Ellen from the-ask
Ellen, Founder of the-ask (an UK-based coaching company), was starting to scale her business but realised things were getting messier over time and out of control.
This is what Ellen said during our last call:
“It was super helpful to have these weekly sessions. I had the fear of building this fancy system to then end up not using it, but I can’t imagine how I would stop using it now. There isn’t a thing that work better than this. I now feel dependant on this system for my business”
The Problem
Ellen, Founder of the-ask (an UK-based coaching company), was starting to scale her business but realised things were getting messier over time and out of control.
She also wanted to gain some of her time back to focus on what makes her business grow (landing pages, sales pages, digital courses, social media and community)
She’s also a big picture creative person and she felt she was not having that big picture mindset. She was working IN the business rather that ON it.
The Proposed Solution
Excerpt from our email conversation:
- We’ll build a minimum viable system so we can slowly start to systemize your tasks and projects/objectives.
- We’ll understand which kind of system and workflows we’re going to need to make sure that the system fits the way YOU work.
- Once we understand what works with you, we can start scaling to a more complex task management system to accommodate your current and future team.
- We will also tackle life admin so we can have everything within Notion
- AND I will focus on accountability to make sure that you actually use the system, and if not, we will understand why and fix it.
Scope
- Task management system for her and later for her team
- Create a template dashboard for team members
- Link google calendar with Notion
- Weekly review set-up
- Objective, to force her to schedule her weeks in advance (big picture thinking)
- Content management system
The Process
The most important part of a productivity system is always the Task database. Everything revolves around it.
Through a series of questions, we drafted the simplest task database possible (below)
System building should also take into consideration the adaptation period the user goes through. This system is something new to her, so I needed to make this process as painless as possible for.
That’s why we started small.
With the tasks database built, we needed to create workflows to actually use it.
A database without workflows to guide the user is prone to errors, so the next thing we do is creating a process for inputting data into the database, to schedule tasks and to take action on the tasks. This is done in 3 different pages. One page per purpose.
It just took us one call to get all this done (database and workflows), and from this moment on, Ellen already had a place to create her tasks and a 3 step process to make sure all tasks get completed.
After Ellen got comfortable using the tasks database, it was time to scale the system and built a Projects database.
After another barrel of questions, we started to define how that database would look like.
We wanted to be able to have an easy overview of what was going on in each of the projects without the need of going inside of each project to check.
This is what we came up with:
Ellen has a lot of client calls, so it was imperative for her to be able to see all her week’s tasks AND events in the same place.
Before she was going back an forth between Google Calendar and Notion to schedule her weeks, and this is not something we want.
For that, we created an automation that brings every event from Google Calendar onto her Notion task database.
We then added an extra column in her focus page and BOOM! we had everything in one place, tasks on the left and events on the right.
In order to tie everything together and to ensure that the system is always on point and not messy, we need a weekly review.
This is normally the hardest one to interiorise for the user as it’s basically a new habit.
During the following calls we checked on how she was doing with the reviews.
It took us a bit of time to make this new habit stick, but in the end she’s been sticking to it, which has given Ellen a great sense of control over her weeks and an overview of what’s always going on.
With the core system built, it was time to scale and prepare and easy way to create dashboards for her team.
That template would allow Ellen to create a fully functional dashboard for every new hire, with the same workflows we built for her, with a simple click.
Ellen also wanted to see what everyone from her team was working on, which projects, and with which timelines. This was the last piece of our puzzle.
We ended up creating this view, where at a glance Ellen is able to have that company overview that allows her to work ON her business.
The result
After testing the system and making sure it works for her, this is what Ellen said during our last call:
“It was super helpful to have these weekly sessions. I had the fear of building this fancy system to then end up not using it, but I can’t imagine how I would stop using it now. There isn’t a thing that work better than this. I now feel dependant on this system for my business”
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