PP 249: Weekly Wins and Reflections, Volume 4

Kim Sutton: Welcome to the Positive Productivity Podcast, Episode 249. The Positive Productivity Podcast was created to empower entrepreneurs to achieve and appreciate personal and professional success. I’m your host, Kim Suttona and if you’re ready, let’s jump into today’s episode. Today I’m bringing back my weekly reflections, but I’m going to revise them to call them weekly wins and reflections. And for each win of the week, I’m also going to share the lessons that I was reminded of, or that I learned out of the win. Before I jump in, I’m going to share quick that the three pillars of positive productivity are peace, passion, and prosperity and not just prosperity of the wealth kind. But we can be rich in so many areas of our life. In order to achieve peace, passion and prosperity, especially as an entrepreneur, the three areas that I believe we need to focus on are self care, support, and systems. And this is shown through astoundingly this week. Let me give you an example and this is my first win. This week, one of the goals I set in the keep Kim accountable challenge, which if you haven’t entered it yet, you can still find on my website by visiting thekimsutton.com/pp249, that was to have the first 75 podcasts back up on the website with tweets, as well as posts for LinkedIn and Facebook put into Meet Edgar. As the week progressed, I realized this was going to be a dream goal. Because there was no way I was going to find time to get the 45 episodes that I had not yet touched, not only on the site with the transcription, but also compose all these social media messages. But then a new team member of only a few weeks, Leng, asked me about the episodes that were missing from the site, she is so eager to learn how to do new tasks and activities within my company, and the lightbulb went off. For three or four months, I have been stalling on creating a tutorial video on how exactly to put podcast episodes onto the site. So in that very moment, I stopped what I was doing, and finally recorded it. Now let me tell you what’s happened since then has completely blown my mind. Not only did Leng get through Episode 75 back on the site, but she is well over 100 now. And not only that, but she’s also created all the social media images for every single episode, including the guests images. As we’re building our business, we have to remember that we can’t be working in our business all the time, but we have to make sure that we’re working on our business. And by creating the tutorial video, I was able to free up so much of my time and focus on the higher level activities, which have also made my week. If you have not started creating documentation of all the procedures that you follow in your business, and I’m not talking about the big procedures, I’m even talking about the small ones. For example, just how to create a quote image for Instagram that I want you to start creating those tutorials today. They don’t need to be written out with screenshots, although that is one way to handle it. But in my case, I save some time, and I simply recorded a video. Depending on what type of computer you have, there are so many different types of software that you can use and in my case, because I already had Camtasia open on my PC, I decided to do it that way. I took two minutes to edit out a minor blooper, because yes, there are bloopers all the time in my life. And I uploaded the video to YouTube as a private video just for my team’s reference. All those videos are going to be stored in a systems and procedures folder in my Google Drive. And I’m really hoping that by the end of 2018, just about every single procedure in my business will be documented.

The second one of my week and some of you might think this is crazy, is that I actually said no to a prospect who came my way. It wasn’t because I didn’t want the work. But in the past I have said yes to every single opportunity that came my way simply because I was working out of scarcity mode. Well, I realized that if I’m going to reach my upcoming goals for this year, that I have to be really smart on how I spend my time and I have to realize that immediate income may not help me reach future finish lines, especially on my bigger projects. This prospect came from a referral. So I simply wrote back, thank you so much for the introduction. But unfortunately, I don’t have time right now, just because of a few major projects I’m working on. Would you like a referral to somebody who can help you? Not only did I help myself out by giving myself time to work on my projects, but I also helped out a friend who I know does do that type of work. In the end, it’s going to be a win win win for us all.

The third and final win of the week that I’m going to share with you is that I finally tackled a few of the personal to do list items that have been nagging at me for months, I’ve been writing them down every single day just to go do them, and I finally knocked them out. So I don’t have to look at them in the future. Just to give you an idea of what one of those were, it was simply to pick up the medical forms for my twins from the pediatrician and take them to the daycare. I regularly find myself ignoring tasks that will only take 15 minutes to a half hour just because I think something more pressing and more urgent and more lucrative is going to be here at my desk, and that I should be keeping my attention here and on client work or on personal work. Well, if we keep on ignoring our personal to do list items, we could wind up in a sticky situation later on. In this case, if I had not gotten these medical forms into the daycare, eventually they were going to say that the kids couldn’t go anymore. And that would be a huge problem physically and mentally for mom. Along with the forms, I also scheduled a few doctor’s appointments so that I had been holding out on for myself. These are critical doctor appointments and I can’t afford to push them off. But I had been pushing them off for at least a month. If you’re going to learn anything from my wins of the week, I want you to start taking care of yourself by creating procedures documents that can help your team support you. And by tackling the items on your personal to do list that are going to help you live a better tomorrow. I would love to hear what your wins for the week are. So please head on over to thekimsutton.com/pp249 and share in the comment section below the show notes. Now with all that said, go forth and make it a positive and a productive day. Today’s episode of the Positive Productivity Podcast is brought to you by the positive productivity pod created to empower entrepreneurs to achieve and appreciate personal and professional success without burnout. The pod offers weekly group coaching sessions, online courses, a private member community and tons more. To learn more about the pod and to sign up visit positiveproductivitypod.com. See you on the inside.