 Awesome. Okay, let's get started. So we're talking about today growing our businesses or doing better work, being more productive even while you're busy with other stuff. This talk is called Taming the Whirlwind. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm from Birmingham, Alabama, where I am one of the organizers of WordCamp Birmingham, which is coming the second weekend of August. So come down to Birmingham. It's a great place to visit. We have the greatest hashtag of all, WP Yall. It's great. Oldest WordCamp in the Southeast. I'm the host at iThemes Training, which we do two or three live webinars a week on all sorts of WordPress stuff, business stuff, most everything we do is free. So you can check us out at iThemes.com, click the training link. I'm also an ambassador for LiquidWeb. iThemes is a LiquidWeb company, and I do a lot of WordCamps talking about how awesome LiquidWeb is. I've been using them personally in my own business for, oh gosh, seven years now, I guess. Best web host I've ever had. I've personally been a web business owner since 1995. Yes, there was a web back then. There wasn't much of it, but that's when I built and sold my first website way back in 1995. And I've been a business coach for WordPress Freelancers since back in 2014. That's one of my favorite things I do is help WordPress business owners blow up the obstacles that are in their way of growth and help them to grow their businesses. One of the most important features or topics that we deal with is what we're talking about today, which is productivity. I wrote a book earlier this year called Dealing of Problem Clients. I actually gave that talk here at WordCamp Asheville back in 2016, last time I was here. So I turned that talk into a book. It's a lot of fun. It's on Amazon out there. Let's see. So when it comes to this subject, I'm an expert by the definition of Dr. Niels Bohr, who says an expert is a person who is found out by his own painful experiences all of the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field. That is me. Everything I share with you today is simply I wasn't born with it. I made all the mistakes, and so my job today is to help you avoid the mistakes that I made and give you a workable system to grow your business even if you're busy. Now, I like to start these kind of talks with a slide that's something like this. You are not alone. You come to an event like this. By the way, how many of you are freelancers? You own a business. You work with clients. OK, awesome. You're my tribe. It's easy to come to an event like this mixing with and rubbing shoulders with people who do what we do and feel like everybody else in the room, but me, has it together. How many of you have it all together? Joey has it together. All right, talk to him afterwards. He's going to speak next, informally, in the hall. OK, it's easy to think you're the only one who has struggles. But here's what I've learned over hundreds. Listen, hundreds of conversations at word camps, in coaching situations, in face-to-face conversations. I've learned that many people in the WordPress space are one more bad client away from calling it quits. They are one more bad month away from throwing in the towel. And it's a shame, because most of those frustrations and problems are solvable with great systems and processes. And one of the most common things that leads to that feeling of angst is what we're going to talk about today, which is overwhelm. How many of you are currently overwhelmed? Yeah, how many of you have been there in the last 12 months? Yeah, OK. By the way, listen, if you are struggling in this area or in any other area of your business, I drove from Birmingham to Asheville to talk to you. And I'm not saying that tritely. I'm here for you. Now, Liquid Web and iThemes paid the money for me to be here. They're letting me come. They cover the expenses and all that. But I made this trip. I'm taking my time for you, because one of the ways I give back to WordPress is by helping people who are doing WordPress with clients do it better, OK? So I'm dead serious when I say, if I'm walking around the hall, grab me. Let's talk. I'm seriously, I'm here for you. And iThemes and Liquid Web are making that possible. So here is an overview of what we're going to talk about today. The common struggle we all face with overwhelm. Second of all, understanding that problem and getting some terminology around it, because when we name our problems, they become less abstract and scary. And we can actually start to put some solutions around them. Then we're going to develop a strategy that's going to help us become more productive and make it actually work. And then some final suggestions from my own practical experience on how to do this well, OK? Now, by the way, let me be totally honest and transparent. So as that definition of expert I showed earlier makes a lot of sense, and that is this. It's really funny because I've given this talk a few times already this year at different WordCamps. I've given it online in the Freelance Leapier Group that I'm doing right now with a bunch of freelancers from across the world. And it's hysterical because this is the one issue that has kicked my butt up and down all year long, all year long. And I've actually had to make some significant changes in my agency to bring some people in to deal with this issue of overwhelm. So it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about productivity or if you've given this talk at WordCamps a dozen times like I have. This is a constant issue that keeps coming up. But the strategy I'm going to give you is one that does work when you work it. So by the way, if you are a picture taker or one that likes to grab the slides right there, that link, NathanIngram.com slash WCAVL. This is the slide to take a picture of because it's going to give you the download link for all the slides. It is also the place that you want to go to to get the tool that I'm going to give you to help to manage your productivity better. It's a goal planner that I've created and you can download it free here at this link. It's actually part of my productivity course. I'm giving it away free today. And also one more thing I'll just mention is that Liquid Web is awesome in that. They will give you two free coaching sessions with me if you sign up as a partner. Being a partner is free. Just talk to him at the table out there. And we can talk about productivity or anything else you want to talk about in those two sessions. All right, let's talk about the common struggle. Strategy versus execution. Execution is what we do. Strategy is why we do it. Now we're going to spend our time today talking about these issues. And I'm going to put some terminology to this struggle that I think we all face. Every freelancer faces it. Every business owner, every web developer, every blogger, everybody, everybody faces this. This is not a technical issue. This is a human nature issue. We struggle with this issue. Execution versus strategy. Now we need proficiency in our space. We need proficiency on the execution. A lot of the talks here at WordCamp are about the execution. We got to know WordPress. We got to know plugins. We got to know security. We got to know CSS and PHP and JavaScript and jQuery and typography and design and themes and plugins and all that stuff to do the stuff that gives us our work that we do. We need to know the stuff. That's the execution. It's the what we do. The strategy, though, is a little more complicated. The why we do it. We also need proficiency in that area. This is the internal documents and processes. The marketing of what we do. The creation of new services. Personal productivity. All of the why and how that we do things. Both of these are critical. Now here's what I've learned along the way. Most people get into the WordPress space working with clients because they love the execution. We get in there and we nerd out and geek out all over the neat technology and the greatest theme and the page builders and things you can do. You put the semicolon in the right place and the PHP works all of a sudden and everything magical happens on the web. It's wonderful. It is inevitable that somebody in that situation gets a year, 18 months into working with clients and boom, they hit the same walls. All the same walls. And it's all about the strategy. You gotta have the why, not just the what. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. You cannot eliminate it. Now here's the challenge. We all understand the need for strategy. We get it. None of you people are ignorant. You understand the need for strategy. We understand that if we organize our businesses or our lives in such a way that we can become more efficient, more effective, more productive, more profitable, we get that. If you manage your time well, you got more time, you could do more stuff. This is not hard to understand. The problem is the doing of the strategy gets really complicated, doesn't it? I mean, how many of you understand that yes, I need to organize my life to be more productive? How many of us do that well? Right? Okay. This is a challenge. How's your strategy today? Are you steadily improving in your business? Are you steadily improving in your productivity? Or does it look a little more like that? You're kind of up and down, backwards and forwards. You take a, you know, you go in one direction, you kind of work your way around. For many of us, we're kind of down in this arrow in the bottom. And by the way, this has to do with what are the internal processes of your business look like? You know, the difference between owning your job and owning a business are the internal systems and processes in your business. How much of what you do is related to only things that are in your head and not on a checklist somewhere. Does your business run on process or heroics? Where you just step in and make things happen? Or is there a process behind it? If you're running your business on heroics and not process, if you're running it on intuition and not intention, nothing necessarily wrong with that, but you own your job, you are self-employed, you don't have a business. And at some point, you may wanna do something different. And if you've taken the time to build a business and not just own your job, you have something sellable at the end of your work. Does that make sense? Now, here's the challenge. How in the world do I do that when I'm just doing all I can to keep my head above water, just doing work for clients? That's the hard part and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Why is it so hard to keep this kind of strategy in focus? We're at a word camp this weekend. Word camps are fantastic. I did 1980s last year, I'll do somewhere around that many this year. I love word camps. I've been to word camps across the country in Canada. I'm going to Costa Rica in September. I love word camps. I'm always learning something new. The WordPress community is fantastic. You're gonna leave today probably with a fire hose of information. All these ideas, all these thoughts, all these things. And a lot of times we spend time reading blog posts. We attend webinars. I'm doing two or three live webinars a week. We're reading books, we're doing all these things. We've got all these amazing things that we need to know. You've got a list of changes that you know you need to make in your world, but it never seems to get shorter. That sound familiar? Lots of stuff is added to that list but nothing seems to get accomplished. What are you gonna do with all the awesome things that you're gonna learn this weekend at word camp? What happens when you get home? You might have a bunch of great ideas that never get implemented. And it's not that you didn't have good intentions. It's that life got in the way, right? I mean, how many of you've been to word camps before? You've listened to webinars, read books, read blog posts, done all these things. And you've got all these things, nothing ever seems, your list never seems to get shorter. It's just customer demands came up, right? Family issues needed your attention. And three months later, no change, no ideas implemented. So I wanna put a word to this idea that's gonna help us to work to a solution and that word is whirlwind, whirlwind. What is this thing? Let's spend a little time understanding what we're up against so we can know our enemy and then develop a strategy to deal with it. The whirlwind is the energy and attention that is needed to run your business or do your job or whatever it is. The energy and attention that is needed to run your business. The whirlwind is the 14 emails from clients waiting on you in the morning with demands, all the things that have to be done by noon. The whirlwind is that customer call that happens right as you are about to start working on your own website for a change. That sounds familiar? The whirlwind is that one hour meeting with a client that stretches into three. You come to your desk in the morning with the best of intentions. It's gonna be a day where I finally get to do my stuff for a change, and then you make the mistake of opening your email. And that idea lasts about 10 minutes and the rest of the day you're spent putting out fires, chasing the whirlwind. Listen, I've spent hours and hours of my life in seminars and webinars. I've read books all full of excellent information that could really help my business and I never implemented anything at all. And it wasn't the author's fault, it wasn't the presenter's fault, it's just that when I got back, there were emails to answer and clients to call and a hundred other things I had to do in a day. This is the whirlwind, or like somebody mentioned as we were talking at the beginning here, sometimes the whirlwind is me getting captivated by some new piece of technology that came along. And I end up spending an afternoon on something that doesn't really move the yardsticks in my business at all and I've wasted four or five hours doing it. I'm sure none of you have that problem, just saying, for me, sometimes this can happen. All right, so the whirlwind is the urgent. Things that have to be done now. Here's the problem with the whirlwind. Goals and strategy are important, we got that. We understand they're important, we know we need to do them, but the whirlwind is urgent. Franklin Covey Company says, when urgency and importance clash, look at it. Urgency wins every time and it does, doesn't it? Think about it, our practical experience bears that out. Urgency wins every time. We know we ought to be rebuilding our own website, we know we ought to be really kind of brushing off our contract and doing better with that, we know we ought to be doing lots of different things, but urgency wins every time. Those things are important, the whirlwind is the urgent. So what do we say? We'll do it tomorrow. We'll do it next week. We'll do it next quarter. Problem is delaying strategy doesn't work because the whirlwind never goes away. It never goes away. The lesson we never seem to learn is when I say, I'll do this tomorrow, I'll do it next week, I'll do it after I launch this project, we forget one very important thing. Guess what's going to be waiting for us tomorrow, next week, next quarter, after the next website launches. What's waiting for us? The whirlwind, it's still there. If it's not there, we got a problem. By the way, because the whirlwind isn't bad, it just is what it is. The whirlwind is your business, it's your work. If there was no whirlwind, there'd be no paycheck. Are you with me? So the whirlwind isn't bad, don't disparage the whirlwind, you just got to deal with it. The whirlwind isn't bad, it just is what it is. Accept it for what it is. It's a fact of life, of business. So we have to accept it and consider the whirlwind, and then still try to figure out how do we move our businesses forward? How do we do better and grow personally with the reality of the whirlwind in our life? Does that make sense? You with me? You asleep yet? Okay. So here's how we're gonna deal with it. Taming the whirlwind, how do we get the whirlwind? How do we get it in perspective? You gotta have a plan. You need a plan.