Productivity hacks are increasingly crucial in today’s fast-paced business environment, particularly for entrepreneurs who juggle multiple responsibilities. Are you maximizing your time and resources effectively?
In this episode, our host and CEO, Porschia, along with our guest, Jeremy Cline, explore what productivity means for entrepreneurs and why it matters. They discuss the motivations behind starting a business and provide practical productivity hacks to manage an endless to-do list without reinventing the wheel.
You’ll also learn about the importance of asking for help, a common struggle for many entrepreneurs. Porschia and Jeremy share their favorite productivity hacks tools and highlight common mistakes entrepreneurs make regarding productivity.
Jeremy is a coach and the host of Change Work Life, the podcast that’s all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. After 20 years spent largely furthering other people’s dreams, Jeremy started to wonder whether he was going to end his career thinking, “Really? This is what I did with forty years of working life?” And so in 2019 he started the Change Work Life podcast and became a coach in 2022 to help others.
What you’ll learn:
- The true meaning of productivity and why it’s essential for entrepreneurs
- How to determine if you’re being productive or not
- Common productivity mistakes made by entrepreneurs and how to avoid them
- How to know if you avoid getting support and when you should ask for help
- Effective productivity hacks to manage a never-ending to-do list
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today, we are talking about entrepreneurship productivity hacks with Jeremy Klein. Jeremy is a coach and the host of Change Work Life, the podcast that’s all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. After 20 years spent largely furthering other people’s dreams, Jeremy started to wonder whether he was going to end his career thinking, Really?
Is this what I did with 40 years of working life? And so in [00:01:00] 2019, he started the change work life podcast to find out what alternatives were out there and became a coach in 2022 to help others do the same. Hi, Jeremy. How are you today?
Jeremy: I’m very well, Portia. How are you?
Porschia: I am doing great. I am thrilled to have you with us to discuss productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.
But first we want to know a little more about you. So tell me about seven year old Jeremy.
Jeremy: One of the reasons I love this question is that my daughter is seven at the moment. So Seven is an age which I remember vaguely, and it’s interesting comparing myself to, what she’s like and remembering what life was like when I was seven.
I was, I would say, possibly a fairly precocious seven year old I was quite bright [00:02:00] top of or near the top of the class possibly the class swot even at that stage of Seven years old, but yeah, I remember being curious. I remember being quite creative. I think it was probably around that age that I was proudly telling my relatives that when I grew up, I was going to be an author, a fiction author, cause I hadn’t really heard of nonfiction, by that stage.
And, yeah, just inquisitive, I definitely remember being someone who would ask a lot of questions, which I think was occasionally a little bit exasperating for the adults I had to be talking to at the time, and possibly with know it all tendencies, which I’ve been Trying to shed since then to varying degrees of success.
Porschia: Asking a lot of questions I know is in alignment with the law career. So as an attorney, so I could definitely see that, connection from your background. What would you say were some [00:03:00] highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your own business?
Jeremy: Yeah, I think there’s definitely a distinction between highlights and pivotal moments. There was, so in my legal career, there’ve been a few highlights and I think one of them was successfully getting a deal at the end of a very Fraught negotiation it wasn’t just a commercial negotiation. It was a family negotiation as well. We had family members who were at odds with one another and we had two days of extremely intense, rather emotional negotiations and we got a result at the end of it.
One of my mentors said to me that the sign of a good negotiation is where everyone leaves a little bit grumpy. So on that measure of success we achieved it. Pivotal moments, I think it’s interesting to look at [00:04:00] the, some of the moments that got me to decide to, Go down the entrepreneurial path. And I have a vivid memory of a very difficult conversation.
It wasn’t even with a client. It was like with the client’s right hand person and they were being absolutely despicable. on the phone. They had a reputation for it. They would come to the office for meetings and after them receptionists would tell me how rude they had been. And I think it was during one of those conversations when I started to question, why on earth am I putting up with this rubbish?
Who is this guy? He’s not even the client. Okay, yes, he’s speaking for the client, but what makes him think he can be so uncivil when we’re really just trying to help? And It got me thinking that [00:05:00] I’m very happy to act in service of other people, but I think I’d rather choose my own terms and who I want to work with.
So I think that was definitely a pretty key moment that set me down the path of wanting to do my own thing.
Porschia: How did you decide to become a coach?
Jeremy: I will try and keep this brief because it has been through a few different iterations. My first step was deciding I wanted to start a business, and that was heavily influenced by a book called Unscripted DeMarco.
He’s also written a book. book called Millionaire Fastlane, which is a little bit better known. And that was the book that pretty much convinced me or gave me that push that made me believe, yeah, I need to start my own business. I didn’t have a clue what I was [00:06:00] going to do. I have lots of ideas.
One thing that was quite interesting was the notion that if you look for a problem in the world and you think, okay what could a solution to that problem be? So I was thinking in those terms, and I started with a podcast. My problem was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my career.
So my solution was doing a podcast, which explored that. And it was great. I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. It’s still going, but it was never a business. It was a glorified hobby, turning a podcast into a business, especially when you’re starting from no following. No one knows you. Absolutely. Zero. It’s really hard work.
And so it was when I had a second set of coaching that we started to dive much more into me, my strengths, my values, that sort of thing. [00:07:00] And there was a bit of a. Oh yeah, of course, realization, here I am, I’ve got an interest in careers. I like asking questions to people in my interviews and my podcast.
Coaching was a natural fit once I learned more about coaching actually was and experienced it myself. So yeah, everything came together and Yeah, I think this is for me.
Porschia: So Jeremy, what does productivity mean to you?
Jeremy: Productivity I think is an overused term and is not necessarily a helpful term and people have explained to me the difference between productivity and effectiveness.
Productivity I think it has been interpreted less by what we produce, but more by the amount of time we spend producing it. And [00:08:00] possibly that goes back to when productivity meant producing things. By hand in a factory. So I’m increasingly trying to look at whether or not something I’m doing is effective rather than busyness for the sake of being busy.
I, I left my lawyer job at the end of 2023 and I’m still very much in the mentality of you work, eight hours and possibly then some a day, and that’s what you’ve got to do. And I’m starting to try to shift my mindset into, you can get the work that you need to do done, In less time than that, and it’s okay not to spend those hours, which every office worker is expected to do on your business.[00:09:00]
So I’m looking at it more in terms of what are the things that are going to have results for me? It’s one thing they don’t tell you, or maybe it’s one thing they do tell you as an entrepreneur is that you don’t lack for things on your to do list. There are a gazillion things that you could do and you then have lots of ideas and you have ideas as you’re going to sleep at night and you have ideas in the shower, Oh, I could do this.
Oh, there’s this shiny thing. Oh, artificial intelligence is big at the moment. I wonder how I can do that. And so one of the things I’m really trying to focus on at the moment is figuring, all right, so where do I want to go? What are the things? That are going to get me there quicker because in my case, in my coaching practice, it’s probably not things like spending lots of time commenting on posts on LinkedIn.
It’s going to be [00:10:00] individual one to one conversations, that kind of thing.
Porschia: So I really like what you mentioned about being cognizant of the difference between productivity and effectiveness. And you’re right, those are two different things that depending on who, what someone has to do could look very different. Why do you think productivity is important for entrepreneurs?
Jeremy: For the simple reason that entrepreneurs like everyone else have a limited amount of time in the day. That’s one thing where everyone literally has the same amount of time. And when you’ve got lots of choices about how you can be spending that time, it’s important to do it in ways which is.
Productive or effective, whichever word you choose and yeah [00:11:00] being aware of time and being aware of the things which are. The best use of your time, and that might be something that we come on to talk about a bit. There’s a podcaster I follow who he edited his own podcasts for donkey’s years, way past the period where a lot of podcasters will outsource the editing because he enjoyed it.
And okay. Yeah. No, fair enough. He got satisfaction from it. But he realized that. It wasn’t going to be the most effective time or the best effective use of his time. It wasn’t a superpower of his. He could get someone else to do it probably much more quickly, probably much more effectively. At a relatively low cost, and he could do the stuff where he was doing the stuff which was him, his superpowers.
Porschia: So how [00:12:00] does someone know if they are productive or not?
Jeremy: That’s a very good question. How do I know? Whether I’m productive or not, I am starting to journal things that I have done throughout the day. And I can go back and look at that list and figure out which things I think were productive. And I’ve got to be both, I’ve got to be both strict with myself and I’ve got to give myself grace.
So there’s got to be time of the day where, yeah, okay, I do scroll through LinkedIn or Twitter or Reddit or whatever it might be. And I suppose it’s, they’re having the discipline of not doing it automatically, but maybe scheduling it or doing intentionally or something like that. I guess, first of all, it’s defining where you’re trying to get to what’s the [00:13:00] goal.
And what are the sub goals that take you up to that goal? And then is the action moving you towards that? Now I’ve got nothing against experimentation, trying out things. It’s, it’s one of the freedoms that comes with Entrepreneurship, you can, mess around with things. I can spend an hour asking chat GPT stupid questions, but whether or not I’m, whether or not I’m doing things, which get me closer to those goals or those sub goals, I guess that’s the measure of whether or not I’m being productive.
Porschia: Many of our clients who are entrepreneurs feel like they have a never ending to do list to your point earlier. What are some productivity hacks you can share to help them be more productive or more effective to your earlier point? [00:14:00]
Jeremy: I’ve got three really simple hacks, which I find are quite effective, and I’m talking here in particular to someone who might not have the resources to outsource some of the more mundane tasks that they might have, but even taking these steps will actually help you when you are.
So the first hack is using templates. I regularly find myself sending out similar emails to people, whether it’s about scheduling, whether it’s about coaching packages, whatever it might be. And my default behavior. Is finding the last email that I sent when I did that and cutting and pasting it and using that.[00:15:00]
And that’s effective to a point, except that I find myself forgetting what was the last one I did, or I think that there’s an email I did, which fits the bill. And then I go through my inbox and eventually find it. And then I realized that it doesn’t quite do what I wanted it to do. And so then I look somewhere else and it just.
It takes time. So something I’m getting into the habit of doing when I’ve identified something, which I am beginning to send out more than three times is just to create myself a, like a swipe file, a template file, just a Google doc, which has got some template emails in it. So I know that they’re there.
They’re ready. And yeah, it gives me a quicker starting point. And even just a like a proforma template. So going back into my legal career, I would give written legal advice. The advice would be. It would always be different, but [00:16:00] the structure was pretty much always the same. I would always include similar paragraphs and it took ages before I just created for myself a standard document, which included the outline structure and those paragraphs, which I knew were going to be included every time I was going back and trying to find the previous advice and just cutting and pasting that.
But the amount of time I saved. Doing that, creating these template documents. It’s yeah, it made a huge difference.
Porschia: [00:17:00] Yeah. I think templates are really helpful and to your point about using them as an attorney I think a lot of people know, especially if they’re trying to avoid hiring an attorney, they think, oh, I can just go online and buy that legal template, there’d be.
For some contract or business formation agreement or things like that and really. Use that for their legal purposes. But to your point, entrepreneurs thinking about what could be a template. What are those things that I do all the time that could be, automated to a certain degree, right?
Not completely, but, you save time there. I remember when I first learned about, the email template function in Microsoft office, and it was like, the clouds parted because I thought, oh, wow, I can use all these templates and, it’s so helpful for business another hack that, [00:18:00] I’ve heard you mention is around batch processing.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Porschia: Tell me more about that, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Again, it’s a very simple concept. If you have a job to do multiple times, then try to do it all in one go rather than spreading it out. So to give you an example, I tend to get my podcast episodes ready. in batches, usually at least four at a time.
And there’s a process to be followed. There’s uploading to the, my podcast host. There’s getting my blog posts ready on my website. There’s doing the audiograms, There’s doing all the social media posts, that kind of thing. And I have found that when I do all of it in one go, it takes me much less time than it would have done [00:19:00] if I do say one, and then I go and do something else.
And then I come back to it. You just start to get in the flow of it. It’s yeah, another example is when. If you’re not automating it, sending out reminders to people about meetings, again, just doing it all in one hit whilst you’ve got your calendar there, you’ve got the zoom details, you can copy them in.
You can use your template emails that we talked about and yeah, it’s, you just get into that state of flow and so get things done more quickly. It can be a little bit tedious, but it also gets the job done. I tend to give it, I tend to feel quite a feeling of satisfaction.
Porschia: Agreed. I try to batch as much as I can as well.
And I didn’t really learn about batching until I became an entrepreneur to your point. And I heard a consultant talking about batching activities. Also on the psychological side of things, you might’ve heard of this too, Jeremy, [00:20:00] the research that’s out there about Context switching. So when your brain is doing one thing, the kind of lag time to switch and do something else.
A lot of, researchers recommend that you focus on, one activity or project, at a time and then switch to something else. Because if you’re switching your attention to, randomly, they, Say that you’re not as productive or effective to Jeremy’s point.
Jeremy: And bonus productivity hack before we get on to the third one. Someone suggested to me, turn off your email notifications. It’s the best thing I ever did. And When I was in the office, I remember having conversations with people at their desk and I was seeing these notifications binging up all the time and it was distracting them from the conversation they were having with me.
And yeah, email is it’s great and [00:21:00] it’s much maligned. And When you realize that it is asynchronous communication and that chances are an email can wait, it’s not urgent. If it’s urgent, they’ll phone you, frankly. So yeah, turning off email notifications was an absolute game changer.
Porschia: Yeah.
Another thing I hear from entrepreneurs is that they feel like they are reinventing the wheel all of the time. So outside of the templates and the batching Are there any other ways that you would recommend people address that?
Jeremy: The third tip I have is creating standard operating procedures.
It sounds like a drag. What? You mean I’ve got to write down every step of what I do? But, It has been huge and again, yes, you know the process and you get into it and you can get into the flow and batch them like we talked about [00:22:00] earlier, but something does happen, the phone does go, you get distracted, you lose your thread, you start to forget.
Hang on, have I already done this? Do I even do that? I can’t remember what’s going on. When you’ve got it written down in front of you, yes, you probably will get to a stage where you will memorize it and you won’t need to look at your SOP. But I, I wrote my own one for creating audiograms. For social media using the tools I’ve got, because it was a fiddly process getting the transcripts right and picking your your time slot and getting your image there and that kind of thing.
So just having that standard operating procedure on the computer so I could look at it and go, all right, so now it’s this and so now it’s that and now it’s this. And again, the beauty of these three tips is that they can all be stacked. So You can start with the template, you can then batch everything, and you can use your SOP to make sure that [00:23:00] you hit all the steps that you need to.
And then also, and I alluded to this earlier, when you’re at a stage where you want to outsource it, it is so much easier to explain it to someone else when you’ve got these when you’ve got the template documents and when you’ve got the SOP. Standard operating procedures. I know that some people, I have started doing this a little bit.
They video themselves. doing something. In fact a great hack that I picked up from a book and I’m going to forget what it was called, Buy Back Your Time. Dan Martell, I think is the author, where he talks about do a video of what you’re doing. Send it to the person your virtual assistant or whoever, and get them to write the SOP based on the video, even better, so you can get them to do the work.
Porschia: Yes. Yes. That is a great tip. And [00:24:00] I heard someone say this. If. Your assistant can’t do it from the video or from your instructions. That’s a great learning point for you, right? Because there’s something missing in the standard operating procedures that isn’t apparent, right? Handing it off. to see if someone else can do it serves as a great kind of check to your own training that you’re creating or getting your assistant to create, right?
If they’re creating the SOP for you. And then I heard someone say that you should show like your documents in this case, your standard operating procedures to three different people and see if, All three can do it just based on the standard operating procedure. And if that’s the case, then it’s good.
If one of the three or two of the three have issues, then again, something might be missing. So I love that. And something else that you said when you were talking [00:25:00] about, standard operating procedures and memorizing them. I thought this a long time ago and I’ve used a computer analogy for myself, but then I realized a lot of people have had this thought that they use different analogies.
While you can memorize something and just remember it Especially as an entrepreneur, I think that our mental capacity and our brain functioning is so important. We, I think we use our brains for so many different roles, so many different things, a bit more than people who are in a normal kind of nine to five job.
And I, Tell all of our like team members. And I, tell my husband this too. I’m trying to use my brain like a computer, and I’m trying to use my brain for processing, not for storage. So storage would be remembering the process that I’ve done so many times I’ve got it memorized, processing is like getting that out of my brain.
It’s somewhere else so that I can be present and solve these. [00:26:00] Problems that come up as an entrepreneur. I love what you shared there, Jeremy. Sometimes I see that entrepreneurs are avoiding asking for help in certain areas and it’s affecting their productivity. They might think that it makes them look bad or incompetent in some way.
What are your thoughts on entrepreneurs, asking for help?
Jeremy: It’s absolutely essential. Why wouldn’t you? And I think that there’s a couple of Interesting thought processes there. It’s a little bit like parenthood, actually, just because you have become a parent doesn’t mean you know how to do it. You’ve never done it before. Why on earth would you know how to do it?
Just by virtue of having done the, the biologically necessary things to give birth to a child. Similarly, just because you’ve become an entrepreneur, why would you suddenly become Know how to [00:27:00] do it when there are, you’ve been doing it for 10 minutes and there are other people who’ve been doing it for 10 years, it would be crazy not to ask other people for advice.
There are no new problems, everyone or other, every problem that you face, someone is going to have faced before. And so you can tap into people. And also you just you don’t know when you have your own blind spots. So it’s not just. Advice, but yeah I’m a member of a business mastermind.
So there’s five of us, we meet every two weeks and discuss things and just the perspectives you get from other people. The last time I was in the hot seat, we have everyone’s in the hot seats on a rotation. And the last time I was in it and I was, I had this thing in my head and it was really [00:28:00] big.
And there was this other guy looks at me and he said, yeah, this is early onset imposter syndrome. It’s when you start to realize that in your world, your business is everything. And especially if it’s a service based kind of lifestyle business where it is you don’t have. Stuff.
You’re not selling a product. You’re essentially selling you. Then that sort of you is really big in your brain, whereas to everyone else. It’s not that big a deal, you need to postpone a coaching session because your daughter’s off sick from school. Might seem like a big deal for you. For them it’s okay, never mind.
I’ve got something else I can do with that hour. So yeah, just having. The perspective of other people’s ideas it’s crucial. It’s absolutely crucial.
Porschia: So tell us some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen entrepreneurs make when it comes to productivity.
Jeremy: I think a good place to start is probably my own mistakes and [00:29:00] other people’s. Am I going to call this mistake? I could have got to where I am now a heck of a lot faster if I had the realization earlier that I didn’t really know where I was going. I don’t know whether it was a sort of arrogant obstinance or whatever that I was only going to get The first batch of coaching, and then I was going to go and do it myself, and I could have come to the realization a lot earlier that it wasn’t doing for me what I wanted it to do, what I needed it to do, even, did I know what I wanted it to do?
So I think asking for help or getting coaching or mentoring or whatever it was at an earlier [00:30:00] stage for me would have been invaluable. Um, you learn by your mistakes It’s makes you in some ways it’s a bit of a rite of passage, but part of me does think, Oh yeah, I could have done that sooner and I would have been further advanced now than I feel like I am.
That’s probably the main one.
Porschia: So tell us about your business.
Jeremy: Yeah. So since the start of 2024, I have gone full time with my coaching practice and thank you very much. It’s exciting and it’s scary and not having the structure of the nine to five job is interesting. It’s both freeing and slightly. Weird.
Very weird actually. Yeah the people that I am coaching or rather what I’m coaching [00:31:00] around is it’s all around getting satisfying and fulfilling work. So it’s quite broad in terms of who I’ve been helping, but that’s the theme. It’s doing the work, which. you enjoy, which you find satisfying, which lights you up.
So I’ve had people who’ve come to me and said, I’ve been in this career for 10 years. I hate it, but I have no idea what I would do next. And so we explore what the possibilities could be. I’ve had, people who have been through a career change and want help with now I’ve made the change, but I’m in my thirties rather than in my twenties.
What are some of the things that I can do that I can really advance? And I can do it in a way which I’m going to find leverages my strengths rather than [00:32:00] me trying to. push these weaknesses, which I’m probably never going to get much better than mediocre when I could actually get to absolutely exceptional if I leverage my strengths.
I coach people who are thinking about starting their own business, or maybe they’ve got a side hustle and they’re looking to make the jump from employee to going full time with their side hustle and making that transition, which I know from my own experience, it’s been It’s pretty scary. And also from coaching other people also one client comes to mind where she’d had her own successful business for quite some time and, she was basically a solopreneur and she was miserable.
She was stressed. She was not doing the work that she wanted to do. She was going, this is my business. I’ve designed this business. Why [00:33:00] is this going wrong? Why is my business running me rather than the other way around? And so we spent quite a long time figuring out What was going wrong? What was it that she wanted to do?
What were the things that leveraged her particular strengths and superpowers so that she could change her business more to doing that kind of thing? So yeah, that’s the general theme is what do you need to do to get more fulfillment at work? And alongside that, as I said I’ve got the podcast, which Broadly speaking, explores those themes.
Also some of the more tactical ideas. So resume writing, salary negotiation, interview skills yeah, all sorts of stuff all around as you said at the top, beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again.
Porschia: I love it. So we’ll be providing a link to your website and your social channels in our show notes so people can find you online.
Now I want to [00:34:00] ask you our last question and I ask every guest, how do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career or their business?
Jeremy: Do the work on yourself. Do the work which enables you to understand who you are. An absolutely pivotal moment for me and for some of my clients was when I did the work to figure out what my values were.
One of the things I didn’t mention earlier was that I did try starting a business in the podcast space. It was like providing a service to podcasters. It was, and I still maintain, it is a really good business idea. And I started doing it and I spent a long time like getting legal agreements drafted and terms of business and [00:35:00] all that kind of stuff.
And I did it for a few weeks and I hated it. And part of me was going, what’s going wrong here? This is a good idea. I can see this scaling. I could model how this could be a successful business. I had spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets. I had spreadsheets showing what it would take.
But I just, I wasn’t enjoying it in the slightest. And it was only when I uncovered my values that I realized this was a business that required scale. It was going to need lots of clients that were dealt with at a relatively light touch kind of level. It was a bit of a, like a, Sausage machine, almost kind of product based business.
And the two top values that I uncovered when I did my work with a coach were around social connection and community and. [00:36:00] Collaboration. And I just wasn’t getting those in that business. Whereas particularly the collaboration side, the sort of co creating in that intimate setting one to one with clients is much more in alignment with me.
Yeah, figure out who you are and then do that, do it on purpose. There is a Dolly Parton quote sometimes, something along those lines, it’s um, figure out who you are and then do it on purpose, something along those lines.
Porschia: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Jeremy, because sometimes people put a lot of pressure on themselves and they are fearful of pivoting or changing course.
So you can definitely do that, as an entrepreneur and you just, outlined a great example of that. You’ve also shared a lot of great tips with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident [00:37:00] in their careers and their businesses. We appreciate you being with us.
Jeremy: Thank you so much for having me.
