I’m so grateful how virtual summits and online conferences make professional learning accessible. But if we aren’t careful they can cause overwhelm and even have the potential to drive our progress towards the big important goals off track. It’s taken me time to develop systems to help me make the most of these virtual learning opportunities but today I’m sharing my summit systems with you.
–> I’d love to support your business
Learn more here
–> Do you have a win-win story to share with the teacher business community?
Apply to be a guest here
–> Let’s chat business on Instagram @teacherjaniceva
Reach out on Instagram here
Read the transcript:
Janice Cook 0:00 Welcome back to Your Win-Win Teacher Business. I’m so grateful for how virtual summits and online conferences make professional learning accessible, but if we aren’t careful they can cause overwhelm and even have the potential to drive our progress towards the big, important goals off track. It’s taken me time to develop systems to help me make the most of these virtual learning opportunities, and today I’m sharing my summit systems with you.
Janice Cook 0:33 You’re listening to Your Win-Win Teacher Business, a podcast for teacher authors who want to make a big impact in the world for teachers and students and have fun doing it. I’m your host, Janice Cook, here with a pep talk to start your week off strong. Some seasons of running a business feel hard and sticky, but it shouldn’t feel like that all the time. Let’s make your business a win-win together.
Janice Cook 0:58 Before we dive into today’s episode, I wanted to give a shout out to charlyn styles for leaving such a sweet review for the podcast. She said, I’m so excited for the continuous growth of this podcast. Our awesome host is so generous in sharing positive and beneficial information with such a kind and down to earth personality. Woo hoo. This review made me smile. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump through the hoops in Apple podcasts and leave this message. I really want this to be our podcast, so please know it means the world to me when you log in and share your thoughts about the show. It’s also really helpful for other teacher business owners to know what to expect before they push play for the first time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Janice Cook 1:46 I’m recording this episode after doing something that I would have never done a few years ago. I attended two virtual summits in the same week. I do not recommend this, but for me, it was the right thing and let me explain why. One of these summits was laser focused on my current goal for this year, which means all of the sessions were aligned to the same topic, and all of the people at the summit all shared the same common goal. And that was a heck yes for me. It was bite size, it was audio only, it was so well organized, and I got in, got great action plans that were a perfect fit for my business, and I got right back to work. Later in the week, was a summit of a very different style. This summit is more like what you see at a virtual conference, where there’s a hodgepodge of sessions for a variety of different topics, for people at different stages of their business, and a wide variety of people to network with. And there’s pros and cons of these types of summits. It’s not that one is better than the other but you always want to choose your summits wisely by really thinking about your stage of business and your goals and what you hope to get out of that summit opportunity. I consumed every single session at both of these summits, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that unless I had a plan and a system.
Janice Cook 3:20 This is a year in my business where I feel confident enough in my systems that I knew I wasn’t going to get distracted by shiny objects. I knew that I could make space in my capacity puzzle for this professional learning opportunity, and I felt confident in my systems that it wasn’t going to pull me off track. And I realize that not everybody is in that place. I have been through the overwhelm soup of many a virtual learning opportunity, and that’s where my heart is today in sharing these seven systems that can help you skip that summit overwhelm.
Janice Cook 3:58 So system number one is that you need to check in with your goal before you walk into that summit for the first time. I keep my goal posted above my computer. It’s visual. I can see it, and as I’m scrolling a list of sessions and I read their titles, I have to gut check myself say, “Is this session going to get me closer to the goal I’m trying to achieve right now?” And if it’s not, you can skip it. It’s totally okay. Sometimes I might go into a session that’s not aligned to my goal, but I will build that awareness muscle with myself first to say, okay, there are going to be great ideas in here. They’re not for right now, Janice, but if I find something that’s exciting to me, I can put it in this place for next year, when I’m making a plan and I’m goal setting. So it’s just helpful for me to frame my mindset carefully before I push play on a session, and remind myself what my to do list already looks like and what goal I’m trying to achieve right now. Before you push play on a session, before you decide to go in and hear the next must do task and software and tool that you need – they’re going to make it compelling, they’re going to make you feel like you need it – you need to have your goal crystal clear in front of you, to remind you what you’re working on right now. And that doesn’t mean it’s not okay to pivot if you leave a summit and decide that you actually should pivot your goal and do that before what you were planning on, and it’s intentional, and you really feel good about that gut check, I’m all for it. But usually I’m banking this PD, I’m learning more, and I’m finding a spot on my calendar for it later, so that I still honor the goals that I currently have. And I just encourage you that having eyes on your goal is step number one before you walk into a virtual learning opportunity.
Janice Cook 6:15 System number two has to do with accountability. If you have friends in a mastermind chat business besties that you always chat with on social media, you need to grab a friend or two, and if they have aligned goals, and this summit would be a win-win for them, bring them with you. Go to the summit together, talk about your plan, and be a sounding board for each other. Let them know if the action step they’re about to take sounds like it isn’t in alignment with the goals you know that they’re working on right now, and ask them to do the same for you. It’s really powerful when a new, exciting idea is mentioned, to have people that you already have an established trust and relationship with and are already like minded and aligned in how they want to run a business. Those are the people you want to be your sounding board as you unpack new ideas and think, hmm, is this something I want to dabble in and bring into my business with curiosity, or do I feel repelled from this strategy, and does it just make me feel stronger about the game plan that I already have? There’s nothing that says that every session and every technique and every idea is a yes and a right fit for your business. You always have to take your CEO lens through the sea of new ideas and filter that information and decide what you’re going to bring into your business. So if you’re heading into a summit, don’t wait until the second or third day of the learning opportunity to tell your business besties about it. Invite them to come with you, see if it aligns on their calendar, and hold space for each other so that you can process all of this new learning in this compressed time period.
Janice Cook 8:09 System number three is a note taking plan. This one’s really tricky for me. I find when I’m consuming a fire hose amount of content that sometimes I’m going to be hearing the content at my computer, and sometimes I’m going to be having to take that content on the go and listening on my mobile device. That’s the only way that I’ll have enough time. So I tend to take screenshots in both situations. I will grab a screenshot of a slide on desktop, I will grab a screenshot of the whole screen on mobile. But I have to have a place to put those. I have to say these are going to go into this Google Drive folder with the name of the summit and the year or the date, or these are going to go in this asana task, and once a day, or at the end of the week, I’m going to gather all the screenshots from both of the locations. I’m going to look through them again. I’m going to decide which ones I don’t actually need, which ones are there because I just needed one piece of information that I could put in another place, which one is there to remind me to talk to my accountability pod about it, and I need to take those screenshots and actually use them. I took them for a reason. So you need to decide before the summit starts where you’re going to take your notes and when you’re going to process them at the end of the event. So we’re not just scheduling time to consume this content passively. It’s really important to actually take your notes and make sure you block off some time to look at them, because that’s when the deeper learning happens, not really when the presenter is throwing new ideas your way.
Janice Cook 9:54 System number four is related. It’s an action items plan. So I usually give myself a one week time period if there are quick wins that I can do and take action on and optimize and try from a virtual learning opportunity, I’m gonna take action and put those tiny tasks on my calendar for the upcoming week. I’ll probably put them all in one Asana task, and I’ll just run through it as a running checklist and make sure I finish before the end of the next week. And then I have a second task on my Asana calendar that actually is for the following calendar year. So I do my annual planning in October. I will take my notes from this summit, and I will really write good notes to future Janice about why I think I might want to consider making space for this in the upcoming calendar year. And I’ll include those couple of screenshots that I saved, relevant links, maybe a freebie download that came in – I don’t want to be digging back months for in my email inbox. And I will gather all of those resources into that Asana task so that in October, when I sit down to plan my goals, I have this gift from past Janice on my Asana calendar that says, Oh yeah, remember that virtual summit you went to? You felt called to really look more into this in the new year, and then as I’m making space for what the next step is in my business, in October, I have so much more clarity about where my business is, to look at the data and decide if that indeed is the next step, and I have the resources that that presentation gave me. They’re not lost in a Google Drive. They’re not lost in the bin because a post it note fell off my desk. They’re not closed in a notebook never to be found again. I put them on my calendar when I anticipated having the brain space to actually take action on those. Because they’re not part of this year’s plan again, unless I’m feeling called to do a really intentional pivot. I’m not going to have any time between now and October, it’s very unlikely that I’m going to finish this year’s goals in 10 months instead of 12. The earliest new capacity is going to open up on my calendar for really true, new, bright, shiny ideas is the fall. So that’s where I put items that can’t be accomplished in the first week. If it’s a tiny task and a quick win, I will do it the week after the summit. If it’s a bigger picture needle mover for me, it goes on my calendar in October. And I know that when I sit down to do my annual planning, I will be so grateful to past Janice that she gathered those resources and put them in one place so that I can have a really productive annual planning meeting with some ideas already kind of on the virtual whiteboard to start with.
Janice Cook 12:51 System number five is a filing plan. You’re going to get so many PDFs and so many workbooks and so many resources, and you don’t have to save them all. But if you are saving them, they need to be in a folder, either on your desktop or in your Google Drive or your Dropbox or your iCloud or your project management system, and they need to be filed properly so you ever have a chance to find them again, and they need to be named properly. So depending on what they are, they might all be saved in the folder where it’s named what the summit was, but they might be good stand alone resources that night need to kind of be filed with other materials like them. For example, if there was a really great blogging resource, you probably have a folder where you keep all of your blogging professional development. So it might be good at that point to take it out of the summit folder and move that really valuable resource to hang out with all of your other blogging reference materials. You really want to think about when I’m doing this action, where am I going to be looking for resources, and you need to make sure that these golden nuggets that you found end up in the right place.
Janice Cook 14:07 System number six, we’re going to come back to the schedule. You need to schedule time to watch or listen. If there’s a lot of content, it might be a little bit of everything, like we talked about before. It might be swapping out the podcast you usually listen to, the time you usually wind down and read, the time you usually watch TV – it might just be a wash this week where you take out all of those media consumption blocks and you swap it out for professional development. But actually mark out on your calendar when you’re going to be consuming this content before you sign up, because if you can’t find a spot to consume it, don’t even bother signing up and getting all of that marketing in your inbox. And then you also need to schedule a time on your calendar to reflect. The reflection piece is the most important of a summit, in my opinion, because this is when you decide what you’re going to do with all of this learning. I think as teachers, we love to learn, and it feels like action. You feel the energy of other people talking about their business, and you feel like you’re doing something. You feel like big things are possible and I love that energy. But what I love more is taking action, learning something new, realizing where it fits into my big business plan, how it can help me move forward, and actually putting it on my calendar to take action. I don’t want you to come to these summits and just lose a week of momentum in your business, or even two if you’re too overwhelmed when it’s done. I need you to schedule time on your calendar to watch the sessions, and also time to actually reflect on what you learned and make decisions what one or two or three takeaways you’re going to adopt and actually take action on within your business. You might consume 20, 30, 40 sessions. You’re probably only going to bring away two or three new ideas that are truly a good fit for your season of business and what it needs right now.
Janice Cook 16:21 And system number seven is my personal favorite, and it is to schedule two weeks after the virtual event ends, an inbox intervention. Because you probably signed up for lots of freebies and they landed in your inbox and you didn’t have time to look at any of them because you were busy consuming content. And each of those freebies was probably the first email in a welcome sequence where this person welcomes you into their list, teaches you new things, offers you more resources, upsells even more ideas, and you might not even remember who they are because you took in so much information in a short period of time. So within two weeks, you really should get back over and look at that freebie and learn more about them, read their whole welcome sequence from beginning to end, really get to know them, and how often they plan to be in your inbox, and the types of content they plan to share with you. And about two weeks after a summit, you probably have some clarity on where you’re headed next. And you know, if you need to keep getting emails from this person. By the time you get to the end of someone’s welcome sequence, which is usually about two weeks, you have a pretty good idea if this person is aligned to your current goals and needs to be in your inbox. So if they’re not, enjoy the freebie, enjoy their welcome sequence, and then unsubscribe and clean their materials out of your way so that you can get back to your goals. If they are aligned and you do want to hear from them each and every week, I invite you to set up a filter where you send all of your professional development content so that you can consume it in a consumption session. I have times in the morning where I sit down with a cup of coffee and I read newsletters from the people that I’ve intentionally invited to give me PD in this season that are aligned to the goal I’m trying to achieve right now. There’s no reason to stay on all of these email lists if you don’t have time to read all their emails. And really, you’re gonna take their stats on their email marketing platform, and you’re probably gonna drive up their email marketing bill. So the kindest thing you can do at the end of two weeks, if this content really is not aligned to the action steps you’re taking this year in your business, the kindest thing you can do sometimes is to unsubscribe. It’s a gift to you, and it’s a gift to them, and it’s going to allow you to stay focused on your current goals. I personally love reading all of the welcome sequences from these action taking business owners, but that’s because I love the strategy of a welcome sequence, and I love consuming email marketing content. I love writing it and I love mapping it out. So I genuinely enjoy reading people’s welcome sequences all in a pile like that after they’ve landed for about two weeks. But I realize that’s not how everybody consumes their inbox, it’s just what works for me. Either way, if you went to a virtual summit two weeks later, your inbox is going to feel suffocating, and you need to have a plan. So when you sign up for that summit, you’re scheduling time to watch the sessions, to reflect on the sessions and make an action plan, and you’re also putting an inbox intervention on your calendar.
Janice Cook 20:07 These seven systems will help you skip the summit overwhelm and keep you laser focused on your important, big goals. You’re going to see sessions that help you do things faster. You’re going to find shiny tech and hacks that can help you do things faster, but I don’t want you to do tasks faster that you don’t actually need to be doing at all, and that’s why we have to come right back to our goals each and every time. You only have time on your calendar for action steps that clearly lead you one step closer to your current big goal. So every morning, you need to be clear on what your goal is, so that you can be really protective of your calendar. And every task that’s on your calendar, you need to say, Does this task bring me closer to my current goal, or is this task a shiny object that can bank on my calendar for my next annual planning session? I wish that we had time to do all the things. I wish I could chase every bright, shiny, crazy idea. But this is the system that works for me. I absolutely love getting a pulse on what’s going on in the community, networking, meeting new people. I love the flood of energizing new ideas, but I also love my calendar having balanced capacity and the feeling of growing my business, meeting my goals, and clocking out with confidence at the end of the year, knowing that I’m ringing in the New Year, truly ready to welcome new goals, because I finished the ones I set last year.
Janice Cook 21:55 Let me know, what did I miss in today’s episode? I bet you have a signature system and a pro tip and a hack that helps you get in and out of a virtual summit without a scoop of overwhelm, and I would love to hear it. You know that I love to chat business in the DMs on Instagram, and you can also hit reply to any email you get from me in your email inbox – there is a real person on the other side that loves to chat about business systems. But I hope that if you’ve just come out of a virtual summit experience, like I have, that this helps you plan for your next virtual summit so that it’s less overwhelming than the experience you just went through. And if the universe sent you this message right before your next virtual summit, try out some of these systems and let me know how they go.
Janice Cook 22:49 Thanks for making this podcast a part of your day. I’d love to help you find clarity with your next step in business. Go to cookfamilyresources.com/hiring-guide. I’ll also leave that link in the show notes for you. This guide is packed with good news for those days when you feel like you can’t possibly do it all. It might be time for you to invest in paid support, but the truth is, there are a lot of free steps to explore first. After you dive into that guide, I’ll be in your inbox every Monday morning with more actionable tips to help you enjoy running your business again. See you in the next episode.
Here is a playlist of other episodes I think you will enjoy about SYSTEMS AND ORGANIZATION:
