5 Ways I’m Working Smarter While the Kids are Home

QUICK NOTES – 5 WAYS I’M WORKING SMARTER WHILE THE KIDS ARE HOME 

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TRANSCRIPTION – THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GETTING SHIT DONE AND TAKING PRIORITIZED PURPOSEFUL ACTIONS:

​Welcome to another episode of Work Smarter Not Harder Wednesdays. I’m your host, Kim Sutton, and today I’m going to talk about five ways that I’m working smarter with kids at home.

At the time of this recording, we’re going through the stay home COVID quarantine process, but I know that this could be timely at any point in which you’re listening. It could be winter vacation, it could be summer vacation.

I am a mompreneur with five children. I know some… Some people don’t like the word mompreneur. But hey, I embrace it. I am a mom. I am an entrepreneur. I need to figure out how to make both fit together and work together and keep me productive so that I can serve myself so that I can serve my clients so that I can serve my family as I intend to.

So again, five ways I’m working smarter with the kids at home.

Way number one is I am cleaning up my tech,

I know this might sound like a non productive thing to do, that I could be outsourcing  cleaning up my tech to a virtual assistant, but for me, it’s been almost therapeutic. I’ve cleaned out my inbox. By cleaned out, I mean it’s under 100.

I would love to…. I would like to have inbox zero, but I’m not so stressed about that. But having an inbox that’s over 200 stresses me out. So, every single day, I make sure that my inbox is under 100.

I’ve also cleaned up all the files on my computer. The downloads folder gets cleaned out once a week. My desktop gets cleaned out once a week. My documents. and when I’m cleaning it up, I’m just I’m not just throwing everything out. I’m actually filing all my files into the cloud.

I don’t know about you, but I have lost computers in the past. I’ve lost PCs. I’ve lost my Mac. I dropped this Mac onto the floor last week because the charging cord got stuck around the doorknob when I was walking through the house. And so from about four feet up, it just flew out of my hands and crashed on the floor. And the first thing I could think of was, oh, crap. That’s not actually what I was thinking it was a lot worse. You can imagine. But I was afraid to open up the lid because I was afraid that it was going to be all cracked, and especially during this whole stay home thing. I’m sure the Apple store is not open. If they are, that would be really surprising.

But that’s why it’s so important that at least every week, I’m putting things into the cloud. Putting my files into the cloud and keeping everything cleaned up so I can still access it, if all hell breaks loose.

So that’s way number one of the five ways I’m working smarter with kids at home.

Way number two is I’m optimizing my SEO.

Again, this is an activity that I could be outsourcing to other people. However, again, this is therapeutic for me. I am going through all of the old episodes for the Positive Productivity podcast, I believe we are up to episode number 650 or 651, but I’m going through and optimizing each episode… Their… Its SEO.

SEO, if you’re not familiar, is search engine optimization, I want to make sure that every episode is as searchable or as findable as possible. So right now, of the 650 plus episodes on my site, about 150 have really been optimized. But I’ll tell you that even when I started this whole process, at the end of 2018, simply optimizing the first 50 episodes took my website traffic and I… You know, I’m always really transparent and I’ll share my numbers, but it took my website traffic from 500 a month to 4000 a month.

Now I’m at 150. I haven’t looked at my numbers recently, so I can’t share with you. But I can’t wait to see what the results are after all of the already released episodes are optimized and ongoingly, as each new episode as it’s released, is optimized straight off the bat.

So, right now, I am cleaning up three episodes a day. I’m optimizing three episodes today. And that’s way number two of the five ways I’m working smarter with the kids at home.

Way number three is I’m setting up evergreen marketing. Okay, I’m just gonna stop saying it. But I realized that a lot of these things, looking down my list, all of these things really could be outsourced. However, things slowed down. I’m okay financially and I can do some of these things myself. So I’m not going to say it anymore. They’re therapeutic. I realize that I could be outsourcing them and in the future I will.

But way number three is I’m setting up evergreen marketing. What I mean by that is that, well, number one for each of the podcast episodea, I’m making sure that I have tweets and Facebook posts and all of the marketing setup, and into my evergreen marketing scheduler, so that those posts are going out on an evergreen basis.

I believe that the evergreen tool that I have right now is called SocialBee. To be totally transparent, I tried to use it once. It was giving me difficulty. I purchased it a couple months ago off of AppSumo. I really need to get back in and use it but for right now I’ve been putting every single episode into Pinterest and right away I can see the results coming through.

If you didn’t know, in the future… In the very near near future, I do have a course, an evergreen course, coming out called Pinterest for Podcasters. And I talk all about that in in the course and how to set up your podcasts in Pinterest so that it’s constantly driving traffic to your site to your products, to your programs to your services, and to the show itself. So if you’re interested in that, just keep your ears open and let me know.

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But, along with the podcast, I am also setting up evergreen marketing for my Instagram quotes. I know this might sound really far out there but I’m a little bit Instagram OCD. I like my Instagram profile or flow or what’s it called stream to have a pattern. So anything that’s not congruent with my stream usually goes in my stories but every… Let me think what is… I think every five posts is a quote. And what I’ve been doing is, because those are square and Pinterest prefers the vertical, I’ve been making a vertical pin for each quote, putting it on Pinterest and then using Tailwind, start setting up a SmartLoop that drives people to the Instagram quote every time it gets re-pinned. This is great because it’s cross-pollinating from Pinterest over to Instagram. And what I would like to do in the future is even take people from Twitter, to Instagram from Facebook to Instagram, and I put work into the quote images so I might as well be reusing them over time.

If you’re wondering what I mean by “I put work into these quote images,” at one point — and it’s not off the shelf right now — but at one point, my team and I spent significant time developing the the Positive Productivity Planner. A quarterly planner, undated, and every single day of those 90 days had a quote.

But we thought at one point that we it was going to be four separate books. One for quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. So we had assembled over well over 400 different quotes that related to Positive Productivity. And I still have that spreadsheet.

So that’s where I am pulling from to create these Instagram images. So, I have enough quotes to last many years and I might as well get as much out of each quote as I possibly can.

So that’s the evergreen marketing.

Way number four that I am working smarter while the kids are at home as it is I’m cleaning out projects. I’m cleaning out client projects. I’m cleaning out personal projects. I mean, the cleaning up of the podcast in itself is a project that has been on my plate since 2018. It is about time that I got all the episodes updated and not in my way.

So that moving forward… We’re not having to do all the cleanup work, but we can focus once a week on optimizing that week’s episode. So cleaning up and closing out projects like that will be a huge relief on my brain of… of my bandwidth. And honestly of my Teamwork. I don’t want to see it in Teamwork anymore. I want it gone.

And way number five of the five ways I’m working smarter while the kids are at home is I’m giving myself.

I know you might be wondering, “Giving yourself? What’s that mean?“

I’m giving myself grace. I’m giving myself patience and giving myself time. I’m giving myself self care. I’m giving myself permission to say no.

Just because people are panicking and freaking out and are fearful about (?) does not does not mean that I need to be giving out hours and hours or weeks or months of my time for free on a one on one basis. To be completely… Just honest, I would rather be here giving away a month of free time talking to you… Giving you the feedback and the motivation and the inspiration and the strategies that you need to take your business forward. Because in this way, I can be helping dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people versus giving away one on one time for free where I’m only helping one person.

So I’m giving myself permission to say no. I am giving myself permission to sleep and not wake up with an alarm. That’s not going so well, by the way. My kids are waking me up. My cats are waking me up. I just want to sleep in. That’s it.

But I’m giving myself.

Today, I’d love to know how you are working smarter during this time. So, leave a comment down below. Wherever you are — if you’re watching on Facebook, if you’re watching on YouTube, I would love to hear your feedback. And if you’re not already subscribed, click the subscribe button. Hit the bell so that you find out when future videos are put out.

And I want to offer you one last gift. I want to offer you the 30 Day Work Smarter, Not Harder Challenge. So I’ll be putting a link down below so that you can sign up.

Now, with all this said, go forth and make it a positive and a productive day.