During a presentation, someone once asked me a question:
“Presentations take me too long to prep for. What do I do about that?”
Let’s talk about ways to do things faster – and also a more empowered approach to take when it comes to managing your time.
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Full Transcript
Ep 71. “How Do I Do Things Faster?”
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so a number of years ago, I was giving a presentation to an organization, and at the end of the presentation, I kind of walked through the overview of The Bright Method. I got a question that has really stuck with me, both in its simplicity but also what it represents in how I think a lot of us think about things. And the question was from a woman, and she said, “It takes me way too long to prepare for presentations. What do I do about it?”
And I want to talk about that because I think that a lot of us have that feeling of, “I just need to do some of these things faster,” and I’m sure it comes up for you in whatever context it does, and let’s talk about it today. Let’s talk about, first, some ways that we can get things done faster, particularly on the work front, and then I want to shift to a more powerful and empowering approach that I think will really help.
Idea #1: Create Workflows For Repetitive Things – 1:23
So when it comes to doing things faster, I would say that the first suggestion I have is less around doing things faster and more about doing things smoother, if that makes sense. For her, she was talking about doing presentations plural, and so, that a little bit pre-supposes that there’s a repetitive thing going on, or it does pre-suppose that. And so, for the repetitive things you do in your job, and perhaps in your personal life, are there ways that you can just kind of memorialize the workflow of doing those repetitive things? And what I mean by that is creating an Excel spreadsheet, using a Word document, using a project management tool, anything you want, and writing down all the steps that go into it.
And the reason that I suggest this here is because then every single time you do it, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can take this draft workflow and modify it, personalize it to the specific presentation or whatever it is that you’re doing, but modify it so that you’re not forgetting steps until the last minute and then you’re scrambling to do them or things like that.
So basically just having a workflow for the repetitive things. Not everything but for the things that you do frequently, having that workflow might help you at least plan on the front end more quickly and then have the whole process be a lot smoother and you avoid those forgotten steps that you might forget to do one time if you don’t have this workflow and are using it as your touchstone.
So that’s the first idea is, really, for those repetitive things, creating workflows so you at least clarify all the steps that go into them and ensure that you’re doing all of them.
Idea #2: Utilizing AI – 3:01
A second option here is AI. Now, I’m bringing this up because it’s 2024. I know that it’s where a lot of people’s heads go, and so, with AI advancements, perhaps you could use that tool(s) in some way to allow you to be faster.
I think there are some awesome benefits to AI. Going back to that previous example, even giving you a rough draft for a workflow for a type of project could be a really awesome way to use AI. I’ve also heard of some really amazing ways to use it in your personal life in particular. So even last night someone actually messaged me about using AI to meal plan for the week and saying, “I have three kids, two adults. What are some easy, kid-friendly meals for the week?” and then backing out grocery lists. And I thought that was just brilliant. It’s such a great way to use AI to really make your life easier.
I’ve also heard of it for activities like itineraries even for the weekend. Just like, “What’s going on in my area this weekend? What are some ideas? What are great playgrounds in the area within this X amount of miles of our house,” or whatever it might be, or “We’re going to this town. What’s a great itinerary for it with kids or without kids or eight adults,” whatever it might be. Those can be really great ways to help make life easier.
That said, I have my own hesitations around AI. I won’t go into them too much. I think that they’re probably related to, one, me coming from an IP background and then, two, just being old and resistant to things. [Laughs] And so, I don’t know if my hesitations are fully legitimate or not. I will say I have talked to an AI expert, and he kind of confirmed some of my concerns, and so, I’ll just share them here to the extent — I mean, you can take them.
I don’t have any expertise in this area. I just have concerns about, well, a couple things. I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s mind talking about confidentiality. I think I would be very conservative on what information you share with AI about yourself personally, other people personally, and also any confidential information at work. I just don’t think there’s enough clarity around where this information goes, where it’s stored, all that kind of stuff.
I also have IP concerns. It’s pulling on information that is on the internet or that it has been trained with, and to me, from a content creation standpoint, whether you’re creating presentation slides or drafting anything that you’re going to send out to other people as your own work product, it’s not clear to me where it’s getting that information, where the sentences are coming from, that kind of stuff. And I don’t have enough confidence to use it in my own business, for example, creating any sort of original work by me because I don’t have confidence that it’s not pulling sentences or concepts or anything like that from somebody else’s work, and then I have weird ethical things about presenting it as if it was my idea when it wasn’t my original work.
But more to the point from an IP standpoint, it’s not clear to me. I’m like is this someone else’s idea that it’s pulling off of somebody else’s blog, and I’m suddenly going to take credit for it? Anyways, I go on. I digress. But I did run especially that IP concern by an AI expert who’s really much more involved than I am, and he was like, “Yeah, I would not — I would be very careful there. It’s not clear, and there are gonna be some big lawsuits in the future about this,” if they are not already filed. I think some of them already are.
So those are my concerns. AI sounds really great. I more wanted to give my own hesitations around using it because I think that we just want to be careful about new technology. That said, Maybe I’m just being grandma-ish about it, and someone can reach out to me and tell me I’m wrong, which is totally fine.
Idea #3: Delegating – 6:50
The last thing that comes to mind to make things faster is delegating. Now, I think we all know that delegating can slow things down too. And so, I think where I would really go to for speeding things up is the repetitive stuff that the frontend cost, timewise, of training someone up on doing something is worth it for a long-term pay off. So if you can delegate out attending meetings or drafting certain presentations or documents or things like that, that makes a lot of sense to train someone up if that’s something you’re doing once a week or a month, and they’re gonna take that over in the long run, and it might slow you down for a couple of months but it’s worth it.
Embracing How Long It Realistically Takes to Do Things – 7:29
So these are ideas (workflows, AI, delegation) to speed you up. On the whole, my guess is that’s not very super satisfying to hear, which I really get. And I just want to point this out that you’re smart. The women I work with are smart. If there were magical ways to do everything faster, you would have figured it out by now. And so, I think, in my opinion, the more powerful approach to take here is embracing that it takes that long to do that thing, and in light of that, let’s get creative about what we can do about it. What does that mean? If that’s how long it takes to do something, what does that mean?
So I want to walk through some options. I’m gonna apply them a bit to that example of the woman having to draft X for presentations and prepare for them. But I also am gonna talk about it more in the areas outside of that as well.
So there really are no finite options here. There are probably a ton of creative solutions that could come out of this, but when you embrace that, for example, it takes you X amount of time to prepare for presentations on average, plus or minus, let’s say, two or three hours, what does that mean? The first thing I want it to mean for you is that you calendar that amount of time and lean on the conservative, over-inclusive time when you calendar. You calendar that amount of time for every single presentation you have.
So, for this woman, if she had five presentations coming up in the next six months, I’d want her to find each of those presentations and calendar the amount of time she needed to prepare for that. That might include multiple different blocks. It’s not like you do it all in one swoop. But for each presentation, calendar that amount of prep time. Seeing that can be very powerful.
Now, that might be all you need. You know, if you just are like, “Yep, it takes me this long. I’m gonna calendar this amount of time.” Now, this person and you, if you’re doing this, have sufficient time protected in your calendar to do that, and that might be all you need. It might really reduce your stress to be like, “Okay, I’m just gonna embrace it takes me this long and protect that time for it.”
You might have other feelings though that come up when you do that, and you see that amount of time in your calendar protected for those presentations. It might push you to do certain things when it comes to presentations or whatever the comparable activity is for you. You might decide that you don’t want to do that activity as much and eliminate it entirely to the extent you can or just reduce how often you say yes to these types of things.
This obviously gets more complicated if you have less unilateral control over your workload, but I think even if you don’t have total control over what presentations you say yes to and things like that, it does inform your baseline willingness to say yes or no to things when you realize how much time those things take. You might find yourself pushing back a little bit or pushing out a deadline because of how much work goes into that thing, and then now you have clarity around how much work it takes. You don’t have this somewhat wishful thinking like, “It’ll just take me less time this time.” If you’re like, “Nope. It takes me this amount of time to do that thing. Therefore, maybe I can’t say no to this thing, but I can push back on when I have to have it in because I have clarity around, ‘It takes me X amount of time.’”
And just know that you having clarity about how much time it takes because all these steps go into it gives you a lot more confidence and power in conversations around this. I’ve had a client who was getting an assignment to do something, and she said, “I need to push it out by two weeks because it takes us 20 hours to do this. It takes my team 20 hours to put this together,” and the boss kind of balked because they hadn’t done it in so long, or maybe they’d never done it and they weren’t away of the amount of time. And because she had the clarity around what we had been talking about, she was able to stand firm in that and say, “Nope, XYZ has to happen. Then XYZ has to happen. Then these other things have to happen. It really stacks up to about 20 hours, and we need sufficient time to do that.” And having clarity about time and what goes into it is really, really powerful when you go into these conversations. And so, just know that might happen. That pushback might happen, but you’ll feel more empowered and equipped to handle it because you have this clarity.
So again, just to recap that little point because I kind of went off on a tangent there is you can eliminate that activity or majorly reduce how often you do it. You also might schedule things out farther in light of the prep work that goes into something that now you have clarity around. If you can’t unilaterally make those calls, you can at least come at it from a place of, “I don’t just say yes and then demand I work faster at doing something.” You can stand a little bit more firm in, “Yes, I can do that. But I need more time.” The flip side is you might not be able to push back at all on the timeline or saying yes, but now when you calendar that, again, using the presentation example, and all the prep work that goes into it, you will see now on the front end where the conflicts are with your other work and potentially might move out that other work in light of it.
Standardizing or Specializing – 12:40
A couple other options here come a little bit more — I think they’re related. One is standardizing. So for this woman who’s doing presentations, some of those presentations were, in her case, I think it was a little bit more like the client of her organization. It would vary by the client. But there was room for there to standardize portions of the presentation and then just personalize other components of it.
So I would just throw that out there that if there are ways that you can standardize your work and, again, that leans into the workflow, then you kind of have this repetitive stuff that you can recycle slides or workflow or things like that, that can help speed you up a little bit. And while that can help speed you up, I bring it up in this context because if you embrace how long things take, then one thing you might want to do is realize when I’m personalizing something or learning something new to handle in a presentation or whatever it is, that slows me down. And so, the more I can standardize my presentations or work, the better.
If you’re like, “This has no relevance to what I’m doing. I don’t do standardized anything,” what I would encourage you to think about is specializing then. If you can’t standardize things you do, you still have an option, perhaps, to specialize. So, for example, I think of this in the law context.
When I was new as a junior associate in a big law firm and litigation department, I was doing all sorts of litigation, like IP but also general commercial, employment law, all sorts of stuff. Over time, I started specializing in large part to work with a particular team, and I found the substance of IP litigation super fascinating. I really loved it. The benefit also of specializing is then you start operating in a world where you get really familiar with kind of the broad strokes of the world. Once I was in the IP world, I could just issue spot things, I understood the basic tenants of the law, things like that. I got a lot faster operating in that world, in just the IP world, than if I were also doing IP but also had to do employment and general commercial and all these other things and often teach myself the law in the process of litigating a case.
The more you can specialize in something, the more you can, in a sense, standardize your work. You create more familiarity for yourself within that world and therefore it takes you less time to do things and it’s easier and more standardized, as I said, because you’re operating in the same type of world.
So if you are kind of a general practitioner in law or anywhere else, over time as you learn what you like, the type of people that you like working with and what they do, things like that, the more you can specialize, the more you will allow your work to be more streamlined. And through that you actually get faster at operating because you’re more familiar with it and it’s taking less time. You’re more familiar with this world and can apply it.
And I see this a lot with clients who are starting out their own law firms, and again, law is really accessible to me, but this can happen — this can be a medical-type thing, anything. When you’re new as a business owner, whether it’s a law firm or something else, you often take on anything that comes at you. You’ll take on anything because you’re like, “I don’t really know how. My marketing’s not there. I’m not getting enough clients. I have to kind of take whatever comes at me.” And you’re somewhat of a general practitioner.
But in that comes with it the time cost of having to learn a lot of these things, and often at least sometimes for me, I wouldn’t bill for that time that I was learning the basics of something. And it wasn’t for everything. I’m not saying don’t bill your time. But sometimes I felt like I’m just reading a treatise to get schooled up on this area of law that’s really basic. I shouldn’t be billing the client for this. And so, you might even be spending a lot of time that you’re not getting paid for doing things just to get caught up to speed on a certain area.
And what I would recommend is over time, as your business level comes in at a good clip and things like that, is really start specializing in areas that you’re good at, that you enjoy, things like that because, again, then you get that familiarity. I’ve seen this in the medical space, especially with let’s say even physical therapists, if you start specializing in a certain type of treatment for injuries or any sort of ailments or things like that, then you know what you’re doing more, and so, you can streamline the process and make it easier, smoother, and sometimes faster for yourself.
Related to that, and this might just be more for business owners who have more control over the rates that they charge for certain things, is you might start seeing, “I need to take on less of these things and maybe specialize in something more, and because of that I need to raise my rate. Now that I see how much time goes into something and that I can’t take on as many, I’m going to need to have a different approach to hit my revenue goals, and so, for that I’m gonna have to raise my rate because I’m gonna have to do less of these things.” Or you’re gonna do the same amount of them but now that you realize that they take up so much more time and that you’ll not be able to do other work as much because of how much time, whatever we’re talking about, presentations or something else takes, you’re gonna have to up your rate for those things.
All in all, what I want you to hear is I think the more powerful inquiry is less around, “How am I gonna do things faster so I can cram more in,” and more around, “These things take this long. That is a fact. So how do I plan my work and potentially make some tougher calls on the front end in light of how long all of these things take and the limits of my own time and energy so that I’m making time for the most important things and leaving less important things behind.”
Recap – 18:35
Just to recap what we’ve talked about, although I think this is an endless list of creative solutions, you can eliminate something entirely. You can do that work less frequently. You can ask for longer deadlines to do that type of work. Maybe you decide to keep this type of work, do it just as you’ve been doing it in the past, and just build in the prep time that you need. But that requires you to move other types of work in light of these things, which is totally another option as well.
You might decide that you want to specialize or standardize your work to make that work smoother, to have that less up-front cost on educating yourself on how to do that type of work. The more you can get familiar with it, the quicker you’ll get and the more comfortable you’ll get with it. And then another option is just raising your rates in light of how much time something takes.
I don’t think this is the end of the discussion. It’s the end of this podcast but it’s not the end of this discussion. because, as I said, there are so many other options that you probably could do. I think that this is where creativity can really shine and that the more you experiment with, the more ideas you’ll have. I just want to throw that out there as well. It’s an experiment. Just try something. Try something on for size for the next six months and see how it goes. Learn what works. Maybe it doesn’t work. But think about why so that you can try another creative solution. You don’t have to solve it perfectly right now. You just have to be willing to take an approach and try it for a period of time. Give it a real shake. Don’t give up on it at the first hurdle. But try it out and see how it goes.
If you have trouble, understandably, trying to figure out the prioritizing element that goes into this, check out episode four. I think it’s a good accompanying episode for this episode because it talks a lot about prioritizing and understanding capacity and what’s already in there and all of that kind of stuff.
I hope that this makes sense! I think it was a little bit meandering. It’s not as clear, perhaps, as some of the episodes I like to do. But I think it’s really worth it. I think the more that we can shift out of, “How do I do things faster? How do I do more and more and more? How do I cram more in,” and shift into that more I would almost say leadership approach of, “These things take time. I cannot do them all faster. This is what it is. Let me take it as fact, as these things take time. Let me also take as fact that I have limited time or energy, or so does my team, and therefore let’s get creative of how we’re going to prioritize the most important things and modify anything that’s not working for us,” whether it’s a timeline, what projects we take on, all that kind of stuff we’ve talked about.
If you have anything you want to add into this conversation, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to disagree with me. Also feel free just to add more ideas, more creativity to it. And you can message me at ke***@ke********.com or shoot me a DM on Instagram.
Thanks for nerding out on this with me! Check out episode four on prioritization if you haven’t already or want a refresh and thank you for being here. I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
