 Well, good afternoon. My name is Melanie Adcock and welcome to get her done maximizing your freelancer day and The best way to figure out what you could speak about on WordCamp is find something that you struggle with and Figure out a way to solve that problem and then teach others. So This is what I came up with Tell you a little bit about myself very quickly I've been a freelancer since 2010. I Co, I'm a co-owner of adcott creative group with my husband who's right here I've been developing Websites since the late 90s. I've been using WordPress since around 2010 Exclusively since 2011 and I live in noon in Georgia So and there is my email address which will also be at the end What we're going to cover in this Mainly fire hose of information in the 20 minutes that we have is recommended reading Taming your inbox No, isn't a rejection Tracking your productivity. So you know that number one where you are now and that you're getting better Have a process for everything which is a whole talk by itself and some project management tools Recommended reading Getting things done by David Allen Number one on the list for a reason Okay, take the stairs by Rory Vaden Procrastinate on purpose same author Rory Vaden Everybody writes by Anne Hanley and I'm a I love checklist. So the checklist manifesto I could actually have an hour-long conversation with you just on that book alone Okay, taming your inbox Unsubscribe You're not they don't take it personally just get rid of the stuff that you don't really look at Okay, get it out of your inbox Use a third-party tool if you don't want to like necessarily always get rid of it totally like I like coupons I don't want to see them unless I want them. So I use unrolling to put all my promotional emails in Out of my inbox they actually go into a folder in my inbox because I use airmail 3 and I can go there get my Coupons what I want them, but I don't have to see all those emails coming in every day This is from David Allen's get getting things done When you get an email you do one of four things You delegate it you give it to your virtual assistant. You send it to your project management management tool You defer it. Oh, I'm going to do that later. Send it to Trello. I'm going to delete it because Just delete it. Don't leave it in your inbox. Take it up room Just get rid of it or you do it right then and he says if it takes less than two minutes to do do it right then I Kind of flex if it takes less than five minutes. I'm probably going to stop and do it then Otherwise it goes to my project management tool Set up a way to send from your inbox to your project management tool Get it out of there get it out of your head and get it somewhere else Don't worry. Don't spend or waste your mental energy trying to remember things to do if you get it out of your head Get it out of your inbox Your things aren't going to fall through the cracks Set a schedule to check email and then turn it off. Okay. This is like the hardest thing in the world for me to do Still I checked my email first thing in the morning Then I quit it. I don't I don't look at my phone I work for a few hours then I'll open it back up again and check it I actually schedule it and yes, I cheat sometimes but every time I find myself chasing squirrels It's because of my inbox and I turn it off turn off the indication of how many emails are showing up You can do that So it doesn't say 37 emails Because that'll just drive you insane and then you're going to open it up to see what those 37 emails are There's probably one valuable email in there and the rest is junk. So just turn off the little indicators and There's there's a link here and there's links to slides at the end on email hacks and there's some great ones in this Resource I found online. Okay. Track your productivity. Know where you're spending your time. I use rescue time Love it takes a couple weeks for it to learn what you're doing and you have to tell it Well, this is not wasting my time on the internet. This is actually research This is actually communication time when I'm talking to clients on zoom So what you actually go in there and categorize it So I did that for the first couple weeks and every once in a while I'll go in and tweak it again And it gives me a productivity score now because I'm like data driven And I like to know how well I'm doing and I love, you know, I was the person that loved to get their report card So I want to know how I'm doing if I'm below 80% Productivity I consider that week a failure. So I am like driven to make sure that that I'm productive at least 80% of the time Toggle is another good one I threw in focus at will and brain FM because they actually have Music that you can put in your headphones and it helps you be more productive. It stops the you know the sounds in your house, you know when you have the cat fight downstairs or It just anything that's going to interrupt you the guy with the lawnmower mowing your lawn I wear Bose noise canceling headphones and when I'm at the my most productive time I actually have brain FM on so I can pick concentration music and it plays music that helps you concentrate headphones help your bloods help Have a process for everything This is what I learned from WP elevation and from my business coach Nathan Ingram is Have a checklist for everything and then use them and Check things off for your incoming what everything you do when you have a prospective client have a checklist for that For your client interview. I actually have a checklist of the things. I'm going to ask I actually have a list of questionnaires of things. I'm going to ask them So I don't forget. I don't want to depend on my memory a Proposal everything that I do in a proposal have a checklist Design I actually have a Trello checklist for design. I have a cell up Trello checklist for development I have one for pre-launch and launch and post launch And so the postmortem make sure that I actually know what I need to do after a website launches I don't want to depend on my memory because It's just not gonna something's going to fall through the cracks always Take the time to document your processes This was the hardest thing for me to actually do and now every time I do something new there's a Loom you can record your screen with a loom So every time I do something that my virtual assistant hasn't done yet. I record it and That way now when I go on vacation next week She's going to be doing everything if something she hasn't done I can just throw it into Trello for her and say I want you to update this on the website Here's how to do it. So I've been slowly teaching her everything that I do so she can take over the majority of the daily tasks Create checklist of your processes Create create a development or stack of themes. This is one of the things I do I have used WP engine so I actually have an install on WP engine called base install and it has all my plugins that I use on most all the sites I use either generate press or Astra for my Theme so it's got both of them installed on there has everything I need to start a website and I just have to copy it and create a development website takes about two minutes for WP engine to spin that install up with everything I need to start a project I also have that same setup on a local using desktop server So if I'm going to actually do development on my liquid web server I can pull out a backup buddy backup throw that up there have everything ready saves you a Couple hours. You don't have to worry that much about licensing some of them You have to put them in on every site, but it saves you a ton of time Keep a list of all your serial numbers and keys for quick access. Mine's in a Google doc It's also in my my address book, but then you have to switch to everyone But I actually have a list a Google doc that I just bring up boom boom boom fill out all the licenses and I'm done I use managed WP, but there's main WP. I think sink There's all these different web dashboards so you can access all your client sites from one place It saves you a ton of time You don't have to know username password just boom boom boom you're in and out of websites and updating project management tools Everybody's got a different kind of learning Best practice some people learn by listening some by watching somebody doing you have to find a tool that works with the way you think and I've tried a bunch of these Some didn't work for me like a sauna It looks nice drove me crazy couldn't handle it I want to see the whole thing in a big picture So I use Trello because I can see my whole week at a glance. I Can see you know Monday Tuesday. I can move things around. I love Trello. So I've tried base camp I didn't like that one either. There's Monday. There's Plutio Disabo pancake. There's a gazillion you have to Try and use the free trial try them out find one that works with the way you like to work in the way you think But you've got to use something to manage your projects if you're doing one project at a time That's fine. But once you get to or three or four It starts to become unmanageable and things fall through the cracks Okay, there's more These are some great tools to look at better proposals for writing proposals Text expander my new favorite thing in the world. You've never heard of it You can type little key codes and you can set your own little codes and it will Expand the text. So for instance when we came up with our business name adcott creative group In hindsight, I would have liked something that was really short because I'm typing out adcott Melanie at adcott creative group now. I type out period ACG I just type ACG it expands puts my Email address in there or it's my whole email address in I even do that with some of my client stuff when I have to keep Repeating the same things over again. I just create a little snippet in Texas spander and boom That's how you're when you're on chat support and they keep they just do something and all of a sudden you get this paragraph from them They're using something like text expander Blisk I owe mobile responsive testing for websites Excellent. It's a like a little Chrome browser that allows you to test on phones and tablets. It shows you what it looks like Coda or transmit for FTP and editing together Astro pro sites if you're not the world's greatest designer Then start with a starter site Astro pro has some wonderful ones Get a coach to help you if you have having if you're struggling in your business Find somebody like Nathan. He's in the back there Or a nut or WP elevation or some other person that can help you get your business off the ground Or it can help you with things that are struggling because if you just keep knocking your head against the wall You're not solving the problem. Sometimes you need to bring somebody in from the outside to help you You know contact me I'll be glad to answer questions and There you go for more information You can contact me and Melanie adcott creative group my Twitter is MGA at MGA creative and my slides are at adcott creative group comm force a getter done and I have one minute and 58 seconds left. I can't believe I got it done Do I have any questions? Yes. Hey, yes, I use Trello and what I do is I actually have a Sample website Trello board setup that has Information design has just general information design development pre-launch launch and post-launch columns and then the cards go and I create a board for each project I invite my clients in so they can see where we are and what we've done If it's a small site, we'll do a card for each page And we can they can see what's done and that they can check off on it and make sure I have one for a Month that just says incoming Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday And then I have a weekend one. I actually have my shopping list on Trello there as well Yeah, I Have them all created on Trello so I can copy them from one board to another So I have a development checklist and so when I go to a New thing I just boom I have my development or if I want my VA to optimize the site using Hummingbird, here's the checklist for Hummingbird. I have them all set and I keep tweaking them and adding As I go along. Yes Better times a day for productivity. That's going to be a Personal thing. I actually thought my most productive time was in the morning but because of email and You know putting out fires and phone calls and stuff My most productive time is actually in the afternoon, which I thought was my worst but according to rescue time It's what I get done them. I spend more time working on websites in the afternoon than I do in the morning, which was Shocking to me. So what you think you're being productive about being productive at all It's a great eye-opener on you get to see where you're spending or where you're wasting your time Thank you very much