EPISODE 109 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: LESSONS WE LEARNED FROM OUR GET STUFF DONE WEEK
Sonya:
If you follow my agency, Linchpin Digital, on Instagram, you may have seen that we recently had a “Get Stuff Done” week.
I’m talking about five business days where we went through EVERY client file, folder, system and Slack channel to make sure that everything is in order and we’ll be hitting the ground running in 2023 with clear heads (and even clearer inboxes.)
But that’s not to say we didn’t learn a thing or two!
In this episode, I’ll take you through the PURPOSE of a GSD week, why we chose to do it NOW (instead of in January), and how to implement a GSD week of your own, if you think your business needs it.
I like to pride myself on being pretty organised. I love a list, I love systems, and I LOVE knowing where my team is at in terms of client work at any given moment.
My agency made the big shift from Asana to ClickUp at the beginning of 2021, and I’m not kidding when I say it was a BIG shift. The capabilities of ClickUp are incredible, and to be able to create tasks, then subtasks, with dependencies that mean you can’t move a project forward unless the tasks are done in a particular order?
My Type A personality LOVES this sort of system. It just makes SENSE to me.
However…
If you’ve worked with other humans in ANY sort of capacity, you’ll know that no two people think the same - and often, two people with the exact same job, similar skills and similar experience, can be POLAR OPPOSITES in the way they work.
That’s certainly the case with my team, and for some the migration to ClickUp was… challenging.
And I’m going to put my hand up here, and say that while the creation of systems is well and truly in my zone of genius, the ENFORCING of those systems is something I’m still learning to get comfortable with.
The purpose of our GSD Week?
To reduce overwhelm,
To identify and resolve anything that makes our operations ‘clunky’,
To get a clearer picture of where we’re at in terms of team workloads, client projects and our results, and
To re-energise the team as we head into the pointy end of the year.
Our GSD Week was intended to be a Spring Cleaning of sorts. We aired things out, threw out what was no longer needed, organised what was left and gave it a good scrub down.
And just like you can think a bit clearer when you’re not stepping over dirty laundry, gym gear and random pieces of Lego, I believe that the same can be said for a clear digital workspace, too.
I chose to do it now instead of January for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it hit a sweet spot in the schedule where our ads, organic socials and projects team all had a bit of a ‘breather week’ between their busiest week of the month and our reporting week.
Secondly, I HATE the idea of my team recovering from what has been a pretty massive year, only to be thrown into the fire their very first week back, when we could ride the wave of momentum NOW, and MAYBE ease into the new year?
Side note: I know if my team’s listening to this episode they’ll be laughing right now, because in agency land things just keep rolling on… But I’m hopeful guys. Really.
So. What did we actually DO for that week?
It depends on which area of the business we’re talking about, but across the board, our team was:
🔹 Reviewing our internal goals for EVERY client;
🔹 Identifying opportunities to offer even more value;
🔹 Looking at where we can streamline our processes for an even smoother client experience;
🔹 Brainstorming fresh content ideas, and
🔹 Getting clear on our goals as an AGENCY, so we’re all on the same page, and we can help even more ambitious business owners hit their big business goals.
Our ads team spent time assessing every single ad campaign.
Our organic content team assessed and amended each client’s content in terms of branding, content pillars and objectives.
Our web team went through their standard workflow, and identified potential roadblocks and what can be done in future to keep projects ticking along nicely.
We put our heads down, our bums up, and when I say we had a Get Stuff Done Week? We well and truly GOT. STUFF. DONE.
Here’s what we learned.
We don’t have to be so reactive when it comes to responding to emails, requests, and most of all, to notifications on our phones.
It’s going to take us a bit of time to get out of the habit of responding to everything IMMEDIATELY, but an interesting thing we found was that, when you give a request a bit of time to breathe, often the person making that request will come up with a solution on their own.
They’ll figure out where to find that folder, how to upload that image on Shopify, or what the font name is for that client who loves a sans serif.
And on the client side of things, we have to remember that none of our clients expect us to be immediately available, ALL the time.
We’ve built regular calls into our processes to ensure that we catch up with every client monthly, at the very least (depending on how busy they are, what’s going on in their business and if they have anything big coming up). So for additional calls, emails and the like? We can assess their urgency and respond accordingly.If you don’t stay on top of things, things can easily get on top of you.
Have you ever looked at your to do list and got completely overwhelmed, not knowing where to start, CONVINCED that the 17 things listed will take you the ENTIRE weekend, only to find (after procrastinating for an hour or…12) that you were able to easily knock it all off in a couple of hours?
That’s kind of how I felt when I’d look at my team’s to do lists in ClickUp. And the funny thing is, a lot of those tasks were DONE, they just hadn’t been ticked off the list! And this is what I mean by staying on top of things. It’s just as easy to check a box as it is to NOT check a box, so why not save yourself the hassle later and do it now?
I’m keen to see, next time I spring a GSD week on my team, if the process is smoother next time around.The world doesn’t stop because you’re trying to get organised.
The team still had tasks to do outside of their GSD work.
Clients still rang (and we answered, I promise!)
There were plans and projects that had been held up the week before that needed to be juggled with the additional tasks.I’ll admit it, I was interested to see how my team would go with a large, different set of priorities - and I have to say, they did pretty well, for a first attempt!
Your first go won’t be perfect.
You’ll realise halfway through that you left a few things off someone’s list for the week, or you didn’t realise just how many clients one person had to get through and you also gave them another big task to complete.
This is where you need to make sure the lines of communication are open. Rather than have your team pull all-nighters to get through all their tasks (talking to my team again here - I see you, you know who you are… and we need to talk!)...
Getting back on track…
While this week should stretch your team a bit, it shouldn’t break them. You should be checking in every morning to discuss their day’s tasks, if they have everything they need, and if they have any concerns about getting the work done. Then, you leave them alone! Let your team have the peace and quiet to get the stuff done.
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If you’re thinking about running a GSD Week for YOUR team, have a think about these things first:
- Does your team have capacity for a GSD week?
Or, will it cause too much stress to have the entire workplace concentrating on their systems and processes all at once? If you have a very large team, you may want to stagger your weeks to make sure you’re not dropping the ball when it comes to customer service or the day to day operations of the business. Similarly, if you have a very SMALL team, you might want to go one or two team members at a time.
- What are your objectives?
Mine were to reduce overwhelm, smooth out our processes and to identify areas for improvement and opportunity. Yours might be to tidy up all things admin-related before you have to deal with your next BAS deadline. Ask yourself: at the end of this week, what do I want to have fully completed? Then, go do it.
- What processes do you want to put in place so that, moving forward, the systems you have in place are followed by EVERYONE?
Do you need to employ the old carrot-and-the-stick? What are the consequences for allowing your project management system to fall back into disarray? What are the incentives or rewards for demonstrating superior organisation and adherence to your new workflows? This isn’t a one and done event. If you want to stay on top of things, it CAN’T be a one and done. But you CAN try to make sure that it’s not a massive production, every time.
To sum it all up, our GSD week was definitely effective.
Some team members enjoyed it more than others… and I have to say, they’ve ALL managed to stay on top of things in the week or two since we had our big clean up.
It’s going to be interesting to see if they can stick to it!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea of a Get Stuff Done Week. Love it? Hate it? Thinking about implementing it in your business?
Let’s keep the conversation going, over in the Boom Your Biz Facebook Group. Just search Boom Your Biz and submit a request to join.
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