Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
You started your business for freedom, not to be chained to your desk. I help solopreneurs replace manual tasks with a reliable system so they can take time off worry-free.
On Streamlined Solopreneur you'll get real-world strategies, smarter workflows, and practical tools to help you reclaim your time and actually enjoy the freedom you set out to create.
Your host, Joe Casabona, is a seasoned technologist with over 25 years of experience. He's seen how the right systems can transform a business. But more than that, He's a teacher at heart.
His goal isn’t to overwhelm you with jargon, but to make complex ideas simple and give you an actionable plan you can actually use.
Because your business should support your life—not take it over.
Tune in every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Intro: My coaching client, Laura, recently told me that she saved more money than she spent on my coaching because I helped her simplify and consolidate her tech stack. And now I want to do the same thing for you, too. I have put out a free tool called the Tools Audit. It will help you determine what tools you use, how much you're paying, and where you can consolidate and eliminate to simplify what your small business tech stack. You can go to streamlined.fm/tools to get your free tools audit today. That's streamlined.fm/tools.
I was thinking recently about how there's two types of work. The first is the type of work where repetition is beneficial. This could be cognitive training like trying to memorize stuff, the idea of practicing a speech or public speaking, or physical training, right? The more that you train, the better you'll get at something. Or other types of training like emergency response training. For example, you can train your body to react a certain way in times of stress. The repetition here is the important part.
The other type of work is the type of work where repetition is a hindrance, and this is the type of work that I specialize in helping solopreneurs eliminate. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. My name is Joe Casabona, and I help solopreneurs build one high-leverage system so that they can step away from their business and take a vacation without bringing their laptop.
Today, I want to talk about that type of repetition that hurts you, and it's not because I see it a lot, which I do, and it's not because it's directly related to some sort of lead magnet, which I guess it could be. But it's because I was sitting here today, realizing that I am repeating a lot of my work.
In the middle of last year, I had a pretty well-oiled system for moving from newsletter to published blog post to podcast episode. And I even took some of that and turned it into shorts, or the idea behind a short, and social posts. Now, my process has changed a lot since then. I actually found myself, instead of recording the podcast episode first or recording a short first, which is the beginning of the process— I would do the recording, get the transcript, turn it into some semblance of text that I would then massage into something that's actually good, and make sure that the AI didn't editorialize anything as it does.
But lately I find myself writing more. I actually love writing the first draft. I have a blog post about this over on Streamlinedsolopreneur.com called The First Draft Is Where the Magic Happens. And you think— you have to think about the problem when you write the first draft, when you don't just say, hey, I've given you everything I've ever written, I'm thinking about this, give me a first draft.
I think it should go the other way around, where you write the whole first draft and read through it a few times, and then AI is the copy editor that proofreads it for you. But that's not really what this is about. What this is about is how I got into repeating myself too much. And so I would go from recording a podcast episode or recording a short where I have a really good system and process in place for that, because my VA does all the publishing of that stuff. And so I need to make sure everything is in there. And that would flow down to newsletter ideas for me. And so I had this really good interconnected system for, oh, here's the content I've published or I have coming out. What of this content will make a good newsletter? I find myself now writing the newsletter first and then going, oh, this newsletter would probably make a good podcast episode, except I like writing in Obsidian.
And so my process for writing is I write in Obsidian, I copy and paste it into my copy editor in Google Gemini. It tells me the spelling mistakes. I say, is that really, really all of them? And it's like, no, I found some more. We argue over, we don't argue because we don't argue. You can't argue with an LLM, but it points out things that I think are wrong. Anyway, I take the feedback that I think is worth taking, uh, and then I publish it to Streamlined Solopreneur, and I copy it into ConvertKit to send, but it's not making it to my newsletter tracker anymore.
And so when I go to look for ideas for episodes, now I need to think, have I published an episode about this newsletter already? Which means I'm going through and searching the site, searching my drafts, and searching the upcoming scheduled episodes. And that's too much repetition. There should be a button in Notion that says, turn this newsletter into a podcast episode, and then it automatically copies it into my podcast planner, or a way for me to say this episode is based on a newsletter and associate them. But because I'm not putting my newsletter into Notion, back into Notion anymore, I'm losing that step.
Now, before I get to a solution to this problem, I also want to highlight another place where I'm repeating stuff, and that is around workflow and automation quizzes. If you've been following me on social or you are on my newsletter, you'll know that I have been struggling to really nail down my positioning, my value proposition, my surprising, transformative promise. And it's really largely been around, oh, I'm going to help you, uh, bend the will of your tech or help you build better automations, convert your duct tape systems to a well-oiled machine, whatever, right? Too many things that I wasn't really sold on. Uh, plus my wife said she didn't like the bend tech to your will thing. Um, which I like, I put it to a vote across socials and LinkedIn, and it was like pretty even split on the two that I put out there. Like I say pretty even, it was even split. So like no help whatsoever.
Um, then I was talking to my friend Justin, uh, Justin Moore, and he brought something up that a few other people have brought up to me, but in a slightly different way. He said, why don't you focus on building one high leverage system? And in previous conversations, people, you should focus on like a content system or a CRM sort of system, right? Like be the content system guy or the CRM system guy. And I didn't really love that because I feel like my skills can be applied to all of that and I can help people where they need to be helped, right? Um, it's almost like telling a general contractor, like, you should only tile kitchen floors, uh, when they can do a lot more than that. And people probably want to hire them for a lot more than that. But Justin recommended have a quiz, right? Have like a, like an advanced quiz, right? Where people take it and then, based on their results, I recommend the one high-leverage system I built for them. And I love this idea.
And so I started to think through what the quiz would look like. And I already have an automations quiz, right? You can take that over at casabonda.org/quiz and it's like 4 questions. And then based on the answers to those 4 questions, I send you some Zapier automation recommendations. But the problem with that quiz is that it's really easy for somebody to pick too many different answers and then we don't have anything narrowed down.
However, I do have a Google form and this is where the repetition comes in. Cause I was like, oh, I can rebuild this from scratch and come up with more questions. And I realized I already did this and I'm actually working with Charlotte Crowther on my signature framework that is largely based on this form. And that form is way more advanced and it's not automated in any way. I would review the results and that's fine by me.
I don't think everything needs to be automated. I think that the human still needs to be somewhere in the business. But I have this Google form that I can send to people who are interested, and then based on their answers, which is a combination of long form and short form, now I could probably have AI like read the form results and pull out the language and blahdy blah, and then I could tell it to route it to one of 4 different ways.
But I don't want to do that right now. The whole point is that I started to build a thing that I have thrice built previously. And it's because I don't have a good system in place for this quiz stuff. Part of it is, is I feel like I'm jumping around too much. I feel like I've been thrashing a little bit, right? If you're unfamiliar with the term of thrashing and, uh, competitive gaming, especially like video games, It's like random lack of strategy, just trying a bunch of stuff and it's really frustrating and usually doesn't get you anywhere.
And I feel like I've been doing that lately and it's hard to build a system when there is no strategy and when you're just trying a bunch of stuff. Sometimes you do need to try stuff. I don't think I've completely wasted my time over the last couple of months, but it also means that I'm not documenting things well, which gets me to the solution for not repeating stuff, right? Because even in my analogy at the beginning of the episode, repetition for the sake of repetition may not get you anywhere, right? If you are lifting weights and you start at a bench press of 100 pounds and you never increase because you're not tracking how much you've been doing, then you're never going to get stronger. You'll always, you'll plateau and maybe that's fine. Maybe you don't want to be jacked, but the same thing goes with cardio, right? You, you want to continue to challenge yourself and adjust your workouts as your body adjusts to your workouts. So tracking, documenting is the important bit here. When you are creating content or creating forms or opt-ins, you really should have a system where you're keeping track of everything.
So what are my solutions for this? Well, I'm going to turn to Notion because I do basically everything in Notion and there are two options for me. The simplest would be to start writing my newsletters in Notion. My VA is already there, so she can start publishing my newsletters and blog posts if she wants. And then I could easily associate the newsletter with a podcast episode. Or because my toxic trait is over-engineering, and I really, really, really like writing in Obsidian. I could set up a Zapier automation to watch my newsletter. I'm actually already doing this to capture feedback and then take the published work and send it to Notion. I should probably do the former. My philosophy of the fewest links is important. I could also just copy from Obsidian into Notion, or, you know, if I could probably do something else. But Notion, it should be where it lives without having any sort of automation. So that's the solution to the problem.
And I have to commit to that, right? Just like when you run a half marathon or a marathon, you need to commit to the training. You do have to commit to the system. With my lead magnets, similarly, I'm going to create a Notion database of all of my lead magnets. I think this is something I should have been doing anyway. Like when you have a bunch, you should keep track of them. You should maybe categorize them into what type of content or where it makes sense to promote them.
And you could also track the efficacy of them, right? I, you know, I had a lead magnet for years that was just not good, but I wasn't really tracking any of that stuff. So I'm going to have a simple Notion database that has like the name of the lead magnet, where to find it, what it does, and just have the links there. And that'll be step one in trying to repeat less of my work.
So the big problem in business, repetition could be a big hindrance. And the solution is set up a system in place so that you can easily reference the work that you're doing. Now, for you, it might not be Notion, right? Maybe it's a Google Drive folder, right? If you have Google Forms, I think those forms all can show up in a Google Drive. All of your writing can be in Google Drive. Heck, if I wrote in Google Drive, I could actually probably automatically send it to ConvertKit for publish or whatever. So like find the system that works right for you, but document what you're doing and keep track of what you're doing.
Okay. That's it for this episode of Streamlined Solopreneur. I hope you enjoyed it. You can find links to everything I talked about below or over at streamlined.fm. Let me know what you think. Send your feedback to streamlinedfeedback.com. If you are worried about repeating your work, or maybe if you have tools that overlap, and so you're performing repetition by paying for too many tools, check out my tools audit over at streamlined.fm/tools.
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I hope you find some space in your week.