This week, Emily Merrell and Lexie Smith dive into time-saving hacks and strategies for coaches, sharing their personal approaches in their multi-business lives. They reflect on the evolving landscape of business promotion and the latest influence of technologies such as ChatGPT and AI. Beyond tech, Em and Lex share different techniques to help improve overall business productivity and efficiency.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Follow Em & Lex on Instagram at @readysetcoachprogram
Learn more about the Ready Set Coach Program at Readysetcoachprogram.com
Learn more about Six Degrees Society and THEPRBAR inc.
This week, Emily Merrell and Lexie Smith dive into time-saving hacks and strategies for coaches, sharing their personal approaches in their multi-business lives. They reflect on the evolving landscape of business promotion and the latest influence of technologies such as ChatGPT and AI. Beyond tech, Em and Lex share different techniques to help improve overall business productivity and efficiency.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Follow Em & Lex on Instagram at @readysetcoachprogram
Learn more about the Ready Set Coach Program at Readysetcoachprogram.com
Learn more about Six Degrees Society and THEPRBAR inc.
Lexie Smith
Hi, Lex. Hi. How's it going? Oh, I'm
Emily Merrell
good. I so enjoyed her Instagram. Would it be just do No, LinkedIn just did
Lexie Smith
a LinkedIn live with ladies get paid. You guys can still see it. If you missed us live. It's on YouTube, Facebook, and ladies get paid LinkedIn channel. It was rad.
Emily Merrell
It was really rad. It was really fun to be interviewed. We should bring someone in to interview us.
Lexie Smith
No, we should do it more. Talk to ourselves.
Emily Merrell
I love talking. Do you feel like we're sisters at this point?
Lexie Smith
We've established Sister Wives. I think we established that like a year ago. Yes.
Emily Merrell
We're past the point of friendship y'all. Like we're we're kind of just we're not I don't want to say that were mean to one another. But like, we're past politeness. Yeah. We're like at the siblings stage where you can like say what you mean. And you don't have to be you don't have to be passive about it and be like, maybe we parked in the wrong place. Or like you parked in the fucking wrong place. Sorry, if I can't say Oh,
Lexie Smith
Emily was just trying to sell me something before this. I'm like, No, I'm really good. She's like, No, you should really try and like I'm no, just no. Move on with your life.
Emily Merrell
I will get to speaking of selling you, I am back on the core power wagon.
Lexie Smith
I haven't seen what I got you.
Emily Merrell
So it's in the other room. My My child is trying to use it. But for my birthday. If you guys have listened to her past episodes, every time I say core power yoga, Lexi encourages me to take a shot. So she bought me a shot glasses for our yoga for my birthday. Which I think it'd be kind of fun if I bring it into the class. And I just you know,
Lexie Smith
green juice shots. I just couldn't resist.
Emily Merrell
But it was my first day back at this class. Since being away for two weeks, and I did everything that you're not supposed to do on vacation. Way didn't work out. So I didn't work out on vacation. I just ate and I drank and I ate and I drank. And I took this class and I kind of I made the mistake. This is one of those classes where it's so hot, you need to have like a good amount of food in your belly or you're gonna pass out and get really lightheaded. And I don't know if you've done hot yoga before. But yes, you know that feeling you're like, I know that. I'm gonna fall. So that was one of those days. And also, I felt wildly just like out of shape. But I felt like I was hitting the restart button on on everything, which is so frustrating. Anywho there was a woman who was pregnant in the class, and it was her due date. And she was doing like burpees. And she was jumping in.
Lexie Smith
Yeah. Oh, my darling.
Emily Merrell
Birth by end of class. Well, here I am just you know, taking Child's Pose doing the fetal position, Mike for half of it. So the point being is, you know, sometimes it feels hard to restart something. But I think once you actually do it, you there's so many benefits to what's the
Lexie Smith
metaphor, Emily, I appreciate it. And then there's the freaks of nature, like my husband who don't run for months and months, and then they get up this last Sunday and run 8.3 Miles like it's no sweat off their back. This guy doesn't run. He doesn't he's not a runner. And he just goes, I'm gonna go run today. And then it comes back like two hours later. He's like, I want three miles here too.
Emily Merrell
I'm like, oh, but why? Like what what inspired him? What motivated him to want to run?
Lexie Smith
He's I mean, he's big into fitness. Maybe he just wanted to? I don't know, great question. You can ask him when you are here. But I just been sitting there like eating my goldfish on the couch glaring at him. Like I can barely run a mile right now without dying
Emily Merrell
without peeing your pants, that's for sure. For me. Well, one, one last life lesson and then and then we can move on to our show. But my husband has this philosophy about working out and he says that it's easier to continue with the habit than to take days off and then re engage the habit. So he has only missed seven days. have run he runs. He's not he wouldn't consider himself a runner, he likes it that it's time cuz it's time efficient, you can do it anywhere. You don't need to bring much. And it's he gets his workout in under an hour. But it's easier to continue the momentum than to stop the momentum and to restart. And I think that's so true about a lot of things especially, especially coaching. And what else likes?
Lexie Smith
Well, the other thing you said, you know, was that he likes that it's an efficient exercise, which I got to appreciate that about Greg and agree. And, you know, we're just here we are, we're talking about time saving hacks for coaches.
Emily Merrell
Not our best transition, but I wasn't ready for it. I
Lexie Smith
thought you were like, anyways, I digress. All right, kick us off. Per usual putting you on the spot first. Oh,
Emily Merrell
what a what a gem. Um, so time saving hacks for coaches. I love this topic, because we are in the age of time saving. So let's go way back first off into the old days, and 1990s 1980s 1970s, which is actually
Lexie Smith
a while ago, which I don't feel like it is but the 90s even was, like 20 plus years ago, 23 years ago, 24 years ago, technically 33 would be 2000.
Emily Merrell
Then Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. And I am, I'm thinking like, 9090. I'm like, keep going. Keep going. Yeah, yeah, you're, you're correct. But I was gonna say so in that time period. As a business owner, you aren't marketing on social media. You weren't marketing on email quite yet. You aren't marketing on? Gosh, what other platforms to eat market on now.
Lexie Smith
What you are doing is probably a lot of printed out pamphlets, and billboards and advertising in magazines. You're not doing Google ads, or PPC, right? That's not really a thing yet.
Emily Merrell
Exactly. So it was very, very antiquated and daunting. And you had to, you had to get photocopies of things and you had to hand deliver them places. And it was just a lot of work and a lot of time. So even in the last 30 years, there have been so many time saving innovations that have come up, we know that email is one of them for for good or for bad. Email has changed the world. So as social media, anyone can market a product now without the overhead of having to bring in a billboard specialist or whatnot. And yet, even in the last few years, the advances have become that much more sophisticated. Guys, we're talking about AI. We're talking about chat GBT
Lexie Smith
last night, right? I'm prepping all these birthday things. And I'm realizing at like, 7pm at night, I'm like, Oh my God, I don't have a cupcake yet. And I go, Oh, great. I have an app for that. And I go on to DoorDash and I literally my lazy booty says for the Vons Uber guy to come deliver me a cupcake. And it's there in under 40 minutes. I mean, we're living in this culture of if it's not here by tomorrow from Amazon, like, Oh, my God, I can't wait. Right. So our society expectations, which we can argue probably both sides of the coin is a good and a bad thing. But we're consistently working in overdrive our expectations as consumers has our like dwindled, like our attention span has, and therefore there's more things competing for our time. And we have to become efficient. So let's talk about some of the things that are efficient or can help us for our coaching business. And Emily, you already mentioned one, I think we have to start here because kind of like how the Internet. The age of the internet changed the world. I think we're in a moment where the world is changing again, with AI.
Emily Merrell
Yeah, and I think AI it's, it's incredible if you guys want to really, really figure out where your family stands on things like bring up AI at a family discussion, you're going to hear people who are worried about robots taking over the world, and the world exploding because you had the Flexi swizzy exploding because of them pushing a button or on the flip side, you'll hear about people who are cutting the hours in which they're working and spending more time with their family. And they're able to work more productively thanks to these tools and these innovations. But at the top of it. I think all the news right now has been really focused on this specific tool called Chat GPT and bar, bartender and bird Yes, yesterday, right. So if you're not familiar with them, there's nothing really snazzy about either of them. It essentially looks like looks like a forum, it looks like you're like a, just one simple box, where you, you write a prompt, and you tell this tool what to do. So online, you're online, yes, you're it's an online tool, they also have an app now, I only really use the online version of it. But you can enter, you can write a prompt that says, write an email, write a coaching email about our upcoming cohort launching this summer, make it witty, and it can write a witty response. And then you're up, you want to modify it, you can give it more prompts and say, make sure that the language is geared towards women. And so then they can modify it. And it's geared towards women, or insert these dates or include information from this link. So essentially, you're feeding it information, and it's pulling from these already existing websites or what they know. And then they're, they're tweaking accordingly. And so what I, I really like about chat GPT and lacks, you can share what you don't like about it, but I think we're talking positively about these things on this episode is I like that, it can give you a framework, or it can give you a jumping off point. So what might have taken me an hour to write an email that I'm really proud of, I now now have a working idea of an email and I can stream I can edit it accordingly to add my voice and add my elements into it. without overthinking what I'm going to write an email to the same vein, if I need ideas, I can write into the chat box, hey, give me 10 ideas of email subjects for advertising a coaching program.
Lexie Smith
So Emily, is what I would say the ultimate like chat GCTs. Hype girl, I think you were one of the OGS like first person I heard talking about it. So you're also an early adopter, which is great, I have a very healthy appreciation for it, meaning I appreciate it, I think there's a space for it a place for it. I also understand the negatives that can come from it. It's essentially a massive content generation machine. And so yes, Emily just highlighted a lot of really positive ways that you can use it as a time saving tool in your business. So if you're getting stuck, for example, generating social media, prompt ideas, you could be like, give me 10 ideas of what to talk about for my coaching business. And it's gonna go pop up with PPP and give you a bunch of ideas. You can say, you know, I need to write a bio for my client, or edit this bio for my client and you can put it in and people, people, people, it's out. So I use it from a day to day as an aid. I use it when I'm feeling stuck. I use it for outlines. I use it for generating new ideas. If I have a word or another word, a sentence that I feel like it's not well worded, I'll ask GPT if they can reword it for me. And I found it really phenomenal in cutting down on brainstorming time. You have to be careful though. This is like the other side of the coin and relying on chat. GBT or Bard are these platforms solely for content production. Some of it is not accurate. A lot of it actually isn't and verified. And it's bridging the line between, in my opinion, what is authentic, your authentic voice. So I still think there's a time and a place where especially in the coaching industry, it's really important. And we should hear your unique point of view and a robot can't share your point of view. So I think long story long that there's a healthy marriage use or think of tools like chat GBT as a ideation, place to go for ideating ideas as a place when you're feeling stuck as a place for content generation. All great, great time saving hacks, other software and tools that are similar and great time saving hacks. One of my favorites is otter.ai otter.ai is a transcription tool. So Emily and I are huge on creating accessible content. We do transcripts for our podcasts, if we ever want to read this, mind you, they aren't perfect and grammatically perfect. Instead of us typing out our entire episode and listening back. We upload the file into otter.ai. And it transcribes it for us. So that's one of my favorite tools. What about you? I'm
Emily Merrell
one that I've been, I haven't built it myself, but I've been showing people who want to build a website, how it's great for inspiration for a website. It's called durable.co. And so you can type in the name of your business what you want and it will generate a website in 60 seconds for you. And so it's a great jumping off point. Yeah, it's incredible. Check it out. Yeah, It's it's it's a game changer, but it's nice in that it. If you're then gonna go build your website on on Squarespace or whatnot, you have an outline of what your website could look like. Because it to your point earlier, I think a lot of times you need a starting point and you're not quite sure where to start. So that's a favorite one of mine, another tool, we did a whole post on six degrees. So I'm looking at that is Geni dot i o jgnei.io. So whenever you're on a website, you can use it to summarize the whole page. So the longer the page, the longer the summary. So that kind of reminds me of what was the SparkNotes when we were younger.
Lexie Smith
And I've been using chat GBT for that. When I have mass, I got a client sent me like a five page book overview. And I was trying to help her narrow it down into one paragraph. So I'm like, Ah, IGBT. Can you summarize this in one paragraph? So this does something kind of similar, but it scans the actual web website for you not to like put it like copy and paste like govt
Emily Merrell
let me I think you can. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm unsure exactly. I'll also go out all I don't I don't go the other one. That's really cool. It's called booth.ai. And so you can generate product images that look like they were shot by a professional photographer, even if you have no photography experience. Another one is called mid journey, which you've probably heard of MIT journey before, it's a little bit more, it's a little bit more complicated, because you have to download discord, which is a platform, and then you have to talk to the journey within the platform. And so you could say like, Hey, why don't you create a picture of a blonde and a brunette woman talking on a podcast together and make it look like a Simpsons cartoon. And then it could generate and then you're like, oh, actually make it look like a Matisse painting. And so it will generate this or Okay,
Lexie Smith
so now we're going into guys and why Emily and here's my gripe with all these tools, I see the positives. But I have such respect for photographers and artists and copywriters, and where I want us as a society, what I want us to be careful of, is letting these tools replace humans who are invested in this craft. So there's positives to it, you know, I love that these are accessible, maybe you can't hire you know, $5,000 photographer so this is a great way to to bridge the gap, but also just had to like put a shout out that they do not replace the the true human beings behind these crafts. Behind Okay, so beyond all the.ai.al Bada all the little words, right, if you're feeling lost, don't worry. Let's talk about some other ways to save time as coaches. So one of the things we want to talk about if templatized ng templatized ng can be an absolute game changer for your business. And you can templatized everything from the follow up of a sales emails to an onboarding, email to your contract, of course, to some of the actual content or homework you offer, often your offer, offer your students. There's also different software's that can help you quickly save your templates. One of my favorites is streak. It integrates directly into your your Gmail, and it connects your templates to your Gmail inbox. But templates is a great one. Emily, what else is something we like to do? Or offer to save time?
Emily Merrell
Next, how can people find out how to work with
Lexie Smith
us? Super simple, go to ReadySet coach program.com can show notes.
Emily Merrell
Wow, excuse me guys. So just drink some water that went down the wrong wrong pipe,
Lexie Smith
I just casually let you die in the background and kept going.
Emily Merrell
You just kept on going. I think temples templatized how you do things. So I've we've talked about this before in our systems podcast. And I've got a raspy voice. But templatized thing, every little step of something that you do. And so often, you can catch yourself doing the same repetitive task over and over again. And so when you've caught yourself doing it at least twice, that's the moment that you stop and you pause and you take that email that you're writing for the 1,000th time and you put it into a document that says email response for a question about blah, blah, blah. And to Lexi's point, you can pop it into streak or if you're not someone who likes Gmail plugins like myself, you can guys I actually really hate it. And we can talk about that in a second. So
Lexie Smith
ironic because you're like pro new tech, but you're like an old lady in so many ways. is so many
Emily Merrell
ways. And we'll go into that in one moment. But when I put it into a Trello board where I then have like to dues I have I labeled them to do so that I know what the responses are for things. Here's my hack, y'all. I don't like Gmail, because it, I like Gmail, I use Gmail, I don't like the user interface of Gmail, because I find it really hard to sort and I find it really hard, I get overwhelmed. And so what my hack is for saving time on my end, is I use the Apple Mail. thing that comes with your Mac computer, or if you're a Windows user, I think there's like a Windows version of it. And I plug in my Gmail, and I plug in my six degrees, I plug in my ReadySet, Coach email, I plug in my events at six degrees email, I plug in my Gmail, and they're all there and I can toggle between all of them, and then I can sort. And so it doesn't have a lot of plugins, but it saves me time. And it's easier to delete things.
Lexie Smith
So templates are great. Something else we want to talk about are the way you deliver content. So beyond having different templates for homework, if that's part of your coaching practice, something that you can consider doing is if there's foundational knowledge that you are starting to notice you deliver to clients time and time and time again, consider recording a module. So for ReadySet coach, for example, while we still integrate live coaching, so we meet bi weekly as a group, and we have one on one coaching the content, we offer as pre recorded modules, which while it took a lot of time when we recorded them to make now and we're in our group cohorts, it's as simple as dropping the link to the content, and it has saved so much time for us.
Emily Merrell
Oh my god, it's been a game changer. And and it answers those questions that get asked over and over and over again. Another thing to add on that same point to making your life easier, are automating things. And we've talked about this in past episodes, but batching, so batching, how you do things. So could it be writing all of your newsletters in one sweep, and then scheduling it in your email provider. So then at the start of the month, all of your emails for July are now scheduled. And you don't have to then go, Oh, my God, I meant to send out a fourth of July promo email shoot, and you stop your family barbecue. And that's what you're doing. Now, you want to be thinking ahead of time for the month ahead or the week ahead or the year ahead, however organized you are. Similarly with social media, I think that's a really incredible time saving hack is if you want to post your content in real time, rewrite it, if you want to schedule it, that will make your life that much easier. Instagram now has an opportunity for you to schedule directly within to that directly within the app. So if you're don't want to overcomplicate it with an outside tool, you can just schedule all of your posts within the app.
Lexie Smith
Awesome. And another thing I do one thing I was on a call with a mutual client of Emily nice yesterday, and everything that we're mentioning right now depends on how you work best. So these are all ideas, Emily is phenomenal. And the way she works works great with content batching. For me, it's not a productive use of my time, because it does, I don't thrive, I have to find other areas of my business to time to save time. So for you, you might find a system that works to save time with social media. While for me, let's see, maybe I'm saving time when I have it stuck. So that's another one. I have this podcast and we have another podcast and I listened to the edited versions before they go live. So when I do that, because that would have me sitting down for 30 minutes to 45 minutes per episode. I listened to them back when I'm on a stroller walk with my daughter, so that I'm not spending precious time when I have childcare dedicated listening to these episodes. So habit stacking is something that works good for me. Similarly, since I don't work well with content batching when I'm at the gym, which is in my garage on my bike, and I've used both my hands, that's when I opened my notes up on my phone and I'm really great at producing content. So that's a habit stack as well
Emily Merrell
as are very good examples of habit stacking. And I love that Ashlyn is probably having like full conversations with you in French and you're like, Sorry, can't talk to you. listening to our podcast, I love it. I love it. And I think one thing also to think about for you all here is to start being cognizant of your time and how you're spending it. How are you spending your time and I today was a perfect example of me dilly dallying and ways in which I could have probably been more productive and probably worked more intentionally. I got distracted threads came out today on Instagram. So I was like, Oh, what is threads? And I went down a rabbit hole,
Lexie Smith
basically exactly like Twitter. Yeah, it's Twitter. They knocked off Twitter. Yeah. Runs knocking off everyone. Yeah, right. Yeah,
Emily Merrell
exactly. But, but if you are someone that's like, where am I spending my time where I want to get a better understanding, there's different tools that you can use to track your time that much more. You can use something like time hero you can use, I think it's clock Nephi. You can kind of like, see where you are. You can also just take notes on on your phone of where you are tracking your time, you're like, Oh, my God, I just spent, you can even look on your phone, they'll tell you, if you were using your phone, predominantly, you'll say like, Hey, you spent six hours on social media today. Good luck out there. Whatever it is, but I think knowing where you are dedicating your time, it will help you help inform how you can best spend your time and be more productive moving forward.
Lexie Smith
So that's your homework, guys, you're going to do a time audit. So a time audit is you can do it on your phone. You can do it with pen and paper, you can have an Excel sheet, you can use a tool, like Emily said, but for one day or at least one chunk of a day. Track your time by task. How much time are you spending doing certain tasks. So that's step one, but no judgment, just track. Step two is to go back through an audit and see if there are areas where you're spending three hours with maybe a tool that we mentioned today. It could take you 15 minutes. So time track, take a step back, then look at the areas for opportunities and see if there's a tool circa 2023 Or a strategy a time saving strategy that you can
Emily Merrell
implement. Yes, amen to that. And with that, we will see you the next time on The Ready Set.
Lexie Smith
Coach the podcast
Emily Merrell
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