Happy New Year!
This is a weird time of year for me.
On the one hand, I know New Year’s Resolutions are dumb. I mean, if something is worth changing, it’s worth changing now — not waiting for some arbitrary flip of the calendar, right?
But it’s hard not to get caught up in all the “fresh start” talk, and at the very least reflect on what went well for the last 12 months and where you might have opportunities for improvement.
In that spirit, I want to share few things that went well for me last year outsourcing-wise, and a few areas I’m still struggling with.
First up, the wins.
My dedicated assistant Karla from OkayRelax has been doing a great job with the research, data entry, and even website updating tasks I send her way.
One example was when the Virtual Assistant Assistant site switched over from http to https last year, I had to go through and update all of the images to https. It wasn’t the most difficult task in the world, but it was time-consuming, and she nailed it.
Another company that helped during that transition was Zen WP, which offers 24/7 WordPress maintenance and support. They also helped clean up a lot of the pesky little bugs that had been floating around the site.
My freelance writer has been a huge help this year, producing content for this site, summarizing my podcast episodes, and now even writing the accompanying blog posts for those episodes.
And while I still go through and do my own final round of edits, I think the PodcastFasttrack podcast editing service I’ve been working with has still been a net time saver.
For my book project last fall, I used the crowdsourced design service DesignCrowd.com. To be fair, some of the designs were pretty awful, but I really liked the end result.
And finally, I’ve been loving the results and automation behind the robo-investing service called Betterment.
It’s not direct business outsourcing in the traditional sense, but with each dollar I invest, I’m essentially “hiring” thousands of workers — and getting to share in the fruits of their labor.
So what flopped? And what’s next?
There were a couple things that didn’t go so well. For example, I wanted to hire a freelance marketing specialist to help me drive more traffic to my sites, but haven’t heard from him in months. Back to the drawing board on that one.
On the horizon, I have some more website technical stuff I could use help with, and perhaps some graphic design, video creation, and even advertising sales as well.
But mostly I’m the bottleneck. There are a ton of projects I’d love to tackle but am stuck in “maintenance mode” and have a hard time finding time for “growth mode.”
For the new year, I haven’t set any resolutions or 12-month goals. Instead, I’m trying to focus on shorter-term “sprint” goals and mini-habits.
For example, a shorter term goal I have is to add a subnavigation menu to one of my sites to make it easier to access relevant archive content.
An example of a mini-habit would be doing at least one proactive thing in my business before checking email or social media.
Another mini-habit I like is doing 1 push-up. It’s super easy to check the box, and once you’re down on the floor, you’ll probably do a few more.
Your Turn
What about you? What worked well last year?
What’s on the top of your list to delegate this year?
Cheers to working ON your business rather than IN it in 2017!