The Problem: Admin Overload

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Quick question. How many tasks are you carrying in your head right now? Not on your to-do list in your head. Because admin overload isn't just what you're doing, it's what you're remembering. It's the email you haven't replied to, is the client you need to follow up with, the file you can't find, the invoice you keep forgetting, the post that you meant to publish, the quick request you still have not done. And yes, it's the meeting that you have not prepared for. If you sit down to work and your brain starts scanning what am I missing, what's urgent, who's waiting, and before you've done anything important, you're already tired, then this episode is for you, friend. Welcome back to the systemized business. I am your host, BK. I am a business operations specialist, and today I'm sharing my admin reset. This is a weekly workflow that buys back your time. It reduces decision fatigue. It helps you execute without feeling like your business is eating you alive. This is especially for you if you start your day in your messages or your email and you never come out. If you work all day but you never really feel in control of your day, if you find yourself reactive rather than proactive. This is especially for you if you have been trying to be consistent, but the admin keeps winning. Because admin overload isn't a character floor, it is a workflow problem. By the end of this episode, you will have a weekly rhythm that you can implement immediately. And I'm going to give you a seven-day experiment so you can test it out for yourself. Alright, so before we get into the weekly rhythm, we need to have an understanding and to put a name to the three things that drain and steal our most productive hours. The first one is using your inbox as your task manager. You know, email has a way of just feeling productive because you are responding, you feel like you're on top of things. But most inbox work is not progress, it's just maintenance. When your inbox is your to-do list, you end up rereading the same emails over and over. You search for that one message that you can't quite remember when it came in. Um, you're replying to things that don't really matter, and then it it keeps you carrying open loops all day. And how do you know this is this is you? If you open your email and you're immediately scanning it, like, oh what am I forgetting? If you're leaving emails unread or you flag them so that you can come back to them later, you're basically treating those as tasks. If you're responding in a rush because you're afraid of missing something, then yep, that means your inbox is your task manager. And the cost isn't just the time, the cost is your attention because your brain is trying to remember everything that you haven't captured. Email should not be where our tasks live, but email should begin as the trigger for tasks, not the storage unit. Okay, so the second thing is that just drains our time is context switching, and this is so subtle, right? You sit down to do something important like write a proposal or create content or even deliver client work, but you keep interrupting yourself with small, non-urgent things. You pick up your phone, you open up your calendar, and if you work from home, you know, something catches your eye, and you think yourself, you think to yourself, huh, maybe I could quickly put a load of laundry while I while I do this. Okay, I'll do that quickly and then get back to the document. And then another message comes in. And you know what? And we've talked about this before on the podcast. Every time you switch from one task to another, you get hit with something called restart text, and your brain has to reload, it has to kind of reboot. What was I doing? Where was I? What was my point again? So you feel busy, but you never get into deep focus enough to create meaningful input. And if you've ever said to yourself, huh, I've worked all day and I've got nothing done, then it might be that context switching that is the reason. And I found that being um, I've really tried the past few months to be very intentional about um protecting my like deep work focus time. Because that's what we need. We need to protect that time, not kind of build the or will ourselves um to to work more, to work harder. And then the third one is the third thing that really wastes time. Oh my goodness, is unclear handoffs. And people think handing off work from one person to the uh another matters only if you have a team, but even as solopreneurs, we hand work off to our future selves, and the problem is the same because if your workflow isn't clear, then you end up redoing the work. You forget the decisions that you made the first time, and then you spend time remaking those decisions the second time. You know what I mean? So you keep jumping back into things because nothing is clearly defined. And if you have a if you have an assistant, if you have a small team, then um unclear handoffs show up as constant questions, the needing to clarify over and over, incomplete tasks, um, missed or unclear expectations. And then you end up taking the work back because it's actually faster if you just did it yourself. And that's how founders get stuck doing the work that they should not be doing. It's not because they cannot delegate, it's because the system for delegation is not set up correctly. So those are the three things that really drain our time and keep founders stuck in low-value work, using your inbox as your to-do list, context switching, and then unclear handoffs. And so this is where the admin reset comes in. We stop trying to be responsive all day. We build a rhythm that contains the admin, that protects your focus and makes your operations predictable. So here's the principle that we want to remember before we get into the nitty-gritties of this admin reset rhythm, right? Here's the principle work expands to fill the space you give it. And this is so true for admin tasks as well. If you let them bleed into your whole day, that is exactly what they will do. But if you contain them into structured blocks, it becomes more manageable, and so this is the four-step rhythm, um, four-step admin uh reset rhythm of weekly planning, daily triage, deep work, and ops cleanup. Okay, those are the four steps: weekly planning, daily triage, deep work, and ops cleanup. So, step one is the weekly planning block. And I like to set this as 45 to 60 minutes once a week, either on a Sunday evening or a Monday morning. Um, but the purpose of this is quite simple. You decide once, not all week. You decide what you are doing once and not every time you sit down to work. So here's the structure. Um, and if you want to take out your notebook, make notes. So here's the structure: you scan, you open up your calendar, you scan, you scan it, you look at your week, you look at what tasks or events are fixed, you know, calls or appointments, deadlines, personal uh things that you have on your calendar. You get a high-level view of what your week looks like, what times you have available. You scan your projects, you open up your project management tool if you use one asana, clickup, notion, whatever it is that you use. You look at your active clients, you look, you look at your active projects, you look at what are your active deliverables for this week. Okay, we're still high-level. Now you think to yourself, okay, um, three things. Rule of three pick your three outcomes for the week. We'll go a little bit deeper into this particular thing, but you choose your top three priorities for the week. Okay, now that you have that information, what's on your calendar, what's uh on your projects, like what do you have to what deliverables you have this week, you can time block your week now. In time blocking your week, you want to schedule one daily triage time. This is 20 to 30 minutes. We'll get more into this what uh in terms of what happens during these 20 to 30 minutes. So one daily triage time, you schedule at least two deep work blocks. So this is 60 to 90 minutes within your calendar. Two sets of these, and then one ops cleanup block, 30 to 60 minutes at the end of your week. You can choose, okay, on Friday, I'll have my ops cleanup block for 30 minutes uh Friday afternoon. So now that we have these blocks, right? We have one daily triage time, we have two deep work blocks, and we have one ops cleanup block. So it's within these blocks that we will batch our work. So you're not starting each day trying to figure out what needs to be done. You've already decided what you you know, you've already decided that. And this, even just doing this step, is like very it is there's immediate relief because you've now eliminated decision fatigue. So now let's get into each of these blocks and see what exactly are you doing within these blocks of time. Now we've have we have a high high-level view of our week. Let's take a look at block number one, which was our triage block. We've given ourselves 20 to 30 minutes every day to communicate, not create. We are communicating during this 20 to 30 minute triage block. And this happens every day, by the way. So the triage block includes responding to emails, responding to WhatsApp messages or DMs or voice notes, uh, giving quick approvals. Now, if you find that within either emails or messages or from your team, these contain tasks, then you have to be critical and make judgment and make a judgment about how long these will take. Okay, so and the rule of thumb that I have is that if it takes under two minutes, then do it right then. If it takes more than two minutes, then capture it as a task and then you schedule it. Because what erodes our day is starting a 20-minute task inside triage, which remember is only 20 to 30 minutes, and then you start a task that takes 15 minutes, and then you're down a rabbit hole. So this triage block, remember, is for communication, not creation. Once your 30 minutes is done, then that's done. Triage has to stop. You're not catching up on the internet, you're not wandering into tasks, you're what you are doing is closing communication loops and moving on. Okay. So let's move on now to our second block, deep work blocks. These you have two, at least two of them a week. Two per week is my minimum. So it's great if you can do more, but start with two so that you can ease into the rhythm, right? Each block is 60 to 90 minutes, and this is where you do the work that grows the business. We're talking client delivery, we're talking creating your offer or your product, uh, content batching, sales outreach, improving your onboarding process, building your standard operating procedures, and these are just examples. This is where you stop, you stop being reactive and you start being strategic. So, this is the time that you need to be like fiercely protective. So, no notifications, turn those off. Work or try to work with one tab open at a time. In other words, have a single objective because tabs can be open, yes, on our computer, but tabs can be open in our head too. So, we want to have a single objective, no context switching, no checking this, opening that thing. Oh, I need to do uh this one, two, three thing real quick. And your brain is going to resist this at first, it's going to be all over the place, and it's gonna think, oh my gosh, I don't have enough time. But we are doing, we have one single objective for this time, and the you know, because the problem is it's not that there aren't enough hours in the day, and and I'm sure we know this, right? It's not that we don't have enough hours in the day, most of our time is not enough. Problem can be solved by just having fewer interruptions and focusing on one thing, so that's the deep work block, right? And then we have our ops cleanup block, and this is 30 to 60 minutes once a week, usually at the end of the week. And this is just your business operational housekeeping. So this is where you update your tasks, you close loops, you file documents, you check on your pipeline or your customer relations man uh relationship management system. Gosh, that's mouthful. Um, you check where how your clients are pro progressing, how um how things are doing, you're checking your systems, you're reconciling invoices. Maybe you're looking at and reviewing automations that have been running, maybe some have failed, so you are fixing those or kind of looking at those a little bit closer, you're resetting templates for the next week, for example. So you can actually also do this at the end of each day. I it really does depend on the type of business and the the things that are um are happening in your business from week to week and from day to day. But usually it's okay to do it at the end of uh the week to just to do an operate operational deep dive, closing the loops for the week, updating your project management tools, making notes for the following uh week, basically setting yourself up for success next week. So, yeah, this is really nice because think of it like resetting your kitchen the night before. It's not glamorous, nobody really likes it until you walk in the morning. You walk in in the morning, right? You'll be so glad you took that extra bit of time just to put things in order. And yeah, now you can get to the business of making your coffee and getting your you know day started instead of wasting time with yesterday's tasks or last week's tasks. Um yeah, so those are that that's the ops um that is the ops cleanup block at the end of your week. So now remember I mentioned the rule of three? Here's the part that makes the whole rhythm work. Um you need to know and work within your limits. We need to realize and appreciate that our energy has limits, our brain has limits, and we should respect those. Your week only really needs three outcomes, three goals for the week that will um help you work towards reaching your bigger, your bigger business goals. We don't want to have ten goals, we don't want to have everything as a goal. We just need to have three. And here's how I recommend choosing what three goals to have for the week. Have one revenue outcome goal, something that supports money coming in. Is it proposals? Is it follow-up? Is it content that sells? Is it outreach? The second one is have a delivery or retention outcome goal. This is something that improves your client or your customer experience. So a milestone, a fix, an upgrade, something that will make their experience with you and your business that much more special, which will make them happy. And happy customers are more likely to stay with you for the long haul, right? And lastly, pick one systems or operational outcome goal. This will be something that will make your business easier the next week. This can be something uh like fixing a workflow or an automation, writing a standard operation, uh operating procedure and an SOP, or creating a template. So here's an example of a rule of three weeks. Revenue is my uh send three proposals, delivery, finish client onboarding revamp, and then systems, automate booking to intake to welcome email. Three things, and those are not three small things, those are three big things that those will fill your week, right? Because what we don't want to do is have everything a priority, because that means nothing is a priority. So the rule of three keeps your week realistic and your execution clean. So let me address two things. Some of you might be thinking as you're hearing me go through this. You might be thinking that uh my day is too unpredictable for this. And my response is then you need this rhythm even more. Because unpredictability is exactly why you need containers. Of course, life is messy. Sometimes it doesn't go as planned, uh, as planned. We don't aim for perfect days, we aim for stable anchors, and the anchor in this case is one triage time, one deep work block, one shutdown ritual. You might also be thinking, I have clients who message me all day. I have requests left, right, and center. What do I do? This won't work for me. But friend, that sounds like a boundary problem to me, not a workload problem. You can still be responsive without being consistently available. You can absolutely let people know that you check your emails or you check your messages at X and Y time every day. If it is urgent, then let them indicate uh that in the subject line if it's an email. Unless you literally, unless you are literally in the business of saving lives, your clients don't need instant replies, they just need constant delivery. Let me take a quick pause here and let you know if admin overload, if this sounds um like you, if you sound like it need you need more help, and if admin overload is stealing your best hours and you need help designing a weekly rhythm that you can actually stick with, go ahead and book a free clarity call. We'll go through pinpointing the biggest friction points in your tools, in your communications, in your calendar, in your handovers. Then we can map out the fastest fix for you. So take a look at the link in the show notes. Alright, so here's your mini action. This is a seven-day challenge. Calm down, it's only seven days, not forever. You're going to implement uh three things. You're going to go through the admin reset. So you're going to uh look at your calendar, you're going to look at your projects, you're going to look at your um your week, and you're going to choose a time that you can schedule in your triage block. So the 20 to 30 minutes once a day. Then you're going to schedule your deep work blocks a minimum of 60 minutes, put it in the calendar, treat that as a non-negotiable meeting. Put that in and stick to it. And then you're going to put in your ops cleanup, uh, stroke shutdown ritual. You can have this uh five to ten minutes at the end of the day, or uh 30 to 60 minutes at the end of the week, whatever you work, whatever works for you. So one triage time, one deep uh work time, at least one, and then one a shutdown ritual. What we'll be doing is capturing those loose tasks, we'll be choosing tomorrow's first tasks, and then we're gonna close our laptop. That's it. The goal for this week is not to do more work, but to rather stop carrying work in our head. And if you want an extra layer for the experiment, here's the question to ask at the end of each day. Did I protect at least one block for what matters? That's the question you ask yourself. Did you protect at least one of these blocks for what matters? I'd love to hear how this works for you. And if this episode helped you, subscribe or follow the Systemized Business Podcast. Share it with a founder friend who will find this episode helpful. And I thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you in the next one. Bye for now.