007: Unsubscribing from the Shit - 3 Ways to Get Your Head Back in the Game

18 Oct

Taking Back Joy Podcast • Episode #007:

Unsubscribing from the Shit - 3 Ways to Get Your Head Back in the Game

We've all heard the phrase, 'block and delete' right? The idea that you've got that drama llama on your social media or that friend that's constantly toxic, a Debbie Downer. And we've all heard the saying that when they suck way more energy than they give, you've got to do the old block and delete.

Well, what if I told you that this idea of blocking and delete could actually be great way to get your head back in the game for your small business?

I want to show you how you can unsubscribe from some of the shit in your life when it comes to both business marketing and your business admin. I want to show you how you can go through some of your key communication channels and start finding out ways to cut some of the crap out of your incoming mail so you can get a bit more clarity about what it is that you do need to take in what's going to be beneficial for you to take in and how you can start clearing some of the clutter and getting your head back in the game when it comes to running and growing your business.

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Show Notes: Links & resources mentioned in this episode

Episode Transcript

Download: Episode Synopsis (PDF) | Episode Content (PDF)

Synopsis

Meredith Paige 00:00

We've all heard the phrase, 'block and delete' right? The idea that you've got that drama llama on your social media or that friend that's constantly toxic, a Debbie Downer. And we've all heard the saying of these kinds of people who just feel like they suck way more energy than they give, you got to do the old block and delete.

Meredith Paige 00:19

Well, what if I told you that this idea of blocking deleting could actually be really a good way to get your head back in the game for your small business?

Meredith Paige 00:28

Do you feel like you're constantly overwhelmed, running around like headless chalk that your to do list is out of control. And it's feeding into feelings of anxiety, self doubt or feeling like you're not good enough and don't have a handle enough on this. That imposter syndrome shows up. And then we find ourselves micromanaging and stressing and fretting. And we've kind of got ourselves in a spiral where we don't really even know where it started to begin with.

Meredith Paige 00:54

Meredith Paige 01:29

Let's jump in

Episode Content

Meredith Paige 00:00

One of the best and at the same time worst things about running a business in this day and age, I mean, world falling to pieces COVID stuff set aside, is how accessible digital platforms social media, email, our phones being like mini computers, how accessible, all that makes us to our business and how accessible it makes our business to us. So let me unpack that for you.

Meredith Paige 00:28

So with all the Pro, if you've even if it's a word, pretty beefy, of technology that's available to us, it is so easy for us to have our business in our pocket in our backpack on the go, which is really a double edged sword when you actually think about the how much good versus bad it brings to your life. And I've talked to a lot of clients like this who've experienced massive tech transformation in their industries, typically accountants, people in those kinds of services. What they've found is that whilst the Tech has made things easier, there are some drawbacks to being 24-7 accessible from elements of your business. What would happen in days gone past when everything like pen and paper days was that at the end of your business hours, you may be there a little bit longer tidying up some book work, but then you would turn the lights off, shut the door, walk away and go home.

Meredith Paige 01:25

Now, I'm not going to pretend that it was that simple back in the good old days, which quite frankly, was before I was born. But there was an element of having a clear divide between work is finished now and now I'm at home. You just physically couldn't take home, work home with you unless you took all your bookwork and everything home. But it wasn't as easy. And I think sometimes when things is easy, it's expected of us. So because the average business owner and the average consumer is across email, and Facebook and Instagram, and whatever the hell platform you're showing up on these days. Because everybody has the understanding that it's very easy and very quick and accessible to go live on these platforms and be present there. There is this expectation that you should be present there 24-7. And that's what I want to unpack today.

Meredith Paige 02:21

I know for myself, this is a realisation I've come to that's kind of been me trying to trace back the root of my overwhelm and anxiety. And feeling like I'm not going to be able to get on top of everything, feeling like my to-do list is breeding like a pack of rabbits. I was trying to find out where this constant feeling of running around like a headless truck was coming from. I feel like I've actually traced it back to digital boundaries in business. Now boundaries is my new favourite soapbox topic. But having discovered this I wanted to walk you through the things that I've done to kind of take back that space, take back those distinctions between work time and family time, or just not work time. And then give you some really practical actionable things you can do now to try and get a bit of your sanity back when it comes to the working on your business stuff. Because it is really this stuff that the's ever present. Like you've got Xero on your phone, you've got Facebook, Instagram, Email on your phone. And it's very easy to wake up in the morning and see, you know, 50 notification in total from all these different platforms.

Meredith Paige 03:37

And so what I wanted to do with you guys today is to walk you through a unpacking the practical components of this. So you can take a moment, de-stress, have a really good look at what's actually going on on these channels. And then start putting mindset things in place practical steps in place to start making these things feel less like they're running you, more like you're running them. Because a lot of the time, the sense of pervasive overwhelm that comes with using all these platforms, then triggers all these other really bad mental behaviours that we can sometimes have, whether it's anxiety, self doubt, it's this fear of I'm hopeless, I can't stay on top of this, what's wrong with me, I'm constantly running around like I've got no idea what I'm doing.

Meredith Paige 04:22

It can it can sometimes manifest itself as micro-management or lack of trust in others. You think there's so many things going on your business that only you can do. And so you find yourself overwhelmed and really run off your feet purely because you don't have the capacity to step back and delegate because all this feels like it's can only be done by you then then often this overwhelm can lead to lack of productivity, like it just seems so big, you'd rather just not start the first place and you'll do what I lovingly tell myself is procrastinati-working, especially running a digital business and largely from home. It's very easy to go out to put a lot of washing on and 'then I'll get to work'. 'I'll just get the dishwasher sorted and then I'll get to work' and Across the working, it's the ways we trick ourselves into thinking we're being productive when we're really just avoiding getting stuck in. So all these things hold us back from putting our best self out there when it comes to our marketing promotion, and getting the best out of ourselves and feeling the best about ourselves and what we've done each day.

Meredith Paige 05:18

So by tracing my own anxiety, lack of productivity, headless-chook sprinting back to what these platforms were doing to me, and what the headspace was being put in, I really want to share that with you. So we're going to look at primarily two key areas here, your inbox and social media.

Meredith Paige 05:38

Let's let's focus in on the inbox first. Now I'm sure you can relate to the feeling of seeing 30 unread emails in your inbox. And straightaway, it goes back to the end of the to do list for that day, because it's like, I don't even want to know how bad it is, I can see some of the stuff in like the preview screen, I will deal with that later. That's going to be a massive job. And I want you to stop and think for a moment. How many times have you actually sat down to finally rip the band aid off and go through your inbox, only to find that you're deleting half of them without even opening them. I know myself, there's businesses whose marketing emails I've subscribed to. And yeah, I've bought a couple of things over the years but the amount of things I've purchased off of them is nowhere near in direct relation to how many emails I allow myself to receive off them. So this is step one, because as business owners, we're often very much opportunist in that if we see a business that offers a service we might not be quite ready for feel like it's going to be something we might need in the future. So rather than sign up, save it, label it for the future, get a really smart categorization strategy in place, e.g save the website in the bookmark folder, and then unsubscribe from the emails. None of that sounds very counterintuitive for a marketing person who should be promoting you do marketing emails, but this is about getting your head back in the game and clearing a lot of the clutter. So we're talking about unsubscribing, blocking the leading, cutting the crap. So if this if this company is sending you emails, and you don't plan to take action on them right now, save the website as a bookmark in a folder and unsubscribe. And you will find that that step alone cut a huge chunk out of your inbox overwhelm, because I've found that myself sometimes when I've sat down and gone, Okay, here we go. Diving into the inbox, at least half of it I am deleting without opening, because it's like 'not today, not today, maybe' those emails that you're saying to yourself, 'not today, maybe later'. That's the ones we're hitting right now. Once you've cleared all the marketing clutter, and you're actually looking at emails that are relevant to you, I want you to look at them through, let's say three different lenses.

Meredith Paige 07:52

So is the email asking a question that you've been asked before? Could this email have been prevented by having a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website, or maybe addressing some of these issues in social media posts? So is there a way that this email can either be sent off to a staff member and I'll cover this one next, sent off to someone who can go 'Alright, this will be a really good thing to talk about on social media next week, can you turn this into a video reel? Post?' So is this email taking up time where it shouldn't? Could this have been a frequently asked question on your website? Or again, could it be part of your content strategy? Is this something you're getting asked regularly, that needs to be out there and not manually handled by you every time it gets asked?

Meredith Paige 08:39

The next thing is, could the email that you're looking at could that have been handled by a software or a system is. Is it asking about a date or a time to catch up or something like that, could this have been run through a software like Calendly, which is a scheduling software and allows people to get a preview of your available spaces in your personal calendar. So if they're trying to to and fro with you about catching up and for a follow up session or if you're booking an appointment, Calendly is really good for this kind of thing. It does take the too-ing and fro-ing about organising appointments out of the equation. Even if you want to set up a personal one for people trying to catch up and have lunch or a phone call or coffee, maybe have a personal one where it's like 'this is my calendar. I'm flat out but just jump in there and if it's free, go for it and it's a date.' Because the other good thing about software like calendly is it will also take care of sending reminder emails. I believe you need to integrate texts although I haven't experimented with that myself. So it will actually send reminder emails to that person that they have an appointment coming up with you so you won't have to check closer to the date to make sure it's all good. They will get that prompt from Calendly.

Meredith Paige 09:53

So is there a software system that could be handling this email so you don't have to spend 15-20 minutes answering it? And then thirdly, is this something that you could be handing off to a trusted staff member? Like, is there a way you can separate out your inbox and start getting a personal inbox and a business inbox? Or perhaps maybe setting up a separate business email account? Is it possible to set up an admin@ or info@youbusiness.com.au ? And can that be managed by a staff member? Can you find maybe one or two staff members who you know to know your product or your service or your business to a really, really high standard? And they can answer those questions. And then that can be something that it becomes their job, they suddenly become more valuable and more productive in the business. They feel good, and you're not handling tedious, and let's be frank, $15 per hour tasks that are answering emails.

Meredith Paige 10:52

So when you're looking at your inbox, I want you to look at the emails that you find yourself answering through these three lenses. And then if they can't be either summed up in a frequently asked question on your website or answered via social media, if they can't be run through a scheduling tool or something to that effect. And if it can't be answered by staff member, then it must be answered by you. But we really need to play hardball with ourselves, especially when it comes to lines of communication open with us as to what do we actually need to be handling and what can be outsourced. Now I recently did an episode about Systems, Subbies and Software (see show notes).

Meredith Paige 11:30

Basically, it's about this looking at a three bucket strategy for how can you do less and be more productive at the higher order level stuff that you should be doing. I recommend you go check that episode out because I want to elaborate more on this. So this is just some really good basic stuff you can get stuck into in your inbox to try and alleviate a lot of the overwhelm we get when we sort of managing that particular communication channel. So now the other thing is social media. And in this instance, I'm talking about Facebook and Instagram. But you can really apply this to any. So I recently took, I didn't put an exact timeframe on it, it was probably somewhere between two weeks to a month, off Facebook. I deleted the app off my phone, because I was finding that when I was feeling stressed and unsure of myself, I was going to Facebook and looking for a reason to feel better about myself. Does someone agree with me? Does someone share my point of view? Am I wrong? Am I right? Can I get some sort of instant gratification here from this platform to let me know I'm on the right track.

Meredith Paige 12:44

And then when I realised that that's what I was doing with Facebook, I was I was using it to essentially make myself feel better. I realised that that is not an okay way to be relating to something that's got a very powerful, very borderline dangerous algorithm. I was getting very much sucked into like dramatic, toxic crap, basically on social media on Facebook. And so I was like, you know, I'm out of here and if anyone needs me urgently, there are far more professional, acceptable ways to contact civilians. So I'm out. See you later. And so I deleted it off my phone, about a week later also deleted Instagram because I thought I'd fixed and then I realised I was just going to Instagram for the same self-gratification hit.

Meredith Paige 13:36

The only times I had access to them was when I was working with a client and I had to log in to manage their Facebook page. But I wasn't getting the whole light up, vibrate, someone said something about you level kind of notifications that fires off all the brain centres from your phone. So when I was logging into Facebook, it was very much from a business mindset, not a 'scroll to make myself feel better' mindset. And so that was really important and when I finally became more not active on it, because I'm really not still super active on it anymore as much as I was it's very much like measured doses now. But it actually reminded me of when I took bread out of my diet for a month and like this seems like a long bow to draw but hear me out! I was getting to a point where I was feeling really like awful, crummy, bloated etc. Someone mentioned 'why don't you take bread out of the equation and just see what that does for you'. So I took bread out of the equation for a month and felt a million times better. And the next time I had a bread roll at a BBQ, it felt so heavy in my stomach and foreign to my system, it hit me like a punch in the gut. And this whole Facebook detox reminded me a lot of that where once I had kind of gone through the withdrawals and detoxed off it, when I came back to it, I was became very conscious about what I was doing and how long I was spending on it.

Meredith Paige 15:25

I have not yet found myself falling into a 15-20 minute scroll hole anymore, because as soon as it starts happening, my brain goes, 'What, hang on, you need to stop, we're not we're not in business mode anymore. Let's bail out.' I became very sensitive to how my brain was behaving and how I was behaving using these platforms. And I highly recommend it to anybody who uses social media for their business, because there is this weird expectation that either we've set or the customer set and we didn't push back where we should, where we feel obligated to be accessible to potential customers 24/7. Just no. I've said this in a previous podcast that you wouldn't Facebook message Nissan and ask them to fix your radio under warranty, you would wait till business hours the following business day when you would ring them and you'd expect that conversation to take maybe 20-30 minutes. Because Nissan doesn't do business with people over Facebook Messenger at 11 o'clock at night on a Saturday, they just don't. And if anything, Nissan are better resourced, to provide that level of service, but guess what, they don't.

Meredith Paige 16:47

So for some reason, as small businesses, we've allowed ourselves to fall into this trap of thinking that we should provide that level of service. And we are far less resource than businesses like Nissan. So something that's a really good idea is you can actually set autoresponders on your Facebook messages. So what I recommend you do is go in there and customizer, let people know that this isn't monitored regularly. So if they do need to get in touch with you and expect or donate a more urgent inquiry, they should call you or visit you in store. And maybe I don't know what the character limit is, but maybe if you can send them links to important pages on your website that might answer some like frequently asked questions, or maybe a contact form. Or if there's an if there's a page that you know, as a good reference point on your website, direct them to that. But having that autoresponder set up is a great way to give you the peace of mind that they have seen that a) message has gotten through and b) they've been made aware of the fact that this is not the best way to contact me. And this is where I find I take a little bit of issue with other marketers out there. And look, we've all kind of fallen prey to the system, because everyone sort of worked out that you could do business quite well on these platforms. But we all fall into the trap of here's how we think you should do it. I followed a lot of marketers that say you should try and sell in selling the DM's. So that's the catch phrase, sell in the DM's. And look, that's fine, but you need to have some really rock-solid boundaries around that. Otherwise, you will find yourself chasing potential customers at all hours of the night, all hours of the morning, when you should be present with your partner, present with your kids, members present with yourself and taking some time for yourself away from Facebook and Instagram. So if selling in the DM's is something that you do, I would not recommend you make that part of your marketing and sell strategy until you have some very clear boundaries and you know how to stick to them. So having that autoresponder on Facebook is really good. I'll be honest, I'm not sure if Instagram has the same feature. But in any of your calls to action, I would not be encouraging people to dm you because I feel like with a DM there is this level of expectation that they should get an immediate response. By all means encourage comments and conversation and things like that. But encourage people to send you an email or call you or visit you in store whatever is the best way for people to get in touch with you encourage them to do that, but have a really good think about what that looks like for you and what's sustainable and manageable for you.

Meredith Paige 19:14

So now that we've talked about the inbox, we've talked about social media, I suppose, overarchingly, this Facebook detox or went on really made it clear to me that we need to be super mindful about what we allow into our space in terms of people, in terms of ideas, in terms of what we watch and what we listen to. Ever since I took this break from the incredibly toxic environment that Facebook is right now, it made me (like that bread scenario) it may me super sensitive to what was going on in that space and also made me super sensitive to the effect it was having on me mentally and physically as I was consuming it. So if I could give you take away nothing else from this episode, I would really encourage you to do like to take step back and away from it for a very decent period of time, 2,3 or 4 weeks, because then when you come back to it, I really feel like you will have a heightened sensitivity to what it's doing to you mentally and physically when you return. And then that will in turn cue you to be more conscious about using it going forward.

Meredith Paige 20:19

So have a game plan, have set time aside, unsubscribe, block, and delete anything that isn't bringing you immediate value, anything that you don't intend to invest on in the immediate future, and get really protective about what it is you allow into your space mentally and physically. Because you've got to be so protective of your mind and your body, so you can keep your head in the game and you can keep doing what it needs and what it takes to run a successful business. I really hope these strategies give you a few quick wins, right off the bat. And I really hope it does all kind of add up to greater peace of mind for you. Because that's what I want for my small business people. You guys are fantastic. you're juggling all the balls, you're often raising families and running businesses and volunteering on a bajillion committees and sporting groups. So if anyone deserves to have peace of mind and clarity and focus, it's you. I really hope you took some value away from this episode today guys and I'll see you next time.

Meredith Paige http://meredithpaige.me/