#MarketingNerds: How Delegating, GTD, and Virtual Assistants can Help Your Productivity
Hi, everyone. This is Kelsey Jones, Managing Editor at Search Engine Journal, and I’m here with Stephan Spencer, the author of Google Power Search and the co-author of The Art of SEO. He also runs the blog The Science of SEO. How are you today?
I’m doing great.
Good. So, I know you’re going to be joining us at the SEJ Summit in Santa Monica, and you’re going to be covering productivity and getting things done. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. I know that you lived in New Zealand for eight years while you continued to run and own a US-based agency. What are some tools and websites you used while you were working abroad that anyone could use either while they’re working abroad or they’re right in the office?
Right. Some of the tools that I used back then don’t exist anymore, or some of the tools that I use now don’t exist back then. For example, back then, I used an app called IGTD, but that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not being updated. I use things for the Mac and things for iPad and iPhone. Both versions are by cultured code, and they all synchronize and work seamlessly together.
So, that’s kind of the trusted system that I use, and that just helps me keep everything out of my head and in a place that I trust. I also give my assistants access to my things database so they can go in and, like I said, because it’s all synchronized and in the cloud of things on their Mac, then they can access all my projects, next actions, and so forth. I wonder if maybe it might be useful for your listeners if I step back a little bit and explain what I mean by GTD and getting things done.
Yeah, definitely. I know that that’s what you’re going to cover at your SEJ Summit session, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about that methodology for those of us who don’t know a lot about it?
Right. So it’s all based on the best-selling book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. And he teaches workshops on the topic. He’s a very rich resource site on GTD at davidallen.com. It’s just it’s amazing, not for time management as much as it’s for life management, and it’s not just for your business and so forth, and so by having, for example, the idea of everything out of your head into a trusted system that’s a GTD idea you get into a state a zen-like state called to mind like water or you don’t have to remember your grocery list you don’t have to remember.
Like, oh, I got to make this call before the end of the day. So, it’s really quite a freeing thing just to have that one trusted system, not to have notes scattered around the place on Post-its or backs of envelopes or napkins or anything like that. One trusted system. Then, you figure out what your next actions are for your projects. You don’t have to figure out the entire project. It’s not like figuring out the whole Gantt chart and everything. You just have to figure out what the next thing is that you do to move that project forward.
Then, the next action will present itself, and so forth. So if it’s simply to make a phone call, then that’s what you put into your trusted system to make that phone call, not mapping out the entire project. That’s unnecessary at this point. And then assigning a context to those next actions so that you know that, oh, this is a phone item, this is an errand, this is an app computer sort of thing, and then this thing here is something I have to do at home so that you can filter your to-do list, your next action list by context and say, “Oh, I’m just gonna make a phone call here while I’m sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room. I can’t go on an errand right now. I can’t do stuff that requires me to be at the office or at home.”
So I don’t wanna see any of that stuff. It’ll just make my brain hurt. I just wanna see the things that are phone items that will be easily accomplished in this time slot that I have. So I use, like I said, things for the Mac and for iPhone and so forth. So I just pull up my Things app. I click on the at phone option in my Filter by Context list, and I can see all the phone items I can do. So that’s really handy, and you do like weekly reviews where you have an appointment with yourself to go over your next actions list, your someday maybes, your waiting for, or your open loops, in other words, your projects list. And it’s just a really powerful methodology.
I only kind of scratched its surface. I encourage you to read the book. I know you have, Kelsey. You’re already using GTD, so that’s awesome. Once you have a methodology like this, it makes it a lot easier to start delegating and outsourcing more efficiently and effectively. But that’s a whole other topic, like virtual assistants and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, definitely. I know I read Getting Things Done a couple of years ago when I was just starting to freelance full-time. It really struck a chord with me because it made me feel like everything that I have to do is manageable, and I just kind of take it one step at a time. And like you said, putting everything in a trusted system for me, I love Todoist. It’s a free service, and then they have a premium version that’s 30 bucks a year, and they just have an app and then a web-based version, and you can break up your to-do items in specific projects.
You can do reoccurring tasks, or you can assign tasks to other people. So that’s been one that has just really worked for me. And it’s just kind of, I think, a process of what works best for you personally. You know, I like Evernote a lot too, since it’s cloud-based and I can, like you said, if I’m standing in line, you know, waiting at the DMV or something, I can pull up Evernote or Todoist and say, okay, what’s one thing I can get done? While I’m standing here, I can look at my quick tasks that I know only take me a few minutes to get done from my phone.
Right, so I am a real geek when it comes to this stuff, like all the technology around productivity and so forth. There are people who are using Pomodoro timers. There are people who like more project management types of systems like Asana. I use Trello. So, I use a range of different tools depending on the needs. There are also tools for just being more focused when you’re working. I use a tool on my Mac that allows me to just automatically hide everything in the background that is not active at the moment. So it’s just a free little app called Hocus Focus.
That will minimize everything other than what you’re working on at that moment because any kind of clutter will just take focus away from what you’re working on. So you can even hide—there’s an app called Desktop that can even hide your menu bar—so you won’t see that file edit view window and all the app icons and so forth at the top. It just blacks that out until you need it, and then you mouse over it. So clarity and focus are all about getting stuff out of your eye path that is not related to the immediate task at hand.
Yeah, definitely. One thing that’s really helped me focus is I’ll listen to classical music on Pandora or songs on Spotify, and there’s also a site that I’ve used before that I know I’ve mentioned in another podcast, but it’s SimplyNoise.com. And you can do either the sound of rain or you can do white noise, which is basically a reoccurring noise like if you tune your TV to a station that’s not working, that buzzing sound that’s white noise. And surprisingly, that can help you focus. It doesn’t work for everyone. My husband definitely thinks that I’m off my rocker whenever I play that from my computer, but it really works for me sometimes to play white noise just because it helps me block out everything.
Yeah, or you could try binaural beats.
Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that. I haven’t tried it.
Yeah, so you can get an app for your phone that will play binaural beats, which are their tones that have a special effect on your brain. I’m not really that clear on how it works, but it’s pretty cool. I’ll give it a try and see how it works out for you. Even if you just wanna use it to relax before you go to sleep, definitely you don’t wanna do a lot of computer stuff right before bed and have the blue light from the screens of whether it’s your phone or your laptop or whatever right before you try to go to sleep.
It’s not good for a good night’s sleep or deep sleep. I’m also a sleep geek, so I have one of these Zeos, which they don’t make anymore. You can strap it to your forehead, and it will track your deep sleep, light sleep, or REM sleep and give you a report in the morning of how much you got of each. You can see the trend line and everything. Pretty cool.
Yeah, that’s awesome. I have a Fitbit Surge HR and you just wear it on your wrist, and it tracks your heart rate, your steps and how many flights of stairs you took the whole day. And I don’t wear mine at night, but you can, and it tracks your sleep. So it tells you, you know if you moved around a lot, then it can surmise that you didn’t really get a good night’s sleep. So that kind of stuff is definitely interesting. And I think having as much information about yourself and how you work and sleep and live as possible, as possible, it kind of helps you figure out what type of tools and tactics work best.
Yep, absolutely. Something that is just perfect for one person, like they’re big into base camp or Asana or Trello or whatever, may not work for you. You’re maybe more of a Pomodoro person. The Pomodoro method, or there’s actually a tool that combines the Pomodoro method with GTD.
Oh, really?
Yeah. So Product Hunt, if you’re familiar with that site, oftentimes there’ll be some really cool productivity tools. There’s a productivity section of Product Hunt.
Okay. I’ll have to check that out.
Fun to look that out. Yeah.
I know one other thing that you had kind of mentioned earlier in the podcast that I wanted to touch on was having virtual assistants. I know that for my own company, MoxieDot, I just have a small marketing agency. I have two virtual assistants who help me come up with projects, do research, and help me research content for social media. I know you mentioned you have virtual assistants as well. How did that come about, what do your virtual assistants do for you, and how does that help your productivity?
Right, so I use virtual assistance to manage my email to manage my calendar, travel bookings, and setting up appointments with clients and prospects because I’m doing SEO consulting, and I have client work and meetings, and I also speak at conferences and so forth. I have a pretty active schedule, so having to manage all that myself would be a real nightmare like.
I want to maintain what’s called inbox zero, where I go into my inbox randomly at one point during the day and see nothing or almost nothing. That’s basically what happens because my virtual assistants manage my inbox for me. So, if you were to email me at my main email, Stephan, at StephanSpencer.com, I wouldn’t see that initially. It would get filtered and sorted by my assistant.
Who would decide whether it’s something that requires my action or just my reading and reviewing of it, or if it can go straight into the archives? There are things that are more like someday maybes. There’s a folder for that. There is a folder waiting for us. But for the most part, I am concerned about the two folders in my email. One is Action, and the other is Read Review. And I don’t put stuff in there. My assistant puts stuff in there. I don’t look at my inbox.
I just look at Action and then occasionally at Read Review, which is just kind of like an FYI folder. So that in itself will change your life because think about how much time you spend on email. Yeah. So much of that time is unproductive. So that is a fantastic thing if you can trust somebody to hand over the reins to your email in that way, which I’ve.
You build that trust. You don’t have to say, here are the keys to the kingdom. The first day that you hire them, they have to earn that trust. But once they do, I mean, it’s so freeing. It’s amazing. So, finding things I don’t know, like travel bookings, hotels, flights, and all that, I delegate that as well. I delegate, like I said, maintaining my calendar, even just doing research and like, for example, I’m in some high-powered Masterminds, and there are Facebook groups associated with those that are really valuable, and I don’t have time to scan through all those.
So I have my virtual assistants scan through those, find the really best bits to highlight and provide a summary in an email so I don’t have to spend a half hour on Facebook. It’s so distracting. In fact, one of the best things you can do for your productivity is to uninstall the Facebook app from your phone.
Yeah, I should definitely do that. It’s almost a force of habit to open it up.
Yeah. And then you get caught up in this urgency addiction sort of thing, which is the same thing that draws you into your email constantly throughout the day. If you only schedule, like I’m going to go into my email two or three times a day, and then you block out time. Like I have a separate calendar.
I use Google Calendar, and my assistants book my appointments, calls, and other things, but I have a separate calendar for project time. So I block out time to work on different projects and different client projects like an SEO audit or whatever. I’ll block out a chunk of time.
But it won’t be on the calendar that my VA sees because I don’t want to if a prospect needs to have a call with me and they only have limited time; it’s like, okay, I only have, you know, these couple of time slots available. I don’t want to miss out on that opportunity so I can move my project time blocks.
In that separate calendar. So that’s a nice thing to do, as well as having multiple calendars if you’re using Google Calendar or iCal on your Mac or whatever. So yeah, the VA thing is life-changing, even somebody who is just in a traditional work environment and has a boss and, you know, reports to people and so forth.
They would benefit by being able to delegate stuff that is kind of mind-numbing work or is not their gift to the world, you know, it’s not the thing that they do the best. You know, collecting data and spreadsheets, aggregating stuff, and even drafting tweets and blog posts and things like that. I don’t have time to write as much as I’d like to, so I provide concepts. I record ideas for blog posts or articles, and then I have a virtual assistant draft something so I’m not staring at a blank screen.
I have an article that I can refine and revise and then submit for Search Engine Journal, for example, whatever, right? So it’s so freeing to have people that you’re delegating that sort of stuff to. In New Zealand, when I lived there, I actually had an assistant on site who’d come in and into my office and would take shorthand. I would kind of dictate the idea for a blog post or an article that way.
And that worked well because she had that skill of shorthand and she was a good writer. So she would craft something that, as I said, it’s so much easier for me to not have a blank screen but to have something that I can work with and kind of like having some clay that I can mold in the shape that I want. So, you know, once I moved back to the States, she stayed in New Zealand, and I did; she moved on to other things, and so I haven’t done it in that way since.
Now, I just record myself and hand it over to a VA. But surprisingly, for some people like me, I enjoy it, and I’m more in the flow when I’m talking to somebody versus just using a recording device with nobody on the other end. You have trouble talking into a mic or recording device. You need somebody at the other end. It’s worth hiring a virtual assistant and having them be on the other end. Make it more of a conversation so that they can extract your brilliance, and then you can get that transcribed or summarized by the virtual assistant or whatever.
Yeah, so kind of wrapping up our conversation today. I know that we could talk so much more about productivity, and you’re gonna talk more about it at your session during the SEJ Summit in Santa Monica. But if let’s say, you know, some of our listeners want to hire a virtual assistant, what are some, you know, websites that you would recommend as a good place for them to get started?
Right, so I’d first caution you on. Going straight to a site like ODesk or Freelancer.com or Elance because the folks that you would hire are distracted by other shiny objects very quickly, like somebody else offers five more cents an hour, and suddenly this person that you worked so hard to find just disappears. So the way that I do it is I put up a job advert which includes a riddle and some other requirements.
They have to jump through some hoops in order to apply. A problem-solving riddle, you’d be amazed at how much that improves the signal-to-noise ratio. Oh, wow. So many nonsense applicants will hit you up otherwise. So I use Craigslist in the US. If I’m looking specifically for somebody in the Philippines, then I’ll use Onlinejobs.ph. But yeah, the approach to using Craigslist is pretty specific.
How you go about it, which cities would you target? Of course, because this is a virtual role, you don’t have to target somebody in the same city as you. In fact, a lot of times I would advise against that. But yeah, there’s a whole process here. You just have to come to the SCJ Summit and hear my talk on it.
Yeah, definitely. So, Stephan Spencer, thank you so much for joining us for Marketing Nerds today. I know that we all enjoyed having you.
Thanks for having me.
Yep. And signing off, this is Kelsey Jones, Managing Editor of Search Engine Journal.
