automation Archives - Strategy Sarah

Spouse, parent, employee, business owner, entrepreneur, friend, volunteer. How many roles do you play? And how much information comes along with each of those roles?

Alerts, news articles, checklists, emails, junk mail, bills, phone calls, text messages, meeting invites, fliers, forms…all of it “must do now!” and “read immediately!”

We live in a day and age of ever expanding information flooding into our lives from every direction. It’s an overload on the best of days and beyond daunting on the worst of days. FOMO is a real thing.

What if there were steps we could take to defeat information overload?

We can’t stop the flood, but we can take preventative measures to reduce our mental load, give information a place to go and decrease stress.

How to defeat information overload and reduce stress

1. Reduce the amount of information coming in

Unsubscribe from email lists liberally.
Add yourself to do not call lists.
Remove yourself from physical mailing lists.
Think about whether you really need to attend that meeting you were invited to.

2. Know when to admit defeat and start over

Triage your email.
Triage your digital files.
Triage your desk and office. Do a clean sweep of paper and other clutter. Quickly put away or purge.

3. Have a clear system for information that does come in

Organize your desk and your office.
Set up a system to keep your email organized.
Set up a system to keep your digital files organized.

4. Automate, automate, automate

What are you still doing manually that can be automated? There are social media schedulers, budgeting apps (my favorite), online bill pay, automatic email sorting rules, and more.

5. Delegate

For what you can’t automate, what can you delegate to another human? What are you doing that someone else could or should be doing? What can you assign to someone else or hire to be done for you?

RELATED: Do you really need to do that?

6. Stop doing things

In addition to delegation, what are you doing that simply doesn’t need to be done? There’s an adage that the amount of work will always expand to the number of hands available to do the work. One of the reasons companies restructure and reorganize is often to identify work being done that isn’t critical. Maybe it was critical at one point, and the business has shifted. Maybe there was always a better way to do the work, but there wasn’t a compelling reason to change the status quo.

Unless you move to the middle of nowhere and become a hermit, you won’t ever fully stem the tide of information. I haven’t. What I have learned is to use these techniques to make the inflow manageable. You can too. Pick one way to reduce information overload and get started today. When you’ve made progress, move on to the next. You can live a calmer, peaceful life!

To make it easier to defeat information overload, you can now download a PDF checklist to print, review, and come back anytime you need a refresher. Enter your email address below and get started now!

I have been known to hop on to Facebook to post or check one simple thing in a project-related group and come up for air 45 minutes later, without having done the one thing I logged on for. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

While there is a time and place for keeping up with friends and social activity (after all, it is called social media), this should be intentional time.

Fortunately, there are several social media scheduling tools to automate the process.

Coschedule – Awesome scheduling tool for bloggers. I had a paid CoSchedule account for an old blog, and it worked great. Getting one set up for this blog is on my to-do-someday list.
Buffer – I love how simple and clean the user interface of Buffer is. I also love that they added Pinterest to the Awesome (paid) plan.
Hootsuite – I’ve been a user of the free Hootsuite version for a long time. I love how robust it is, but the look and feel is definitely more techy/industrial. My favorite feature: autoschedule.
SmarterQueue – The price point is a little higher, but I love, love, love that SmarterQueue will re-schedule evergreen content, meaning you’re never left with out content to post. If you do a lot on social media, using SmarterQueue is a great way to save time and money over manually scheduling content yourself or hiring someone to do it for you.

Tip: You don’t have to use just one of these tools. Using multiple social media scheduling tools strategically can increase automation, and potentially even save you money.

If you’re super strapped for cash, you can use a combination of the free plans to automate more social media accounts. Buffer’s free plan allows you to link up to 3 social media accounts. Hootsuite’s free plan also allows up to 3 profiles for free.

You could also use one paid service and one free service to allow more flexibility. I’m still playing around with this myself, so let me know if you have a strategy that’s worked really well for you.

Today’s action items:

Pick one social media scheduling tool and sign up for a free account. Test scheduling social media for the next week.
Decide when and how long you want to spend actively on social media for socialization. Block that time into your schedule, and stick to it!

This post is part of 31 Timesaving Tools, Tips & Templates, read the rest of the series here.

automation