I am going to paint a picture for you on just how important finding places to automate your leadership is to gain your sanity back and your time. Let’s start with two scenarios.
The first scenario starts with you coming in from your weekend. You open up your email and it lights up with endless messages that ask you to field questions, make decisions, and tackle an endless list of tasks. While you are trying to answer the constant nattering of your inbox, the door swings open with the first crisis of the day. You run off to put out that fire only to find another and another. Your cell phone is ringing and it is now 3:00 pm and you haven’t eaten lunch. Not to mention, you haven’t had a chance to tackle the original list of emails. You head back to your office to do that after you do bus supervision and answer a few more questions from staff after school. At 6:30, you spouse calls you and asks when you are coming home. You respond with, “Hmmm….maybe 7:30? I’ll do my best to get home by 7 though.” I don’t know about you are but I am not into this scenario at all.
Ok, let’s dive into scenario number two. Back to that very same Monday morning, you open up your email and there are way less emails sitting there because you have a solid start up and shut down routine every day. You know that you have some emails that will automatically go out because you have pre-set that up already (I’ll get to that in a moment). You look at your door and wonder when it will open to put out the first fire. Sometimes the door still opens with a crisis but it opens with solution based thinking instead of “help, put out the fire for me”. You walk through the schools and actually get into classrooms to spend time with students and teachers. Your phone doesn’t ring during these times. At the end of the day, you have a shut down system that sets it all up for you so that you can go home at a normal time and have a life. You are proud of yourself because you know that you have automated everything that you possible could so that you could pour your energy into the right places and be more productive. I know that I am definitely way more into this scenario than the first one!
Now that storytelling is over, let’s get out of dream mode and into how do we actually make this happen mode. The secret to it all is diving into what you do in a day and looking at places where you could automate your leadership so that it is not always you doing it all, all of the time. I first starting to get serious about automating after I listened to a podcast, called Take Your Hands Off The Wheel: Automation for the Smart Business Owners, by Amy Porterfield. It was an aha moment for me to be honest. I realized that I had not automated one thing in my leadership and I was spending so much time doing the things that could be automated vs the things that really mattered. By automating parts of your leadership and administrative duties, it means that you can pour your energy into what really gets you traction. You get to start each day knowing exactly what needs to get done and actually doing things that light you up instead of trying to keep your school afloat putting out fire after fire. But it is going to take some work my friend….
I am going to walk you through a few of my favorite tips and tricks for automating to help you get started taking control of your own time again. Let’s talk about why you should look to automate whatever you can. It can save you time and energy, get your sanity and passion for leadership back, and can help your community feel more supported because you are more present.
The first thing that I would automate is your email. First of all, if possible, only check your email twice a day. I suggest setting up a start up and shut down routine where this happens. That is another great example of automation that I talk about in a previous blog post called Starting Up and Shutting Down Your Day. To recap, this is where you set up 20 minutes in the morning and at the end of your day to set up your days. The goal is to clear you inbox to zero during each of these times which helps to prevent a massive back up of emails.
Now, let’s talk about how you automate your emails. Because you only check your emails twice a day, you can set up an autoresponder that states that their email is very important and state the times of day that you check your email. Let them know that you will plan to get back to them during these times. Another idea that I got from Amy Porterfield’s podcast is to attach answers to a frequently asked Q and A that may help them with answering a question that may be on there. You may even want to attach scheduling links or school info, etc. Amy goes on to suggest that you can wrap up the email, saying, “I hope these help to answer your question. However, if they didn’t, please respond back to me, and I’ll get back to you the next time I check my inbox.” I realize that you still need to respond to emails but this may help to alleviate some of them and it sets a time where you can really get in and focus on rifling through them during your start up and shut down times.
Now Amy Porterfield also has a trick for those emails that cannot be answered through a frequent Q and A. She taught me about the term guided responses. This is a process where you take the most common questions or email replies that you send, and you create a guided response for each one. Now, each time you send you may need to tweak it a little and add your personal touch but having that guided response to common questions and emails you send can save you so much time. I create my responses on Google Drive on a running Google Doc and keep adding to it as I notice patterns and trends to my email responses.
This next one may be something you already do but I thought I would mention it just in case. As far as scheduling goes, set up your schedule in outlook and provide access to all those who need it. Block out the times where you are available so that they can schedule all of your appointments in those areas so that you can control your time even more.
Let’s tackle the “endless swinging door and putting out fires issue”. Set up a zoom time each day or a couple times a week that teachers can access you to mastermind problems. They send you the problems ahead of time in a google doc and that way you know what is coming your way during the hot seat zoom times. Teachers then know that you are here for them but it needs to be during specific times. I also suggest that you set expectations for them to come with solution based thinking to the problem they may have. Other teachers can jump in and listen and contribute to solving the problems and learn from each other as well. We have a problem solving system in our school called the “Leadership Edit System”, that teaches teachers how to choose a top priority, set up three specific actions, how to measure progress with evidence in order to get the results they are looking for. They develop frameworks and roadmaps for how to solve that particular problem and they can bring those to the hot seat zoom sessions (or face to face) to help solve problems as well. Guess what, this Leadership Edit System has helped to automate problem solving too. If you are interested in knowing more about this system, email me at jacealynh@gmail.com. These hot seat sessions are meant to have a community jumping into to think of solutions, not just you. You can use the google doc that they use to write their problems down on to determine how often you should have these hot seat sessions. If there are a lot of issues on the google doc, have it more often. If there are less, then I suggest having it less frequently.
If you are a leader that has endless texts and phone calls all day long, automate the calls or texts. I realized that emergencies and crisis are just that so that is definitely not the calls or texts that should be automated. Set up an autoresponder just like email that tells them when you will be checking your messages or you can get your admin assistant to really field these calls too. Sometimes, just leaving your phone in your office if you are in classrooms is the best way to be present. People know where to find you if it is a massive emergency (There is always the intercom as well to get you back as soon as possible.). By fielding your calls, you get control of your time back and you can be totally present where it matters, with the people.
Automation can also happen with the content of your leadership messaging too. I like to batch my professional development content and planning my meeting agendas. Batching is when you dedicate chunks of time to work on similar tasks without any interruption. These chunks of time will usually last around two hours but may go on for multiple days. This magical dedication of time will lighten your load and you eliminate stress if you stay dedicated to these focused chunks of time. It eliminates overwhelm and stress and will save you tons of time! And you guessed it, batching is another form of automation. Instead of planning content or meeting agendas a little bit each day, batch it for a few months in advance so that you don’t have to even think about for six weeks or so because it is all pre-planned and automated for delivery. If you want more info on how to batch, check out my blog post on the magic of batching.
Automation can happen in a lot of places in your leadership. I am sure that I haven’t even come close to realizing just how much can be automated. We automate so that we can spend time with our teachers, kids, and fellow leaders and so we can really pour our energy into what really lights us up. This, in turn, brings us more productivity, efficiency, and love for leadership again. Choose one place in your leadership that you can start to automate and try to implement it in the next week or so. Once that becomes automated, choose another area and see what happens! Start small and build from there. Send me a DM, an email, or post it in our private facebook group to collaborate and learn from each other!
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Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. (2021). Take Your Hands Off The Wheel: Automation for the Smart Business Owner (374th ed.). In A. Porterfield (Ed.).
Even If You Miss..... 