📆 TL;DR in case you’re skimming: AI-focused office hours for paid subscribers are officially in session! We have an amazing group of creative business owners, and I would love for you to join us :) The next one is on May 20 at 12 p.m. ET. Learn more »
Happy Friday! Today’s edition of Time Well Spent is a throwback to September 2014, when I first introduced the Bottleneck Buster Template (now in Notion, of course :) Little did I know I’d publish a whole book on the subject eight years later!
Before you delegate to team members or software, you need to know where your biggest bottlenecks are. Many of you want to start experimenting with things like Custom Agents, but you don’t know what to have them do first — or you’re feeling overwhelmed by what’s already on your plate, let alone setting aside time for fiddling with new software and traversing the learning curves that follow.
If that’s you, don’t start with the software at all — just begin by observing your life and business for the next two weeks: 👀
Where do tasks or projects pile up?
What regularly gets swept under the rug?
What do you dread doing or avoid until the last minute?
⏳ Are you the bottleneck in your business? Continued from the 2014 post:
Your to-do list: How many items are hovering as “low priority” and for how long?
If you have a team: how many tasks are they waiting on you for, unable to proceed without your input? What about your customers or clients?
Maybe you feel the lack of “efficiency oxygen” in your day-to-day work: You are furiously treading water just to get the minimum required done, barely touching your most strategic projects.
Wikipedia defines a bottleneck as “A phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or limited number of components or resources.”
You might feel a vague sense of where you’re operating inefficiently, but if you already knew exactly what was clogging up the works, you probably would have fixed it by now!
As with many habit changes, awareness is the first step: I created this Bottleneck Buster Template when I was spending too much time weed-whacking in my day-to-day work; it helped me stop complaining and start strategizing.
Let us know in the comments! I love learning and sharing ideas with each other 🤓
Our twice-monthly agentic AI-focused office hours for paid subscribers kicked off this week! Office hours will be held on the first and third Wednesdays of every month at 12 p.m. ET. ❌ Note: they will not be recorded, since everything in this arena changes so quickly! We do share detailed notes and resources in Substack chat afterward.
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