Productivity Weapons BY ARI MEISEL OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE, AND OUTSOURCE EVERYTHING ARI MEISEL OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE, AND OUTSOURCE EVERYTHING Make Gmail, IFTTT, and Virtual Assistants Your Ultimate Productivity Weapons OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE, AND OUTSOURCE EVERYTHING Copyright 2013 Ari Meisel All rights reserved under the International and Pan American conventions, including the right to re- produce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced in any form whatsoever without prior written permission. For additional copies of this book, please contact Ari Meisel at: http://www.lessdoing.com/contact Editing and Design (except the cover) by Cara Stein / BookCompletion.com Introduction................................................................1 Gmail ............................................................................4 The Less Doing approach to email ............................................5 Getting startedmigrating to Gmail and importing accounts ...........................................................................................7 Getting Gmail settings and labs tweaked to perfection......11 The most essential filter and the ONLY folder youll ever need.......................................................................................13 How I process my email using Gmail ......................................16 Gmail add-ons and plugins .........................................................21 IFTTT.........................................................................34 Basic recipes..................................................................................37 Advanced recipes.........................................................................38 iii Table of Contents How I use IFTTT..........................................................................40 How I use Zapier.........................................................................44 Virtual Assistants ....................................................48 Why everyone should have a virtual assistant ......................49 Two types of virtual assistants and how you can use them both......................................................................................51 What can a virtual assistant do for me? .................................54 How I use FancyHands ...............................................................58 Creating the Manual of You........................................................60 Tasks and tools for advanced outsourcing .............................66 Tasks that should be automated...............................................71 The ultimate: automate your virtual assistant .......................72 Conclusion.................................................................77 Bringing it all together ................................................................78 Be even more effective ...............................................................81 Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything iv Introduction Learn the Three Amazing Weapons of Productivity: Optimize, Automate, Outsource! The Art of Less Doing is an entire framework and philosophy for getting more done and freeing up your time, so you can do the things you want to do. The goal is to free up as much of your time as possible. That way, you can stress less, be more produc- tive, and accomplish the things that you want in life. The main principle of Less Doing is to optimize, automate, and outsource EVERYTHING. People can save thousands of hours bynot running errands, and they can manage their time better bychoosing their own workweek, but a lot of people just want to know how to deal with email andget rid of their to-do list. This book will show you how to do that. Ive boiled it down as simply as possibly by showing you the three most important pro- ductivity tools to simplify your life and free up your time. The first tool is Gmail. With Gmail, you can optimize not only your email, but your overall life management. Next, well cover IFTTT, which allows you to automate so much of your life that you can simply set it and forget it. Finally, virtual assistants bring it all together by outsourcing all of the other time-wasting tasks in your life and business. Each chapter in this book will show you my personal, Less-Doing- approved methods. Then, Ill present a number of essential plugins Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 2 and add-on services. You wont just learn the fundamentals. Ill show you the advanced techniques for using each of these serv- ices individually, and then Ill show you how to combine them into the ultimate productivity toolbox so you can start being more ef- fective today! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 3 Chapter 1: Gmail The first amazing productivity tool well cover is Gmail. Gmail comes with a lot of excellent tools and add-ons that can help you eliminate inbox clutter and become far more efficient in han- dling your email. The Less Doing approach to email My inbox used to look like this; yours may, too. When youre working with a cluttered inbox, everything you have to do takes longer. You have to search just to find the important items, and its easy to get distracted by all of the other items in front of you. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 5 The Three Ds: Delete It, Defer It, Deal with It To eliminate the overhead of inbox clutter, remove time-consum- ing distractions, and be able to quickly and easily identify the im- portant items demanding your action, the goal is simply to clear your inbox. To accomplish that, as you go through your inbox, you have three options for each message:delete it, defer it, or deal with it. Thats ityou have to do one of those three things for each message. Heres how I deal with those three options: when I open my inbox, I look at each email and do one of the three Ds: If the email is something that Ive already responded to, then I delete it. (Or, I might archive it. A wonderful feature of Gmail is that you can archive without deleting, so you dont see the message, but if you ever need to search for it, youll find it.) If the email is something that I can better deal with at an- other time, I forward it (defer it) usingFollowUp.ccto a time when I can deal with it best. If I can do it now, then the best thing is to deal with it now and move on. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 6 I realize that seems insanely simple, but using that method effec- tively invokes the all-importantEssential vs. Optionaltheory to make it easier. Over time, you will get better and faster at processing emails. Once youve got a handle on the methods were about to cover, tryThe Email Game to work through these principles and get re- warded as you improve. Getting started migrating to Gmail and importing accounts If you havent done so already, head over toGmail and setup your free account...its ok, Ill wait. If youve never used Gmail before, spend a few minutes playing around with the interface. If you need a basic primer on Gmail features, check out thisTutorial. Done? Great, lets go! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 7 Gmail makes it really easy toswitchfrom your current email service without missing a beat. There are two ways to go: you can either do it yourself, or you can outsource it. Do It Yourself Gmail allows you to import messages and contacts from dozens of different providers by simplyclickingon the gear icon in the Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 8 upper right of your mailbox and then going to Settings. Next click on Accounts and Import, and under Import Mail and Contacts, click on Import Mail and Contacts. The process takes you step by step through entering your current provider informa- tion and transferring messages. Right under the Import Mail and Contacts section is a very cool feature called Send mail as. Suppose, like me, you have several business emails, plus a personal one and that college alumni email you dont want to let go of. Using Gmail, you can send mail from as many addresses as youd like, all from the same place. All you have to do is click on Add another email ad- dress you own and enter the address. Gmail will send a confirmation email to that address, so as long as you have access to it, all you have to do is click the confirmation Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 9 link. Now, you can send mail from that address whenever you want. I would alsorecommendchoosing the option right below that that saysWhen replying to a message:Reply from the same address the message was sent to. That way, people dont get confused. Outsource It If you dont want to set up your Gmail account and move your email yourself, there is an excellent service called MigrationWiz that will migrate all of your messages and contacts from any serv- ice to Gmail for you. This is a great option for people with thou- sands of messages in dozens of folders, since the process will maintain your entire folder structure. You dont need to down- load anything or have any technical knowledge. You just provide the login information for the old service and the new Gmail ac- count, and they take care of the rest. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 10 Getting Gmail settings and labs tweaked to perfection Once you have your Gmail account, there are some settings and tools that can make a big difference in your productivity. You can play around with settings and labs (Gmails experimental fea- tures) to tailor your Gmail account specifically to your needs. Many settings default to the right choice, but here are the settings I find most important and useful. To access the settings, simply click on the gear icon in the upper right of your inbox and select Settings. General Keyboard shortcuts - On Auto Advance - go to the previous (older) message Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 11 Send & Archive - Show Send & Archive button in reply (This saves you a step: when you respond to an email, you dont have to go back to the inbox and archive the original email.) Signature - No signature Inbox Inbox type classic Filters Filtered Mail - dont override filters Labs Undo Send Enable undo send for 10 seconds (Sometimes you hit send and then realize you forgot something, or maybe you said something regrettablethis lab allows you to give yourself a little grace period to undo it) Background Send enable Canned Responses enable Google Docs preview in Mail enable Google Maps Preview in Mail enable Google Voice Player in Mail enable Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 12 (if you dont use Google Voice, I highlyrecommendit, even if you only use it for voicemailit allows you to get your voicemails transcribed into your inbox for free) Signature tweaks enable Again, these are the essential settings I find most important. You may find other Labs features you really like by all means try them out and see if they improve your efficiency. The most essential filter and the ONLY folder youll ever need One of the greatest built-in features of Gmail is the ability to au- tomatically filter emails based on certain characteristics, such as who theyre from or what words they contain. You can create fil- ters specifically in response to non-essential messages, to make sure similar messages go into your Optional folder in the future. I cover how to do that in thisscreencast. However, the most essential filter and possibly the only one youll need should be created first. This filter will get over 90% of emails out of your inbox automatically. Heres how to set it up. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 13 1. Once youre logged into yourGmail account, click the gear icon in the upper right corner and choose Settings. 2. Then switch to the Labels tab and create a new label named Optional. 3. Next, switch to the Filters tab and click on Create a new filter. 4. Here, enter the following in the Has the words field: opt-out OR unsubscribe OR viewing the newsletter OR privacy policy OR enews OR edit your prefer- ences OR email notifications OR update profile OR smartunsubscribe OR secureunsubscribe OR ya- hoogroups OR manage your account OR group-di- gests OR mailing list OR ensure delivery OR Manage your subscription OR click here to view OR view as web OR mailing list Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 14 5. Now head to theNext Step, where you should check mark the following rules: >Skip the Inbox(Archive it) >Apply the label:Optional >Never mark it as important > Also apply filter to* messagesbelow. Finally, click on Create Filter in order to apply the filter for the changes to take effect. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 15 Thats all there is to it! Now all of the emails currently in your inbox and any future messages that meet these criteria will auto- matically go straight to your Optional folder. That way, you can re- view them whenever YOU want to, and they dont create noise in your inbox. How I process my email using Gmail To show you how this works, I want to walk you through a typi- cal email session using my system and show you how I actually process my email. Going to my inbox in Gmail, Ive received six new messages in the last hour and a half or so. There are also 32 unread emails in my Optional folder, but I dont have to worry about that. The inbox contains the essential stuff the stuff I have to do. Everything in the Optional folder is the stuff that Id like to go through and maybe act on it, if I have the time. The point of the Optional folder is that all of that noise is out of the Inbox. The Inbox becomes a place of action. Remember, there are only three things we can do with anything in the Inbox: Delete it, Deal with it, or Defer it. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 16 So, my first email is from ScheduleOnce, my appointment scheduler. ScheduleOnce gives you a public appointment page, so people can go to your schedule URL and pick times to meet with you when it is convenient for YOU. This email is a request from someone I recognize and want to do business with. Shes requested a phone call with me. Sched- uleOnce shows three possible times when shed like to talk with me. I know that Im available during those times, so Ill just pick one, and Im done. ScheduleOnce updates my calendar and hers automatically. So Im done with that Inbox message, and I can archive it. The next message is a confirmation message from Tinypass, a service I use to process payment for membership to my site. It sends a confirmation message each time a new member signs up for my site. I do want these emails, but I dont need to see them every time someone signs up. It would be enough for me to check them every once in a while. This is a perfect example of a specific kind of filter that I want to set up. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 17 While reading the message in Gmail, I can go to More > Filter messages like this. It automatically populates the sender ad- dress, and Im creating a filter for any message from that sender to Skip the Inbox and Apply the Label Optional. With this filter, from now on, any email regarding new signups will automatically be placed in my Optional folder, where I can review it when I want to. Returning to my Inbox, there is a new mes- sage confirming the meeting I just set. That can be archived its done so thats out of the inbox. My next message is another meeting re- quest. This is for another 15-minute phone call when Im available. I can spare that, so I enter it on my calendar and its done. Those were all of the items that I could deal with right now. I also have a message from someone from Tinypass who was working with me to sup- port how I integrated it. He wants me to give him a call, but right now Im involved in doing something else, so Ill defer this. I think Ill be freed up in an hour, so Ill forward that message to onehour@followup.cc. Gmail Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 18 has the usual Send button, but theres also a Send and Archive button that will send the message and remove it from your Inbox. Im choosing that. Thanks to Followup.cc, that message will come back to me in an hour, when Im free to talk. My next message is a Followup.cc message reminding me to do the task Im already working on. Obviously, I dont need that, so I just archive it. Finally, I have a response from my Fancy- Hands assistant. Theyre informing me that they made the purchase I requested, so my order is confirmed and the vendor has included a coupon code in appreciation of the business. Thats a discount good until June 30 th on a product I dont need right now, so Im going to for- ward the email to June28@Followup.cc and Send and Archive that. Thats it now my Inbox is empty. This process would usually take under a minute, and I dont even have to think about things like that coupon code: it will automati- cally come up when I can use it. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 19 Now that the Inbox is clear, I can look at my Optional folder. It contains some newsletters I like those, but I can look at them later. Theres an email from a friend whos forwarding an email about an app I was interested in. It went to the Optional folder because the forwarded message contains the word Unsub- scribe. This is a good example of why the Optional folder is so useful. I easily recognized the message from my friend, so I could pick it out and deal with it. This particular message is about an app that my friend and I dis- cussed. Although the message is from a friend, I still wouldnt have missed the information its not essential so the Optional folder is the right place for it. Continuing in my Optional folder, I can quickly go through and look at any email that Im immediately interested in. Then, I hit Shift-A to select all and Shift-I to mark everything read, and Im done processing the Optional folder. So, I had over 40 new emails, and theyre all processed in just a couple minutes. Now, some people say you should save time by only checking your email twice a day, but that may lead to more stress than not. For me, its better to check it frequently and so that I can get through all of the messages quickly I just went through some Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 20 important stuff and a stack of non-important stuff in just a few seconds. Either way, the point is to get as efficient as possible with your email. Gmail add-ons and plugins Canned Responses CannedResponses is a tool that gives you templated responses you can drop into your email messages and send right away. To enable Canned Responses in Labs: Click on the gear icon in Gmail (its in the top right corner). 1 Then go to Settings > Labs > Search for a lab. 2 Type Canned Responses in the search bar. 3 Press the Enable button and press Save Changes 4 (See screenshot on the next page.) Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 21 To add an email to your collection of canned responses: Compose an email that answers a common question or 1 problem that people ask you by email. Click the little 2 more options tri- angle (currently located next to the trash can in the bottom of the compose win- dow,). Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 22 Select Canned Responses > New Canned Response. 3 Enter a name for the response that will help you remem- 4 ber what its about next time you get this question. Click OK. 5 To use one of your saved responses: Open a compose window. 1 Go to the more options triangle. 2 Choose Canned Responses. 3 Select your saved response from the menu. 4 Gmail will populate this answer into your message, where you can edit and customize it for this recipient, or send it as-is. You can include links, text formatting, and as much content as you want. Followup.cc Followup.cc offers a very simple, valuable service that allows you to create email reminders. Basically, you write an email, and then you CC or BCC any time period you want at followup.cc. For ex- ample, if you BCC 1week@followup.cc, youll get your original email back in one week, automatically, as a reminder. (If you BCC the followup, only you get the reminder; if you CC it, the re- Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 23 minder will go to both you and the sender a feature that can be very useful for teams.) Messages from Followup.cc also include a snooze feature in the upper right corner, allowing you to easily defer the message again. Deferring an action to a more practical time gives you incredible peace of mind, because as soon as you hit the send button, you can forget the email completely. You dont have to think about it again, because you know its taken care of. Contactually Contactually works as a personal CRM system. It sits in the back- ground and looks at the emails you send and who youre com- municating with, and it gives you reports that tell you who it thinks you should be following up with. Its very smart and helpful. By reminding me and suggesting peo- ple for me to follow up with, its enabled me to take advantage of business leads and even friends that I had lost touch with that I wouldnt have contacted otherwise. It seamlessly integrates with your workflow. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 24 OneReceipt OneReceipt is a service that watches your inbox for receipts, whether from Amazon, iTunes, Nordstrom any store, it doesnt matter. OneReceipt automatically organizes everything, pulls in all the receipts, tracks your spending, and generates a personal ex- pense report for you. You can also use the iPhone app to take pictures of your receipts on the go, and it will integrate those as well. Slice Slice is a similar service that pulls in all of your shipping receipts. This is very handy for someone who gets a lot of packages from Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 25 Image courtesy of OneReceipt.com the same place (Amazon, for example). Rather than just getting a notification that a package is being delivered, Slice will actually tell you whats in the order. The great thing about this is that it happens automatically. You dont have to do anything, other than use Gmail. PowerInbox Im really against the gear-shift mentality where you shift back and forth between activities, like working for five minutes in an Excel spreadsheet, then taking a phone call, then switch on to some- thing else. Its inefficient. That inefficiency pertains to email as well. It may seem counterin- tuitive, but PowerInbox helps you spend more time in your inbox in a good way. As you process your email, you might find yourself jumping out of your inbox to act on the emails. Instead of switching away and coming back to the inbox, PowerInbox keeps you inside the inbox as much as possible. For example, when you snooze a Followup.cc message, it nor- mally takes you to the Followup.cc website. Instead, PowerInbox lets you take care of that inside the inbox, in a small active area of the email. You can also respond to Facebook messages and com- ments, and even retweet things, without ever leaving the inbox. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 26 TripIt TripIt is another automated service that works from your inbox, this time to organize your travel stuff. It doesnt matter whether you make a flight reservation, book a hotel room, buy a confer- ence ticket or a train ticket, reserve a rental car, or make a dinner reservation TripIt will automatically pull all of your travel plans out of your inbox, make an itinerary, and even add the itinerary into your Google Calendar automatically. TripIt also allows you to keep track of your membership rewards, and you can use it to share your itinerary with a spouse or someone you have to visit. TripIt will keep track of all of the parts of your trips and keep them in a well-organized itinerary. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 27 Image courtesy of TripIt.com Boomerang Boomerang offers two fantastic services: Boomerang Calendar, and Boomerang. Boomerang Calendar is a plugin with Gmail. When someone sends you an email with a date listed, Boomerang automatically checks your Google Calendar to see whether youre available. If someone shares multiple times, it will show each time in green if youre available, red if youre not, or yellow if you have something right next to it. If you choose a time, you can add it to your cal- endar with one click. You can also share your availability with one click, either for the next four days or the next week. The recipient doesnt see what youre doing, just when youre available. This makes it really easy, and you can even schedule group meetings, all within Gmail. Boomerang also offers a service thats just like Followup.cc, allow- ing you to send yourself email reminders. The difference is, with Boomerang, you have to be in Gmail to use it. Personally, I prefer to use Followup.cc, because its platform independent you can use it wherever you are but Boomerang may be a better fit for your way of operating. Boomerang also has another feature, which I use extensively: the ability to send an email later. Sending an email later may seem like an odd thing to do, but its actually incredibly powerful, because it puts the ball in your court when you want it there. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 28 For instance, lets say Friday at 4:45, someone sends you a quick email. You get back to them right away. Then, they get back to you at 4:59 and leave for the weekend. Your weekend is pretty much ruined, depending what the task is, because its going to be on your mind, stopping you from being about to concentrate on what you want, which is probably relaxing over the weekend. On the other hand, if you write that response at 4:45 but set it to send first thing Monday morning, the task is off your plate and you dont need to worry about it. Nothing could have been done about it over the weekend anyway, so you dont lose anything, and you dont need to be stressed about it because youve al- ready taken care of it. Rapportive Rapportive is an application that runs in the sidebar. Every time you get an email from someone, it will pull information from their Twitter, other social media profiles, your own interactions with them, and other applications like CrunchBase. It displays this snapshot of publicly available information about the person to give you context for the conversation. If you dont remember who the person is, this snapshot may trig- ger you to remember. Also, if you see other recipients CCd on an email, you can hover the mouse over their email addresses Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 29 and see a profile on them. It provides a very helpful context and background information for the person. WiseStamp WiseStamp makes supercharged email signatures. It will automat- ically insert signatures, and it can include your most recent blog post, your most recent tweet, the most recent thing that youre selling on eBay, the most recent thing you stumbled upon its very dynamic. Rather than just having a static, text-based email, it adds nice icons and interactive information thats automatically in- serted into the emails. Kloudless Im a huge fan of keeping things in the cloud. I keep a very lean machine and store very few files locally. Most of my stuff is on Google Drive or Dropbox. Kloudless makes it easy to manage that, in two ways. First, when someone sends a message with an attachment, Kloudless can au- tomatically save the attachment to Google Drive or Dropbox, or it will let you do that manually if you prefer. Secondly, when you want to send a file to someone, instead of having to find it in the cloud, download it to your machine, and Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 30 then upload it to Gmail, Kloudless will let you attach it directly to a message from the cloud. Thats much faster and easier. WriteThat.Name WriteThat.Name is your address book, automagically updated. This service watches your inbox, and when you reply to some- one, it automatically grabs their contact information from their email signature and adds it to your address book without you having to do anything. There are safeguards in place so it doesnt save junk. You never have to add anyone to your contacts, and if someones phone number changes, it will automatically update. If you want, you can get a digest report every night, telling you what it did and allowing you to approve or disapprove each change. Or, you can just let it go. It makes it so much easier not to have to keep track of these details yourself. HelloSign HelloSign allows you to sign PDFs, and much more. There are many services that allow you to sign PDFs, but whats unique about HelloSign is that it lets you fill out and sign PDFs directly in Gmail and send them back right away. This can save you hours, as you dont have to print the document and scan it back inyou Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 31 can just fill it out, sign it, and send it. You dont even have to be at a computer. It works from your iPad, iPhone, or other device, di- rectly in Gmail. KeyRocket There is actually such a thing as Keyboard Shortcut week, and one related study concluded that we waste eight years of our lives by not using keyboard shortcuts. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 32 Gmail is a great example of somewhere you could use keyboard shortcuts, but sometimes theyre hard to learn. Thats where Key- Rocket comes in. KeyRocket is a plugin for Chrome that makes it as easy as it can get. You install it in Chrome and go about your business, and as you do things with your mouse, a little blue box pops up to tell you what keyboard shortcut you could have used to do the same thing. It provides immediate reinforcement to help you re- member the right shortcut for the next time you want to do that task. I used this for about a week, and it trained me so well, I didnt need it anymore: I had all the keyboard shortcuts memorized for the things I do. Its a great tool, and its saved me a lot of time be- cause using keyboard shortcuts is so much faster! * * * I hope these tools will help you make the most of Gmail and use it to clear your inbox and streamline your productivity. With all of the plugins and services available, Gmail is a key mem- ber of the ultimate productivity trio. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 33 Chapter 2: IFTTT The next productivity power tool well cover is IFTTT. IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. Its one of the most valuable pro- ductivity sites on the Internet, and its free. IFTTT creates automated links between various web services that you use on a daily basis, including Bitly, BuzzFeed, Dropbox, LinkedIn, weather, YouTube, and Wordpress. Basically, IFTTT watches the service you identify, and when a particular event happens, it triggers some action that you want to automatically happen in another service. For example, lets say that any time you favorite a video on YouTube, you want that video saved to your Dropbox. To make that happen, all you have to do is use IFTTT to set up a rule, called a recipe. Youd simply click on this to tell IFTTT the trigger (the if this part of the rule). In this case, youd click on YouTube and choose Favorite a Video. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 35 Once youve set up the trigger event, youll need to specify what you want to hap- pen. Again, this is very simple: you click on that to specify the then that part of the rule. Then you click the Dropbox icon and choose Add file from URL to save the video to your Dropbox. You can also specify more information, but if you dont want to, you can just click Create Action, and youre finished. Youve cre- ated a recipe on IFTTT, and you set the whole thing up in five clicks. IFTTT also makes it simple to manage your rules/recipes. As you add more recipes, you can see them all in one place, turn them on and off, edit them, and share them. Its a very easy-to-use, helpful service. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 36 Basic recipes As you saw in the example above, creating recipes in IFTTT is ex- tremely easy, and the site walks you step by step through setting up each trigger and its subsequent action. Ease of use is IFTTTs greatest strength, but it may also be its greatest weakness. Be- cause IFTTT allows you to create so many combinations so easily, it can be somewhat overwhelming and you might not know where to start. Below are links to several of my favorite recipes to get you started and give you some ideas for recipes of your own. These first four areSharedRecipes, so you dont have to recreate them yourself: you can simply look to the bottom of each recipes page and click the button labeled Use Recipe. Call in a Note To Myself and Get an Email with a Tran- scription Send a Text and Get an Escape Call Save My Blood Pressure to Evernote Upload New Podcasts to Soundcloud But thats not all the following are more simple recipes that save me lots of time and may benefit you in a couple of ways: think about what would happen when each of these recipes does its work, then go ahead and create one like it on your own. The exercise will give you some useful tools and reusable ideas, but it will also give you valuable practice in the process of reducing an Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 37 action to a process or recipe. Try building these recipes for your own use: Notify me of the shipping status of my package by SMS If I Check In on Foursquare Add to Google Calendar Let My Family Know When I Check In At An Airport So They Know Im Safe If I Label an Email with Something, Forward It to Someone These are all simple recipes that I have found useful. Remember, this is to give you an idea of the capabilities of IFTTT. You may find these specific recipes useful in your life, but more importantly, I hope youll come up with some amazing ones on your own. The idea is to let IFTTT automatically do the routine actions that take up time you could use for better things. Advanced recipes Now that you have a basic understanding of IFTTT, I hope you will create recipes of your own to make your life easier. Here are some more advanced uses of IFTTT, some involving third party services, that allow you to really supercharge your productivity. You may notice that most of these are specific to the user and may require website login information or other private data. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 38 Since we wouldnt want to share that kind of data, Ive mostly provided descriptions and, in some cases, links to articles. Here are some more sophisticated things you might want to do with IFTTT: Automate your virtual assistant and outsource your out- sourcing Remotely start downloading a torrent while on the go Back up your Pinterest images to Dropbox and share the folder with your team Find a new job Get notifications of important emails while travelling inter- nationally even without a global data plan If you have grandparents or friends who arent very tech savvy, you can make it so any time you post a picture with a particular tag (like a childs name) to Facebook, or Insta- gram, or a Dropbox folder, then it gets send via email to that person. If they are really in the dark ages, you can set it up to email the picture to a service likeUnityFax and the picture will be faxed to the person. A client told me they had a nanny who didnt do email and was bad with scheduling, but she could text. This client set up the Google Calendar channel so that if there is an upcoming item in the childs schedule, the nanny automati- cally gets a text message alert with the time and details. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 39 Using the WeMo Motion channel, keep a record in the Google Drive spreadsheet channel of every time your pet goes to the bathroom in a certain area, to establish a schedule and be more vigilant to avoid accidents. These and any number of events and actions can be set up using the 70-plus channels available in IFTTT. (And, for similar interac- tions between more business oriented services, check outZapier and its interaction with over 200 different channels!) How I use IFTTT In a nutshell, I use IFTTT to automate as many things as possible. Tasks YOU automate may be complex or simple. They may affect only you, or they may reach out to numerous friends, associates, or contacts on your mailing lists, using a variety of channels. What they all have in common is the ability to free up the time you used to spend on repetitive tasks. Here are some more examples of recipes I use: Whenever an email comes in with a particular keyword, IFTTT sends that email to FancyHands with instructions to answer it personally, using information that Ive provided. Its kind of a human autoresponder. If I save an item on Feedly, which is my replacement for Google Reader, IFTTT adds it to Buffer. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 40 Once a week, IFTTT sends an email to FancyHands asking them to check and make sure all of my blog posts were posted correctly. 15 minutes before I have a phone call in my Google Cal- endar, IFTTT sends me a text message reminding me to turn off Do not disturb on Google, so the person can call me. If I bookmark something on Pocket, IFTTT automatically adds it to Delicious, which is where I keep everything for my virtual assistants to create a weekly post of things I found interesting. Any time I add something to Buffer, IFTTT adds it to Ever- note, Zootool, Storify, my Facebook fan page, and LinkedIn. On a certain date each month, IFTTT sends an email to Fancy Hands, instructing them to check that all of my rent checks have come in and explaining how to do that. If I pin something on Pinterest, IFTTT gets it from the RSS feed of my Pinterest and adds the item to Buffer and Tum- blr. If I like a video on Vimeo, add a YouTube video to watch later, or post a podcast to SoundCloud, IFTTT posts it to Tumblr. Every week, IFTTT posts a Facebook ad for a vacation property I rent out. It also tweets about my courses each week. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 41 When a blog contributor sends an email with a specific subject line, IFTTT sends that email to Fancy Hands with instructions on how to post it to my blog. If I call in a note to myself, IFTTT will automatically send me an email with a transcript and the audio file. Whenever my Interesting things of the week post is pub- lished, IFTTT will send an email to Fancy Hands, instructing them to post it on Pinterest. You cant automate posting on Pinterest, but Ive automated outsourcing this task. If I post something on my blog, IFTTT will automatically post it to Facebook, LinkedIn, Buffer, Storify, Diigo, and Zootool. It will also automatically send an email to Fancy- Hands, instructing them to submit the post to Stumble- Upon. StumbleUpon is responsible for 40% of my blog traffic, and you cant submit to them automatically, so again, Ive automated the outsourcing of this task. Every Friday, IFTTT sends an email instructing a Fancy- Hands VA to create my Succulent Saturday post. Every Thursday, it instructs Fancy Hands to create my Interesting things of the week post. If I weigh myself on my Withings scale or take my blood pressure with my Withings blood pressure cuff, IFTTT adds a note with my weight or blood pressure to Evernote. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 42 If I check in at an airport, IFTTT will send an email message to my wife and my parents, letting them know Ive arrived safely. If I change my Facebook profile picture, IFTTT changes my profile picture on Twitter to match. Any time I star a message in Gmail, IFTTT will save it to Evernote. When a new workout of the day was posted at the Crossfit gym I used to use, IFTTT would send me that workout by email. Whenever I like something in Instagram with certain names in the caption, IFTTT will add those pictures to DropBox. (I use this to automatically save pictures of my kids to DropBox.) If I check in on Foursquare, IFTTT makes a note in my Google calendar, so I can keep a record of Ive been. If I take a picture in Instagram, IFTTT adds it to my Drop- Box. Again, the goal is to automate everything possible. As you can see, the variety of tasks you can automate with IFTTT is truly mind-boggling. The bottom line is the amount of time that this automation saves each week or every day the time saved is ab- solutely phenomenal! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 43 How I use Zapier Youve seen how to use IFTTT to automate the tedious tasks of your life. Zapier does some of the same functions, but it offers more complexity and integrates with an enormous number of services, including more business functions, like BaseCamp, Chat- ter, GoToMeeting, MailChimp, Crypt, Osmosis, PayPal Business, Streak, TaskRabbit, and Zendesk. It also allows you to create your own linkages or use it in conjunction with IFTTT. Whereas IFTTT is mainly focused on personal services, Zapier has more of a business focus. Because of its greater number of Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 44 linkages and the greater complexities it allows, Zapier offers even more power than IFTTT for automating your life. I want to show you a little bit about how I use Zapier, so you can see how it works. I currently have five zaps running. Two of my zaps automate what happens when I record a pod- cast. Every time I record a podcast, I want messages to be sent to my virtual assistant, directing them to edit the podcast and post it. I used to have to remember to send those messages by hand, but now, if I just upload a new file to Dropbox with a particular key- word, it automatically triggers these two zaps: one to send a mes- sage to the virtual assistant, directing them to edit the file and giving instructions on how to do that, and the other directing them to post the podcast and explaining how to do that. Automating these tasks saves me three or four steps. More importantly, it saves me from having to remember to send those messages. The next zap is set up so that when someone signs up for my Pro membership, a message is automatically sent to my virtual as- sistant, directing them to invite the new member to the Vimeo group. The zap is triggered when TinyPass processes a payment and sends a message notifying me of the new member. There is Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 45 no automatic way to add someone to a Vimeo group, but this is another example of a task where Ive automated outsourcing. Another zap I use is one I created to re- place someone elses service that wasnt working. This service was called Mention Notifier, and it did one simple thing: it sent me an email when I was mentioned on Twitter. I dont spend a lot of time on Twitter, but this allowed me to par- ticipate in conversations where people were mentioning me, without wasting a lot of time. The problem is, the service was unreliable. It would go down, and Id miss mentions and never realize it, so I created my own re- placement right here in Zapier. Whenever someone mentions me on Twitter, it automatically sends me an email notification. The great thing is, Zapier allows me to set up custom, dynamic fields within the message to tell me the users screen name, num- ber of followers, the text of the tweet, and a link to the tweet. There are also many other options that I could include. Finally, my last zap is triggered any time I move an email to a spe- cial folder called Unsubscribe. When that happens, it will auto- matically send a message to my virtual assistant with instructions to unsubscribe me from that list and an explanation of how to do that. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 46 The great thing about this is that when Im processing my Op- tional folder, I can select seven or eight messages at a time and move them all to my Unsubscribe folder, and an actual person will take care of the rest, whether it requires simply clicking on something, or actually contacting the company to get me off the list. I hope these zaps have given you a taste of what Zapier can do. I encourage you to try it out, and its free for the first five tasks. Zapier can really take your business a lot farther than IFTTT. For example, I recently posted a case study of a company that has 14 processes that automatically take place when a customer signs up on their website, and all of those processes are done by Zapier. Previously, they had humans doing these tasks, and it was taking half an hour each time someone signed up. The time savings for that company add up to hours and hours, and it could be the same for you. Give Zapier a try! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 47 Chapter 3: Virtual Assistants The last essential productivity tool that well cover in this book is virtual assistants. Virtual assistants make up the third step in the Art of Less Doing. For any tasks that cant be eliminated or auto- mated, you can get them done without wasting your time by out- sourcing them to virtual assistants. This is one of the central tenets of the Art of Less Doing: less doing means creating more time in your life for living. Why everyone should have a virtual assistant Everyone wishes there was more time in the day. Whether an investment banker or a stay-at-home mom, an architect or a col- lege student, everyone could use an extra set of hands, an extra hour to get things done, or a little extra time to themselves. Re- gardless of whether youre short on hands, short on time, or short on ability, multi-tasking, (accomplishing more than one thing at a time) can be the key to filling your shortfall. The truth is that most of us are poor multi-taskers, and most of us dont even know it. Having several tabs open on your web browser is not multitasking, nor is eating a meal while reading. Truthfully, youre just reducing the quality of your per- formance for each activity. We all need a little help, and fortu- nately that help is within reach. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 49 Virtualassistants are individuals who operate from remote loca- tions, whether they are off in the Far East or nearby in your own city. They typically work for several clients at once, cost less than full time employees, and are more efficient at getting things done. Simply working with avirtualassistantwill teach you to ef- fectively communicate and delegate your tasks to someone else. This frees you to focus on your core competencies and do more of the things that you are passionate about. Activities that you consider tedious and un- pleasant are easily delegated to avirtualas- sistant. This clears as much time as possible and frees your mind to think about the things that really matter to you. And with so much time made available, you will find that you are free to come up with better ideas than youve had in a long time. Just to be clear, EVERYONE can benefit from having avirtualas- sistant: Students can get help with research and paying bills Entrepreneurs can maintain the image of a more estab- lished company without consuming cases of Red Bull in order to accomplish their goals. Parents can get help keeping their home stocked with sup- plies and finding new ways to spend time with their kids. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 50 9 to 5ers can make sure that their personal life isnt con- sumed by their professional life Retirees can make sure nothing is ever forgotten and pa- perwork is handled promptly But most importantly, working with a virtual assistant is an educa- tional process that helps you learn how to relay and delegate tasks as efficiently as possible. When you are in a situation where you are assigning work to someone you have never met and in some cases will only speak to once, that places a very interesting focus on how you explain what needs to be done. It forces you into a better understanding of the tasks you need done and how to do them, and it develops your skill to see those things faster and more clearly. Two types of virtual assistants and how you can use them both There are two types of virtual assistants: on-demand and dedi- cated. Depending on what you need them for, one type may be better for you than the other. Many people will use both. Generally speaking, if you are an absolute beginner or an ex- treme expert at what you need done, you should use an on-de- Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 51 mand assistant service. If you are somewhere in the middle, where youre not sure what you need to outsource and want a more personal touch, then a dedicated assistant is for you. The on-demand assistant With an on-demand assistant service, you send in a task (either by emailing it or leaving a voicemail), and then any one of hun- dreds or even thousands of assistants will pick it up and do it. You may never deal with the same assistant twice. They wont have any stored personal information like your childrens birthdays or your Gmail password, but they can still provide valuable services, make purchases for you, and interact with your calendar. On-demand services tend to be cheaper than a dedicated assistant. And, because there are many assistants, you benefit from 24/7 service and the ability to issue a high volume of tasks in a short amount of time, with each one starting right away. On-demand tasks tend to be defined as anything that can completed in about 20 minutes (not including holding on the phone or waiting for someone else to respond). Myrecommendationfor on-demand service: Fancy Hands Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 52 The dedicated assistant With a dedicated assistant, you get more of a relationship. When you call or email, you will always get the same person. They get to know a little about you and the way you like to do things, and they can keep lots of information on you to help streamline fu- ture tasks. Working with a dedicated assistant, you can develop the trust needed to give them access to more financial information, email accounts, and other personal data. A dedicated assistant can do morerecurringand long-term projects, and even help you with outsourcing jobs to more specific contractors like graphic design- ers or mobile app developers. This type of services tends to be more expensive than on-demand services, and workload is lim- ited because you are dealing with one person. My recommendation for a dedicated assistant service: Zirtual Using a specialty assistant For some tasks, neither a dedicated nor an on-demand assistant quite fits the situation. It may be that you need a specialist or someone for a really big project, or maybe you want just the op- posite: a very limited but free experience with a sort-of virtual assistant. These are special cases, but theyre not unique by any means. When you have one of these situations, there are places to go for help. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 53 When your task is a big project or a highly specialized technical one, check outElance, where you can post a description of what you need to have done (from legal work to transcriptions to ghost writers) and get bids from around the world. At the other end of the spectrum, for micro-tasks and very nar- row information or service needs, check outTalkTo, a service that allows you to text any business and get a text response. You can make a reservation, find out if something is in stock, or pretty much anything else. For just about anything you need to have done, regardless of the type of task it is, there is an assistant available who can accom- plish what you need, while freeing you to focus on the kind of ac- tivity that suits you best. What can a virtual assistant do for me? If youve never worked with anassistant, you probably dont real- ize 90% of what they are capable of doing for you. With the right techniques and tools, a remoteassistantcan do just about anything anonsite assistantcould do for you. This long list is just a fraction of whats possible. Take a look and see if you get any ideas. Perform receptionist duties, answering and routing calls Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 54 Research Contact people or businesses for information Schedule meetings Make reservations Manage your social media profiles Manage a blog Follow up with clients Archive and respond to emails Send thank you cards Submit insurance forms Check, transcribe, and respond to voicemails Take dictation Make purchases Edit writing Graphic design Create PowerPoint presentations Create Excel spreadsheets Compile mailing lists Cold calls Fact checking Summarize documents Craigslist Postings Classified Ad Submissions Event planning Website analytics Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 55 Meeting minutes via speaker phone Travel planning Customer service Accounts payable Accounts receivable Content moderation Document formatting Mailing letters Budgeting Financial analysis Tax preparation Expense reporting Statement balancing Photoshop Web programming Lead generation Market research Mobile application development Editing Ghost writing Meal delivery Grocery delivery Meal planning Check deposit by mail Scanning documents or business cards Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 56 Sending handwritten letters Paying bills Birthday cards Comparison shopping Selling or donating old home items Wakeup calls Waiting on hold Translations Viral marketing Thats a lot of time-consuming tasks, and I hope the list suggests other ways that a virtual assistant can let you do less of the things that keep you from spending your time how you want to and how you should spend it. Remember, when it comes to Less Doing, we always try to optimize first, automate second, and then outsource what little is left over. If there are a lot of items on this list that you could have avir- tualassistanttake off your plate, then you are already way ahead of the game. However, you should realize that just as you should be offloading nonessential tasks to your VA, you should automate as much as possible before handing off the tasks that require an- other persons attention. The more efficient your system be- Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 57 comes, the more youll gain, as your assistants time will be opti- mized for greater effectiveness. How I use FancyHands Now that youve had a chance to think about some ways you can use virtual assistants to help in your Less Doing, Id like to give you an idea of how much impact using virtual assistants can actually have on your time and your life. Over the last year, my FancyHands dashboard shows Ive had over 1300 calls placed for me including more than 3700 minutes of phone time plus nearly 300 emails sent and nearly 1800 requests fulfilled. Just think about how much time and frustration would be involved in doing all of that yourself and how much distraction it would be from more important things! So what do I do with all those tasks to FancyHands? Personally, I do about 150 tasks in an average month. Here are the most re- cent ones showing on my dashboard: Find a food testing company Learn how to get French passports Add a podcast to my blog Research Adobe Presenter Express problems Find a doctor specializing in hormone testing Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 58 Post weekly motivation video to my blog Find international services providing complete meal cook- ing ingredients Locate the nearest clothes donation drop boxes Arrange a Task Rabbit to pick up and drop off clothes do- nation Find sources for bullet-proof doors Find DVDs of a rare video Pay bills that cant be handled by autopay Find a source for my wifes favorite perfume Find [anything] from an undocumented picture seen online Locate and order exotic or international foods Correct my sons birth certificate Remove me from an email list that has no source info or unsubscribe link Find best price on a toddler bed and order it Automatically have blog posts pinned on Pinterest, Stum- bleUpon, and others Find a nearby source for tuxedo studs and one to dry- clean in about 5 hours Stop paper statements from a business on autopay Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 59 Learn the lead time for ordering a particular ceramic tile Add an article to my press portfolio Get a quote for exterminating carpenter ants Cancel an order thats been delayed Check status of an order Get recommendations for a pediatrician in Ohio Youve probably noticed that I actually have a lot of personal tasks and purchases handled by FancyHands. The reason: time is time. Any time that I can save is time that I can use for something else. And any time that I can use for something else pays multiple benefits, because I dont have the distraction of worrying about all these minutia. Look closely, and youll probably find that a lot of tasks that dont really need your own attention are taking up the lions share of your time! Creating the Manual of You Making the concept of Less Doing work for you means crafting your processes to work for you. In the first fundamental of Less Doing, namely, the80/20 rule, I talk about the importance of tracking your resources. You need to understand how you spend your time and get things done in Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 60 order to optimize all of the processes in your life. While some people might complain about the vagueness ofIKEA instructions, you have to admit, they have broken down the process of building some- thing, into a set of instructions that is language-indepen- dent, requires as few steps as possi- ble, and is mostly fail-proof. The goal with your processes should be exactly the same. Ikea In- structions. You need to break your tasks down to the fewest, most explicit steps possible so that they are easier for you and, more impor- tantly, so that they can be automated or outsourced entirely. What processes? We all have processes that we go through on a regular basis. Yours probably include how you do things like checking your email, writing reports, doing research, generating content, review- Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 61 Photo credit: jon|k ing materials, making meals The list goes on and on and in- cludes so many things you do daily or weekly, or even just once in a while. The problem is that most of these activities have become so rou- tine that we do them without even thinking about them, almost as if on autopilot. That might seem like a good thing, but the truth is, if you can get a task done on au- topilot, then someone else can probably get it done for you. Its easy to fall in the trap of thinking you are the only one who can do the things that make your world spin, but have you ever stopped and considered the steps you actually take? As anexercise, think about something you do often. Now de- scribe, on a very granular level, each step you go through in order to complete that activity. Think about it as if you were creating The Manual of You, as if you were going to give the Manual to someone who doesnt know you or how you work, and they have to get that task done. This can and should be applied to most of the things you spend your time doing. I have clients go through this exercise with incredibly complex and precise tasks, with the same results: the perfect instruction Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 62 manual. I had one client start with a process that was 10 pages long and end up with 11 easy-to-follow steps. A personal example involved providing a discount code to a po- tential student for one of my Skillshare classes. If a student cant make it to a session they paid for, I have my assistant generate a discount code for them so they can sign up for a future class for free. The process for generating the discount code looks like this: 1. Go tohttp://www.skillshare.com/ 2. Login using user name******and password ******* 3. Go toDashboardat the top of the page 4. On the left hand side, you will seeupcoming classes. Hover over the date of the specified class and hitmanage (it should pop up in orange). 5. On the right hand side you will seediscount codes,choosecreate new codeand alittle box will pop up. 6. Enter a name for the code the name can bewhateveryou want. (Example: for August15 th , I would name it: AUG15). 7. Put in the appropriate discount amount and the number of codes you would like to create, then hitcreate. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 63 8. Note the URL of the page you are on that URL is what you will send to the student in an email with the code for where to sign up. 9. Finally, email the discount code with the URL and instruc- tions to the person on theoriginalemail. Now, the first time I wrote this out, I left out the third step, and the whole process had 16 steps instead of the current nine. When I initially wrote out the 16 steps, I looked at it and immedi- ately found redundancies, which I removed. Then, the first time I sent the task off to aFancyHands assistant, they quickly pointed out that they didnt know where the upcoming classes link was (which prompted me to realize I had glossed over the step ex- plaining that they had to go to the dashboard first). The second time I sent it off, I got a different person (and hence, a different perspective), since FancyHands is an on-demand assis- tant service. This new assistant pointed out the superfluous as- pects of some of the latter steps. Just getting the process down makes it easier to understand your process and see where things were missing or where they were repeated. And, integrating other peoples interpretations of your the in- structions is an invaluable help in making them fail-proof and easy to use. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 64 In tweaking a process, its also important to get in the mindset of If This, Then That. By that, I mean you want there to be little or no communication needed between the time you assign the task and the time you receive confirmation that the task has been successfully completed. In order for that to happen, you need to an- ticipate problems or forks in the road. In the task above, I might have added a line that said, If more than one upcoming class date exists, provide discount code for all dates to avoid the question of Which date did you want the code for? Even if it means adding an additional step for situations that come up less often, its worth adding that step. You only have to write it once, and it will save you from having to take the time to deal with it over and over in the future. The point of all this is that, in the end, I was able to break this task down to an incredibly efficient, error-proof process thatany- one can follow and complete. Once a process has been per- fected, delegating out of your sight and out of your mind is about as easy as can be. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 65 Tasks and tools for advanced outsourcing Using virtual assistants can help optimize your life, but optimizing outsourcing your tasks to a VA can save you additional time and headaches. A variety of tools are available to help in optimizing your outsourcing. The key to reaping their benefits is recognizing where they can help. What follows is a sampling of tasks that need additional tools: Processing Voicemail For checking, transcribing, and responding to voicemails, use Google Voice to get voicemails by email and simply forward them to the assistant. Dictation For transcribing audio or dictation, use your favorite voice- recording program (I likeDropVox) to send your assistant an audio file for transcription. This can become one of your most valuable tools, whether the content is a short blog post, a letter, or even just an idea you want to get out of your head without losing it. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 66 Scheduling Meetings UseScheduleOnce to share your schedule with the VA and allow them to make appointments for you. Your ScheduleOnce link should be in your email signature. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 67 Above: Sched- uleOnce allows you to specify your avail- ability for meetings. Right: When oth- ers want to meet with you, they can choose among your available times. Mailing Letters UsingPostalMethods, a remote assistant can send a pdf through postal mail to individuals or to entire mailing lists. Sharing Passwords To provide information access by securely sharing passwords, use LastPass. Tasking an Assistant For outsourcing complex or repetitive/reusable tasks,CannedResponse allows you to create template emails in Gmail so you can write something down step by step and save it as a template. That way, its just one click away the next time you need to have the same task done. For repetitive tasks, you can useFollowUp.cc to send recurring messages (which may be one of your CannedResponses). An ex- ample would be having an assistant log in to a site (with details provided in the template), check stats, and give you a report each week. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 68 Real World Physical Tasks UseDealing with paper for general tasks andRedBeacon for home services. Bookkeeping Combine weekly check-ins with the virtual bookkeeping services ofLess Accounting. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 69 Image courtesy of LessAccounting Lead Generation Using CannedResponse, FollowUp.cc, recurringmessages, and a script, an assistant can do systematic, weekly lead-generation work. Blog Content Moderation Use CannedResponse to provide login information and Boomerang to task an assistant to moderate your blog com- ments on a regular schedule. Craigslist or eBay Postings Use CannedResponse to provide login information and a content template; you just provide specifics and photos for each item. Expense Reporting Use CannedResponse and a sharedGoogle Docs Spreadsheet to allow you to send a photo of a receipt and have it parsed and entered into an expense report. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 70 Sort and process postal mail UseVirtual Post Mail to receive physical mail virtually. Manage Incoming Payments Using Virtual Post Mail, checks can be reconciled, and deposits can be made by mail. Research Task an assistant to research interesting blog/news items fa- vorite a tweet and useIFTTT to automatically archive the item and share it for further research Tasks that should be automated As time goes on, you should be getting better at finding which tasks are consuming most of your time, defining and optimizing the processes they use, automating the processes you can, and outsourcing the ones you cant automate. Weve looked at many tasks that could be outsourced and a number of ways to outsource them with tools to make that Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 71 work, but remember that outsourcing is best reserved for tasks that cannot be automated. In that spirit, here are a number of tasks that could be outsourced to a virtual assistant but would be better done by automation, including suggested tools for au- tomating them: Wake Up Calls -WakerUpper Waiting on Hold -Fast Customer orLucy Phone Add Business Cards to Address Book -CardMunch Make Dinner Reservations -OpenTable Follow up by Email FollowUp.cc Send Thank You notes Ink A Note Meal Delivery SeamlessWeb Text message/Phone reminder/Escape call IFTTT Order a car service Uber orGroundLink The ultimate: automate your virtual assistant Once you know how to work with a virtual assistant, the pinna- cle of achievement in outsourcing is to outsource, not just the tasks themselves, but also the process of outsourcing them. Even better, automate the process of assigning tasks to your assistants! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 72 Ive achieved this with IFTTT. It started with a simple assignment to my Fancy Hands virtual assistant: Find out how to automati- cally submit new blog posts to StumbleUpon. Its pretty unusual to stump a Fancy Hands assistant, but the re- sponse I got back was, There is no current method for automati- cally submitting blog posts to StumbleUpon. I held my breath for the briefest of moments. Then my mouth pulled into a smile. I like challenges like this. I didnt realize this would open a completely new realm of outsourcing for me. Its one thing to use an on-demand virtual assistant for standard tasks, but recurring tasks are tricky, since your tasks are assigned to different assistants each time. Initially, I got around this by cre- ating a reminder from Resnooze.com with the task instructions. You can have this message sent to you at a certain interval; when it arrives, simply forward it to the assistant. I thought that was a pretty slick solution, but it still required a moment of my involvement. The issue with Resnooze is that its not trigger-based, only interval-based. So, the task might say, Add new posts from the past week, but it couldnt say, Add the post that JUST went up. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 73 Another approach I tried was to create a forwarding filter through Gmail. The problem was the resulting email didnt origi- nate from my own email address. Because of that, most virtual assistant routing services wouldnt recognize it; they rejected the task. This time, I approached the task backwards and on a very basic level: how can I assign a task to my virtual assistant without having to initiate the request at all? I was seeking the holy grail of outsourcing, the perpetual motion machine of the outsourcing world: I wanted to outsource my outsourcing. Since mind control of Gmail doesnt exist and wouldnt be a real- istic solution anyway (why use my mind for that?), I started to scratch my head. I remembered that IFTTT has a Gmail channel, which Id never used before. You can create triggers based on searches or starring an item, but you can also send an email. But wait, does this sent email originate from your own email ad- dress? YES, IT DOES!!! I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself. Thats when I cre- ated the first IFTTT recipe, which has resulted in 32 outstanding and amazing automated actions that I never have to think about again. It couldnt have been more simple: If a new post (based on Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 74 the RSS feed for my blog) is created, Then send a Gmail email message to request@fhands.com and say, Visit this {FEEDURL} and submit this newly published post to StumbleUpon. IFTTT gives you several options for automatically propagating in- formation, so FEEDURL is replaced with the most recent post address. Thats all there is to it. According to the 80/20 Rule, I should only be focusing on the things that only I can do, like cre- ating original content for the blog. Everything else should be han- dled by someone else if possible. IFTTT has about 50 channels at this point, most of which can cause an email to be sent to your virtual assistant. I set up a trig- ger so that every Friday morning, my assistant receives an email telling him/her to create my Interesting Things of the Week post, based on my Delicious links from the past seven days. You may ask, why not just give your assistant one instruction: create the post every Friday? But if you dont have a dedicated assistant, you cant do that. Even if you do have a dedicated assis- tant, what happens when that person gets sick or takes a new job? Doing things my way makes you future- proof, bomb-proof, and idiot-proof. Think how much fun you can have with this! How about if every time you take an Instagram picture of a cool product and tag it Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 75 with the word #buythis, your assistant gets an email instructing him or her to find it at the best price and order it? Maybe on rainy days, you decide to indulge in an Uber car instead of walk- ing to the train. So, you set an IFTTT recipe that checks the weather, and if rain is predicted, it sends an email to your virtual assistant asking him or her to order you a car to take you to work. The more you can make things happen based on the things you are already doing, the less stressed and more productive youll be. Let your imagine take the reins and watch how far it takes you! Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 76 Conclusion Bringing it all together Processes Optimization Automation Virtual Assistants Applications that interact with the physical world Once you understand how to use these tools, you can start to combine them for some amazing results, including something I call The Human Autoresponder! One of the most difficult things to outsource, much less optimize, is email. Its exceedingly difficult to let go of control over some- thing thats so personal, and in many cases, critical to a person or businesss way of operating. Even if we accept the notion of let- ting go, most of us probably have no idea how and where to begin. Ive developed what Im calling The Human Autoresponder, and while the components are not necessarily that ground-breaking, the compilation and final outcome really has me salivating over the possibilities. My first attempt My concept was something that would work like this. You start by picking some keyword or combination of keywords that you often see in your incoming essential mail. In my case, I get a lot of inquiries regarding Crohns Disease. Maybe you get a lot of email about a particular product or service you offer, or maybe Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 78 you work in real estate and particular addresses are mentioned a lot. In my case, to respond to inquiries about Chrons, I set up a stan- dard canned response in Gmail that would respond to any email that had the word crohn in it. The autoresponder tried to cover all possible questions relating to Crohns and give a general an- swer, pointing people in the right direction for the information they were seeking. I even had an intro stating that it was an auto- matic response and I hoped it answered their question, but if it didnt, then I would get back to them with a personalized answer. I was pretty satisfied with this setup and started testing it, but within about two hours, I realized that it was a horribly bad idea. I got a newsletter email from the Crohns and Colitis Foundation, and when Gmail autoresponded, it bounced back and created an endless loop: newsletter response bounce response bounce response repeat ad infinitum! Someone else emailed me with a question that wasnt covered at all by the canned response. To make a long story short, it did not work. The Upgrade I decided that I needed a different approach to the autoresponse. I created an Evernote notebook called Autoresponders, with each note referring to a different keyword. Now I have a note in Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 79 Evernote, and rather than contain a canned response about Crohns, it tells my story and gives bullet points for every Crohns resource I know of, including those on my site and on other sites, and even my coaching services. Now, as youve probably figured out already, that was too much information to send everyone. The Human Autoresponder At that point, I turned to our good friend IFTTT. I set up a recipe so that if a new email comes in with the word crohn, the email will be forwarded to my FancyHands assistant with these instruc- tions: This email has been automatically forwarded to you based on certain keywords. If the message is obviously spam or there was some error in the forward, then let me know.The task is for you to personally respond to the person below using the information provided in an Evernote note. You will use your best judgment to create a personable and informative re- sponse. If you dont have enough information in the notebook, then let me know.Otherwise, visit this Evernote note for full in- structions: https://www.evernote.com/xxxxxxxxxxx. Now an assistant has all of the information they need and can extract just enough to provide the correct answer to the inquiry. I even included an opening paragraph that basically explains how I feel its more important to give someone the information they Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 80 are seeking quickly than to delay just to give a personal response with the same information. Its not about arrogance and being too busy to answer them: quite the opposite, its how I get them the best information I can as quickly as possible. The fact that this process results in Less Doing for me is just a great side-benefit. One nice feature is that IFTTT recipes run every 15 minutes, so if you happen to be working in your email and you see one of these messages come in, you have the opportunity to deal with it yourself. Otherwise, you now have a method for a virtual assis- tant to craft an automated yet personal and charismatic re- sponse to your emails. Be even more effective Now that youve read about the top three productivity tools Gmail, IFTTT, and virtual assistants I hope youll dive in and start using these tools to optimize your life and make more time for doing what you love. This book has given you a taste of The Art of Less Doing. Along with the ideas presented here, I hope youll visit LessDoing.com and find more of the tools and techniques that can help you get to where you really want to be in life! If youd like to learn more, make sure to check out my blog and sign up for the newsletter. Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 81 The concepts of Less Doing make up a methodology and frame- work thats the core of my business. I work with people who have any variety of problems, from health issues to business is- sues or even relationship issues. My vision is based on the belief that I can help people become more effective at any- thing they do. I have helped clients attain goals ranging from outsourcing a busi- nesss bookkeeping to running a seven-minute mile to achieving lucid dreaming. I offer a different way of looking at things a fresh perspective to fill in the gap that stands between my clients and true accom- plishment and satisfaction in their lives. Thats often all it takes, and my job is to supply that vital perspective and help people find it for themselves. I offer courses, corporate programs, and individual coaching to help anyone become more effective at everything. Please get in touch if youd like to discuss how I can help you. Good luck and thank you! - Ari Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything 82