Grow With Soul Ep.16: How To Get Stuff Done

This week I want to talk more about how we work in our businesses, productivity, mindset and how to get stuff done. I think that a lot of us struggle with this in different ways, and productivity and motivation is something we tend to beat ourselves up over. So today I’m going to take you through a few tools and concepts that I use to keep going and getting stuff done.

Here's What I Talk About In This Episode:

• The concept of Intention + Action

• How to introduce more intention and action into your planning

• The Minimum Viable Product

• Using three things to prioritise tasks

• Projects and campaigns

• Defining your job role

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Read the episode transcript:

It’s just me this week, and I really want to talk to you more about the working side of your business, rather than the marketing side, and how to get stuff done. I think that a lot of us struggle with this in different ways, and productivity and motivation tends to be something that we beat ourselves up over, so today I’m going to take you through a few tools and concepts that I use to keep going and to get stuff done in my business. I hope that you find some of them helpful too. 

Intention + Action 

This came out of a conversation with my friend Jessica Rose Williams, where we were discussing those people that we look up to and that I’m sure you look up to too - what are they doing? What does it take to get to the point that they’re at? What does it take to be killing it online, to be leading the life that you want to live? 

What we came down to is that those people are just doing it. They’re doing the work, they’re showing up, they’re not moaning or whinging or overthinking, they’re just doing the work. 

However, I then went away and did some overthinking about that, but I did refine it down a little bit because I think that glorifying just the doing aspect isn’t actually too helpful, and that it needs to be purposeful action, so that’s where the idea of intention + action came from. It’s really about how we approach both our whole business, and individual tasks within our business. In order to be successful (whatever your version of that is) or to get what you want out of your business and/or a task that you’re doing, you need to combine the action that you’re taking with a really strong intention behind it. 

Generally, we lean towards being naturally one or the other, so being more of an intention setter or more of a doer; I’m definitely an intention setter. I will plan and have ideas until the cows come home but I tend not to always follow through on those. Over the last 7 years, I have had maybe three different blogs that I’ve started, but those didn’t work out because I just didn’t publish them, or I didn’t publicise them anywhere. That’s the difference to me; that was a very intention-led thing that I was doing in setting up this blog, but I didn’t follow through with it with the action it actually takes to make it a thing. The risks therefore of being an intention setter is that you have all the ideas and you don’t follow through with them or make them happen or bring them into reality. The risk of being more of a doer is that you spend a lot of time doing stuff but it’s not always effective because it doesn’t have a strong purpose behind it that’s really driving it. So you end up being really busy and exhausting yourself, but the actual energy you’re putting into that isn’t coming out the other end as results. 

Have a little think about which of those you think you probably are - it’s probably quite obvious to you! But then let’s think about how to integrate more of the other into what you do. If you are a natural intention setter, then one way to make sure that you’re always filling in the action is to plan it into the plan itself. Rather than thinking ‘oh I’m going to start this podcast and it’s going to be really great’, right, so, when is it going to be published? When are you going to be doing the recordings? Put some dates in place so that the action becomes part of the intention. 

Another thing is to find ways to get it done, even if it’s not done by you. That’s what I did with this podcast - I had the intention to start it for a very long time but never actually got round to doing the doing. So I outsourced the editing and the technical stuff because I knew that was what was holding me back, so I was therefore able to add the action onto the intention but it wasn’t necessarily me doing all of the action. Have a think about when there’s something you’ve got a strong intention about but you’re not following through; is there a way you can get it done without you physically getting it done?

Another thing to do is have fewer ideas! I think the more time that we spend dreaming, the less time we’re spending doing, and if you’ve got 15 different ideas, and you’re just stewing over them in your mind, then none of them will ever get done. So make sure that you are limiting the time that you spend having the ideas and setting intentions, and that you leave space and room to be taking the action and to be doing things in your business. 

If you are a doer, it’s all about incorporating more purpose into what you’re doing. For example, I have a client who is very much a doer, and we kind of realised that she was fiddling around doing stuff on the website without any purpose behind it, just as a kind of form of procrastination and just to feel busy, even though it wasn’t the more effective use of her time. We put her on a ban of fiddling with the website and so that might be something to do if you recognise tasks that you’re doing to take up time rather than to actually do something productive; put yourself on a ban so that when you come back to doing that task, you’re coming at it from a sense of purpose. 

Another thing to do is to time your tasks. If you’re spending six hours writing a blog post for example, maybe set yourself a two hour timer, and only let yourself spend two hours doing it. Then what you’re forced to do is sit down and really think about the job that this content has to do, so that you can do it within the two hours. It’s giving yourself a framework within which you can start to introduce more purpose. 

More generally you can put together a checklist process; when you sit down in the morning at your desk you look at all the jobs you’ve got to do that day, you make sure each one you’ve got a little tick next to it and you know what the purpose of that task is. Using the blog post example, if you had ‘write a blog post’ down on that list, you could tick through ‘I know what job I want it to do for my business, I’ve thought about how this can come alive for my audience and what they need from it’ and make sure that you think about things for just 5 minutes longer to ensure that there’s a purpose behind it, an intention behind it, and that therefore it can be more effective in your business. 

In terms of using this in a practical way, as I said at the beginning, it’s two-fold. You can use intention + action to your overall approach to your business. In your planning, when you’re thinking about all the things that you’re going to do in the next year or the next quarter, what is the intention behind those? Say you’ve got a campaign coming up or you’re launching a new product or whatever it is, what is the purpose of that campaign? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to do for your business? How do you want it to help your customers? Once you know that, what actions are you going to take in order for that intention to come into fruition? 

Again, thinking about new products, you can use this and it’s important because quite often we have an idea we want to run with and it falls down because you’re taking just the action route instead of the intention route, so when you’re thinking about a new offering, again, what is the purpose you want that offering to do for your business? What’s it providing extra to your customers and then what’s the plan for making it real and putting it on sale? 

Thinking generally about the direction you want to take in your business and in your life, what do you want your life to look like? What’s this all for? It’s a question that I am asking myself quite a lot at the moment; so what is it for? Why are you moving your business in this direction? Once you know that, what are the best ways in which to bring it into reality. 

However, where I mostly use intention + action is in day to day tasks. So planning my content, thinking about emails that I’m sending and networking that I’m doing, all those sorts of things. And also in my client calls; I’ll always set an intention for the call, and then I set the talking points of the call to make sure that I’m following through on the intention. 

In terms of planning your content, it’s really thinking about the intention, this is what I teach in my courses; what is the job that that piece of content is going to do? How then can you create it in a way that it’s best set up to do that job for you and your business? Whether that’s a blog post or newsletter or Instagram post, what is it that you want it to do? Similarly, if you are wanting to collaborate with someone or you’re trying to outreach and get interviews on podcasts, be really clear about what you want out of it and ask for what you want, and make sure that you are setting out your store early that in that email you’re saying ‘this is my story, this is what I want to get out of it, this is how I want us to work together’, and then following up on those. 

For me, intention + action is really an approach. In terms of actually physically managing my time, making sure I’m getting stuff done, I have some more practical stuff as well. One of which is…

The Minimum Viable Product

If you don’t know what this is, it’s what people use to think about what the very basic thing that we need to produce in order to get this on sale is. So rather than thinking of the most perfect version of a product that’s going to take ten years to get to market, what is the first draft that we can do now that’s good enough to go on sale? 

For example, if you have an idea for an all singing all dancing printed journal/diary, then perhaps the minimum viable product is an eBook version, so you can get that out on sale, get it tested, get some funds coming in, in order then go on and develop the all singing all dancing version. In terms of using that concept for your tasks, it’s what is the absolute minimum you have to do to be successful this week? What is really good with that is that I find it really helps me when I’m overwhelmed. If I’ve got a lot on and I’m drowning in my inbox or I’ve got all this content to produce and I need to get it done right now this week, it actually really helps you to focus in on what really is important here? When you have to get really specific about what you can cut out, it makes it clear what is important. 

For example, let’s take my week. Next week I’m off, I’m off to see my parents for a week, so I’ve been really overwhelmed this week thinking ‘I need to get my blog post out, I need to record all these podcasts, I have to do my calls, I need to write my course’ and it’s all feeling loaded on top of me. But actually, what is the minimum I have to do to be successful this week? I have to record THIS podcast because it’s going out this week. A blog post; is that the most necessary important this? No. I can cut that out. My calls I have to do but actually that’s fine, just because I’m used to doing them, they’re just part of it. Smoke signals, yes, I do have to write some of those but actually when I look at the spread of my week I can fit it in in little places so I don’t have to set aside a big four hour block of time, I can do an hour today, an hour tomorrow. When you start to actually think about breaking down those tasks, what is important? It’ll help you to see that. This is a case of giving yourself less to do in order to be more productive. Yes I might not get a blog post done but I get the important things done; my calls, my podcast and my course and that’s what’s more important. 

The three things

I’m pretty sure I might have mentioned this in a previous episode, but if not, it’s something I’ve sent out to my mailing list before. The three things is something that I’ve taken from an old job of mine, and that job was at a recruitment company. We would always have a Monday morning meeting and within that meeting everybody had to say, out loud, what the three things they would do that week to make more money. For our context, I turn it into ‘what three things can you do this week to make it a success’ or ‘what are the three things you need to do to move your business forward this week’. Then in that job, someone one would be writing them down, and then the following Monday we’d have to say whether we’d done those three things or not, which was always a very good way of getting stuff done. 

Similarly to the minimum viable product, it really makes you focus in on what is actually important, what’s actually going to make a difference in your business, and it takes a weight off and that everything else is just extra. 

What I would say as well is that the three things shouldn’t be your everyday stuff. For example, it shouldn’t be ‘answering my emails’, or ‘posting on Instagram’ or ‘doing a blog post’ unless of course you are so overwhelmed that actually those are the things that, if you could get them done, your week would be a success. But generally, I say it’s things like pitching for some outreach or sending an email to a magazine or investing in that course that you’ve been meaning to do; all those things that are going to move you forward, that are above and beyond the normal stuff that you do, they are your three things. If you can maybe get an accountability buddy to share your three things with, that would be really great; you can check in each week and make sure you’re moving forward and doing things that you say you’re going to be doing.

On the subject of day to day vs not day to day, now’s a good time to talk about how I think about structuring your marketing projects. I know that the trouble with marketing is that there’s not one important thing to be doing. Marketing works best when it’s a system. Everything that you have, your Instagram, your blog, your podcast, your email list, they’re all cogs in a machine and they all need to be turning together and working together. You’re spinning all the plates in tandem because if somebody finds you on Instagram then they need to come over to your blog and be able to see that there’s content there, and they need to be able to sign up to an email list if they’re not ready to buy yet. It all needs to work as one big journey for people. It makes it really difficult to be able to prioritise your tasks and things like that. 

The way that I think about it is in terms of your baseline and your projects, or your campaigns. Your baseline work is all the stuff that you have to be doing to be existing online. That’s your social media, your content creation, maybe newsletters if you send those regularly. They’re all the things you need to be doing to be just existing and basically visible online. That’s what I spend more of my time doing in my business now; I write blogs, I record podcasts, I email my newsletter, I’m visible on Stories, I post on Instagram, and that’s all the stuff that I need to do just to exist. That’s what you might call the low hum of your marketing. 

Then on top of that, you have the campaigns, or the projects, which cause either a spike in new activity, or they might be something that you wanted to start, and then they become baseline. This podcast, for example, started out as a project, so it was a project to get it done and to get it launched, but now it’s moved into being in the baseline hum. 

In a musical sense, your projects are the trumpets. On top of the hum, where you want to be really visible, really loud, for a short period of time, and then go back into the hum. An example of that might be if you’ve got a new product launch, then all the content you’re creating is about that launch, you’re more active on social, you might be getting outreach and stuff to be more visible during that launch period. Those are all the things that you might be doing within those projects and campaigns. And you might want to plan those in one a month, or maybe you do it more quarterly, but especially for product based businesses, a lot of your campaigns and your projects are going to be in Q4 when you’ve got Christmas coming up. 

That’s just a way to think about how you’re planning your marketing and the tasks that you’re doing in your business. You shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by your baseline stuff. I know things happen, stuff comes up, personal stuff comes up in your life where actually even your baseline stuff feels like a push, so it’s just getting in tune with the rhythm of your business and knowing when you need to be doing your trumpet solo, when you need to be doing your campaigns, and making sure that you don’t have other stuff on at that time so you can be really full force into promoting those things. When you’re thinking about your three things, generally you should be doing more project based things for those as opposed to baseline things, but as I said, if you’re really up against it and actually getting an Instagram post out this week is going to be the best you can do, still go for it. 

What is your job? 

I find in my own personal experience and from working with clients, that we do things that really we shouldn’t be doing, or don’t necessarily have to be doing, because it feels important. And we don’t do things that we should be doing (or want to), because they feel frivolous. 

An example of the former is spending three hours engaging on Instagram. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but is that your job? Are you an Instagram influencer who needs to spend the large majority of their time building that following? If you are running a business that is not being an Instagram influencer, the answer to that is no. Is that the best use of those three hours? It never will be. It’s important to engage on Instagram; if you’re not engaging regularly, you need to be. However, it’s really about balancing the time and actually thinking ‘right, my job is the CEO of this business, and if I’ve got three hours to spend, maybe half an hour of that should be on engaging on Instagram, and the rest of it I need to be finding more effective things to be doing’. 

Similarly with the latter part of that statement about not doing things that we should or want to do because it feels frivolous, this is something you need to define in your job as well. It’s something I’m working on at the moment in that I really want to be reading more, I really want to be researching and listening to podcasts and reading widely around my subject, but it feels like it’s not work, it feels frivolous, and I’ve not been doing it. And actually, I had to think ‘well, what is my job?’ If part of my job is advising people, giving them help, giving them resources, then actually knowing what’s going on in the rest of the world, having examples to give, being able to recommend books and podcasts and articles is a really big part of my job. I need to be reading widely, researching, listening to things, keeping an ear to the ground and being connected to the wider world; that’s an important part of my job, so I need to do some mindset work around that so I can think ‘what are the areas that aren’t necessarily a part of my job that I can stop doing or maybe outsource in order for me to do this important part of my job?’ 

Write yourself a job description. Define your job role and what the tasks are that you need to be doing and then plan your time accordingly. Again, going back to spending three hours a day currently engaging on Instagram, let’s knock that down to half an hour, maybe an hour if you’ve posted that day, and then the rest of the time, what can you be doing? Do you need to be emailing for pitches to be getting coverage in time for Christmas? Do you need to be reading and researching like me in order to be able to give my clients a better experience? Do you need to be creating products? Do you need to be planning for the year ahead? All these things are things that can be better spent than doing stuff that’s not the most effective use of your time. 

Those are really the main things that I use at the moment to be thinking about how I’m using time, how I’m being effective, how I’m being most productive. I think if you aren’t feeling like you’re at your top productivity game at the moment, don’t feel bad about that. I mean I certainly am not, I feel rather like I’m dragging myself across the finish line at the moment; a big part of this is acceptance and tuning in and learning about ourselves, how we’re motivated, how our levels of productivity change.

 I know that Jen Carrington talks a lot about what season you’re in at the moment, and that there is something useful in not feeling like you have to be the number one most productive person in the world at all times because you’re never going to be that. It’s absolutely fine to not be completely motivated and jumping for joy out of bed every morning every week. But what I hope that this podcast has done and perhaps the thinking that it’s going to start is to give you some structures so that when you’re not feeling full of the joys of productivity, that you have a structure and framework in place to still be effective and still get stuff done, even when you’re feeling slugging, like I am at the moment!