces that came up was having a review process and having some approvals. I was actually just in the Slack group for those of you who are also ClickUp or system service providers. There's a Slack group we have. It's just to kind of shoot the shit. So if any of you would like to join, let me know. I'll send you the link. But we were chatting in there I think yesterday, maybe it was this morning, about how, how we can manage approvals and pieces like that. And I think in this case I'm going to try out using either a checkbox or people icon. Let's see. Or drop down. Let's use a dropdown approval. Not approved. Approved. And let's just do that. Go with a nice teal and we'll just keep this gray. So we've got an approval dropdown, so I can have that. And since I don't have any subtasks, I don't think I need to approve each subtask step. It's just a newsletter and for me that's not a very critical process. So I'm okay with that. I could also create a dropdown for each draft coming out. Because I did not choose to make subtasks or even checklist for this. I might want to have custom fields to give me a little bit of visibility into what's going on in here. So in this case, maybe I'll make a dropdown for draft status. What do we call that? Revision. Revision Drafted again. Instead of using creative Statuses. I'll keep my statuses to do in progress. Done. Something simple like that. And I will just use these dropdowns to say drafted draft one, draft two. All this. Let's say it's typed, it's in there. Let's just say revision one and revision two. That feels good to me. If you are an actual writer you might have a more sophisticated process. But we will do that. And let's do those there. And scheduled now. I could do a date for scheduled now. I actually prefer to use the due date for that because in ClickUp your automations and most of the cool functionality only drives off of due dates, not date custom fields which is dumb and I think will eventually change. But since that is the case, I'm going to keep the due date as the scheduling date and I will put in here when we schedule it. We need to make this a step. Step 7 Change the due date capitals of this task to be the date you and time you scheduled this article. Article. My goodness. Email for and sorry, I'm flipping back over here. I'm just adding in that I'm going to make sure that I have people set the due date to be the actual schedule date. I have an automation in almost every content area that I have that once that due date is hit, it automatically moves it to a different area whether that's published or into a database style area. Because due dates are the only ones that allow us to do that fun automation. So there we are. Now that has not resolved all of our concerns over here where we wanted to. We have the proofing. We've checked that one off. We put some structure on the content. We did not do different duties around drafting and editing. I'm feeling pretty good about just making it one big thing. Assignees I did not put in this template, but I should once I'm in my proper space. I'll mark that off for now. We did include approvals and we did do the SOP links, although we could probably still use a little bit more to make this a proper process. So let's see what other fields we got here. We've got approval. We've got revisions going to use schedule date as the due date. Is there anything else I want to pull in here? Trying to think. I don't think so. We're going to leave it like that for now. I don't even know where I'm at. Where is this? Here it is. Let's add these custom fields so we can pretend that we're doing it and see how it Feels approval not approved by default and revision. We're going to keep it blank for by default. I'm just deciding what statuses and levels I want in my template. So not approved. And then we're just gonna leave that blank in the template. And for now we'll just say this is me and the due date will be. Well, I have to pick a time, but let's say Friday's at 9:00am or 8:45. Okay. Priority is gonna be low because it's always low versus other things. Weekly newsletter in mail or light. And what I would do now is go through this and try to actually do the process. Well, lucky me, I do have to schedule my Friday newsletter. I'm going to go through now and I will try to actually execute this process using this process and fill in any cracks as I go. That's step two. We've drafted it and now I'm going to actually use it and then I'm going to get someone else to use it. And that way we've got multiple layers of revisions. I'm feeling pretty good about this now. I know if I go back here, we still need to have our template. I think I keep flipping, forgetting to flip back. I hope you saw this. Maybe I didn't flip it back in time. I added the custom fields here just to see what they look like. And I put the status of the custom fields or the stage of the custom fields to be whatever I want it to be in my template. So that way I can then save this as a template and use it accordingly. Oops, not in there. In here. Because every ellipses does something different and I will save it as a template. So back here there's a few other things I know I need to do before I start working through it. I want to make sure I pick and I'll do this as I'm actually doing the process. I'll pick which template I want. Maybe it involves editing the existing ones and making a new one. Who knows? I'll pick which one that is. I need to create some kind of guideline around writing. I think for now I might just use good bad examples. If you haven't heard me talk about this, I feel like that's the lazy way for writing and qualitative stuff to write an sops just to collect a bunch of examples of good and bad and use them to eventually distill some rules and best practices. But I think to start I'm just going to use a examples approach. So that's an easy task of just pulling Some of my past ones that I liked or didn't like. SOP time. Yes. I need to decide that still. I think actually I just picked. I just picked Friday at 8:45. Hold me to it, guys. 8:45 is currently going to be the S.O.P. we're going to see if I stick to that. And we already changed our review process and we have that all in there pretty good. And yeah, so now I'm going to go through the actual process and in here I will use this to actually execute the thing. I might decide that I want to add some checklists to this I know for. For one example would be probably the revision checklist or what did I call it? Let's check what I called it because I could save that as a template for various places to how we proofread emails. What's it called? Send, test email and all type of review email checklist. That thing. I think I might actually create that here just so I know what I'm checking for. Maybe you guys are watching and are better at marketing than I am. Feel free to tell me what should be in here, but I'm probably going to make a draft and then I'll do a little bit of light Google stalking if I feel like it's not complete and see what other people do. Test links, proofread for typos. What else I want to do, check that correct images are pulling in. This is so light that you can see how this is already going to at least give some accountability about making sure you check these boxes. I can even have a round one and then even have the same thing, a duplicate of it or just a slightly different version for round two, which is my round of editing. I do very well with having a checklist so that way because otherwise I'll skip steps every time. So this at least makes me slow down enough to say, did I do that? No, I didn't. Okay, proofread typos, test links, check that correct images are pulling in. I don't think there's too much more here. What's really good about having someone to delegate this to is as they have questions or they catch things. One of their jobs is to add to this review list. Add to things that we should check for the future so we don't make the same mistakes. Again, I might add test links in incognito because sometimes we do use templates for ClickUp templates and maybe I would make if ClickUp template. So if we give any of those out, make sure you're logged into a Non PD co account because sometimes we'll find that a template works, but it's just because we happen to be logged into our ProcessDriven account and if we had been logged in as one of our dummy accounts, it would have given us an error. So yeah, so that's testing links. I'm going to make that a separate thing. So round one, maybe I'll add a round two review email checklist. Round two. So these are ones that are going to be assigned to me. Check content makes sense. That's probably an important one. Maybe I'll add that to both. And that should always be the first thing. Hopefully the person who actually wrote it would do that. But you never know. Check content makes sense. Do I want to check the links? Probably not. Ooh, just thought of one. Check links. As you're seeing, this is how it goes live. If there are any affiliate links, I could detail the whole process here because that's something I don't want to be on the wrong side of. Right. We normally don't use any affiliate links for clients unless they are like a win win link. So if we just get something, it feels weird to us, like we made this decision I think a few months back that feels weird to give an affiliate link to a client who's paying you for recommendations because it immediately feels like is this an objective opinion? So unless it's very much giving them a discount in some way, we won't use them. But for external communications we do use affiliate links. And so I want to make sure there's the right disclosures that the people who aren't used to using affiliate links know that in the newsletter we are using them. And I could link out to our resources link to affiliate link doc because I have a whole doc explaining how we use our affiliate links and I could link out to that as a view only link. I can't do it here because I'm in the dummy account, but once I transfer this over I will. So we'll leave this for now. Once I go through it and I'm feeling pretty good, what I will do is I'll go up here, save it as a template. Let's create a new template. We're going to call this weekly newsletter and Mailerlite. Now, some of you have maybe seen some of the limitations of template organization here. I might give this like a code at the beginning to let it know it's for pd, internal, whatever. I could give it kind of a naming convention to make these easier to organize because otherwise these templates become ridiculous. Make it private to me, public sharing. And then I'll save that template and then I can take that template and put it into my other workspace and start using it. I will, like I said, I will use it for at least one week before I delegate it to anybody. And I have to fill the cracks before I will delegate it to anybody. Unless I have somebody on my team who I feel confident can fill the cracks. Like add screenshot. No worries. I know my team can fill that. But the review email checklist, I feel good that I did that. Using the checklist below this description. Perfect. That's a process. I feel like I made a little bit of progress here on my own. Stuff you saw in these 4:45 minutes or so we went from original draft to revised draft to start building it out, to start building out those reusable checklists, templates, those kinds of things in 45 minutes here. This process feels a lot better. It's probably going to take me another half hour or so to wrap this and remembering I do go slower when I'm talking through it all live as well. But the whole idea behind this, just to wrap us up here, then I'm going to close, is to make this feeling not happen. Because as much as we all love our ideas, they stress out the team around us when we just hand them off like these flaming piles of ideas to someone who's supposed to just take it and run. An idea typically isn't enough unless you have that integrator who can take your brain and translate it into something more logical. Unless you have that middle person here. This usually isn't the most effective, efficient or cost effective way to delegate things. And so what I just did here is what I would do for every process before I delegate. I have a client right now who's going through an interesting process of how they're growing. Their team is based on who is able to make delegatable things. So you can hire somebody to help you because they're in growth stage. You can hire an employee when you have all of the processes that that future employee owns documented. And I think that's a great convention that many of us can take away from this. You can hire that VA when you have at least the first draft of your processes documented. What I showed you here, this first draft is not how the process is going to stay. What's wonderful about having good assistants and good people executing is because they will take this and with the right prompting and permission to let them know that this is a valuable use of their time they will improve this. They will tell me this doesn't make sense. They will tell me that you didn't clarify what font you used. So I just used everything in Comic Sans. And whether it's through error or through discussion, this process will improve. Which is cool. Which is why I think it is worth the time to put these 45 minutes into the newsletter process, even though. Even though I hadn't put the time into it until this point. So that is kind of where we're at. And I want to pass it back to all of you who are watching this and ask if there are any questions that you guys have. If you have any thoughts or, or ideas that have come up for you around this, please feel free to leave them in the comments in the Facebook group. If you're watching on YouTube, if you're watching the replay here, leave those comments there. I check every single one and sometimes what comes up out of These Q&As is what determines what is the next more formal YouTube video that comes out later. And yeah, I like to keep this image because I feel like this is sometimes what we all become and we don't want to become this and stress out our team and make them feel like they are reinventing the wheel for us because that is our job to at least start the pioneering process and then let everyone else improve it and make it their own and become the owners of that process. So thank you guys so much for watching and watching my cowlick for the past hour. This is a crazy kind of day. I will see you all in the next workflow Wednesday. If this was valuable to you, give it a thumbs up. Or if you're on YouTube, click Subscribe. And if you have ideas for future updates, episodes, if I can call it that, let me know. I believe it's this Friday or next Friday. You're going to start seeing some new shiny stuff coming out on the YouTube channel. I mentioned during this process mapping that I just revamped my content process for that as well as upgraded some of the gear. So you're going to see some new, hopefully even higher value stuff coming out over on the YouTube channel, beginning with some feature Fridays talking about deep dives into features in ClickUp that you can use, including the one that I demoed here which was proofing. So I think that's it for this one. I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye.