Do it for Future You

One of the wonderful and terrible things about being self-employed is that you are both in charge of doing the business and in charge of HOW you do the business. In my consulting life, I advise companies much larger than mine on process automation. Here’s my brain dump on what kinds of process automations/process infrastructure improvements that make sense when you are self-employed.

Type of solo biz infrastructure improvements:

1. Templating (draft documents like contracts, emails, and launch plans that need minor customization)
2. Computer automation – examples
   1. Zapier to collect data for later use
   2. Zapier to do a task
   3. Recurring calendar reminders
   4. Make use of features of software you are already in to do more (sequences if you’re already in ConvertKit, using Calendly for scheduling more types of interactions)
3. Brain supports – examples
   1. Chunking down a more complicated task into pieces and putting the broken down task list where you’ll be next time you need to do the task
   2. Tiny checklists (don’t be mean about what your brain ‘should’ be able to hold)
   3. Tiny helper spreadsheets (date math, money math)

What makes a task/project a good candidate for infrastructure improvements?

It meets two (or more) of the following criteria:

1. Doing or thinking about the thing riles you up (for example, adding it to your to do list brings up feelings of annoyance, resentment, anger, etc.)
2. Frequency: either
   1. You need to do the thing infrequently, and remembering the steps has a high cognitive burden (updating your website?)
   2. You to the thing repeatedly enough that you tune out/are bored by it
3. Accuracy in the task/project matters
4. Timeliness in the task/project matters

What is an appropriate amount of time/effort to spend on an infrastructure improvement?

If you aren’t accustomed to making infrastructure improvements, you’re not going to be a good at estimating how long making an improvement will take or good at predicting which improvements will actually be helpful. Instead, I recommend thinking about this as a % of overall effort. I keep a “Someday” index card with ideas for things that meet the improvement criteria, and then spend a 2-4 hour working session about once every three months making some of those improvements. For me, that works out to about 10% of my “working on the business” time (vs “in the business” time), which is enough that things get noticeably easier over time but not so much that I fall merrily into productive procrastination via over-engineering my processes.