Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love creating automations because it frees people up to be the best version
of themselves, to creatively and
intellectually focus on the things that they're
passionate about doing, versus doing boring, repetitive tasks
over and over again. Hi, my name is Kevin Siskar. Today we're going to
talk about productivity and how we can automate
your workforce. Over the last few years, I've worked with
hundreds of companies, I'm an investor with 43North, where we invest $5
million per year in a high-growth
technology companies. I also run Finta a
software company that helps founders automate
the fundraising process, and I have a Podcast
Ambition Today, where we interview founders and their entrepreneurial
journeys. In today's class
productivity tools, we'll talk about how to
automate your workflows. First, we have to
establish a baseline, measure your week
and figure out which opportunities are
prime for automation. Then we're going to pick those, figure out how much time they're
going to likely save us, and then plan and build
those automations. Once they're built, we're
going to remeasure our time, figuring out how much intellectual and creative
energy we've got your back. Then finally, we'll
make a plan on how to maintain those automations
going forward. I really hope that you
take away the idea that there's a better way
to do things sometimes. It can create more
output and productivity in the long run across a
team that's meaningful. Throughout this class, if
you want to follow along, you're welcome to use any of the tools mentioned in the past. I've also provided a
worksheet that you can find in the resources
section down below. I encourage you to share it for everyone else to
comment and discuss. You can all help each other
as it Skillshare community. Let's get started with
productivity tools, how to automate your workflows.
2. Measuring Time: In this lesson,
we're going to start by measuring your time. This is going to help us
establish a baseline. Measuring your time is important because
you don't want to be repeating the same repetitive
task over and over. But measuring your time and summing it all up across a week, we can start to see
where we can get you the biggest return on investment for creating
these automations. If you can maximize your ROI, you can maximize the amount of time and creativity you
get back into your life. When you multiply
that by 52 weeks in a year or a few years, that time really compounds, saving you not just
that time per week, but in the long run, countless hours,
maybe even days. In 2021, Asana did a
state of work report, and this report uncovered some surprising facts
about how we work today. Burnout is on the rise. Seventy-one percent of workers experienced burnout in 2020. Also, about 87 percent
of employees reported consistently working late.
What does this mean? Compounding things
like tool overload, hurting team alignment. They also found that amid
the race to stay connected, workers are switching between 10 apps almost 25 times per day. Fragments in team communication and reducing efficiency overall. Basic coordination tasks are consuming about 60
percent of people's day. As a result, only
26 percent of time is spent on the skilled job
someone was hired to do. If you're a marketer, actually
doing market analysis, if you're a software developer, actually doing
software development, and only 14 percent
of our time is spent on forward-looking
strategy. Meaning that the
bulk of our days, every day, five days a week, is being spent on
coordination and parts of our job that we really
weren't hired to do. Those weren't the skill sets intended when we
were brought on, but that is how our time
is being spent to do the current nature
of work in 2021. The same way that
machines created exponential
productivity outputs in the industrialization
age of the past century. We're now living in
the information age. Setting up automations and
automating our workflows does the exact same thing and creates exponential productivity
outputs for companies today. Zapier recently
did another study about how office workers
spend their time. What they found was
that 76 percent of respondents said they spend 1-3 hours simply moving data
from one place to another, and only three and five
knowledge workers, about 61 percent use
automation software at work. But nearly all of those
whose automation software, 98 percent say it benefits them. I think that's an important
point worth mentioning here, that almost everyone who has
set up workflow automations is glad they did so and continues to use
them going forward. Taking that step back
has only continued to yield and pay dividends
for them down the road. To start by measuring your time in the
worksheet provided, we have a basic
layout of your week, Monday through
Sunday, hour-by-hour, and you can start to
manually pen and paper, write down how you're
spending your time. If you prefer to
use digital tools instead of pen and paper, I can also going to recommend a few software solutions
to record a time as well. I personally use
Timeular, which is free. You take a look at
the calendar here, you can see that there's a blank calendar hour-by-hour
and you can also see that I've saved
the activities and the tasks that I
most commonly do. You can then start to
record those tasks in here at a glance and start
to measure that time. You can even add
notes or tags to save and give a little more depth into what you've
been working on. Timeular also provides
insights throughout the week that can show you where you spent
the most of your time. In addition to Timeular, you can also check out Toggl, another free app that will offer you free time tracking software. What are the great
parts about Toggl is it'll actually use your Chrome tabs
to automatically record your time and
auto-log it for you. In addition to that,
iOS and macOS, as well as Windows and Android, all provide screen
time software. You can take a look
here and you can start to refresh your memory
on what you've been working on simply by going into your settings and taking a look at your
screen time as well. Now that you've determined how you're going to
measure your time, start looking back on
the last few days of work and try to remember
and write down where you spend the most energy
and the most time and continue to do that
in the next few days moving forward as well. You just start to quickly
see where you spend a lot of the same time and
tasks over and over again. If you'd want, record
your work time, record your personal time. The more information you log, the more informed and
the better off you'll be in this task,
in this process. Go ahead, take some
time now and start to fill out the worksheet
and record your time, and then we're going
to take a look at it together in this next lesson.
3. Determining Opportunities: Now that you've
recorded your time, in this lesson, we're going
to take a look at it. We're going to determine the best opportunities for automation within
your workflows. It's important that we determine where you can get
the most time back. We do that by taking a look at this past week and figuring out where you spent
the most time and where those opportunities
are to automate that time. You don't want to automate
something at the bottom of your list because
it might take you more time to set up
that automation than it takes you to actually
do those tasks. We want to make sure
that we're saving your time and creating
return on investment. By taking a look at
this list and taking the stuff at the top where
you maybe spend an hour, 2, 3, 4, 10 hours per week over and over doing
the same task. If we could take that energy and that time and give
it back to you so you could focus and
be productive on other meaningful
aspects of your job, then that's where we can create the most return on investment
in these exercises. That's where over
the next 52 weeks, a year, two years, you could see the greatest
return on investment, giving you the most piece of mind and time and energy back. Taking a look at your last week, let's add up all the time
you've spent on the same tasks. Whether you were commuting, add all that time
up, whether you're doing email, add
all that time up. We're starting to see chunks
of where you're spending the most time and where
there is room to automate. Now that we've seen where
you spend the most time, we want to start to determine where the opportunities
to automate are. Start to break them
into two categories. One, predominantly digital
and software-based. These are tasks that probably
have a clear trigger. Something that happens
very specifically, and then causes an action. Other kinds of tasks are
maybe more human-oriented. They require more creativity. They require more of a
human touch to be done. Let's start to put our tasks in those two buckets and figure out where we have the
opportunity to automate. We're going to
predominately focused on the software aspects
and those tasks today. We'll talk a little
bit about how you can optimize and automate
those other tasks as well. Now that we've started to
talk about how to determine the best parts and aspects of your job to
potentially automate, I want to show you how I've set up some of these automations. With my company Finta, we create software that
helps founders share a deal with investors and they do that by sharing
a single link. What I did within Zapier, which is one platform and one
place that you could use, we created a Zapier recipe
that tells us in Slack, every time a new user creates
a deal room and shares it. This lets us follow up easily. The trigger of a new deal being created lets us see that right away and then reach out to that founder and provide
feedback on their deal room. What that looks
like in Zapier is everything always
starts with a trigger. This is one task, one thing that happens that sets off a chain of events
to follow suit. So within this, someone
creates a new deal room. We see that, we delay it for a little bit of
time to give people that opportunity to finish it. We clean up some of the numbers and how
they're presented, so they are clearly and cleanly
presented to us in Slack. Then we send a new
message to Slack. We set this up one-by-one, step-by-step, almost
like if this then that. Then when we test it, we'll see here that
it's going to fire a new Slack notification. We come in and we
could see here, there it is that this person
just created a deal room. We can click this link,
go in, look at it, and see how they're
doing, give them feedback and share
more information. This specific task happens over and over every day
within our company. So rather than us manually
having to search it out, go in and check accounts, we now get automatically
notified every time someone takes as action and we could follow
up accordingly. Saving as countless minutes
and hours every day spent manually digging through our own company's accounts, figuring out how and when users
have been taking actions. We now know automatically
and we have a clear and concise process for how to handle and respond
to those actions. If you haven't already completed this section
of the worksheet, add up and summarize
all your time, categorize it by
digital or non-digital, and start to see where you have the biggest opportunities
to automate.
4. Planning Automations: Now that we've measured
our time and we've highlighted the prime
opportunities for automation, let's jump into it and let's start automating those tasks. We're going to focus first on digital tasks and how
you can automate those. For the purpose of
these examples, we're going to use Zapier. I worked with Zapier
because that's the tool that I'm most familiar with and my company works with due to the
integrations they offer. But there's a few
other alternatives that I'd like to walk you
through here as well. Automate.io is
another alternative and they have some
different integration. You might want to take a look. If This Then That is a little bit less
business focused and a little bit more
personal focused. Let's say you arrive home from work and your phone
knows your GPS location, and you want to turn on
the lights in your house, If This Then That is a
great solution for that. There's also free
solutions built into the operating systems of
your computer likely. Apple has an application
called shortcuts that's free both
on iOS and Mac OS, where you can create
automations that way. Then Microsoft has
flow alternative for windows that can create
automations as well. Regardless of the
tool you choose, you really just want to make
sure that the integration is supported by these
platforms and that the task you want to
automate is capable of being automated by
either Zapier or Automate, If This Then That,
whatever tool you choose. But all of these platforms
follow the same structure. They have a trigger
followed by an action. You want to send a text message each time you receive an email, then that trigger
would be a new e-mail. The action would be
sending a text message. Sometimes you can string
multiple actions together. Now, I'm going to walk
you through how to set up an automation using
Zapier as my example. Let's take a look
at how to create a new recipe right now. After you create a free account, you're going to come
in and create a ZAP. Now, this is like I said, going to start with a trigger. A trigger is an event
that starts your recipe, starts your ZAP your automation. We're going to use Typeform. Typeform is a simple
form builder that lets people submit forms and fill
in questions and answers. I have a form going and
I need to connect to my Typeform account
to access that. Now that we've
connected the account, we're going to start
to see our forms. We're going to pick our form, and when someone completes our investor interest form here, we will test the trigger, we can see that there's a recent response,
and we can continue. We know the form is talking, we know the trigger is defined, and now we want
to send an email. You can use Google or Gmail, but also Zapier offers
their own email client. We're going to send
an outbound email we're going to send it too. You would put the variable for the person's email in here. For the purpose of
this example I'm going to put my own
e-mail so it goes to me. We can write out
our subject line, so thank you for applying. Then we can write out
the body of the email. Hey, and then we can
insert a variable such as first-name, Jim. This will dynamically update for every new person that
fills out the form. Thanks for applying and we
would love to work with you. How is next week to
discuss further? We can say it's from
Kevin or whoever on your team might be fielding these and we can
press "Continue." Let's test it and we'll
see if I get the email. Return on Zap and we're
good to go. We tested it. We'll go to my email
account here and we can see thank you for applying.
We'd love to work with you. Something as simple as that really only took me
about two minutes. The marketing team could go promote the link to that form, have people fill it out. Then every single person
that comes in and fills it out is going to
immediately get a response from our team. We can start to
take things a step further and string
actions together. In my previous
example where I said we have people come into
Slack and notify us, and then we manually reach out, we can take that a
step further like in this example and then automate
that reach out as well. Stringing these
things together and really saving us
time and energy, and automating a lot of these
workflows and processes. Often these platforms
also offer a ZAP history. You can see a record of all the automations
every time it runs. The last month across
nine automations our company has
automated 4,763 tasks. You could see how
each one is run, how often it's used, and start to measure
them that way as well. Now, take a few
minutes to dive in and start to set up
your automations. Choose your platform, find the one that supports the
integrations you need. Create your account, determine your triggers, set
up your trigger, then set up your
subsequent action or actions if you want to
automate multiple steps, and start to set those
up, and turn them on. You can see the log and the
record of them going forward.
5. Measuring Your ROI: Now that you've taken
the time to set up your automations
and turn them on, let's take a minute and see how they're creating a return
on investment for you. You want to make sure
that the tasks you've set up are actually saving
you time and energy. What we're going
to do here is take that blank weekly
schedule that we did once before and we're
going to do it again. What we're going to be
able to do is compare the first one to next one, and start to see where we saw differences and
where we saw changes. Hopefully, we'll see that the automations you've
set up have won you back time and energy that
you could spend in more meaningful in productive tasks in your day-to-day. Let's take another blank week. Let's lay it down in front of us and let's start
to fill it in. I use Timeular,
and you could see here that I filled
in my entire week. We compare them
before and after, we can start to see where
we've made improvements, where we've got those gains and how we've won back
our time and energy, not just for ourselves,
but also our own productivity for the
company as well. If you've saved time, then you should keep
that automation running. Maybe you can even
expand upon it, adding some other actions. That's probably been a very valuable thing to
set up for you. If not, then maybe you need to go in and tweak your
automations a little bit, continuing to expand on them, maybe adding some
subsequent actions until they really are
saving you time and energy. Now that you've determined how much time energy you've saved, what you're ROI was? Other people on a team of
probably done this as well. If you could start to add
up that time and think about not just how much
time it's saving you, but also saving
your entire team. That's meaningful
to the company. We've seen that within
my own company, when you start to take multiple
people and you free them up to not only just do the work that they love and
do what they love, but remove the repetitive
tasks and create animations. It gives your company
a massive advantage. For this lesson on
your worksheet, recomplete the week and write down a document how
you're spending your time. Take a moment to compare that to the week before and highlight
those opportunities where you one back time and you free yourself
up to do the things that you love.
6. Maintaining Automations: You now have multiple
automation setup that can help you win back time. But maintaining those
automations is also important. You're going to have triggers that are always monitoring and always firing and causing
some other action to follow. So a few things to
talk about here. One, you should make
sure that everyone on your team knows what
automations are running. The last thing you
want to have happen is someone to fire off a trigger unknowingly and then
e-mails 6,000 people. This happened to
us once actually. We had a form that people
would fill out and it would send them a welcome e-mail to our non-profit
that we started. We had an intern come in and uploaded a few thousand people to a spreadsheet that was
connected to that form. It looked like that form
had new completes and had e-mail all those people,
the welcome e-mail. Many of whom didn't
really sign up. You want to make sure
everyone on the team knows what automations
are set up and that they unknowingly
trigger something that causes an unexpected action. You also want to monitor
your automations because sometimes the
integration you're using such as type form or Google
pushes some change to the integration and
that could affect how your automation runs either from a trigger, or
action perspective. Maybe every six months or so, eight months a year, you want to make sure you come
into the account. You just glance and look them over and make sure
they're running smoothly. Put yourself in a position
where you can know whether these automations are running and every six months and
you take a look at it, maybe you check
your inbox and you see all those e-mails
stopped two weeks ago, and you go and look into it. Think about when you
create your automations, how you can set up little breadcrumbs or ways
to keep you in the loop. You don't actually
have to do any work, but you can still monitor and
see those automations are running smoothly and properly
and continuing to work. One easy way to do this, is either in your task
manager, or your calendar, create a recurring event
every six months or so that reminds you to come in and
check on your automations. I login to my Zapier account
and I can see all of my recipes and my
automations set up here. I can see that they're on
and that they're running. Then I can also go over
here to the Zap history and I can also
take a look to see where and what is
running the most. Now something that's useful
especially in Zapier, is I can actually filter by whether or not something failed. I can come in here
and I can filter by stopped or errored, or stopped and
halted and I can see which automations
didn't run fully. Maybe this new user notification automation
that I have set up here, which has been halted a few
times in the last few days, is something that I want
to take a look into. Maybe it's halted
because I wanted it to, or maybe there's something
erroring out here because there was an underlying
change in the integration. That's just one example of what you want
to be looking out for and how you can make sure
that these aren't failing, and things are always running
properly as you intended. If something's broken, I
do keep a close eye on my e-mail and I typically get
alerted by the platforms. If the platform
you're using doesn't offer any historical, or search, or filter tools to take a look at your account, then maybe what you want to
do is just write it down. You can document it
in a Google Sheet, or a pen and paper. But setting up automations
has honestly been key. It's a big difference in
not only company culture and leadership
being able to free people up to focus
on what they love, but also a strategic advantage. I can't tell you how often I see companies default to
just doing manual labor, manual work and that's great, that brings in money and
that pays the bills. But there's a big
difference between a software company that scales to a billion dollars and predominant does that
because of automation. Now oftentimes they're
writing code to do that. But the big difference
is the focus and the energy with which
they're doing it and going and working
in that direction. If you could set up automations using one
of these platforms, drag and drop style, you're still going
to be light years ahead of any competitor, or any other company
manually doing this work, or shuffling paper. If multiple people on
the team have done this exercise,
then get together. Add up all the
time you've saved, multiply it by 52 and see how much time you
save for the year. I could personally tell you from my own experience that every time I've been able to help someone get out of
doing some redundant, repetitive tasks that
they don't enjoy and have allowed them to focus
on something they care and the passionate about. It changes the entire
dynamic, the entire energy, happiness of the team and it's something
that's really powerful and improves morale and improves the vision long-term for
everyone on the team, how they work together,
how they collaborate, and honestly just how much
fun they have working. Take a step back,
do this and I think you'll see and be really
happy with the results, especially how it works
across everyone on the team. For this lesson, take a look at the worksheet and start
to create reminders. Maybe every six months,
eight months or a year, whatever you're
comfortable with to come back in and check
your automations. Keep an eye on your e-mail inbox because these
platforms will often alert you if there is something changing that you need
to keep an eye out for, or go in and check
and include yourself. Build yourself into the
automations so you can monitor them as they
happen from the triggers, the actions, and the responses.
7. Final Thoughts: What I want to leave you with today is the important
reminder that in this decade, every company is becoming
a software company, whether you're a mainstream
business or Fortune 500, software is eating the world. The more that you
lean into that, the better off you'll be. Making sure that you take a step back to setup these automations, find these opportunities
really will help you stay disruptive and innovative and under cutting edge
of your industry. I hope that you've seen
how much time you've saved from measuring
that initial baseline to seeing the after of setting up your automations and
seeing how much time and ROI you've saved. I hope that going forward I've inspired you to set
up more automations, find other opportunities in your job and your work to say, how could this be
done better and improve not only
your day-to-day, but the company's
productivity output. I encourage you to
submit your worksheet, ask any questions you have in
the project gallery below, and I'll respond,
give you feedback and I can't wait to see
the work that you've done. Thank you so much
for being here. I hope we've made a
profound impact in the way you work and improve
the day-to-day life. Stay curious everyone. My name is Kevin Siske
and I will see you in my next Skillshare class.
Kevin Siskar, CEO, Finta
