Welcome to coffee powered systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host Miranda Merton. Hi ladies. It's Miranda. Welcome to coffee powered systems. Welcome back. I'm so glad that you are here with me today.

[00:00:23] Join me with a cup of coffee, tea, water, glass of wine, whatever you're drinking today. I still have a cup of coffee with me, even though it is actually rather late for me here. My batch day turned into a, an extended batch day. I ended up writing show notes and now I'm recording because I got a little backed up this weekend, so now I'm rolling my day, my two days into one.

[00:00:50] Today we are talking about what to focus on in your business if you only have an extra five hours a week. When I say an extra five hours a week, I'm talking about the little time that you have for planning and doing the extra things because if you are a writer or a content creator. Your week is going to be focused on creating those contents, writing your scripts or stories, and if you.

[00:01:16] Have clients, a lot of your week is going to be taken up with client work and we want to talk about what to focus on when you are working on your business and you have some extra time during the week to help plan and function that. So the first one I want to talk about is learning. This should be included in your strategy each week.

[00:01:35] So you want to spend at least an hour. Pick up a book that you're reading or make headway on one of those online courses that you spent money on, and you know the ones I'm talking about, they always end up in your drive and you forget you even bought them when you're deciding what to focus on this week.

[00:01:52] See if one of those courses that you purchased that you have not gone through yet, if that would be beneficial to go back through and look through some of those modules. So you want to focus on. One of those courses, or you can listen to an episode of your favorite business podcast. The key here is not to spend all of your time learning though.

[00:02:11] You want to focus on little chunks here and there. You can do 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever you have time for, but the strategy here is to poke at it a little bit each day because again, we don't have a lot of extra time, but you do want to make time to work some of those things in into your day. Again, we don't have a lot of time because we have to take action if we're going to move the needle, but we also want to learn something new each week so that you can either implement it in your business or continue to build upon it.

[00:02:42] Number two, the second thing we want to focus on is your business metrics. Now, this doesn't have to be done each week. I'd say maybe every month or even twice a month. If you want to do a mid month check in and then they end up. Check in so you can compare how your month went, or if you, if you have a bigger business and you need to check in midway through the month to make sure you're on track for the month, that's also good, but I don't think you need to check in every single week.

[00:03:11] Certain things. Maybe you do have check in every week, but that's up to you and where you are in your business. A lot of times we tend to ignore the numbers and we keep moving along, but how do you know. If what you're doing is working, if you're not going to track the efforts, so what numbers should we track?

[00:03:30] If you are running ads, if you're running Facebook ads, you're definitely going to track those. Those are going to be something you track more often if you are running ads, typically we're not actively running ads 365 days a year, so if you're in the middle of an ad campaign, you're definitely gonna want to check those every day.

[00:03:48] Make sure that your ad is doing what you want it to do. And either make a shift or turn it off because you don't want to be throwing money into ads that aren't working. And you also want to measure things that are measurable in your business specifically. So social media numbers. Although we don't want to get hung up on things like how many followers you have.

[00:04:13] You do want to notice the different trends, like are your followers continue to go up steadily or are you having a sudden drop in followers and they're continuing to go down. What types of posts tend to get the most engagement from your base? So things like that. If you start to notice different trends, you can make shifts.

[00:04:32] And what you're doing on social media. If you are suddenly having a drop in followers, you're going to want to note what you have changed or what you've been doing. Maybe it isn't resonating quite as well, or if you notice that maybe. Posts with your photo tend to get more likes and engagement than posts of just a picture of a stock photo of a desk.

[00:04:56] So take note of what types of posts are working, and then you can adjust mid month or next month. You also want to check website traffic right. You're a popular content. What's getting the most views? If you have a podcast, check your subscriber numbers. See if those are going up steadily. Maybe then you can focus on some efforts on what you can do to get more subscribers and income goals.

[00:05:23] You definitely want to check your income goals. Everyone at the beginning of the year usually sets an income goal. You'll have. Your standard, this is what I want to make this year, and then you might have a stretch goal as well, but you definitely want to keep an eye on your goals. Are you hitting your monthly income goals so that if you said you wanted to make $75,000 this year and it is now the middle of the year, where are you?

[00:05:50] Are you at 40,000 or are you at 50,000 then you can definitely tell. If you are on track to hit your goal. So you want to keep an eye on those numbers. Number three, planning. The type of planning that you do in your business or you have to do personally will depend on whether or not you have help in those areas.

[00:06:12] So if you already have a VA or somebody that is handling your social media. Or some other part of your business. You won't have to particularly touch on that hopefully if they are doing the specific job well that you hired them to do. Now, when I say planning, that includes social media scheduling and posting, preparing for the upcoming week, what will your main goal for the week be and how are you going to achieve it?

[00:06:38] Plan out the action steps needed to complete that goal. Prepare for the next day. We usually want to do that the night before. By planning your focus goals and prepare for any upcoming phone calls for the week. So if you create content like books, if you're a writer, you podcast, blog, create YouTube or tick tock videos, et cetera, you want to make sure that you plan your content ideas and when you will be creating the content.

[00:07:06] So don't just sit down any old time during the week and decide that now you want to sit down and write a blog post. You want to already have that plan in place. Number four. Well, yes, meal prepping and grocery planning will save you a lot of time during the week because I know we spend a lot of time on food, especially if you have a family or especially if you've got children and you do the cooking and all of the grocery planning and shopping right.

[00:07:37] If that all falls on you, the less time you spend deciding what to eat, the more time you'll have to spend focusing on other things. So let's take it a step further by using, you could also use a grocery delivery service like Amazon fresh. You can cut the extra time spent in the store and. Not to mention.

[00:07:56] It also cuts out on impulse buying. So why meal prepping? Why planning? Why do you want to plan your groceries and your meals ahead of time? This helps with decision fatigue and you know you can do the same thing with your clothes. You can do the same thing with a lot of different things that you have.

[00:08:12] This was made famous by Steve jobs. He chose to wear basically the same outfit every day because he said he had too many decisions to make. That making a whole nother decision, like what to wear every day was a waste of his time. Planning out your meals and your grocery shopping ahead of time will help you with decision fatigue.

[00:08:33] You sit down, do it all at once. I like to do my meal planning and grocery ordering because I do use Amazon fresh on Fridays. Swells Friday night, sit down, do all that, plan everything out for the week, and then. Have my groceries delivered over the weekend sometime, depending on when. Uh, they have delivery available.

[00:08:55] I also use a principle that I put up on the refrigerator with the meals that we're having each night for dinner so that whoever's in the home can look on the fridge. They don't have to say, mom, what's for dinner? They look on the fridge. They see what we're having for dinner. And that's it. The whole week planned out.

[00:09:14] And of course you don't have to be so rigid and say, no, we can't have pizza tomorrow. Cause tonight's, you know, tacos. You can switch it up if you're not feeling like making something, you can go ahead and make one of the other days, just pluck it out of there. What I also love about planning ahead is that when I get up in the morning and I look at the refrigerator and I see what meal is for today, or actually I do it the night before, I look at the fridge and I see, Oh, tomorrow we're having chicken, whatever, and I know the chicken is still frozen.

[00:09:45] I can go ahead and take that out. And it will be thawing and defrosting overnight in the refrigerator. Then I don't have to be scrambling the next day. You already know and that decision is made for you. Number five. Deleting your downloads and clearing your email inbox. So doing this simple thing helps you stay organized and stay on top of things to make sure that nothing gets missed during the day.

[00:10:12] I download so many files and photos and everything to my desktop that's from either browsing the internet or from client work, and I end up with a long list of documents in my computer. What I like to do is clear these out, either at the end of the day or the end of the week, depending on how many I do this, especially if I'm creating graphics that day, and I ended up downloading from Canva or my graphics creator, which I also use affinity publisher and affinity photo.

[00:10:44] So if I download those files, what I'll do is I'll. Drop them into their correct folder, or I'll drop them onto Google drive and then I can delete them from my hard drive. When I clear them out, I either file everything where it needs to go, or if it's something that I'm going to use again, I make sure I file it correctly in the correct folder.

[00:11:06] If it's something that I'm not going to use, and I know that it was just a, um, you know, my client said, Hey, sign this. Sign this contract for me. I downloaded it, I uploaded it into Adobe signature. I signed it for him and sent it off. I don't ever need that again. So those kinds of things, I want to get off my computer.

[00:11:26] It keeps my computer running faster and less bogged down with unnecessary files. And this actually won't take a whole hour throughout the week, so you've got a little bit of extra time to kill, but if you leave it till the end of the month or till whenever. You've got all these unnecessary files on your computer.

[00:11:44] And it just gets confusing. You don't know what you need to keep and what you don't. You don't know. You forget what the names of files were and why you downloaded them. So that's why I like to go ahead and get rid of them either at the end of the day, if I have time or the end of the week for sure when I'm just hanging out on the weekend.

[00:12:04] And the bonus tip that I want to include in this as well, we've already done five, but my bonus tip. Exercise, meditate or whatever self care means to you. So I can't tell you what to do here. Everyone finds joy in different activities. So if you prefer 20 minutes on your Peloton or you prefer 15 minutes of meditation, that's up to you.

[00:12:27] But there should be some kind of self care practice involved in your weekly routine. You can fit it in daily. Um, if you can, then that's great, but at the very least, then try to do 20 minutes, three times a week and hello, that's one hour. So that is the end of the five things that you can do and work on in your business.

[00:12:50] If you only have five extra hours this week. All right? It's Q and a time. If you have a question about systems workflows or you just want a recommendation, visit the link in the show notes to leave a voice recorded message for me. There's nothing to download and your name is optional. Just hit recording sent.

[00:13:07] Then listen for your question in an upcoming episode. Okay. I thought this was a great question, and it ties in nicely with this week's topic. The question is, where do you find help when you are just starting out and don't have a big budget? Okay, so here's a few places you can try. Number one. Your business, Facebook groups, those tend to be some of the best places to go when you're looking for extra help.

[00:13:34] Usually if you post that you're looking for someone, people will either recommend their person that they use or you'll have people coming out of the woodwork that tell you that they also have services and. They can help you out. So your Facebook groups are a great place to start, especially the business ones.

[00:13:53] You'll find a lot of help in those groups. Number two, you can try a site like upwork.com or fiverr.com and I'll link to both of those in the show notes. They are both good for finding help. You can read. The reviews on Fiverr and reach out to the person. It's a good way to get simple one off tasks done.

[00:14:18] Like if you need a graphic created or a logo, some of them are, you know, five bucks up to $50 depending on what you're actually, even more than that because I've seen, depending on what you're looking for, the scope of the work could be a lot bigger. So they do have ranges if you want to add on or if you need a quicker turnaround, things like that.

[00:14:38] On Upwork, you can create a proposal and they will bid for the work and then you can interview a person. So that would be a good one. If you want a person to do ongoing things for you, say you need a podcast producer. Or you need a VA, then you can create basically like a job ad and post that on there with everything you're looking for.

[00:15:02] People will bid onto the work and tell you what their rate is and then you can interview from there and choose one. The last place that I could suggest is called virtual staff finder. Virtual staff finder.com this was created by Chris Ducker. It's a staff matching service for affordable workers in the Philippines, so I've not tried them before, but Chris Ducker is great and they have been around for a long time, and you can get VA help for a really good price, and that's it for this week.

[00:15:34] Now go pick one thing on your list to work on and see you next Tuesday. Thanks for listening to coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the [email protected]. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too, and join me here next time.