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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about tasks, clusters, and projects, and the anatomy of an online business. We also discuss how to become better organized, accomplish more in a day, and enjoy greater productivity.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #22 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics make their dent in the world through online business. Our goal is to help you build online research companies, become self tenured, and create the change that you want to see in the world through blogging, podcasting, video, and communicating online.
Chris Cloney: 00:27
I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about tasks, clusters, and projects. We’re also talking about the anatomy of an online business.
I thought this was an important topic because it’s something that I’ve struggled with and something that I’ve gone through over the last three years that I’ve spent building my business. This was the process of moving from a gritty solopreneur, where I’m doing every single step myself, to running a small team with DustSafetyScience and GradBlogger.
I realized that if you don’t have the right processes in place from the start, you can run into big problems. So if you’re still in the solo entrepreneurship space, these tips and processes will help you even more because you’ll be able to:
- Get organized
- Do more in a day
- Encounter less confusion and strife in your life
Maybe you won’t look like I did two years ago when I had three whiteboards in my office and sticky notes plastered everywhere and plans on top of plans on top of plans!
Chris Cloney: 01:26
My whole system is built around a lot of the fundamental concepts of personal productivity that I’ve talked about previously on the podcast. I’ve talked about the book [Affiliate] Getting Things Done by David Allen and my capture sort do productivity system, which I discussed in Episode #13.
After reading [Affiliate] The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, I’ve been applying a lot of the concepts that we’re going to discuss today. This book goes over how technicians, which he defines as those with a labouring skillset, struggle to build businesses and don’t apply the systems or the processes to make it a little bit easier.
Chris Cloney: 02:17
I want to highlight a bunch of systems that I use and how I organize my online business today, with the goal of helping you get your systems organized as well and avoid problems in the future.
Chris Cloney: 02:30
In this episode we’ll talk about:
- The different processes you need to use
- The different systems that we’re using at GradBlogger and DustSafetyScience,
- The three benefits of setting up your business this way
As always, you can find the transcripts at gradblogger.com/22. We’ll also provide in a cheat sheet, which in this case will be my standard operating procedure for how to create a project. This is the one I use every time I create something that’s not a recurring project or recurring cluster task, which we’ll get into as well.
Chris Cloney: 03:11
Every time I open this document (and I use it to start anything new- anything from rebranding to creating this podcast itself), I use the same outline and procedure.
What Are The Different Parts Of An Online Business?
Chris Cloney: 03:27
What are the different parts of an online business? I break these down into tasks, clusters, projects, and reference.
Tasks are things that you do. This could be anything from emailing someone to writing a blog post, to uploading a blog post, to recording this podcast. These are all tasks. These are all things that you have to do as part of your business.
Chris Cloney: 03:57
A cluster is what I call a group of tasks. Releasing this podcast episode would be a good example if I was doing it all myself. I would create the outline, which is a task. I would shoot the episode, edit it, create the show notes, create the cheat sheet, create the transcripts, upload it, then share it. I’d set a date for it to go, I would do social media for it, and I’d reuse it again in the future or something like that. That may be a good standard operating procedure for that task cluster.
Chris Cloney: 04:26
Now, in my business today, I have other people who do other parts of that task, which is why it’s even more important to document it from the start, so you know what processes could be outsourced. So that’s task and clusters.
Chris Cloney: 04:37
Projects are anything that’s one-off or anything that’s not being done on a recurring basis in your business. With the podcast episodes, we do the same process, so that cluster is very well established. If we were to launch a new podcast, that would be a project. If we were to try to increase traffic to a certain page on the website, that would be a project. If we were to increase conversions to our newsletter, that would be a project. So these are all anything new that’s in your business.
Chris Cloney: 05:03
I talked about capture-sort-do projects. One big rule I have is projects are like boxes. They should have lids. Close projects when you’re doing something with them and have a very limited number of open projects at any one time. So that’s tasks, clusters and projects.
Chris Cloney: 05:18
Then the last part, or the last piece of your online business, is reference information. Again, I talked about this in episode 13. Most reference information we’ll never use, or you’ll use a very small percentage of it, but you need to keep it somewhere. We’ll talk about what that somewhere will be in this episode.
Chris Cloney: 05:32
So before we get into what the rules of the system are and how to keep track of everything, let’s talk about some mistakes that people make.
What mistakes do people commonly make?
Mistake #1: Not Labeling Tasks, Clusters and Projects
Chris Cloney: 05:39
Mistake number one is not labelling task clusters and projects. If you just have large lists of stuff and they’re not set up in this hierarchy or any hierarchy, you’re going to be in trouble because it’s going to be very hard to wrap your head around everything, especially as your blog grows, and as your online business grows.
Mistake #2: Taking on too many recurring clusters
Chris Cloney: 05:55
Mistake number two is taking on too many recurring clusters. I’ve done this myself. It is extremely detrimental to your productivity and, probably, mental state. Now I try to ensure that my recurring tasks only take up one day a week, or about 25% of my working time because I try not to work Fridays if I can.
These are tasks you’re doing every week, like writing blog posts or shooting podcast episodes. This approach leaves the other 75% of my time to take on new projects, launch new parts to my business, look for new clients and even managing and reviewing and visualizing what my business is going to be like. Taking on too many recurring tasks can have you feeling pretty stressed.
Mistake #3: Not evaluating recurring tasks
Chris Cloney: 06:35
Mistake number three is not evaluating recurring tasks. Sometimes you have to shut them off, sometimes you have to change them, sometimes you have to change their workflow.
This is an important step. I used to do a weekly Facebook video in the GradBlogger Connect! group and it ended up taking too much time to fit into my schedule. So I shut that off over a year ago. We’re going to bring that back at some point, but only when we get the rest of the systems in place so that I can function without interrupting the new project work that we need to do.
Mistake #4: Working on more than one project at a time
Chris Cloney: 07:03
Mistake number four is working on more than one project at a time. As I’ve said before, projects are like boxes: they need lids, and most of them should be closed. Don’t try to work on 1,000 projects at once. I’m guilty of doing this, and it gets very hard.
Mistake #5: Not correctly defining and documenting a project
Chris Cloney: 07:14
Mistake number five is not correctly defining and documenting a project. That’s why the cheat sheet for this episode is my standard operating procedure for creating a project. I follow it at the start of every project to do things like:
- Create a mind map
- Organize a mind map
- Create the purpose, scope, and the metrics we’re going to use to measure success for the project
- House the notes that we’re creating
- Create the timeline and figure out how we’re doing against that.
That all goes into project documentation, and of course we have a standard operating procedure for creating that documentation at the start of our project.
Chris Cloney: 07:45
If we don’t create a starter project, then halfway through you’re going to go, “Oh yeah, what were we trying to do again? How are we measuring success for this project?” It can be very concerning and disconcerting as you go through that project.
Chris Cloney: 07:58
So, those are five common mistakes I see people make. So, what’s the solution then? That’s going to be this anatomy of the business that we’re talking about, the anatomy of an online business. What systems did you have?
Getting Started: The Rules
So by way of getting started, I just want to explain the rules to the system. The rules are that each task needs a standard operating procedure. When I do a task, I normally do it three times. I do it once just to figure out how to do it. The second time, I write down the steps that I used to do it. And the third time I do it again, but following the steps I wrote down. Then I know if I have a step-wise procedure for doing that task that works.
Chris Cloney: 08:30
A fourth and critical step is giving that task to somebody else and making sure that it can be done by an outside person. We do this in our business when we write SOPs for team members. We had another team member do it following that SOP, just to make sure that’s written in a language that people can understand across different kind of functions within the business. So each task needs a standard operating procedure.
Chris Cloney: 08:51
Each task should be measured. The standard operating procedure should include:
- A goal
- A purpose
- The steps, which is the big piece
- What standard it’s measured against
And, again, this comes from [Affiliate] The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, which talks about setting up your business like a franchise. Pretend you are going to make 5,000 of these businesses and then you’ll have the right process in place. Pretend it’s going to be a McDonald’s and there are going to be people franchising your business. I’m not saying you should have a franchise business, you should just have the systems in place so that it operates like this type of business.
Chris Cloney: 09:22
In the standard SOP that I share, I don’t have the goals and purpose because it’s creating a project. So, I probably should have that in there. But the purpose of that one is to create a new product for your business. Again, the standards would go in the project document. Those are things that should be with each task and included in the standard operating procedure.
Chris Cloney: 09:38
The third rule is that each project needs a project document. We talked about this. This is the process of outlining:
- The metrics that you’re going to use to measure success
- The things that are important to you
- The reason you’re doing this
- How it aligns with your company values
These are all things that should go in that project document and be used to build out that project.
Getting Organized: How To Keep Track Of Everything?
Chris Cloney: 09:57
Now I want to talk about getting organized. How do you keep track of everything?
My growth has been organic: I listened to a lot of other folks who are very educated in the space and read a lot on business systems to create my own business management system. In order to do this, I have a cloud-based central repository with a folder structure. Right now, it’s on my personal G Drive, and we’re moving to G Suite with team features now. Right now the whole team’s in there, but we’re running out of space in everyone’s drives because we’re getting about 25, 50 gigs in size.
Chris Cloney: 10:40
It holds every asset we create: all of our brand elements and all of our website projects. By brand elements, I mean your logo, your colours, your fonts. By assets I mean anything derived from your brand elements. So these are the cheat sheets and the artwork that we create for social media sharing. These are all assets within your business.
Chris Cloney: 11:12
The hardest part here is that that central repository gets big and complicated, so I’d create what’s called a dashboard. This is like a homepage where you can see everything for your business.
I do this with a Google sheet- you may have seen me share this on social media before, but it’s just a big dashboard containing the different parts of the business. I have different parts labelled on the bottom tabs.
The first page is a table of contents, the second is home, which has a link to each of the different sections of that folder structure. One might be ‘website’, one might be ‘open projects’, one might be ‘closed projects’, so on and so forth. The podcast has its own space in the central repository, but just a one-pager that has links to everything that’s going on in the business.
Chris Cloney: 11:57
This dashboard has links to important locations. We display and post metrics like newsletter signups, website traffic right there. Every time you open up the dashboard, you can see how we’re doing, our long term and short term goals, our business values, and core business elements.
Chris Cloney: 12:27
The next tab I have is an asset register. This is where we place every visual element that’s derived from our brand elements (or links to them). It includes things like cheat sheets, the transcripts, image files, and PDF.. This gives you easy access to all these things you create.
Chris Cloney: 12:51
Have you ever came to the point where you’re like, “Aw, I wish I knew where that social media image was or where I put that image that I created for Twitter is.” Well, if you have it all listed in this asset register, you can find that any time.
Chris Cloney: 13:06
The next tab in the dashboard is the standard operating procedure register. So it’s like the asset register, contains all of your SOPs, links to all of them, and grouped. So, in our case, we’ll have the podcast as one group, has the SOP for me creating an outline. The SOP for me creating this episode myself. What do I want to see? If I, for example, don’t like how I sounded or forgot to get water or something for an episode when I’m recording it, I’ll put that in the SOP so I don’t forget next time. Anything from creating the transcripts to creating a network to social sharing. That’s all listing in the SOP register.
Chris Cloney: 13:42
The next tab is the project register. This is where we list anything that’s not a recurring task. For me, this tab lists every project we have and the status. If I open up my dashboard right now and click on the projects tab, I see the following:
- A sponsorship experience program, which is a big project we’re launching with DustSafetyScience to improve the experience of our sponsors and advertisers.
- A DustSafetyScience and GradBlogger branding review project that is closed at the moment, but will be opening next week.
- A membership renewal for DustSafetyScience.
- GradBlogger Connect research to improve the GradBlogger Connect Facebook group.
We can get into any of those projects in our central repository and see at a quick glance what’s open and closed.
Chris Cloney: 14:38
We also include an archive of old project lists. It’s quite lengthy. If I look at these, I see things from 2016, when I tried to sell the first course for creating your blog online through to the GradBlogger podcast launch in April of this year.
Chris Cloney: 14:59
The last part that you’ll have in your dashboard is anything that’s business-specific. In my case, I have a specific task for advertisers for DustSafetyScience. If you’re creating courses, this is probably a good place to have a course registration. If you’re taking a lot of courses yourself, maybe a course registry would be helpful. One for big wins and big successes is also very beneficial. But you can include anything that’s business-specific.
Chris Cloney: 15:28
That was a lot of information on getting organized, keeping track of everything, and creating your own dashboard for the central repository. The dashboard has a table of contents page, a homepage and asset register, an SOP register, a project register, a list of archived projects, and any business-specific tabs that you need. And then you have it all in one place. I have that G sheet open at all times on my computer, so I can quickly get to where I want to go if I’m looking for something.
Chris Cloney: 16:06
I do want to say a cautionary note. This takes a lot of time to develop and it’s not perfect. We have projects that improve parts of our management system or improve our dashboard, so if things have gotten unruly and gotten too out of hand, we’ll create a project and say, “Okay, we need to reel this back in. We need to analyze where it’s gone wrong and fix it to make it more coherent.”When you have a business set up this way, it can get you moving forward, whether you’re a solopreneur or bringing other people onto your team.
Three Benefits Of Setting Up Your Business This Way From The Start
Chris Cloney: 16:38
I want to talk about three benefits of setting up your business this way from the start. As I always mention in this podcast, I want you to create an online business that is going to help you create an impact in the world. That’s why I go through this anatomy of an online business process.
Here are three benefits I want to highlight.
Benefit #1: Waste less time “finding stuff”
Chris Cloney: 16:59
Benefit number one is that you waste less time “Finding stuff.” So if you’re spending a large majority of your day trying to find that file that you can never seem to find when you need it, you need a business management system. A dashboard would help you save time in your day.
Chris Cloney: 17:26
The other thing I want to mention here is that because it’s all in Google Docs, the whole thing is completely searchable. If I search for SOP (all of our standard operating procedures has a prefix SOP) they’ll all come up in a big list. If I search for someone that I’ve talked to, (for example, Katy Peplin), it will come up with the outline that I created for that show and the content upgrades. If you create the system at the start, you will find things a lot faster.
Benefit #2: Goals and metrics are presented up front
Chris Cloney: 18:01
Benefit number two is that goals and metrics are presented upfront. When you open your dashboard every day, you are reminded of where are you headed, where you would like to go, and how you are doing against that goal. It’s so encouraging to see things moving forward.
Benefit #3: You are ready to bring on team members
Chris Cloney: 18:16
Benefit number three is that you are now ready to bring on team members. You have everything identified, you have everything in the right place, you have standard operating procedures for each step, you have estimates on how long they take.
This is all about figuring what you
- Don’t want to do the most, or
- Is costing you the most time that you could spend doing something more valuable. So, for me, that might be creating and editing a podcast episode transcript. That’s something I’m not very good at, and it takes me a long time to do. That might be the first thing I outsource.
Chris Cloney: 18:44
The outsourcing is a lot easier because you can send a test to three or four people, and say, “Follow this SOP, send me the result.” You can compare between those four people and you pick the one that did the best. It makes it easier to grow and scale a team if you have this stuff set up from the front. We’ll talk more about hiring and how to build a team in later episodes. But at least this process, this anatomy of an online business, will get you things set up correctly from the start.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 19:08
So, that’s it for this episode. This is a little bit of a faster one but it’s really probably a ton of information. We talked about the different parts of a business, the mistakes people commonly make, the rules in this system, and the fact that each task needs an SOP, each task should be measured, and each project needs a project document. We talked at length about getting organized. For me, again, this is a personal dashboard created for myself and my team.
Chris Cloney: 19:37
We’ve talked about some of the benefits: you waste less time, your goals and metrics are presented upfront, and you are ready to bring on team members when you want to scale your business.
Chris Cloney: 19:45
So that’s it for this episode. If you liked this content, definitely tag me on Twitter or Instagram @gradblogger. As always, a cheat sheet and PDF download of the transcripts is available at gradblogger.com/22. As always, stay tuned for next week. I’m looking forward to continuing to help you build your online business as an academic and increasing the dent that you can make in the universe with your research and your experience.
Resources
DustSafetyScience
GradBlogger Connect!
GradBlogger: Twitter and Instagram
Books [Affiliate]
Allen, David. Getting Things Done
Gerber, Michael. The E-Myth
Previous Podcasts
GBP013- Getting things done using the capture, sort, do system
