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Issue No. 84: How to Maintain Balance in Life to Ensure Success
Why Ebooks Are Your Best Bet For Driving Leads And Sales In 2024
Jenae Spry
May 31, 2024
In partnership with
Productivity Express
Issue No. 84
The Best in Evidenced-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
How to Maintain Balance in Life to Ensure Success
Why Ebooks Are Your Best Bet For Driving Leads And Sales In 2024
How to Time Block in Notion (Free Template)
The Stream Deck turned out to be an ultimate productivity companion I didn't know I needed
How to enhance generative AI’s problem-solving capabilities and boost workplace productivity
Add this book to your reading list
Sponsor
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Why are 250,000 Vinovest customers investing in whiskey?
In a word - consumption.
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🔥Quote/Prompt
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
Happy Motivated Monday! Can we take a second and just recognize that since we are all entrepreneurs, we're all out there doing hard things and there's risk involved. And we all decided that it was worth it to take the leap.
Can we all just take a minute and appreciate that we all did that or maybe are in the process of doing that? […]
Did someone forward this to you?
🎥 Productivity Quick Tip
 | Can you trick your brain into alertness with ...light? Yep. Here's how. See More & Join the Conversation: |
📈 Performance
Ok, look, this article is worth reading but I need to warn you that it’s a little rambly (no offense, Simon!) BUT great an actionable. He gives you some background and then he gets to a set of questions to help you audit where you are in terms of tracking your own risk for burnout and/or strategies for balance. The four areas he looks at are body, heart, mind, and soul (not necessarily religion). Since I thought the soul could potentially be the most controversial, I’ve included it as the excerpt here. Check out his list though and conduct your own self-assessment.
Soul
Mindfulness, thankfulness
How thankful am I, or can I be today?
How well am I doing in taking time to find peace and enjoy the moment?
Spirituality, faith
How well am I acting out what I believe in?
Am I prioritising the things I care most about?
Reflection, understanding
How well am I developing and reaching my potential?
How closely am I living to my core values?
Fun, recreation
How much fun have I had today or this week?
How much space do I have for my pastimes and recreation?
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⚙️ Optimization
I love that the author here has listed great ideas for how to use eBooks for top, middle and bottom of your sales funnel/sales process so that no matter how ready your customer is to buy, you can create an eBook strategy for them.
To be honest, this article is worth bookmarking so you can review it for your various stages and refer back to it. Most of the content I’ve seen has focused on top-of-funnel ebook use so I’ve included the excerpt for how to use eBooks for the bottom of the funnel (ready to buy). But the author gives examples of effective eBooks, titles, structure, and more for each stage so definitely check it out.
BOFU [Bottom of Funnel]:
Use ebooks as leave-behinds after sales calls and product demos. They provide details the prospect can peruse on their own.
Develop a modular ebook with sections for different buyers. Sales can then customize the content for each prospect's use cases, pain points, and triggers.
Arm sales with ebooks that directly compare your solution to competitors, giving them the information they need to handle objections and showcase your value proposition.
By adding ebooks into your sales process, you'll have more touchpoints to engage buyers, demonstrate value, and, ultimately, close more deals.
⏲️ Time Management
Heads up — this is a 9-minute YouTube video but does have a link to a free template for Notion users. Since I know a lot of you guys are Notion users, I thought this might be helpful for you. I’m partial to time blocking in ClickUp but if Notion is your jam, check this out!
💻 Tools & Technology
Before reading this article, I never would have guessed that this device would have been very useful for anyone other than streamers…you know, hence the name. But I’ve changed my tune and now I am not sure why I didn’t see it for exactly what it is, a faster shortcut device. So…anything you would want to open, or even happen, at the click of a button can be used here.
Take care of repetitive tasks
Gets me up to speed every morning
I primarily use the Stream Deck Neo to streamline a lot of repetitive tasks I do on a daily basis as a part of my everyday work rituals. With just a tap of a single button on the Stream Deck — which I have conveniently customized to display an XDA logo — I now open Slack to catch-up with messages that I may have missed from my colleagues who work in a different timezone, open Spotify to play an upbeat Lo-Fi playlist, and also open the most frequented websites on Chrome automatically.
This may not sound very convincing, but I save a surprising amount of time every day now that these repetitive tasks are taken care of. Not only does it get me up to speed with everything that's happened when I was away from work, but it also helps me get straight to my tasks for the day, which my wandering mind usually has trouble getting to. I can improve this workflow more with a little tinkering, but I'm happy with where it is at right now.
🤖 AI
If you aren’t already aware this is starting to happen and/or be analyzed in your industry, then you should read this article. Long story short and ultra simplified. Since you can tell a tool like ChatGPT, “you are a wedding planner and have been tasked with planning a wedding for..” and then ask it to do that job or similar/related jbos. This is basically creating “agents” — and then you can make them talk to each other in that capacity.
Below is an excerpt to further explain but the rest of the article gives more background if what I just summarized is a little confusing. :)
Consider a team of agents, each assigned a specific role through prompt engineering, working together to tackle a single goal. That’s essentially what agent workflows, or sometimes referred to as agentic workflows, do for LLMs. Each agent is responsible for a specific subtask, and they communicate with each other, passing information and results back and forth until the overall task is complete. By designing prompts that encourage logical reasoning, step-by-step problem-solving, and collaboration with other agents, we can create a system that mimics the deliberate and rational thinking associated with System 2.
Here is where this gets exciting: agent workflows could allow us to imitate entire knowledge teams. Imagine a virtual team of AI agents, each with its workflow’s own specialism, collaborating to solve problems and make decisions just like a human team would. This could revolutionise the way we work, allowing us to tackle more complex challenges with zero or minimal human-in-the-loop supervision. It also opens the idea of allowing us to simulate how teams will react to events in a sandbox environment, where every team member is modelled as an agent in the workflow. The conversational outputs could even be saved for retrieval latter, serving as long-term memory.
By combining the raw power of System 1 thinking with the structured reasoning of System 2, we can create AI systems that not only generate human-like responses but can also tackle more complex tasks and move towards solving problems. The future of work is here, and it’s powered by the symbiosis of human ingenuity and artificial intelligence.
👀 Read, Watch, Listen
This week’s awesome books, YouTube videos, newsletters, etc. to add to your list!
I have definitely recommended this book before but it’s currently on Kindle Unlimited if you have that. If not, just get it. I just finished a Deep Dive 1:1 session with a client today and I’m telling you, the lessons in this book come up over and over. Many of my clients are on their 2nd or 3rd read of this book to get it to sink in because the lessons here are SO massive and can make such a huge difference. It’s probably the most practical and science-based book I have read on a topic that often feels way too “woo” or “fluffy” so if you’re anti-woo pro-logic and science like me, you want this book.
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
I managed to do my morning gym every day.
Had an interesting discussion with banker who would be willing to finance [my] business.
Thought about domain names and really pushing myself forward on [plan for my additional business plan].
I'm finding that this [Doer’s Board] is great for things where I feel anxiety or blockages that make me procrastinate. I let them sit and marinate on this list, and then one day, I look for something from the list to do, and suddenly, the blockage is gone, and I'm able to do one of those things.
I stuck to most of my morning routine most days. I had a lot of work this week and consciously decided to skip my morning routine on Wednesday to get some of it done.
I managed to establish a new workflow where I write my newsletter and create one carussel post based on it.
I made a new training plan and started on it right away.
Quite a bit of mindset work towards the end of the week.
I have 4 new clients and another potential one just contacted me through my website after seeing my profile on the [redacted] listings.
What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!
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I hope you found this valuable!
Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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