John Jonas (host) explains how outsourcing small tasks to OFS helps him maintain a roughly 17-hour workweek while running a large business. Using concrete examples (a WordPress follower notification he delegated and routine customer-service emails he forwards to support staff), he advises listeners to forward small, time-consuming items to outsourced staff so they stop cluttering the inbox and free up mental bandwidth.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 27. Let's talk about getting small things off of your plate via nofs. So one of the things people talk to me about regularly is my work week. I work about 17 hours a week and I have for a lot of years, probably since like 2008, 2009. And people are always shocked that I'm able to run well. I mean, we'll probably be eight figure business this year. And people are shocked that I can run an eight figure business while working 17 hours a week. One of the things I really like having OFS work for me is because I can get small things off of my plate and I don't feel bad about doing it. So today I get this email from WordPress from WordPress.com, which my blog, where this podcast is hosted and where I post my newsletter is all hosted@WordPress.com on johnjonas.com so I get this email from them that says, someone just started following you@johnjonas.com they'll receive an email every time you publish a post. Congratulations. And I was like, what the. I do not want this email in my inbox. This is one of the reasons why I work 17 hours a week. I get less than 100 emails a day. I mean, I would probably say I get less than 50 emails a day. And then from those, one of my ofs takes care of a bunch of them. And I'm just super careful with my email inbox. And when I get an email like this, I'm frustrated because I don't want to see this crap. I didn't ask for this. So WordPress is notifying me when someone follows my blog and I'm like, no, get this out of my inbox. So I immediately go to WordPress.com and looked at it and I was like, oh, gosh, I have no idea how to get rid of this. I do not want to go look through these settings. I don't want to do any of this. So I just closed it. I just closed the browser tab, immediately came back to my email, forwarded it to one of my ofs, and then I let them undo it for me. I didn't have to figure it out. I didn't have to look through menus. I didn't have to get frustrated at not finding what I wanted. And so my advice today is outsourcing a bunch of small things makes a really big difference on your productivity throughout the day. Start to create systems where you can outsource small things. So I'll give you another example of this. Whenever I get a customer service related email, I don't respond to it. Typically I just forward. I just forward it to our customer service people and they respond to it immediately. That's not to say that I won't respond to something, but there's a lot of things in my business that I don't know how to do and I don't know the answer to because I turned that over to customer service people a long, long time ago. And I've been involved in the policies of customer service, but I don't get involved in the implementation of it. So my goal with them is make people happy. And if they're making people happy, then I don't really care what they do and I don't want to get involved in their jobs. So I just forward the email to people. So the next time you have something that is taking your time, something that's annoying you, something that someone else could figure out for you, it might save you 15 seconds by taking two seconds to forward it. But if it saved you 15 seconds or a minute and a half a bunch of times throughout forever, then you know your life is so much better from it. Send that next thing to your OFS and see what happens. See if they get it done for you. Gosh, it makes things so much better.
