Does your work…flow?
As we are traveling this week through Wyoming, we have been lucky enough to catch up with friends along the way. We are all staying together for a week at a stunning RV park in Wapiti, WY, about 30 miles from the East entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It is breathtaking and 2 days ago we were lucky enough to enjoy the first snowfall of the season on top of the peaks.
So far, we spent a full day in Yellowstone, seeing all the geysers. Old Faithful lived up to its namesake and burst about 100 feet into the air within a minute of the estimated time. What a spectacular experience. We also saw 2 grizzly bears just playing on the side of the road, eating the branches and enjoying the sun. I’ve never seen one so close before but when it started walking toward me, I was glad I had on my running shoes and dove for the rented mini-van!
Since are friends are entrepreneurs like us, we can’t help but discuss a little business over a bottle of wine and a campfire (well ours is a portable propane firepit but you get the idea!). And yesterday, the idea of workflow came up. Our friends, who live full time in their RV are great at workflow. They have minimal space which forced them to become extremely efficient in all areas of their lives, including work. With their current workflow, they can post across all platforms everyday within 10 minutes. One day a week, they interview for a podcast, write the email introduction and invitation and then get it scheduled for posting and release. They have scheduled coaching times with clients, time for study and time creation. They do this on a daily and weekly basis during scheduled times and dates.
My system works much the same but it took me a while to find my groove once we started traveling so often. Now, I have a very consistent workflow that allows me to better manage my schedule, control my time for work and play, provide the content and information in a timely manner that my team can then take and publish and produce and of course, it feeds my creativity. Now, when I sit down to begin my workflow, my creativity knows the gameplan and kicks in right away. It is similar to muscle memory. The more you flex that creativity muscle, the more it creates creativity memory.
So what does my workflow look like? Let me give you an easy example you can duplicate.
On Mondays, I write 2 blogs, I shoot 2 videos, I create 2 W.I.N. One Sheets and write 2 newlsetters. This allows me to always work a week in advance, but never too far in advance that I lose the real time experience advantage. This is a really long day for me. Even though my content is short and to the point, I still take a good deal of time making sure it is what I want to say and that my message is clear.
Throughout the week, I have generally also taken some photos to share with all of you so I include that as part of my weekly content creation.
I load all my videos and photos, that I shoot on my phone, into one iphone folder labled ‘Weekly Content Creation’ and then a subfolder with the dates, beginning to end. That folder automatically loads into icloud.
On Tuesday mornings, Pete reviews that folder, does any needed editing and then categorizes everything and loads it accordingly into Dropbox.
Later that day, our social media marketer, reviews the content, adds some additional editing to make the posts work and then creates some video ‘shorts’ as well.
Then, like magic, everything appears as it should on a set release schedule.
You can do all this on your own like my friends do, or create a workflow system that involves your team, like I prefer. Whichever way it works for you is the right way to do it. The important thing is to simply create the workflow system and then, let it work and flow!
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Sincerely,
Karen Schaefer
Founder of W.I.N.; the Women’s Wealth and Impact Network
