3 Tips to Help You Prepare for Vacation

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to this broadcast. Do you want to take time off for vacation this summer without the headache and pulling out your hair, like thinking I don't want to be posting and marketing and checking email every day. If so, I have three tips for you that I want to share that can make your time just planning for vacation and being on vacation less stressful. Hi, my name is Shelli Hitz. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com I'm the podcast host of Author Audience and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine and I'm getting ready to go on vacation. This week. I'm going to be going to Florida to visit my sister and her family, to visit my two little nieces. My husband and I haven't been able to have children and I'm 41 and you know, it may still happen, but I may never have children of my own. And so my nieces have been really, really special to me. So I'm excited to go down there. I don't want to be doing a ton of work while I'm on vacation. And so I've been planning and preparing for leaving this week and wanted to share a few tips with you. The first tip that I wanted to share with you is that you can schedule things. And so by scheduling like I'm scheduling blog posts. If you use a self hosted WordPress blog, you can simply go in and schedule your post for the exact day and time that you want it to go live so you can have fresh new blog content coming out. Even when you're on the beach. Like I'm going to be in Florida, I'll probably be on the beach. And even when you're not sitting at your computer so you can schedule blog posts, the other thing you can schedule are your social media posts. I love using Post Planner. My affiliate link is shellyhits.com postplanner and I am telling everyone and anyone about this tool because I love it. Now if you are on a tight budget, you know you can also use hootsuite for free and I've used tootsuite 4 years as well. But I love Post Planner because you can actually schedule recurring posts, especially on Twitter. This is really helpful. Or if you have like quote images, like I have my quote Images recur every 24 months. So every 2 years. So once I have 24 months of quote images in there, my words, the quotes I've chosen, then they'll just continue to come out and people aren't going to really know, like, okay, Shelly posted this two years ago, so I love those planner. But I already scheduled out my daily quote images for two weeks. If you guys follow me. You know, I post a quote image every morning, so those are done. The other thing that you can schedule are your emails. So I recommend that you continue to nurture your email subscriber list. I had an Author Audience Academy member just tell me today. She had been building her list but she was really discouraged because she wasn't getting signups. So she basically just stopped checking and she just looked today or yesterday and she's like, oh my goodness, shelley, I have 13 subscribers now. I need to nurture them, I need to follow up with them. I didn't even realize they signed up. So if you have not been emailing your subscribers on a regular basis, I definitely recommend it. But I'm going to be writing some emails either today or tomorrow that's on my list and I'm going to be scheduling them to go out to my email subscriber list so that those can go out even while I am on vacation. I'm not working. So the first tip is to schedule. You can schedule blog posts, you can schedule social media posts, you can even schedule your emails and you can be marketing and actually making sales while you're on vacation. That's pretty awesome, right? The second thing is to batch your tasks. So when you are working to be able to go on vacation, you know you want to look at what needs to get done before vacation, but don't forget to look at what you need to do when you get back. So I'm doing both of those things I'm looking at. Okay, what needs to get done to leave for vacation, what needs to be scheduled, what needs to be finished, who needs to be replied to and then what's going to be due or what's going to be coming up when I get back. I have a Take Action challenge webinar I'm going to be doing with Author Audience Academy not long after I return from vacation. So I'm also working on that and planning out what I need to get done for that challenge webinar. So those are things and then once you see what you need to do, you can batch them. So I've already done my batching of scheduling social media in one place, one chunk of Time now I'm going to do my emails, I'm going to sit down. You set a timer, use the Pomodoro technique. 25 minutes of working, five minutes of break. I'm going to have to do that. So batch the tasks then that you need to get done before you leave. And that way you're going to be more productive and, and it's gonna help the flow a little bit better. And then the third tip is to delegate. So I have a team now, and there are certain things you can delegate. It doesn't mean that you have to have an ongoing team. Right now. I know most of you, most of my followers, my lifers, my tribe, you don't yet have an ongoing regular team that's helping you. And so you may wanna delegate to someone just while you're away. So there may be certain things that you could have somebod while you're away. It could even just be a friend. It could be somebody that you hire from your local area to check in. I mean, it can be whatever you want to do. But for instance, this is being recorded right now on Facebook Live as a live video broadcast. I will then send this to my video and audio editor and then the whole process will start of getting this content ready for, for my YouTube channel, for my podcast, and for my blog. This particular training will probably go live on my blog when I'm on vacation. And all of that is going to be done by my team. The only thing I'll have to do is just go in and just approve the post before it goes live. But it will go live on YouTube and my podcast without me doing anything. Delegation is really great. I also have support staff, so. So Tisha Lee is my support staff right now. She will man my email and we have a system set up where she will notify me if there's something that's urgent that needs to be addressed right away. And otherwise I can just check in as I have time or maybe like once a day or once every other day into my email and all of that. So when you have a team, when you're able to delegate, things can be going on and people can be checking in for you and following up. My customers will still be taken care of while I'm gone. But if you don't have a team, then I recommend just batching those tasks. If you have to absolutely do something while you're gone, just log in once a day and check on those things. Like for me, I'm going to log in once a day to my Facebook Group for Author Audience Academy. So I'll still be available, I'll still be answering questions, but I won't be as active as I am normally. So those are my three tips. Tip number one is to schedule out your blog posts, social media posts, your email broadcasts. The second is to batch your tasks as you're getting ready. So do the similar type of things in chunks of time as you're preparing. And the third thing is, if possible, to delegate while you're gone so that it can take it off your mind and that you can be free to do other things. Something else you can do is you can set up boundaries so you can set up a vacation reminder email and just let them know. I won't be checking email during these times. I will reply back when I return at this time just to have the understanding and the basic communication set up that you're not going to be replying right away. So that's another thing you can set up. I was just reading a book, it's called Stressaholic and if you've been a Stressaholic, it might be an interesting book for you to read. It was for me, but she talks in there about setting boundaries and she was saying there was a guy that went on his honeymoon and he was a website designer and when he was on his honeymoon he set up a vacation reminder and the vacation reminder said, I'm on my honeymoon. It was actually kind of a cute message and it was like, I don't want to sabotage my marriage before it's even, you know, getting off to the right start. So I'm not going to be replying until this date and blah, blah, blah. And she was like, it was so cool and it was so sweet and I was really hoping he wouldn't reply back to me before he told me he would because she wanted him to do some work for her. She wanted to hire him and she says, wouldn't you know it, not long after she sent that email, even with the vacation responder, he still replied on his honeymoon to potentially land a new client. So if you do set up the boundaries, don't go beyond them, you know, like use them and make sure they're in place for a purpose. They're there so you can take a break so you're not just checking in constantly so you can have a break. I've actually been taking little mini 24 hour breaks from technology. I'm especially addicted to Facebook and email. I don't know why those two, but that's what I'm addicted to. And What I've been doing is maybe like from 2 to 3 in the afternoon one day to about 2 to 3 in the afternoon the next day. I just won't check in. And nothing urgent usually is going to happen in my business that can't be taken care of outside of that 24 hours. I'm still able to check into my Facebook group for my paid members. I'm still able to take care of my customers. My support staff is still checking in as well. But it has been so freeing and I'm excited to really be able to take a vacation without having that burden of work because that's really, it's been hard for me. I'm a workaholic and I'm really trying to break some of these habits. So I encourage you as well when you take a vacation, be fully present with your family, be fully present where you're at and use a few of these techniques. And if you haven't subscribed yet to my live broadcast on Facebook, you can get notified every time that I'm live. If you're interested in the topic, it will tell you what I'm talking about. You can hop on and you can subscribe all the instructions for subscribing, you can find them@shellyhitz.com Facebook Live. It's a really great habit to create, to really have a time where you can unplug. We all need vacations, we all need times to unplug, otherwise we just aren't going to be as effective. Like, have you heard that quote that I have so much to do? Like, I can't afford to take time for a break or I can't afford to take time to spend with God or to pray or those types of things. It's like the quote that says, you know, the person's chopping a tree and they're like, I have so much to do, I have so many trees to chop, I don't have time to stop and sharpen my axe. But if they would just simply stop, take a few minutes to sharpen their axe, how much quicker could they actually finish that task of cutting down the trees? So much faster. And I have to constantly be reminding myself of this because I'm a worker, I'm a doer on the strength finders test. I'm an aa, I'm an activator achiever. I'm also a communicator, I'm empathetic, I'm woo. You know, I have other things as well, but I have that action oriented part of me. And if I don't be intentional about taking time away. I just won't have that time. And so vacations often tend to get overrun by me checking my email, checking into Facebook, and I'm really going to try to do it differently this time. So you guys have a great rest of your day. And I hope that you implement some of these tips that you set up systems and strategies to help you truly have breaks. Whether it's vacation, it's little mini breaks each week, 24 hour breaks, or even if it's just a few hours, taking that time away to refresh, restore, rest, it's only going to help you be more productive. In the end, it's all only going to help you to restore a connection with your creator. You know when we have so much noise going around and we're checking in Facebook all the time and email all the time, and we're doing things all the time, sometimes we can't hear God's still voice, that quiet voice that prompts us to reach out to someone exactly when they need it, that prompts us to do the thing that will bring the biggest result. So many times, even in marketing, that still small voice that I hear from God, the Holy Spirit, he helps me to know exactly what to do, the next steps to do that end up being the most successful. So when we take this time away to rest and restore and recharge many times too, we'll get some of our best ideas. So have a notebook ready, capture the ideas when they come, when you're turning off all the other noise, but make sure to take that time and to really let yourself recharge. We recharge our phones. If we don't, what happens? They go dead and we can't use them. And so let's recharge us as well. We're even more valuable than our phones and our devices, our computers, and we need this time as well. We'll see you guys later. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.