Podcast Transcript:
Here are five productivity hacks you can start doing right now for better project management.
Hey there. I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author in each episode. You’ll get real world, practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. If you’re here and you’re listening, first of all. Thank you. Thank you for supporting the podcast and spending time with me here today. I really appreciate it so much and I’m glad that you’re getting value out of listening. I would love to hear from you. If you have any feedback about the podcast or topics, you would like to hear different episodes or something you don’t like or that you do like, hit me a message on Instagram. I’m @automatedmama and you can email me hello@jilliankendrick.com.
Let’s dive into the topic at hand. We are talking about project management for productivity. How do you follow through? How do you keep things going? How do you keep the ball rolling or keep the balls in the air when you’ve got so much going on? My team is amazing. They’re highly productive. They’re incredible at what they do. I’m really blessed to have an awesome team between my graphic designer, my podcast editor, our project manager. We have programmers, we have a website person. We are a small but mighty team and sometimes I wear some of those hats as well. And it’s really easy when it comes to projects, client work, client communication, internal communication among me, and you know, my contractors, I don’t have employees. I have contractors. It’s very easy to put the ball in somebody else’s court and then say, ok, well, they’re going to deal with it. I don’t have to worry about that right now. I’m going to go think about the 10 other things that I have to take care of. But where that leads to often is when you put the ball on somebody else’s court and then you say, ok, it’s on them. I’m going to forget about it. You’re dropping your end of the deal, your side of the responsibility that you need to own in order to follow through, or in order to get a project done, or in order to follow up or in order to be productive and complete things. My team and I recently went through talking about our follow through talking about how do we keep those balls in the air? How do we keep tabs on things that we communicated with the client, but we’re waiting for feedback or we’re waiting for them to get back to us with a list or we’re waiting for another team member to share something with us or to get us a document or whatever. It’s super easy to just make your request or send your email or put out your instant message and then wait for the other person to respond.
Well, just like you are super busy or your team is super busy. So is the person on the other end and they might not necessarily know that you have abdicated the responsibility of the progress of the line of communication or the project or whatever you’re waiting on them to get. So what’s important is making sure that you’re following through making sure that you are owning your side of the responsibility of getting that thing done. And here are five ways that you can implement right now to do that.
First of all, you need a project management system, period. As much as I love taking notes, you will hear me talk on this podcast or even in some of my courses about physically writing things down and the power of actually writing them down. And I love that and I have notebooks, books and notepads and stuff that I keep as well. But they need to be organized in a way that makes sense when it comes to your productivity and notebooks and notepads and sticky notes and stuff like that, just don’t cut it. So you need to have some kind of a project management tool. Whether you are just starting out with project management, whether you want to keep tabs on your own productivity, whether you have a team, whether you have one VA or zero, whether you’re wearing all the hats or other people are, it doesn’t matter. You need to have a place where all of that is managed and organized and a project management tool is the best way to do that.
You can use ones like Treo is free or has a free version. There’s Monday.com, there’s Teamwork, there’s Asana, Assembler. There’s 17 dozen different project management tools that you can use. I really don’t care which one you pick. They all have their ups and downs, they all have something that they do great. They all have things that they’re lacking, every single one of them. And I’ve used dozens of them over the years. Some I like, some I don’t like, but you need to have some sort of tool that will organize everything and kind of keep tabs on where things are. So that’s number one. And if you don’t have a tool like that, you can absolutely go and get a free one to have on the cloud.
The second thing is once you have this project management system, you need to actually use it and incorporate it into your routine or into your team’s routine. It needs to be clear and understood by either yourself, if you’re a solo rene and you’re just getting started on your own or if you have one VA if you have 17 VAs doesn’t matter the same rules apply. There needs to be a routine for checking the project management system. So for instance, you could institute a policy with your virtual assistants that every morning when they start work, they need to be looking at your project management system to check what things are waiting. What things are outstanding, what they’re waiting on somebody else for? Can they be communicating that better? What new tasks have come in since they stopped working? And is there any new information that they have that they can use to keep the ball rolling with the projects that they have? There needs to be a routine. And so definitely start of the day is a good time to implement a routine. Before people log out of work for the day they need to check the system. But honestly, in my opinion, I don’t think that’s good because then if something comes in, then there’s potential for your team to spend the entire evening worrying about that new project or that new task. And oh, I have to hit it first thing in the morning and, oh, I need to get that done and, oh, how am I gonna get that done? And who do I need to talk to and don’t ruin their night. None of this is life and death. Nobody’s gonna bleed because an email didn’t get sent out or because somebody didn’t follow up for a single day, it’ll be ok. I promise. So I don’t really like the end of the day policy, but I think early morning, first thing in the morning and then like a midday check is really, really good.
Another good policy to have. And this would be the third thing is notifications, whether it’s desktop notifications, email notifications. When someone gets a task assigned to them or when a task is updated or when a task is completed. Notifications are huge and they give you the ability to communicate effectively within your team and with your clients or for specific roles within the organization. Make sure that those notifications are turned on so that when something happens when a project is updated, when a project is assigned, that person can then take action and doesn’t need to be constantly checking and refreshing your project management system to make sure that they aren’t missing out on stuff.
Fourth would be to get some kind of a communication tool. I said instant message and I’m probably just dating myself. I am saying that because we actually use Slack. We love Slack. I’ve used Slack for years and years and years. I have turned our clients on all on to using Slack as well. And I really love it. I’m a big fan of Slack, not only because it integrates with other systems, which is awesome, but because just like an instant messenger or a Microsoft Teams or something else to that effect. I think teamwork actually also has some kind of like an internal chat feature. You need to be able to communicate with your team and with your clients in real time. If you have a group program or something like that, you might want to do a Facebook group or Kaabi has a membership style portal type thing. I think Customer Hub might have one. There are different ways that you can communicate in real time with your clients. But internally and for us in our agency, we use multiple Slack channels for our internal team, for our client teams, for our external client teams. We love Slack and Slack is a great feature. Slack is something that I literally cannot live without at this point in my business, the ability to communicate in real time is so invaluable, you will get so much out of it. You have to be able to do that.
And then the fifth thing is you need a follow up system. You need a formal way of communicating and following up about different things. We use multiple ways of following up within our team. We add things to Google calendar. We block time to work on projects or tasks within Google calendar. We utilize Slack reminders. So it’ll actually pop up if you click a button in Slack and say, remind me about this. It’ll say, ok, do you want a custom reminder? Do you want to be reminded about it in five minutes, 30 minutes an hour tomorrow, something like that. And you can customize how it, when you get reminded about things, which is awesome. So then if you communicate with a team member or you communicate with a client and you put the ball in their court, then you can click on that reminder thing and say, hey, remind me about this tomorrow at 2 p.m. So then if you don’t hear back from them by that time, then you can send another reminder and say, hey, I haven’t heard from you in a day. Where are we on this project? This is what helps keep the ball rolling. This is what helps you be as productive as possible. It’s really satisfying for me to, like, scratch off that I did, or that I finished something. So you can utilize that as well.
So the five things that you can do to optimize productivity with your project management and follow through that you can do right now is: set up a project management tool, create a project management task review routine, make sure notifications are set up, have a way to communicate or chat with your team or your clients in real time, and then create a formal system to follow up with them until the thing is done. I hope that was helpful and I’ll see you in the next episode. Have a great day guys.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life, or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my Entrepreneur Survival Kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully it’s a five star review and you love it. Then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com. Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode.
All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: # 32
Topic: 5 Productivity Tips
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
