How to Reclaim Your Time with Sean Pritzkau

[00:00:00] Sean Pritzkau: Welcome to Episode 19 of We Can Do This. This is Sean Pritzkau, your host, and thanks for listening to the podcast today. Very excited that you're here and wow, we've had a few really great episodes these past few weeks. I think a few of my favorite, but try not to be biased. I really have enjoyed everyone.

​

[00:00:23] Sean Pritzkau: We've talked through so far on the podcast, but just a few weeks ago, we had the Chelsea Brinkley. Talking about how and when to hire a virtual assistant. And that was my first live episode on the podcast, which was really, really fun. And I hope that I'm able to do that again sometime soon. And then we add Vensy Krishna on the podcast who built and scaled a life-changing app.

​

[00:00:47] Sean Pritzkau: Really one that made a huge impact in India around the COVID crisis and the Delta variant. If you haven't listened to the episode, definitely jump in, because it's really cool to hear about how really in one night she built a solution that scaled that week and was able to bring on a volunteer team of over a hundred people to help her build this app, using all no-code tools, using non-technical people.

​

[00:01:11] Sean Pritzkau: And it's just a really cool story. And then we had last week, Brandon Harvey, founder of Good Good Good, who hosts the podcast sounds good. And has a print newspaper full of good news that they started. And man, that was such a really good conversation learning about how brands started that company or really that project.

​

[00:01:31] Sean Pritzkau: And then really began to grow that. And I'm really excited to see how good newspaper has been growing and is continuing to grow. And there was such a joy to talk with. Now, if you missed any of those episodes, definitely jumped back in. Make sure you get caught up because those were some really fun conversations.

​

[00:01:50] Sean Pritzkau: And I think we're going to begin to build off some of those things that we talked about in those episodes. Now, today, I'm excited to talk with you about systems and processes, man. I know that sounds so, so nerdy and not fun to talk about, but it's been on my mind a lot lately, specifically when I talked to.

​

[00:02:09] Sean Pritzkau: Founders or people that have just started their own business, whether it's working on like a tech, SAS type product or they're a freelancer, or no matter what they do, I find that when people jump into it and they get started, how quickly they get busy. Right. And it feels like they maybe left their full-time job and are, you know, beginning to build this company or building.

​

[00:02:37] Sean Pritzkau: Freelance business and almost overnight, it feels like they're already too busy. Right. And I found that that is really often the case is we just fill up our plates so quickly and we don't take a moment to step back and see, Hey, what are the things that should be on my plate? And what are the things that have already jumped on my plate that don't belong there.

​

[00:02:59] Sean Pritzkau: Right. And what are some solutions to make sure that we're doing the things that only we can do? Like I said, building off a Chelsea Brinkley's episode where she said that as a business owner, you should be doing only the things that only you can do. Right. And. Obviously it's easier said than done because if you're not doing it, who's doing it.

​

[00:03:18] Sean Pritzkau: Right. So that's what we're going to talk about on the podcast today. How can we take the responsibilities, the tasks that you have, and that you do day to day, week to week, month to month, and make sure that you're doing things that only you can do and what to do with all the rest of the. So let's jump into the episode.

​

[00:03:51] Sean Pritzkau: All right. So one of the favorite things that I get to do in the work that I do with clients is hostess brand strategy sessions. So in those sessions, part of the work that we do together is come up with opportunities for efficiency. That means taking a look at things that we do day to day, week to week, month to month, and figure out what are ways that we could.

​

[00:04:18] Sean Pritzkau: Reduce the amount of manual work that we do or remove the bottlenecks in the processes that we have. And this tends to be one of the people's favorite parts of the sessions in a lot of the other exercises. We come up with more things to do, right? What are more things that we can add to the plate? And in this one, we really talk about what can we pull back on and people love it.

​

[00:04:45] Sean Pritzkau: And so if you remember just a few episodes ago with Chelsea Brinkley, we talked about how, as an owner, as a founder of your own. Initiative up, you should be only doing the things that only you can do. And then we need to figure out what to do with the rest of those things. So I'm gonna share with you a framework to take your ideas, tasks, processes through, in order to help you figure out what are the things you should be doing and what to do with the other tasks.

​

[00:05:16] Sean Pritzkau: And I think I take a little bit of a. Nuanced approach to this because of some of the experience I have in the role that automation plays in our tasks and processes and systems. So the four elements of this process is eliminate automate, delegate, and patch. So I want you to think of something that you do for work, right?

​

[00:05:39] Sean Pritzkau: Think of something that you tend to do. Maybe the most regularly. Right? So maybe if you're a designer, think about your design process. So if you're an operator in your company, think through your day to day, week for your company, whatever it is, think through something that takes a big chunk of your day and time, but also maybe some of your mental energy.

​

[00:06:05] Sean Pritzkau: And you're welcome to pause this if you want, and maybe even jot down some of these things now. That big thing that you thought of break that apart into the tasks or steps that takes from start to finish. Right? So after doing this, you might have 10, 20, 25 things written down right now. Just list those things out.

​

[00:06:27] Sean Pritzkau: And we're going to begin to think through those individual tasks and. We want to assign one of those elements of the framework. Right? So think of eliminate automate, delegate bat. And as we talk through this process, begin to write down next to each one of these things. One of those words, eliminate automate, delegate that because in reality, all of these things are going to fit into one of those four buckets.

​

[00:07:01] Sean Pritzkau: So let's define these things. What is eliminate, let's talk about those first one. Eliminate means we're going to look through this list, look through this process and figure out what are the elements of this process that if we just took it out completely. Would anyone care, right? It's like, you know, a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it.

​

[00:07:21] Sean Pritzkau: Does it make a sound, you know, if one of these tasks were one of those trees in the woods and it just went down and no one heard it, like, does anyone care? Now I was listening to a podcast by Jonathan Stark, which some of you may be familiar with him. He has a couple of really fantastic. This one I believe was on the business of authority.

​

[00:07:43] Sean Pritzkau: He also has a podcast called ditching hourly. And on this podcast, he was talking about his YouTube channel. So if you know anything about YouTube, it's a lot of work. Just kind of like a podcast. You can imagine the processes, you have to plan for your videos and decide what you're going to talk about on camera.

​

[00:08:01] Sean Pritzkau: And then you actually have to show up in front of the camera and film your videos and you need to go through and edit down those videos. And make sure that they're all ready to publish and then publishing the whole thing itself. Right? You have to get the file, right? Your title for your show, your description, your show notes.

​

[00:08:19] Sean Pritzkau: You have to tag the videos. You need to come up with a good thumbnail image that will stand out on YouTube, and then you need to go and schedule or post your video. And then after that, you need to promote it. Right? So it's a. Long process. And on this podcast episode, Jonathan was talking about how it was just keeping him from doing videos, right.

​

[00:08:40] Sean Pritzkau: And it was so much work. Every single time he wanted to publish a video that he began to think about. What would it look like to like cut out like 90% of the work. And it's exactly what he did. He decided instead of planning out the shows and putting together the content and then go in the film and edit it and all those kinds of things.

​

[00:09:00] Sean Pritzkau: Push the live button on YouTube and just showed up live and answered people's questions. And that's exactly what he did. And of course the product doesn't look as polished and coordinated as maybe his earlier videos did. But what he noticed was that was okay. People still showed up. People still consume the content and he was getting just as much traction with these video.

​

[00:09:28] Sean Pritzkau: And he eliminated like 90% of the steps in the process. So when we're eliminating tasks, we're acknowledging that time and bandwidth is limited, right? Because if we had unlimited time unlimited bandwidth, then we could do as many steps as we want, but that's just not the reality of it. So when we eliminate tasks, we're saying, if I eliminate this.

​

[00:09:51] Sean Pritzkau: 1 21 notice or care, and two will I still be able to get the end result. So there might be things in your process that you'll just be able to eliminate like Jonathan did with going live on YouTube instead of having a whole flow and process. Organizing his content recording, editing and publishing. So think about your processes.

​

[00:10:13] Sean Pritzkau: Write down, eliminate if there's things that you're just like, I think I can just cross this off the list and no one will know this. Now, once we go through that step, we go to automate. Now I don't think I can understate the important role that automation has to play in our. I remember growing up as a kid and my dad lived in Colorado, so I would go visit him once or twice a year.

​

[00:10:40] Sean Pritzkau: And he was the general manager for this production facility. And I remember going on tours of this facility and going around the different areas and departments of the company and seeing the workers doing what they do. And I remember when I was really young, you know, hundreds of employees in these.

​

[00:11:00] Sean Pritzkau: Production facilities. And they were all at stations, working on a machine in front of them. You know, it was kind of like this conveyor belt type process. Everyone's doing their thing and moving it on to the next station that person's passing it on to the next station. And every single time I visited my dad, I would essentially go on this tour or tour the facilities.

​

[00:11:22] Sean Pritzkau: And remember, as I began to get older, that. You know, I was still going to the same buildings, but I would be going on these tours and there would be much less people in the buildings. And I would go into these departments and where there was maybe 20 people working on these machines. There began to be like five people and then four, and then ultimately like one or two people.

​

[00:11:48] Sean Pritzkau: And there was this still the same amount of machinery, but instead of. Twenty-five people managing this department, there was one or two people managing those departments. The process was automated, right? So there was one or two people making sure that the process was going smoothly, but other than that, the mechanism or the machine were doing their job.

​

[00:12:08] Sean Pritzkau: Right. And I think that's really interesting. Think about that. And we think about automating our work right? Where there could be a dozen people doing something. What if we could scale back the amount of people that are responsible for the activity and then help that thing go on autopilot. And of course, I'm not saying that we need to reduce jobs, right?

​

[00:12:31] Sean Pritzkau: I think this is only creating more efficient businesses so that we can afford other people in other positions and other roles to do. Tasks and the activities are just so much more vital to the mission. So automation is pretty common. People understand that, you know, we can schedule our emails to go out at certain times and we don't have to manually send their emails and social media posts.

​

[00:12:53] Sean Pritzkau: We can schedule those. And we don't have to actually like go into the app and upload a photo and upload the caption and tag people and tag the location and then send it right there's tools that allow us to automate some of those activities. But when it comes to. Other things there's a whole lot more that we can automate.

​

[00:13:13] Sean Pritzkau: And specifically I'll mention here a couple tools that I use every single day to automate a large part of my work. I use a tool called Zapier, which you may be familiar with. Some people call it Zapier. I think it's. And this is a tool that has really made famous this idea of if this, then that. So if you do one thing and that thing occurs, it's called your trigger, then it can kick off a nother activity and that's gonna make your action happen.

​

[00:13:45] Sean Pritzkau: Right? So an example is when I receive an email from this email address, then upload a file to Dropbox. And now Integra mat is another tool that I use really often. And that takes a very similar approach. You can do some really complex things with that tool. So for example, with my own podcast, a lot of the process is automated on the front end and the backend.

​

[00:14:14] Sean Pritzkau: So for example, when I invite a guest onto the show and they approve they'll receive certain emails and they'll be able to schedule. There call with me and there'll be able to send me their headshot, their bio, all those kinds of things. And it all gets pulled in together. So we don't have to do a lot of the manual work there.

​

[00:14:37] Sean Pritzkau: And then on the backend, when I set a status field for the episode to publish, that's going to kick off a whole other series of activities. So for example, when I do that, it is going to take the social media images from our. Tool called air table that we use. And it's going to upload each one of those individual files to Google drive.

​

[00:15:01] Sean Pritzkau: And it's going to take Google drive and it's going to make a share link, right? So my guests can access those images. And then we have a email template and it's going to insert the link and the date that the podcast is going to be released. And it's going to send them an email saying here, You know, all the information with the podcast and here's a link to the social images so that you can share those if you desire.

​

[00:15:25] Sean Pritzkau: And then it's also going to take my show content, and it's going to upload that to my podcast host and to my website and do all these other activities. Right. And if you think about that, those are manual processes that someone would have to do. And that probably takes anywhere from 15 to 30 to 40 hours.

​

[00:15:47] Sean Pritzkau: A week, honestly, in those activities, but for a weekly podcast, that's saving hours and hours every single month. So that's more than scheduling social media posts, that's scheduling manual labor, right. Something that either I would have to do, or I would have to hire someone to do on my behalf. So if you think about this monetarily, if I was to have to hire someone, let's say $20 an hour, And they would have to do those activities every single week.

​

[00:16:14] Sean Pritzkau: Then that's probably 40 or $50 a week that I'm saving in hiring an assistant to those activities. And that's not saying I don't hire people to do certain activities, but I'm just more thoughtful with the activities that I do hire people for versus the ones I can automate. So think about what you have on your list.

​

[00:16:36] Sean Pritzkau: Like, what are some of the things that you think you could automate yourself? Right. Hearing what I've done with automating, maybe my podcast workflow, your activity might have been publishing videos or uploading design files, or delegating tasks to people on your team. There are tools and resources out there that actually teach you how to automate these things.

​

[00:17:00] Sean Pritzkau: And when you're typing. So maybe you're working in a startup or you're a solo founder and don't have their resources to hire people right now, then a really great solution to be able to begin to scale your own activities and workload without adding things to your plate every single week. So we've covered eliminate automate.

​

[00:17:22] Sean Pritzkau: Now the next one is delegate, right? So what are the things that we can't eliminate? Those are things that need to be done. And they just can't be automated. So we've looked through our list and we've said, Hey, this thing can't be eliminated. Can't be automated. So now it needs to be delegated to someone else.

​

[00:17:44] Sean Pritzkau: And the things that we delegate are the things that, like we said, we need to be doing the things that only we can do. So if it's something that needs to be done and it can't be eliminated or automated and. It's not one of those things that I need to be doing and it needs to be delegated to someone else.

​

[00:18:00] Sean Pritzkau: So that's where you need to find someone to do it. Right. And so on the episode with Chelsea Brinkley, for example, she matches people with virtual assistants that help them scale the work that they can do in their business. You may have people already around you on your team that you can begin to teach people or train people how to do these activities.

​

[00:18:21] Sean Pritzkau: And one thing I've personally learned is. Sometimes I can delegate work to clients, right? So there's certain things that I've just naturally assumed the responsibilities, maybe on a project, but I've learned that those are actually things I can delegate to clients. So for example, maybe like asset collection or working on a big website redesign, and we need images or assets or icons or, or things like that.

​

[00:18:48] Sean Pritzkau: Right. I can delegate to that, to the clients. Hey, could you pull together images or resources that you like, and you want to suggest to be part of the design, right? That's one example of probably many things that you can share that responsibility with other collaborators on your projects. So go down your list and then think of what are the things on this list that I need to delegate to someone, right?

​

[00:19:12] Sean Pritzkau: Someone on my team, another collaborator on the project, or who do I need to find to bring on to offload some of these tasks and responsible. And then lastly, the fourth step is bats and likely the remainder of these items, tasks, activities that are on this list of yours. We're going to now want to group those into buckets.

​

[00:19:33] Sean Pritzkau: So let's say that, you know, there's five or six things on here that all have to do with writing. We all know that context switching is one of the areas that really reduce the amount that we can get that. And so we want to eliminate how much context switching that you do. So if you have four or five things on this list that are all writing based, let's put those things together.

​

[00:19:56] Sean Pritzkau: And then we're going to schedule time on your calendar, where that is, where you're going to do all of your writing activities. And then let's say that some of these things all have to do with meetings, right? So you might block off some time that is only for meetings, so you can get all these activities in your.

​

[00:20:13] Sean Pritzkau: Done. Let's say there's a lot of design related things. So in this process, we're going to batch all of your design activities so that all the assets are ready in the beginning of the project. So you don't have to design these assets one by one at different times during the duration of the project. And that's really where the magic happens because when you sit down and you're ready to do some focused work, then you can actually accomplish a lot more.

​

[00:20:37] Sean Pritzkau: In that amount of time. And there's something like contagious about that energy that you get when you are in this state of deep work and you feel productive and you maybe work three or four hours and you've gotten a bunch of things on this list done, then it kind of catapults you into that next thing.

​

[00:20:56] Sean Pritzkau: And that's where you really begin to sense that. Feeling of productivity and momentum, and you're not depleted from those past activities, but actually re-energized to do something new. So that is the four steps in this framework, right? Eliminate automate, delegate bats. And I hope you can take a look at this list that you've put together and everything has one of those letters next to it.

​

[00:21:26] Sean Pritzkau: Eliminate automate, delegate. And you can begin to take this process. And even this week, take a look at that thing and figure out how to incorporate this process into that activity, but also other systems processes that you have alongside that, and then begin to make this kind of a way of life, like a way of doing.

​

[00:21:51] Sean Pritzkau: That's just going to help you get more done and ultimately make a bigger and a greater impact because you're able to actually do more with your time.

​

[00:22:13] Sean Pritzkau: All right. Hopefully that was helpful. I would love to hear from you if there's something that you thought through during this episode or a process that you worked on, I'm really curious to hear what are the kinds of things that were kind of generated throughout this episode for you, but I appreciate you listening.

​

[00:22:30] Sean Pritzkau: And if you have yet to leave a review for this podcast, jump onto apple podcast, iTunes and leave a short review. It only takes a minute. And it's really, really helpful for me to get the word out about this podcast, but thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week. .

​