Latest / The Life-First Solopreneur / 162. The Secrets to Solopreneur Efficiency: How to Reclaim Hours Each Week with Will Christensen

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162. The Secrets to Solopreneur Efficiency: How to Reclaim Hours Each Week with Will Christensen · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: You guys, in this jam packed episode, we tackle the ultimate solopreneur challenge, getting rid of time wasting tasks and embracing efficiency for 2025. Will Christensen, automation expert and founder of Equity Hammer, joins the conversation to share his game changing frameworks like automate, delegate, and eliminate, as well as his 15115 rule. He breaks down why email should never be your to do list, how to streamline your business operations even without a VA, and why your inbox is secretly sabotaging your productivity. Plus, get practical tips for automating, delegating, and prioritizing what truly matters in your business and your life. So if you're ready to make 2025 your most productive year yet, this episode is a must listen.
• 0:43
  So hit that play button and start cutting the fat from your daily to do list. You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those just taking the bold step or even just thinking about taking that step into the world of of solo entrepreneurship. My name is Carly Ries, and my co host Joe Rando and I are your guides to navigating this crazy, but awesome journey as a company of 1. We take pride in being part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all aspects of solopreneurship that has empowered and educated countless solopreneurs looking to build a business that resonates with their life's ambitions. We help people work to live, not live to work.
• 1:23
  And if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the show for you. So if you're eager to gain valuable insights from industry experts on running a business the right way the first time around or want to learn from the missteps of solopreneurs who've paved the way before you, then stick around. We've got your back because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. Well, at the time of this recording, it is January 2nd. It is a miracle the 3 of us are here and realize it's a workday.
• 1:54
  It's also a miracle that we got off of our, offline conversation of you and Joe totally geeking out. so the reason why we wanted to record today is because it's the new year and we don't want solopreneurs to waste their time with things they don't need to be wasting their time with.
• 2:12
  Will Christensen: Oh my gosh. Yes.
• 2:13
  Carly Ries: Yes. 2025 should be the year of efficiency and getting rid of those time wasters. So let's just let's start there. What are the most common time wasting tasks you see solopreneurs struggling with, and how can they eliminate them for this new year?
• 2:26
  Will Christensen: I love that. So, you used one of my favorite keywords. Automate, delegate, eliminate is my framework for solopreneurs to systematically scale. And one of the things that I learned as a solopreneur is if I don't figure out how to take the locus of control from right here in front of me and hand it out to people around me, then I don't actually grow at all. And many people think, well, I'm a solopreneur.
• 2:57
  The whole point is that I'm solo. What I learned is you can actually hire people to come in and do things for you and still remain a solopreneur and still be the only one who's who's in there. There are designers, there are virtual assistants. I have a program I call entrepreneurs apprentice, where I actually pair you with a young entrepreneur who basically clones you and does a whole bunch of stuff. So to answer your question more directly, the biggest time wasters I see honestly is email. this is a classic. I actually literally was talking to one of my clients last week and, he was like, yeah, I just spend hours and hours and hours on email, and if I don't check my email, I don't make business. If I don't, you know, I just get stuck in there. And I said, okay, I have a question for you. If I were to be on a conversation with you, like a podcast, like this one and a really good idea came up, where would you write that idea down?
• 4:04
  And he said, oh, I'd probably email it to myself. you're gonna email it to yourself. Do you realize you just gave every spammer on the planet access to your to do list? Because that's what you're using your email as. When you email yourself that good idea, you're telling your brain good things are inside that inbox.
• 4:34
  Go make sure you do everything inside that inbox, but you're also allowing every single spammer on the planet to send you email.
• 4:45
  Carly Ries: Well, that's your brain. Well, I have done that in the past, and it's funny because I have, an app that I use on my phone, but if it's, a quick thought, I'm like, oh, I'll email it to myself, but I will never do that again
• 4:58
  Will Christensen: That is the key. It is you have to find a way to give yourself permission not to use your inbox as your to do list. If you're doing that right now as a solopreneur, stop. You should not be using your inbox as your to do list. Like, you got a contract you gotta get done today that should go on a separate location for your to do list.
• 5:26
  it should go in Trello or in ClickUp. Both of those have free plans that would work for solopreneurs for months, years before they needed to pay for the paid subscriptions of either one of those platforms. And no, you know, I'm not giving you my link to go sign up, but it's use something else.
• 5:46
  Joe Rando: Do you know who Cal Newport is? Have you ever hear heard of Cal Newport?
• 5:49
  He's a professor at, I think, Georgetown, but he wrote a book called A World Without Email, basically arguing that it's the biggest productivity suck, ever invented, and I agree.
• 6:01
  Will Christensen: Oh,the author of Deep Work. Okay. Yeah. I've heard of Deep Work. So, yeah. No. I am a huge fan of that idea of, like, just peel back those layers. I actually haven't checked my email in years.
• 6:17
  And the reason I don't check my emails because I have a VA who has, like, a 97 page document that she knows what to do with every single email that comes through my inbox and which ones need to surface to me. So you will get to a point where you can systematically delegate that and no longer have it be something that you're focused on, but it's something that takes time.
• 6:43
  Joe Rando: I've been building an app for years
• 6:46
  we have a patent on using AI for this kind of thing. So figuring out which email,
• 6:52
  Will Christensen: Joe, I wanna come try your app.
• 6:57
  Joe Rando: It's got work to do. It's got work to do. But, anyway
• 6:59
  Carly Ries: Well, so you say you haven't looked at email in years. What do you and your VA use, and how does she like, even for this interview, I sent you an email. And I was like, hey. looking forward to our chat tomorrow, blah blah blah blah.
• 7:15
  How did you get that information?
• 7:18
  Will Christensen: Great question. Great, great question. So what happens is, my assistant goes through my inbox, and she actually gets on, at 2 different times. So she gets on 2 hours before I wake up, and then she stays on for 2 hours. And then, we actually broke her shift up.
• 7:35
  She's over in the Philippines. And so for her, it was nicer from a scheduling perspective to take a second 4 hour shift and put it late in her evening, which is end of my day. So, like 4 PM my time until 8 PM my time. So she works outside of the times that I'm generally working, which in some ways is awesome, in some ways drives me crazy. Because, on the one hand, like, she's sending me messages.
• 8:03
  I gotta figure out how to mute that channel a little bit more, like my 4 to 8 because that's kinda where I'm hanging out with family. But on the other hand, I love it because all of these tasks that I queue up during the day, she just pounds them out. So whether it's creating a proposal or whatever else. So to answer your question directly, we actually use Slack. And what we do in Slack is there's an email to channel feature.
• 8:31
  So if you go into a Slack channel, if you haven't heard of Slack, it's a really cool chat system. Internal communication for your team should never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be via email. Like, you should just email internal communication to your team. There's no faster way to get lost in threads and all of the other crazy stupid stuff that's there. So use Slack for internal communication.
• 8:56
  Inside the Slack channel, there's an integration button you can turn on email, and it creates a unique email associated with that Slack channel. Then everything that's forwarded to that specific spot, the entire email thread, all of the forwards, all of the context, all of the text, even the attachments go to that Slack channel. And then I can go to that message inside the Slack channel and hit reply, and I can voice type. Like, I can literally hit the voice, like the record button, and it records audio of my voice, transcribes it at the same time. And I say, okay.
• 9:33
  This is what I wanna say back to this person, and I also want you to do this, that, and the other. And I hit stop, and she picks up that recording. The transcript runs it through chat gpt to make sure that it's, coming out clear and it matches my voice and and all of that. And then she replies to that person. So the only place I check is Slack and go dig into that.
• 9:58
  Joe Rando: I just gotta jump in here because I truly hate Slack. I feel like Slack is email on steroids. But I think what you're saying here is you've got a very limited group of people that you're using Slack with. Like, it sounds like one person.
• 10:12
  Will Christensen: It's actually interesting. So I have found that Slack can be a black hole, and it can really suck you in. The trick that I found with Slack is making sure that the channels and the things that are happening in slide inside Slack are very delineated. So all of your specific channels have like, you know, I have a channel for the team and a channel for when we're talking about apprentice success, a channel for when we're talking about sales and a channel for when we're talking about those different other pieces. My experience has been, the thing I like about Slack is I can control who's in there.
• 10:54
  Right? So I have just my internal teammates, and I've got probably 5 or 6 internal teammates that we've got working on different pieces of what's there. And we put them in there. If we have a channel that has all the apprentices in it, there's several many of them, and those apprentices only have access to that one or 2 channels. And so I can control what I'm seeing.
• 11:18
  And then in the left hand side of the bar, I can move those channels around. So I only have to pay attention to the stuff that's actually super relevant and urgent to me.
• 11:30
  Joe Rando: Okay. It's just tricky. It's tricky, though, because I think a lot of times, it just becomes an email that actually screams for an immediate response. You know? Because it's like, if you're not controlling, your notifications, it's like, blink blink blink blink.
• 11:44
  I just used it for a while with the team, and I just said no. And I still use it a tiny bit, but it's, very limited. There's, like, literally 3 people.
• 11:55
  Will Christensen: No. I love that. And so what you're describing right there, using it in a limited fashion, and I think there's a big part of this. So I don't know if you if you heard this, but, Zapier, so they're a ginormous automation company. Right?
• 12:11
  That didn't used to be ginormous. They were very small. I applied to be the 7th member of their team, like, 10 years ago. And, Wade sent me an email and said, you're just not enough of a programmer, Will.
• 12:26
  We need people who can program on our team right now. everybody's got to program. And it's funny because then, you know, 5 years later, they offered me a job, and it was too late. I had already started another company. But the short version of why I bring up Zapier is, Slack actually developed a feature that turns off the knowing when someone else is typing.
• 12:53
  So Slack has this feature where if I'm replying to someone, it says so and so is replying or so and so is replying. And so you sit there and wait further. They have a feature where you can turn that off. So once that's off, it becomes more of a true asynchronous communication. So that's one recommendation I'd give you if you ever implemented it in another team.
• 13:14
  The second thing I would say is, we established a whole bunch of, standard, like SLAs, agreements, service level agreements for the different channels of communication. So if you want my attention right now, you're gonna send me a WhatsApp message.
• 13:32
  Joe Rando: Right. Right. Yep.
• 13:33
  Will Christensen: Guess who has access to my WhatsApp? Nobody.
• 13:37
  like, just those key people, and they know if they put something in WhatsApp, I'm gonna look at that every hour or so throughout the day in between my meetings looking at stuff. If you want something by the end of the day, check Slack because I do a cleanup of Slack every day.
• 13:53
  Joe Rando: Right.
• 13:53
  Will Christensen: I spend a half an hour to an hour pounding it out and get everything else there. And then the last one, send me an email, and I probably won't see it in there because my assistant will go through and make sure that it shows up in Slack. And you send me an email, My assistant knows within the next 2 to 3 business days, that's gotta be looked at. If it's a client email, probably we gotta look at more like 24 hours, and she kind of massages that into reality.
• 14:20
  Joe Rando: So you also then set expectations with their clients that you're not gonna be one of these people that responds to an email within 5 minutes.
• 14:26
  Will Christensen: Yes.
• 14:26
  Joe Rando: Because a lot of people have that expectation.
• 14:28
  Will Christensen: Well and if I have a client who's in that boat and I can sense that they're sending me an email and then they're sending me another email in 10 minutes and then they're sending me another email in 15 minutes,
• 14:45
  first, validate, validate, validate, validate? Alex Ramosi said there can only be one person in the angry boat. K? So validate the way that person is feeling. And so when he had an angry customer in, he came in and said, I'm so angry that this button is in the wrong place.
• 15:05
  And the angry customer is like, oh, okay. I'm no longer as angry as I was before. And the reason she wasn't angry is because she was validated. Right? Because she could see, okay.
• 15:15
  He's angry. I'm angry. We understand each other. Now we're gonna fix this. So first validate.
• 15:20
  Hey. I can see you're kind of poking at this, email thing, and I could understand how this this thing you're talking about is urgent. I wonder, jump on a 5 minute phone call, and, let's just make sure that we're both on the same page as far as the urgency here. And on that 5 minute call phone call, I'm gonna set some expectations. I'm gonna say, look.
• 15:44
  If you want less than 5 minute response from me, you've gotta pay a higher price. Like, period. Like the only channel I've opened up to you right now is email. If you want access to me via a Slack channel, that's, like, a 24 hour response, here's the price tag. If you want access to me within the hour, here's the price tag.
• 16:10
  So, I do that level of service, but that's not what you're currently paying for. And I apologize if that's not what you anticipated, with what's here. Can you help me understand? Does this need to be done right now? And most of the time, they're like, no.
• 16:24
  I just got excited about getting started, and I was thinking that maybe you'd be checking your email as much as me. And then I asked him that question. Tell me, if I were to give you a really good idea right now, where would you put it? Oh, I probably sent it to my email. Ah, so you're one of those guys that gives spammers access to your to do list, and we have that conversation.
• 16:44
  I educate, and they're like, oh, maybe email shouldn't be a 5 minute response thing. So it's about education.
• 16:53
  Carly Ries: Education. Well, it sounds like you just have so many great processes in place too, and you've really thought through how to work on your business to make it as efficient as possible. Can you elaborate? You have, like, a 15 115 principle
• 17:06
  With automation efficiency. What is that?
• 17:09
  Will Christensen: Love it. So 15115 is one of my favorite things. The reason that I created 15115 is I started automating stuff before automation became a buzzword. like I put up a billboard and I own the domain name data automation.com. That was the first startup we created.
• 17:30
  They still automate a lot of stuff for ecommerce sellers. We put someone else in charge, and I'm off doing other stuff now. But I was doing this, like I said, back before automation was cool, before AI had ever been heard of, before any of this was really like, oh, man. Maybe computers could do that for me. I was digging into that 10 years ago.
• 17:51
  And so I had talked to probably 300 people, and the most common question they were coming to me with was, what can I automate, Will? And I'd be like, I don't know. Tell me about your business. Tell me about what you're doing. What are you doing on a regular basis?
• 18:05
  And I started to realize, oh, there's a threshold. So 15115 is all about the threshold. What I tell people to do is I tell them to get out a sticky note, slap it on your desk, and write 15115 at the top. And what that 15115 is supposed to remind you of is the, daily, weekly, or, monthly time. Daily, weekly, or monthly. So 15 minutes a day, an hour a week, or an hour a month. If the task you are currently doing is taking you more than that amount of time, you should write it down on the 15115 list. Now the last 5, so 15 minutes a day, an hour a week, or an hour a month.
• 18:51
  The last 5 is do it 5 times manually.
• 18:55
  Carly Ries: So do you have some examples that could fall into these?
• 18:58
  Will Christensen: Oh, yeah. So many. So email for me was one that was getting put on my 15115, and I started to realize, oh, no. It's not just email. There's subcategories.
• 19:07
  There's proposals I need to respond to. There are proposals I need to send. There's, initial discovery calls that I need to follow-up on. There's, partners that I need to schedule webinars with. There are all these different things.
• 19:21
  And I started to categorize some of those different tasks. And after I scheduled the webinar 5 times manually, I started to think, wait a second. I might be able to use something like SavvyCal or Calendly, give someone a booking link, and they can select. So that's a perfect example. Carly and Joe, did we, have a phone call where we talked about our openings on our calendars for this call?
• 19:43
  Carly Ries: We did not. No.
• 19:44
  Will Christensen: We did not. We automated that. There was a booking process, and the cool part was I wasn't even involved. I literally handed that to my assistant and said, go book me for this podcast.
• 19:56
  And so she went out and knows my calendar and scheduled that for January 2nd.
• 20:05
  Carly Ries: We need to rethink our Calendly links, folks.
• 20:08
  Will Christensen: That's one of the downsides of automating, right, is it doesn't have that human ish intuition to say, is this the right moment for this to happen for us? Are we gonna be in the right mindset? And one of the downsides of delegating was my assistant thinking, oh, yeah. That's his first day back to the office. Is that gonna be the best day to do a podcast?
• 20:29
  Joe Rando: And in the end This is working out. I really do.
• 20:31
  Will Christensen: I would agree. I think it is working out, but it is interesting how your preferences don't always transfer. But that's a new set of curriculum or rules that I could add to everything that's going on.
• 20:43
  Carly Ries: Hobbies? Well, so what are some ways that people can automate , because you keep talking about your VA, which is great, but some people don't have a VA. So what are some ways that they can automate? And I guess not delegate, but automate and eliminate if they're truly solo right now from like a business operation standpoint?
• 21:03
  Will Christensen: So I would get out that 15115 list and I would slap that down next to me. And every time I came across a task that was gonna come up again. And when I say, weekly, monthly, daily, I'm really looking for people to look for things that are gonna happen again. The automation rabbit hole is a dangerous one. If you go down that rabbit hole on something that really doesn't happen more than, like, 2 or 3 times a year, you're gonna get to the end of it and you might actually automate, but you'll be frustrated because it took you so long to automate it that you're like, oh, I'll never see ROI on this.
• 21:43
  So that's why we're having you surface out and pick tasks that are bigger chunks of your time because there's more ROI opportunity in those. And so in your first go at trying to automate something, you'll have a lot more success going through and pushing on that process.
• 22:00
  Joe Rando: Any thoughts on I mean, let's give it a really dumb example. One of the things I spend more than an hour week on is recording podcasts Okay. Which I'm not gonna automate nor delegate. So but, obviously, that being a kind of a silly example, any thoughts on how to decide things that maybe Yeah. You should think twice about before delegating or automating?
• 22:20
  Will Christensen: So there's an amazing book called Buy Back Your Time and buy back your time is all about delegation because it's talking about bringing in an assistant or looking at those different pieces. But the podcast, for example, you just gave is one that I wouldn't delegate. And the reason I wouldn't delegate is because 1, Joe, I bet it lights you up. Like, I bet you like the podcast and it gets you there. And 2, it probably makes you money because you have an opportunity to publicize the business and push things out and meet new people who need what you have.
• 22:51
  Right? So for me, I spend many hours a week podcasting, doing podcasts, recording myself, recording guests, meeting new people. And the reason I don't delegate or eliminate that or automate that is because it lights me up and it makes me money. And so what you're looking for is things that don't light you up that make you money. That's the key.
• 23:14
  So if we're able to add something to 15115, after you've done it 5 times manually, look through the list. And if it doesn't light you up and it makes you money, circle it. And then go down, that list of things that, don't light you up that make you money and begin to look at ways to automate delegate. And Carly, the way I would go automate that, I would open up perplexity dotai, which is a really cool, search tool. I like it way better than Google.
• 23:45
  It actually replaced Google for me. I go back to Google when I wanna find the link specifically for something. Google is really good at finding the link that I want by whatever I type in. Perplexity is amazing at, picking up context. So for example, you mentioned Cal Newport.
• 24:04
  I immediately opened up a new browser tab and I typed in Cal Newport while we've been on this podcast. And, it went in and it actually searched looks like 7 different places, including cows, calnewport.com. It looked up Wikipedia, the deep life, several different places. And then it gave me a very brief description of who Cal Newport is, But one of the very first things that popped up there and so literally in less than 10 seconds, I was able to pull out, oh, that's the author of deep work, which is why I was able to respond to you. And so, what perplexity does is it searches through that that top end of that search page for you and then spits out, here's the answer that you were looking for.
• 24:47
  So instead of me having to be my own search engine or my own analyzer of a search engine, it analyzes it for me. And so, Carly, what I would say is write the thing down that you want to automate and say, how would I automate insert what you're doing? Talk about, you know, how would I automate automatically replying to emails that look like this? Because I'm spending 15 minutes a day responding to these emails. And if I don't respond to them, I don't make any money.
• 25:18
  Let's say that you're a property manager. Right? And you're getting these emails for applications and you're just having to respond to people to say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And it's becoming fairly repetitive and there's some rules around it. I would then go into perplexity and say, how would I make an automatic reply rule for my email when I get a bunch of emails like this with this context?
• 25:42
  And then let perplexity go search and then just keep asking it questions until it gives you something that's like, okay, that's probably worth digging into.
• 25:50
  Carly Ries: Have you like, what are the benefits of perplexity versus, chat gpt?
• 25:55
  Will Christensen: So chat gpt is really powerful in that it, has kind of consumed the whole Internet, but it generally has a delay. Now they have recently introduced a search feature in Chat GPT that is trying to compete with what perplexity is doing. Perplexity has been doing that for years now already, And so they're way far ahead of the game in terms of, like, take the first page of Google, scrape all of those pages, and give me back a relevant response. Chat gbt is getting there, and I bet they'll catch up at some point here here in the in the near future. But the what I found is when I'm trying to debug something on my computer, I'm trying to find relevant information right now about how to automate something.
• 26:41
  I like perplexity a little better because it gives me the most recent information that's readily available. So if I'm shopping for something, if I'm hunting for, like, nuggets right now, if I'm looking at, like, the corpus of all knowledge and I wanna talk to Data from Star Trek to go back to Joe, can we can actually, drive in the car right now and, actually pretend data is sitting next to us and, like, you can turn on and just have a conversation with advanced voice mode. I mean, it's unreal. what's possible now in terms of what's there? So if I were trying to have this conversation about, like, how to automate things, open up chat gbt and say, pretend you're Will Christensen because there's hundreds of hours of me talking online.
• 27:25
  Pretend you're Will Christensen from data automation, and walk me through how to automate x y z process. And it'll go through and give you some decent ideas, and then you've gotta go push on those ideas and figure out, you know, what was right and where it hallucinated because it's still hallucinating in lots of situations. But that's where I would go is, chat gbt, perplexity. And you've got Gemini and Claude that are also really powerful. Claude's generally better at writing and coding.
• 28:00
  Gemini, I'm still not sure why it's not as good. I don't know. s I've heard lots of people say, oh, no. It's really good for this specific use case or scenario. I personally am still sending stuff to Gemini. Still have not been impressed with the responses that I'm seeing yet, so I'm still testing it.
• 28:16
  Google's going to catch up there. They're not idiots, but they're definitely not competing, right now from what I'm seeing.
• 28:24
  Carly Ries: Oh, fascinating. Well, so I wanna circle back to the VA thing because you are not our first guest to talk about the benefits of having a VA, especially as a solopreneur. It doesn't have to break the bank and yada yada yada. But you were talking about the things that, like, don't light you up or that maybe don't light you up but make you money. So you still want to keep them.
• 28:45
  But there's also a lot of perfectionists out there or
• 28:50
  My baby. I mean, I can't imagine that when you handed off off your entire inbox to somebody, you were like, this feels comfortable.
• 28:57
  Will Christensen: Oh, no. It still doesn't feel comfortable sometimes. Like this morning, I actually I'm laying there in bed and my alarm went off, and I was like, what am I supposed to be doing this morning? I looked at my calendar last night before I went to bed, but I had a meeting that was before this one that got canceled. I didn't know about it because, you know, I was asleep.
• 29:18
  So I got up, and I was like, oh, I guess I'll have to go check my email. And so it's funny because, like, routinely checking my email, been years. Randomly checking in, you know, spot moments like this one where I was trying to see what was going on. Right?
• 29:37
  Yeah. It's super uncomfortable to let go of things inside the business. Dan Martell said, 80% as good as you is a 100% freaking awesome because you didn't have to do it. So letting it go is difficult, but, mind numbingly valuable for the business to grow.
• 29:58
  Joe Rando: And I wanna make a point too that, you know, at least for me, because I'm not necessarily good. I'm good at some things, and I'm not very good at a lot of things. And then I get somebody like Carly to come along and do the marketing or, you know, I've got a basically, what's a VA who's way more organized than me, and it's not 80% as good. It's a 120% as good, maybe more.
• 30:22
  Will Christensen: And there are probably things, Joe, that aren't a 120%, because I'm with you there. I've got things that so I brought in, what we call an apprentice, and she's in charge of all the finance and the recruiting and all of that kind of stuff. And I brought her on just super young, hungry entrepreneur. And I by the way, Carly, anybody who's listening to this, I will do a free time audit. My time audits normally are only 15 minutes.
• 30:47
  I'll extend that to a half an hour for anybody who jumps on this call. And for 30 minutes, and I'll even bet you a $50 Amazon gift card that I will blow your mind on that 30 minute call. So, like, if I don't, at the end, just let me know. say you didn't blow my mind. h my mind, and I'll send you a $50 Amazon gift card. That's how confident I am in the different tools and things that I have available.
• 31:08
  And at the end of that call, I'm gonna give you a good idea of some of the things that you probably should be automating, delegating, or eliminating out of what you're doing. And and my goal there would be for you to have the moment that's like, maybe a VA is the right move, or maybe an apprentice is the right move, or maybe I just need to hire a coach to help me focus because I'm not eliminating enough out of my schedule. So which step is the right one? Automate, delegate, or eliminate? I don't know.
• 31:38
  But we can probably get to the bottom of it in a 30 minute call and kind of see where that's going.
• 31:43
  Carly Ries: How often do you see social media as a time suck where it's like just get or get off whatever?
• 31:52
  Will Christensen: so I was actually like 2 or 3 minutes late for this call. It was totally Facebook. So, like, I'm totally and if you guys ever watched the Holderness family on YouTube. Oh, yes. The Holderness family, like, his song about ADHD just touches me to my core because I've got it.
• 32:11
  I understand. I'm there. I'm with you. I totally got sucked in. I have a timer on my phone and all newest phones, so Samsung's, Apple's.
• 32:25
  I even think the Pixel oh, yeah. I know the Pixel has it as well because they have a Google well-being thing. They have a feature where if you look for, app timer limit in your settings, you can go to that specific app. You can give yourself a timer, and mine is 10 minutes.
• 32:45
  I literally will not allow myself. And now can I go in and change the settings and give myself as much time as I want? And does that happen, I don't know, once every 2 weeks? Yeah. It does.
• 32:56
  But outside of once every 2 weeks where I spend an hour on on social media, I spend 10 minutes, maybe 20, because it allows me to click a button that says, give me another 10 minutes for today. And that has been my way of corralling my ADHD into only allowing me to doom scroll for 20 minutes. And I found that giving myself the ability to and and I tried lots of different times. I tried an hour. I tried a half an hour.
• 33:26
  I tried 5 minutes, and 10 minutes was like, okay. My body will will handle this. So what I would say to you is social media is definitely a time suck. It is definitely something that should be limited. I found that completely eliminating it didn't work for me, because I've got connections there that I want to maintain.
• 33:44
  I've got Facebook marketplace I wanna be going on and searching for something random. I've got a post in my community where I wanna say, hey. Does anybody know where I can find an art teacher for my daughter? Like, I've got different things that I want to be able to do in there. But, yeah, limiting or eliminating that from a, you know, binge session, I think, is really powerful.
• 34:07
  Carly Ries: So, Will, this is a curiosity question. If it's too personal, you can tell me to stop asking. But what do you automate, delegate, and eliminate? And then where do you end up spending your time? What is valuable that you prioritize during the day?
• 34:24
  Will Christensen: Great question. So what I figured out was as you're building a company, there are 2 different sites. Technically, 3, if you count the marketing aspect of things. But I found that marketing and sales at the beginning kinda get put together. Right?
• 34:39
  So you've got one side of it, which is the marketing and sales side. And then the other side of it is the fulfillment. And that's like, if you really boil it down, kinda here's here's a business in its 2 parts. You've got, you know, acquiring people to get do business with, and then you've got doing the business. And then they fall off and you repeat the cycle.
• 35:01
  Right? What I've discovered is that you generally fall in love or you're good at one of those two sides of the equation. And so I am spending all of my time on the acquiring new business part, of of what's there. And maybe 20%, 10% of my time on coaching people inside the business or or coaching mentors who have apprentices, and we're kind of guaranteeing that relationship to succeed and and do all of those different things. And so, I spend most of my time teaching, coaching, podcasting, talking to new people, educating them about Entrepreneur's Apprentice, and selling, our service, which is helping people automate, delegate, or eliminate or clone themselves, as entrepreneurs.
• 35:52
  Carly Ries: Have you also found that all of these processes and your, principles have freed up your free time as well? Like, that you can now actually spend time with your family and spend time with your friends because of all of this? Because we try to, as a solopreneur, you could work around the clock.
• 36:11
  Will Christensen: You don't have to put it down. that's one of the most dangerous things about a solopreneur is because you walk around the house and you think, man, if I don't make that stuff happen, we're gonna lose this. Like the mortgage won't get paid, and we'll live somewhere not here. So even your house becomes a reminder that you need to make money, that you go in and you go to your kids dance recital and you think, man, how are we gonna pay for this dance recital, these dance lessons if we don't make what so everything reminds you, like, the business has got to run. The business has got to run.
• 36:49
  The business has got to run. For me, living by these principles, digging in, learning, listening to books like crazy, understanding kind of what's there gave me some of the power that I needed to trust my systems. So I could say, how many connect calls did you have this week? For me, my business runs on connect calls. Connect calls are where I talk to people who interact with my on ICP, my ideal customer profile, or who are my ICP.
• 37:23
  And if I've interacted with at least 5 or 6 of those a week, the business is gonna be fine. I've set up systems for the rest of everything that's going on, including follow-up calls and even the $50 challenge that I gave earlier. Those are all part of those systems that I've created. So I know as long as I've got 5 to 6 of those. And I also know that I can take a week and a half off.
• 37:47
  So, like, the Friday before Christmas was my last day of work, and today is my first day back. And during that time frame, I didn't check my email. I had my WhatsApp open so that if something urgent went down, you know, they could get a hold of me, had 1 or 2 clients reach out, and we didn't do work. We actually let go of some of what's there, but it is wildly difficult to be focused like that.
• 38:15
  Carly Ries: Yes. Absolutely. Well, I feel like I could talk to you all day about just becoming more and more efficient. Email aside, processes aside, maybe not processes, but what would be the one piece of advice you would give a new solopreneur who wants to make their business and their lives more efficient?
• 38:32
  Will Christensen: So if I am a solopreneur, so first thing I would tell you is go read The E Myth, by Michael Gerber. It is probably the most amazing story based book, and I find that one of the reasons that I love what they've done is they kinda follow the stories of a couple of small solopreneurs, one that I don't even think I think she was a real client of his, but that the book is based on where it talks about this woman who fell in love with the idea of making pies. And it talks about 3 different types of people, technicians, managers, and entrepreneurs. And generally speaking, solopreneurs are technicians. They have become excellent at their trade.
• 39:21
  For me, it was automating stuff. Right? And then it was like, maybe I should go do this for other people. And then I got out there and started doing it for other people. I started to hate it because it just was more busy work and more busy work.
• 39:33
  And then I started to realize, wait a second. This needs systems. The way this is gonna grow, the way this is gonna succeed is if we actually lean into some of the systems. So I would tell you to go read the E Myth, would be the first thing I would I would tell you to do. The second thing I would tell you tell you to do is get out that 15115 list and start writing down all the things that are taking you more than 15 minutes a day, more than an hour a week, or more than an hour a month, and put a tally mark next to them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• 40:04
  Only then can you evaluate. Does this light me up? No. Does it make me money? Yes.
• 40:11
  Because if you've done it 5 times, you then can answer those 2 questions. That's why you have to do it 5 times. Does it light me up? Like, after the 5th time, you might be like, oh, you know what? That actually does light me up.
• 40:21
  I figured out how to do the annoying part of it. And then I would start circling those things that were automatable or delegatable or eliminatable, and I would start looking for people to help me evaluate what that looked like. 1st, I would go to chat gbt, and I would start asking questions about, you know, here's my list. You can take it. You can actually snap a picture of that 15115 list and say, okay, I just did the 15115 thing from Will Christensen from Data Automation.
• 40:53
  This is my list. I've circled the things that make me money that don't light me up. Which one should I focus on first? And and it could actually as long as your handwriting's halfway decent, I can actually read if if you hand it to your wife and she's not gonna be able to read it or your husband, he's not gonna be able to read it. Judge Judy is gonna have a problem too.
• 41:12
  So, you know, the good handwriting versus the bad handwriting, as long as you've done a decent job, that's what I would do is go in from that perspective. In terms of apps I might install, I mean, if you're not using Chat gpt, that's where I would go first and pay for the $20 a month and get the advanced voice mode, and just start talking to it about your business. Tell it who's who's the best small business coach you've ever heard of in the world. Okay. Pretend you're that person right now.
• 41:44
  I'm gonna tell you about my small business that I'm building, and let's just have a conversation about what I can do better. You'll be shocked when you give it that lens of, like, go through these eyeballs, how much it can do to support you.
• 42:00
  Carly Ries: It's so wild. Well, that is such great advice. So I wanna ask another, question about advice that may not be your own, but we ask all of our guests this question. What is your favorite quote about success?
• 42:11
  Will Christensen: Oh my gosh. My favorite quote about success. Honestly, the thing that comes to me is and and it kinda goes back to efficiency. David Allen, is a fantastic author. He wrote a book called Getting Things Done.
• 42:30
  Joe Rando: We talk about this all the time. So Love it.
• 42:33
  Will Christensen: Joe, like, you're gonna have to come on my podcast. I have a podcast called automation hunter, and I'm curious as to some of the things you're using because it sounds like we think alike, but we also think differently. So I love running into people that hate Slack because, well, then you figured out other ways to go through those different processes, and they probably have to walk you through it. We can walk you through it.
• 42:53
  Carly Ries: You guys are meant to be best friends. Just be a fly on the wall between you 2, you have to meet at some point.
• 42:59
  Will Christensen: It's definitely gotta happen. So, I would say, like, my the quote, honestly, getting things done, like, just the sheer title is kinda what flows to me there. The thing that I love about David Allen is the way that he separated the idea of the to do list in the inbox. Right?
• 43:24
  Like if we go back to that very first principle I mentioned of, do not use your email as a to do list. If you read his book, you will never do that again because you'll walk away and say, oh my gosh. Like, I can't allow other people to have access to the priority project list that I need to be tackling. And so for me, I would say, what does success look like? Work backwards.
• 43:55
  Choose your next steps. Like, it's amazing what's possible when you begin to understand some of these principles.
• 44:03
  Carly Ries: Great. Great advice. Well, Will, where can people find you if they want to learn more?
• 44:08
  Will Christensen: Yeah. Absolutely. So, EquityHammer.com is my kind of parent company brand. And if you go to equityhammer.com, you'll see there's several different projects I'm involved with. There's a quick contact form, that you can reach out, and we can connect those different thoughts.
• 44:23
  I believe the time audit is up there already. If it is not up there already, it will be. I have a to do list that I use on electronic ink notepad. And so I'm just writing myself a quick note to make sure that the 15115, guarantee $50 thing is on my website, so you could book me for that as well. But, yeah, those that's probably the best place to find me, equityhammer.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn.
• 44:52
  It's just William Christensen. And if you type in William Christensen data automation, I come right up to the top.
• 44:59
  Carly Ries: Wonderful. Well, I feel so inspired after this. I feel like I could just trim the fat of some of my to dos, and ready to rock the new year. So, Will, thank you so much for coming on the show.
• 45:10
  Joe Rando: Absolutely. A lot of fun.
• 45:11
  Carly Ries: And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, we would love that 5 star review. We'd love it if you'd hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube, and we will see you next time on the aspiring solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go.
• 45:35
  So why not connect with them and learn from each other's success and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.