4 Easy Automation Hacks to Save You Work Time

Hey Friend!

Feel like time’s running out while growing your business? Do you find yourself repeating the same tasks? Want to be successful without being chained to the computer and your business?  I have four easy automation hacks I use to reclaim my work time. If you spend a few hours now, you’ll reap the benefits for weeks to come. 

Learn the four easy automation hacks I use in my business to create a well-oiled machine, giving you back precious time for your family and yourself. 

Hack #1 – Write and Schedule Static Emails

The first hack you need to do for your online business is to schedule your emails. You can write them in advance and schedule them out for the day you want them to be sent. 

An example of how you can use this in your online business is for your new student sequence. When you have a new student come into your program, you will already have a pre-written email created for all new students. This welcome email will automatically get sent out immediately after purchase. This is an easy sequence you can set up in your email provider on the backend. Whether through your checkout software or your course software, you can create this automation email sequence.

Zapier is a program that can help link this sequence together after you have a new student purchase your course. We talk more about this in hack #2. Take the time to think about what emails you are always sending that are static, meaning, the email never changes. These are the emails you can set up and automate.

Hack #2 – Use Zapier

The second automation hack is to use Zapier to get information from one place to another. This is a program I highly recommend. It’s a wonderful tool that links software together. 

For example, if you want the information from the latest podcast episode that you are going to air on Podbean to populate into your content calendar in MeisterTask, Asana, or Trello, you can use a zap. You tell Zapier what you want it to do so you can have everything you need in Meister Task.

Any time you copy and paste information from one place to another, you can use a zap to do the work for you. This is a great way to prepopulate your task management software in preparation for creating content in your content calendar.

Simply open up your task management software, and all your apps are already there for your pre-scheduled episodes. 

You can even put zaps together between your emails and your task management system. Building a zap to add people to a certain list in your email software can save you a lot of time. Again, having that new student come into your student community is as easy as an automated email created by a zap. 

As you work on your business this week, pay attention to the tasks that you do that are repeatable and ask yourself if you could make a zap to make it easier for you. This will save you work time. Over time you will find more opportunities to build out more zaps and automations. It won’t be as clear up front but eventually, you will know what zaps are necessary.  

Hack #3 – Preschedule Content

The third automation hack to find more time is to pre-schedule any content that you can.  If I’m going to record a podcast episode, I don’t want to have to come back to my podcast hosting platform to publish it several days later. I want to have it scheduled out the same day I recorded it.  Otherwise, I may forget to hit publish. Be very intentional about batching the podcast recordings, pre-planning them, recording it, and scheduling them out. When I am in the process of recording, I recommend prescheduling the content since you are already focused on that same type of task. Just that extra click and the extra time of logging out and logging back in later to an unfinished job can cost you work time. Try to avoid that at all costs. Take the time to schedule your content, whether that’s your long-form or your short-form content. It’s a great time-saving hack.

If you use Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram, you can schedule your content in advance as well. Tailwind is a great scheduling tool for Pinterest. Another big bonus with using Tailwind is that your pins get shared to multiple boards when you schedule using the Tailwind app. Pinterest is great because once you share your pin on Pinterest, your pin will continue to be shared over and over again year after year through it’s search engine features. 

For more information on Tailwind and other automation software, visit stefaniegass.com/resources. 

Hack #4 – Create Templates

The fourth automation hack to find more work time is to create templates for recurring inbox responses. Have you noticed that you constantly have people coming into your inbox and requesting to be on your podcast? Are you writing the same responses? Maybe you write the same type of “decline” email or your have the same “acceptance” email for all the pitches that come your way. All you need to do is write it once and make a template out of it. Create a Word doc in Google Drive and build a database of your recurring email templates.

Make it clear, label it well, and return back to this document every year to edit and adjust the templates when necessary.

When an email comes into your inbox, have someone on your team look for a theme within that email and a corresponding response that can be pulled from your email templates. This is a great way to save administrative time. 

Over time these templates will need to be refined based on your market research and messaging tactics for your business. Put a reminder task card in your task management software to alert you to edit your templates annually. 

The 4 Easiest Automation Hacks To Try In Your Business

Let’s review the 4 automation hacks I use in my business every day to help me save time:

1. Automating sending static emails 
2. Building zaps in Zavier for any software or information that needs to be linked to another software 
3. Pre-schedule your content, podcast episodes, and Pinterest
4. Capture recurring inbox responses and build templates 

You will save so much time after implementing these automation hacks. These hacks have saved me and my team 4-5 hours per week collectively. There are endless ways to streamline and simplify your business, these are just 4 easy hacks you can start today. Becoming more organized and optimized in your online business can help you create more time for money-producing tasks. 

Bonus Automation Tip

Never duplicate your effort. Create automations instead. If you often times find yourself writing to-do lists for your business tasks, then you take the to-do list and type it out in Asana, then you write an outline for it, you are wasting valuable time. Always take the time to create something once and put it in the right place from the beginning. To-do lists are not time consuming but having a task management system that eliminates to-do lists is more efficient. If you need help with your business operating system, I highly recommend Chelsi-Jo’s Systemize Your Biz.

If you do something, you should only have to do it once. It’s time to stop duplicating and instead streamline your business. We often feel we don’t have time in our business because we are wasting so much time. 

The sooner you get organized, stop duplicating, and start automating, the more equipped you will be. You’ll be more equipped to have the capacity to run a team in the future. When that happens, you’ll be able to make more revenue, to foster more students and to welcome more sales.

If you are currently running on “E” right now, what’s it going to look like when you scale? 

Take the time to put everything in the right place to build these automation hacks into your business so that you feel locked and loaded. 

It only takes a couple of hours to set up these automations and it will save you a lot of work time. With the time you save, you will be able to focus on more money-making tasks in your business. Remember, with these automation hacks, I have less work time and more me time. 

I pray this blesses you!

Xo,

Stef

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