Hey, 

Agency life has its ebbs and flows, ammiright?

With a couple of crazy-busy months, I think I’m smack dab in the middle of an ebb.

Not that it's necessarily bad, it’s just been (really) busy.

When the todo list stacks up longer than I’m comfortable with, I find myself coming back to the Eisenhower Matrix.

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s pretty simple… You put all your tasks into 1 of 4 categories:

Q1: Important & Urgent (Do First)

Q2: Important & Not Urgent (Schedule)

Q3: Not Important & Urgent (Delegate)

Q4: Not Important & Not-Urgent (Don't Do)

“Urgent” is in my original understanding of this concept, but I often think of it as time-sensitive.

What I really like about this is it makes me think about what I'm working on and if it's really the best use of my time.

Q1 items are emergencies that either came out of nowhere, or we're former Q2 items that are now due.

Q2 is where your time is best spent— scheduled & important tasks. This is where you'll get your most important work done without your hair on fire.

Q3 items will quickly eat away at your time, leaving you nothing to show for it.

Q4 items should generally be ignored.

What I’ve found is when I go and classify all my tasks, I find that I’m spending way too much time in quadrant 4 — where even one minute spent is too much.

Just the decision making process of “what should I do next” can be overwhelming (and probably leads me to more procrastination than I’d like to admit), but this Matrix helps take some of the decision making out of your hands. With all of your tasks tucked nicely into their quadrant, you don’t have to use brain power on deciding what to do, you know exactly what needs to be done first. 

Even with the same amount of work on my plate, separating the tasks this way gives me a better perspective that eases the stress.

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🔥 Inside The Group 

The catch-22 of hiring

Kris shared her story about needing to find help, but having a hard time knowing what route to take. Scaling your agency isn't easy, but the folks of TAB shared some great advice!

Do you use a tool or go old school?

Emily is wondering how people handle feedback from clients when they request edits/changes to their website. Should she use a tool, or is email good enough?

Archiving a website

Alison is curious to know what everyone's go-to method is for archiving an old website that's being taken down.

Automatic updates?

Aira is wondering if the good folks of TAB turn on automatic updates for clients who aren't on a care plan. Is it still too risky?

Are you attending WCEU?

Quite a few TAB folks are hitting up Porto this week. If you're there, drop a comment in this thread so you can connect!

📰 In Other News 

Website Maintenance Packages

I was recently interviewed by Collen Gratzer about care plans. It was a fun conversation that covered the whole spectrum from sales, to staying profitable, systems, and a whole lot more!

Oxygen 4.0 released!

The newest version of Oxygen features tons of quality of live improvements and a much improved update to the UI. 

Easier event tracking for Fathom analytics

Duncan and his team has released a new product to make event tracking in Fathom easier. It's limited in its implementation now, but shows promise for the folks like me who rather make this simple!

🤯 Tip of the Week

This week's tip is all about setting up your Starter Sites.

You can find all the tips here.

This week's Big Tipper award goes to Adam Lowe who shares his WP-CLI magic.

"This Week in TAB" is brought to you by our sponsors:

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👋 Before You Go

I just gotta give a shout out to the combination of Tango.us and Loom.

This week I ran through a few different odd-jobs I needed my son to tackle while he's working for me this summer.

All I did was hit "go" on Tango, and "record" on loom and walked through the process once. In the end I had both written and video instructions that he's been able to use to get all kinds of work done for me.

If it's good enough for a 12 year old to follow, then it's probably good enough for anyone!

If you're struggling with communicating your processes, I'd highly recommend giving it a shot — both pieces of software have free tiers, so you've got nothing to lose!