OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE,

AND OUTSOURCE
EVERYTHING
Make Gmail, IFTT T, and
Virtual Assistants Your Ultimate
Productivity Weapons

BY ARI MEISEL
OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE,
AND OUTSOURCE

EVERYTHING
Make Gmail, IFTTT, and
Virtual Assistants Your Ultimate
Productivity Weapons

ARI MEISEL
OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE, AND OUTSOURCE EVERYTHING

Copyright © 2013 Ari Meisel

All rights reserved under the International and Pan American conventions, including the right to re-
produce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No portion of this book may be
copied or reproduced in any form whatsoever without prior written permission.

For additional copies of this book, please contact Ari Meisel at:
http://www.lessdoing.com/contact

Editing and Design (except the cover) by Cara Stein / BookCompletion.com

 Table of
Contents
Introduction ................................................................1
Gmail ............................................................................4
The Less Doing approach to email ............................................5
Getting started—migrating to Gmail and importing
accounts ...........................................................................................7
Getting Gmail settings and labs tweaked to perfection ......11
The most essential filter and the ONLY folder you’ll
ever need .......................................................................................13
How I process my email using Gmail ......................................16
Gmail add-ons and plugins .........................................................21

IFTTT .........................................................................34
Basic recipes..................................................................................37
Advanced recipes.........................................................................38

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

How I use IFTTT..........................................................................40

How I use Zapier .........................................................................44

Virtual Assistants ....................................................48

Why everyone should have a virtual assistant ......................49
Two types of virtual assistants and how you can use
them both ......................................................................................51
What can a virtual assistant do for me? .................................54
How I use FancyHands ...............................................................58
Creating the Manual of You........................................................60
Tasks and tools for advanced outsourcing .............................66
Tasks that should be automated...............................................71
The ultimate: automate your virtual assistant .......................72

Conclusion.................................................................77
Bringing it all together ................................................................78
Be even more effective ...............................................................81

iv
Introduction
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Learn the Three Amazing Weapons

of Productivity: Optimize,
Automate, Outsource!
The Art of Less Doing is an entire framework and philosophy for
getting more done and freeing up your time, so you can do the
things you want to do. The goal is to free up as much of your
time as possible. That way, you can stress less, be more produc-
tive, and accomplish the things that you want in life.

The main principle of Less Doing is to optimize, automate, and

outsource EVERYTHING. People can save thousands of hours
by not running errands, and they can manage their time better
by choosing their own workweek, but a lot of people just want
to know how to deal with email and get rid of their to-do list.
This book will show you how to do that. I’ve boiled it down as
simply as possibly by showing you the three most important pro-
ductivity tools to simplify your life and free up your time.

The first tool is Gmail. With Gmail, you can optimize not only
your email, but your overall life management. Next, we’ll cover
IFTTT, which allows you to automate so much of your life that
you can simply set it and forget it. Finally, virtual assistants bring it
all together by outsourcing all of the other time-wasting tasks in
your life and business.

Each chapter in this book will show you my personal, Less-Doing-

approved methods. Then, I’ll present a number of essential plugins

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

and add-on services. You won’t just learn the fundamentals. I’ll
show you the advanced techniques for using each of these serv-
ices individually, and then I’ll show you how to combine them into
the ultimate productivity toolbox so you can start being more ef-
fective today!

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 Chapter 1:

Gmail
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The first amazing productivity tool we’ll cover is Gmail. Gmail

comes with a lot of excellent tools and add-ons that can help
you eliminate inbox clutter and become far more efficient in han-
dling your email.

The Less Doing

approach to email
My inbox used to look like this; yours may, too.

When you’re working with a cluttered inbox, everything you have

to do takes longer. You have to search just to find the important
items, and it’s easy to get distracted by all of the other items in
front of you.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The Three Ds: Delete It, Defer It, Deal

with It
To eliminate the overhead of inbox clutter, remove time-consum-
ing distractions, and be able to quickly and easily identify the im-
portant items demanding your action, the goal is simply to clear
your inbox.

To accomplish that, as you go through your inbox, you have three

options for each message: delete it, defer it, or deal with it.  That’s
it—you have to do one of those three things for each message.

Here’s how I deal with those three options: when I open my

inbox, I look at each email and do one of the three Ds:

If the email is something that I’ve already responded to,

then I delete it. (Or, I might archive it. A wonderful feature
of Gmail is that you can archive without deleting, so you
don’t see the message, but if you ever need to search for it,
you’ll find it.)
If the email is something that I can better deal with at an-
other time, I forward it (defer it) using FollowUp.cc to a
time when I can deal with it best.
If I can do it now, then the best thing is to deal with it now
and move on.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

I realize that seems insanely simple, but using that method effec-
tively invokes the all-important Essential vs. Optional theory to
make it easier.

Over time, you will get better and faster at “processing” emails.
Once you’ve got a handle on the methods we’re about to cover,
try The Email Game to work through these principles and get re-
warded as you improve.

Getting started—
migrating to Gmail and
importing accounts
If you haven’t done so already, head over to Gmail and setup
your free account...it’s ok, I’ll wait.

If you’ve never used Gmail before, spend a few minutes playing

around with the interface. If you need a basic primer on Gmail
features, check out this Tutorial.

Done? Great, let’s go!

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Gmail makes it really easy to switch from your current email

service without missing a beat. There are two ways to go: you can
either do it yourself, or you can outsource it.

Do It Yourself
Gmail allows you to import messages and contacts from dozens
of different providers by simply clicking on the gear icon in the

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

upper right of your mailbox and then going to Settings. Next

click on Accounts and Import, and under “Import Mail and
Contacts,” click on Import Mail and Contacts. The process takes
you step by step through entering your current provider informa-
tion and transferring messages.

Right under the Import Mail and Contacts section is a

very cool feature called “Send mail as.” Suppose, like me, you
have several business emails, plus a personal one and that college
alumni email you don’t want to let go of. Using Gmail, you can
send mail from as many addresses as you’d like, all from the same
place. All you have to do is click on Add another email ad-
dress you own and enter the address.

Gmail will send a confirmation email to that address, so as long as

you have access to it, all you have to do is click the confirmation

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

link. Now, you can send mail from that address whenever you
want.

I would also recommend choosing the option right below that

that says “When replying to a message: Reply from the
same address the message was sent to.” That way, people don’t
get confused.

Outsource It
If you don’t want to set up your Gmail account and move your
email yourself, there is an excellent service called MigrationWiz
that will migrate all of your messages and contacts from any serv-
ice to Gmail for you. This is a great option for people with thou-
sands of messages in dozens of folders, since the process will
maintain your entire folder structure. You don’t need to down-
load anything or have any technical knowledge. You just provide
the login information for the old service and the new Gmail ac-
count, and they take care of the rest.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Getting Gmail settings

and labs tweaked to
perfection
Once you have your Gmail account, there are some settings and
tools that can make a big difference in your productivity. You can
play around with settings and labs (Gmail’s experimental fea-
tures) to tailor your Gmail account specifically to your needs.

Many settings default to the right choice, but here are the settings
I find most important and useful. To access the settings, simply
click on the gear icon in the upper right of your inbox and select
Settings.

General
Keyboard shortcuts - On
Auto Advance - go to the previous (older) message

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Send & Archive - Show “Send & Archive” button in

reply (This saves you a step: when you respond to an
email, you don’t have to go back to the inbox and archive
the original email.)
Signature - No signature

Inbox
Inbox type – classic

Filters
Filtered Mail - don’t override filters

Labs
Undo Send – Enable undo send for 10 seconds
(Sometimes you hit “send” and then realize you forgot
something, or maybe you said something regrettable—this
lab allows you to give yourself a little grace period to undo
it)
Background Send – enable
Canned Responses – enable
Google Docs preview in Mail – enable
Google Maps Preview in Mail – enable
Google Voice Player in Mail – enable

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

(if you don’t use Google Voice, I highly recommend it, even

if you only use it for voicemail—it allows you to get your
voicemails transcribed into your inbox for free)
Signature tweaks – enable
Again, these are the essential settings I find most important. You
may find other Labs features you really like – by all means try
them out and see if they improve your efficiency.

The most essential filter

and the ONLY folder
you’ll ever need
One of the greatest built-in features of Gmail is the ability to au-
tomatically filter emails based on certain characteristics, such as
who they’re from or what words they contain. You can create fil-
ters specifically in response to non-essential messages, to make
sure similar messages go into your Optional folder in the future. I
cover how to do that in this screencast.

However, the most essential filter and possibly the only one you’ll
need should be created first. This filter will get over 90% of emails
out of your inbox automatically. Here’s how to set it up.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

1. Once you’re logged into your Gmail account, click the gear

icon in the upper right corner and choose Settings.

2. Then switch to the “Labels” tab and create a new label

named “Optional”.

3. Next, switch to the “Filters” tab and click on “Create a

new filter”.

4. Here, enter the following in the “Has the words” field:

“opt-out” OR unsubscribe OR “viewing the newsletter”

OR “privacy policy” OR enews OR “edit your prefer-
ences” OR “email notifications” OR “update profile”
OR smartunsubscribe OR secureunsubscribe OR ya-
hoogroups OR “manage your account” OR “group-di-
gests” OR “mailing list” OR “ensure delivery” OR
“Manage your subscription” OR “click here to view”
OR “view as web” OR “mailing list”

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

5. Now head to the Next Step, where you should check mark

the following rules:

> Skip the Inbox (Archive it)

> Apply the label: Optional

> Never mark it as important

>  Also apply filter to * messages below.

Finally, click on “Create Filter” in order to apply the filter for

the changes to take effect.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

That’s all there is to it! Now all of the emails currently in your
inbox and any future messages that meet these criteria will auto-
matically go straight to your Optional folder. That way, you can re-
view them whenever YOU want to, and they don’t create noise
in your inbox.

How I process my email

using Gmail
To show you how this works, I want to walk you through a typi-
cal email session using my system and show you how I actually
process my email.

Going to my inbox in Gmail, I’ve received six new messages in

the last hour and a half or so. There are also 32 unread emails in
my Optional folder, but I don’t have to worry about that. The
inbox contains the essential stuff – the stuff I have to do.

Everything in the Optional folder is the stuff

that I’d like to go through and maybe act on
it, if I have the time.
The point of the Optional folder is that all of that noise is out of
the Inbox. The Inbox becomes a place of action. Remember, there
are only three things we can do with anything in the Inbox:
Delete it, Deal with it, or Defer it.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

So, my first email is from ScheduleOnce, my

appointment scheduler.
ScheduleOnce gives you a public appointment page, so people
can go to your schedule URL and pick times to meet with you
when it is convenient for YOU.

This email is a request from someone I recognize and want to do

business with. She’s requested a phone call with me. Sched-
uleOnce shows three possible times when she’d like to talk with
me. I know that I’m available during those times, so I’ll just pick
one, and I’m done. ScheduleOnce updates my calendar and hers
automatically. So I’m done with that Inbox message, and I can
archive it.

The next message is a confirmation message

from Tinypass, a service I use to process
payment for membership to my site.
It sends a confirmation message each time a new member signs
up for my site.

I do want these emails, but I don’t need to see them every time
someone signs up. It would be enough for me to check them
every once in a while. This is a perfect example of a specific kind
of filter that I want to set up.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

While reading the message in Gmail, I can go to More > Filter

messages like this. It automatically populates the sender ad-
dress, and I’m creating a filter for any message from that sender
to Skip the Inbox and Apply the Label “Optional”. With this filter,
from now on, any email regarding new signups will automatically
be placed in my Optional folder, where I can review it when I
want to.

Returning to my Inbox, there is a new mes-

sage confirming the meeting I just set.
That can be archived – it’s done – so that’s out of the inbox.

My next message is another meeting re-

quest.
This is for another 15-minute phone call when I’m available. I can
spare that, so I enter it on my calendar and it’s done. Those were
all of the items that I could deal with right now.

I also have a message from someone from

Tinypass who was working with me to sup-
port how I integrated it.
He wants me to give him a call, but right now I’m involved in
doing something else, so I’ll defer this. I think I’ll be freed up in an
hour, so I’ll forward that message to [email protected]. Gmail

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

has the usual Send button, but there’s also a Send and Archive
button that will send the message and remove it from your
Inbox. I’m choosing that. Thanks to Followup.cc, that message will
come back to me in an hour, when I’m free to talk.

My next message is a Followup.cc message

reminding me to do the task I’m already
working on.
Obviously, I don’t need that, so I just archive it.

Finally, I have a response from my Fancy-

Hands assistant.
They’re informing me that they made the purchase I requested,
so my order is confirmed and the vendor has included a coupon
code in appreciation of the business. That’s a discount good until
June 30th on a product I don’t need right now, so I’m going to for-
ward the email to [email protected] and Send and Archive
that.

That’s it – now my Inbox is empty.

This process would usually take under a minute, and I don’t even
have to think about things like that coupon code: it will automati-
cally come up when I can use it.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Now that the Inbox is clear, I can look at my

Optional folder.
It contains some newsletters – I like those, but I can look at them
later. There’s an email from a friend who’s forwarding an email
about an app I was interested in. It went to the Optional folder
because the forwarded message contains the word “Unsub-
scribe.” This is a good example of why the Optional folder is so
useful. I easily recognized the message from my friend, so I could
pick it out and deal with it.

This particular message is about an app that my friend and I dis-

cussed. Although the message is from a friend, I still wouldn’t have
missed the information – it’s not essential – so the Optional
folder is the right place for it.

Continuing in my Optional folder, I can quickly go through and

look at any email that I’m immediately interested in. Then, I hit
Shift-A to select all and Shift-I to mark everything read, and I’m
done processing the Optional folder.

So, I had over 40 new emails, and they’re all

processed in just a couple minutes.
Now, some people say you should save time by only checking
your email twice a day, but that may lead to more stress than not.
For me, it’s better to check it frequently and so that I can get
through all of the messages quickly – I just went through some

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

important stuff and a stack of non-important stuff in just a few

seconds. Either way, the point is to get as efficient as possible with
your email.

Gmail add-ons and

plugins
Canned Responses
CannedResponses is a tool that gives you templated responses
you can drop into your email messages and send right away. To
enable Canned Responses in Labs:

1 Click on the gear icon in Gmail (it’s in the top right corner).
2 Then go to Settings > Labs > Search for a lab.
3 Type Canned Responses in the search bar.
4 Press the “Enable” button and press “Save Changes”
(See screenshot on the next page.)

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To add an email to your collection of canned responses:

1 Compose an email that answers a common question or

problem that people ask you by email.
2 Click the little
“more options” tri-
angle (currently
located next to
the trash can in
the bottom of the
compose win-
dow,).

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

3 Select Canned Responses > New Canned Response.

4 Enter a name for the response that will help you remem-
ber what it’s about next time you get this question.
5 Click OK.

To use one of your saved responses:

1 Open a compose window.

2 Go to the “more options” triangle.
3 Choose Canned Responses.
4 Select your saved response from the menu.
Gmail will populate this answer into your message, where you
can edit and customize it for this recipient, or send it as-is. You
can include links, text formatting, and as much content as you
want.

Followup.cc
Followup.cc offers a very simple, valuable service that allows you
to create email reminders. Basically, you write an email, and then
you CC or BCC any time period you want at followup.cc. For ex-
ample, if you BCC [email protected], you’ll get your original
email back in one week, automatically, as a reminder. (If you BCC
the followup, only you get the reminder; if you CC it, the re-

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minder will go to both you and the sender – a feature that can
be very useful for teams.)

Messages from Followup.cc also include a snooze feature in the

upper right corner, allowing you to easily defer the message again.

Deferring an action to a more practical time gives you incredible

peace of mind, because as soon as you hit the send button, you
can forget the email completely. You don’t have to think about it
again, because you know it’s taken care of.

Contactually
Contactually works as a personal CRM system. It sits in the back-
ground and looks at the emails you send and who you’re com-
municating with, and it gives you reports that tell you who it
thinks you should be following up with.

It’s very smart and helpful. By reminding me and suggesting peo-

ple for me to follow up with, it’s enabled me to take advantage of
business leads and even friends that I had lost touch with that I
wouldn’t have contacted otherwise. It seamlessly integrates with
your workflow.

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OneReceipt
OneReceipt is a service that watches your inbox for receipts,
whether from Amazon, iTunes, Nordstrom – any store, it doesn’t
matter. OneReceipt automatically organizes everything, pulls in all
the receipts, tracks your spending, and generates a personal ex-
pense report for you. You can also use the iPhone app to take
pictures of your receipts on the go, and it will integrate those as
well.

Image courtesy of OneReceipt.com

Slice
Slice is a similar service that pulls in all of your shipping receipts.
This is very handy for someone who gets a lot of packages from

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

the same place (Amazon, for example). Rather than just getting a
notification that a package is being delivered, Slice will actually tell
you what’s in the order.

The great thing about this is that it happens automatically. You

don’t have to do anything, other than use Gmail.

PowerInbox
I’m really against the gear-shift mentality where you shift back and
forth between activities, like working for five minutes in an Excel
spreadsheet, then taking a phone call, then switch on to some-
thing else. It’s inefficient.

That inefficiency pertains to email as well. It may seem counterin-

tuitive, but PowerInbox helps you spend more time in your inbox
– in a good way.

As you process your email, you might find yourself jumping out of
your inbox to act on the emails. Instead of switching away and
coming back to the inbox, PowerInbox keeps you inside the
inbox as much as possible.

For example, when you snooze a Followup.cc message, it nor-

mally takes you to the Followup.cc website. Instead, PowerInbox
lets you take care of that inside the inbox, in a small active area of
the email. You can also respond to Facebook messages and com-
ments, and even retweet things, without ever leaving the inbox.

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TripIt
TripIt is another automated service that works from your inbox,
this time to organize your travel stuff. It doesn’t matter whether
you make a flight reservation, book a hotel room, buy a confer-
ence ticket or a train ticket, reserve a rental car, or make a dinner
reservation – TripIt will automatically pull all of your travel plans
out of your inbox, make an itinerary, and even add the itinerary
into your Google Calendar automatically.

TripIt also allows you to keep track of your membership rewards,

and you can use it to share your itinerary with a spouse or
someone you have to visit. TripIt will keep track of all of the parts
of your trips and keep them in a well-organized itinerary.

Image courtesy of TripIt.com

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Boomerang
Boomerang offers two fantastic services: Boomerang Calendar,
and Boomerang.

Boomerang Calendar is a plugin with Gmail. When someone

sends you an email with a date listed, Boomerang automatically
checks your Google Calendar to see whether you’re available. If
someone shares multiple times, it will show each time in green if
you’re available, red if you’re not, or yellow if you have something
right next to it. If you choose a time, you can add it to your cal-
endar with one click.

You can also share your availability with one click, either for the
next four days or the next week. The recipient doesn’t see what
you’re doing, just when you’re available. This makes it really easy,
and you can even schedule group meetings, all within Gmail.

Boomerang also offers a service that’s just like Followup.cc, allow-

ing you to send yourself email reminders. The difference is, with
Boomerang, you have to be in Gmail to use it. Personally, I prefer
to use Followup.cc, because it’s platform independent – you can
use it wherever you are – but Boomerang may be a better fit for
your way of operating.

Boomerang also has another feature, which I use extensively: the

ability to send an email later. Sending an email later may seem like
an odd thing to do, but it’s actually incredibly powerful, because it
puts the ball in your court when you want it there.

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For instance, let’s say Friday at 4:45, someone sends you a quick
email. You get back to them right away. Then, they get back to you
at 4:59 and leave for the weekend. Your weekend is pretty much
ruined, depending what the task is, because it’s going to be on
your mind, stopping you from being about to concentrate on
what you want, which is probably relaxing over the weekend.

On the other hand, if you write that response at 4:45 but set it
to send first thing Monday morning, the task is off your plate and
you don’t need to worry about it. Nothing could have been done
about it over the weekend anyway, so you don’t lose anything,
and you don’t need to be stressed about it because you’ve al-
ready taken care of it.

Rapportive
Rapportive is an application that runs in the sidebar. Every time
you get an email from someone, it will pull information from their
Twitter, other social media profiles, your own interactions with
them, and other applications like CrunchBase. It displays this
snapshot of publicly available information about the person to
give you context for the conversation.

If you don’t remember who the person is, this snapshot may trig-
ger you to remember. Also, if you see other recipients CC’d on
an email, you can hover the mouse over their email addresses

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

and see a profile on them. It provides a very helpful context and

background information for the person.

WiseStamp
WiseStamp makes supercharged email signatures. It will automat-
ically insert signatures, and it can include your most recent blog
post, your most recent tweet, the most recent thing that you’re
selling on eBay, the most recent thing you stumbled upon… it’s
very dynamic. Rather than just having a static, text-based email, it
adds nice icons and interactive information that’s automatically in-
serted into the emails.

Kloudless
I’m a huge fan of keeping things in the cloud. I keep a very lean
machine and store very few files locally. Most of my stuff is on
Google Drive or Dropbox.

Kloudless makes it easy to manage that, in two ways. First, when

someone sends a message with an attachment, Kloudless can au-
tomatically save the attachment to Google Drive or Dropbox, or
it will let you do that manually if you prefer.

Secondly, when you want to send a file to someone, instead of

having to find it in the cloud, download it to your machine, and

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then upload it to Gmail, Kloudless will let you attach it directly to

a message from the cloud. That’s much faster and easier.

WriteThat.Name
WriteThat.Name is your address book, “automagically updated.”
This service watches your inbox, and when you reply to some-
one, it automatically grabs their contact information from their
email signature and adds it to your address book – without you
having to do anything.

There are safeguards in place so it doesn’t save junk. You never

have to add anyone to your contacts, and if someone’s phone
number changes, it will automatically update.

If you want, you can get a digest report every night, telling you
what it did and allowing you to approve or disapprove each
change. Or, you can just let it go. It makes it so much easier not
to have to keep track of these details yourself.

HelloSign
HelloSign allows you to sign PDFs, and much more. There are
many services that allow you to sign PDFs, but what’s unique
about HelloSign is that it lets you fill out and sign PDFs directly in
Gmail and send them back right away. This can save you hours, as
you don’t have to print the document and scan it back in—you

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can just fill it out, sign it, and send it. You don’t even have to be at
a computer. It works from your iPad, iPhone, or other device, di-
rectly in Gmail.

KeyRocket
There is actually such a thing as Keyboard Shortcut week, and
one related study concluded that we waste eight years of our
lives by not using keyboard shortcuts.

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Gmail is a great example of somewhere you could use keyboard

shortcuts, but sometimes they’re hard to learn. That’s where Key-
Rocket comes in.

KeyRocket is a plugin for Chrome that makes it as easy as it can

get. You install it in Chrome and go about your business, and as
you do things with your mouse, a little blue box pops up to tell
you what keyboard shortcut you could have used to do the
same thing. It provides immediate reinforcement to help you re-
member the right shortcut for the next time you want to do that
task.

I used this for about a week, and it trained me so well, I didn’t

need it anymore: I had all the keyboard shortcuts memorized for
the things I do. It’s a great tool, and it’s saved me a lot of time be-
cause using keyboard shortcuts is so much faster!

***

I hope these tools will help you make the

most of Gmail and use it to clear your
inbox and streamline your productivity.
With all of the plugins and services available, Gmail is a key mem-
ber of the ultimate productivity trio.

33
 Chapter 2:

IFTTT
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The next productivity power tool we’ll cover is IFTTT. IFTTT

stands for “If This, Then That.” It’s one of the most valuable pro-
ductivity sites on the Internet, and it’s free.

IFTTT creates automated links between various web services

that you use on a daily basis, including Bitly, BuzzFeed, Dropbox,
LinkedIn, weather, YouTube, and Wordpress. Basically, IFTTT
watches the service you identify, and when a particular event
happens, it triggers some action that you want to automatically
happen in another service.

For example, let’s

say that any time
you “favorite” a
video on YouTube,
you want that
video saved to
your Dropbox. To
make that happen,
all you have to do
is use IFTTT to
set up a rule,
called a recipe.
You’d simply click
on “this” to tell
IFTTT the trigger (the “if this” part of the rule). In this case, you’d
click on YouTube and choose “Favorite a Video.”

35
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Once you’ve set

up the trigger
event, you’ll need
to specify what
you want to hap-
pen. Again, this is
very simple: you
click on “that” to
specify the “then
that” part of the
rule. Then you
click the Dropbox icon and choose “Add file from URL” to save
the video to your Dropbox.

You can also specify more information, but if you don’t want to,
you can just click “Create Action,” and you’re finished. You’ve cre-
ated a recipe on IFTTT, and you set the whole thing up in five
clicks.

IFTTT also makes it simple to manage your rules/recipes. As you

add more recipes, you can see them all in one place, turn them
on and off, edit them, and share them. It’s a very easy-to-use,
helpful service.

36
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Basic recipes
As you saw in the example above, creating recipes in IFTTT is ex-
tremely easy, and the site walks you step by step through setting
up each trigger and its subsequent action. Ease of use is IFTTT’s
greatest strength, but it may also be its greatest weakness. Be-
cause IFTTT allows you to create so many combinations so easily,
it can be somewhat overwhelming and you might not know
where to start. Below are links to several of my favorite recipes
to get you started and give you some ideas for recipes of your
own. These first four are Shared Recipes, so you don’t have to
recreate them yourself: you can simply look to the bottom of
each recipe’s page and click the button labeled “Use Recipe”.

• Call in a Note To Myself and Get an Email with a Tran-

scription

• Send a Text and Get an Escape Call

• Save My Blood Pressure to Evernote 

• Upload New Podcasts to Soundcloud 

But that’s not all… the following are more simple recipes that
save me lots of time and may benefit you in a couple of ways:
think about what would happen when each of these recipes does
its work, then go ahead and create one like it on your own. The
exercise will give you some useful tools and reusable ideas, but it
will also give you valuable practice in the process of reducing an

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

action to a process or recipe. Try building these recipes for your

own use:

• Notify me of the shipping status of my package by SMS

• If I Check In on Foursquare Add to Google Calendar
• Let My Family Know When I Check In At An Airport So
They Know I’m Safe 
• If I Label an Email with Something, Forward It to
Someone
These are all simple recipes that I have found useful.

Remember, this is to give you an idea of the capabilities of IFTTT.

You may find these specific recipes useful in your life, but more
importantly, I hope you’ll come up with some amazing ones on
your own.  The idea is to let IFTTT automatically do the routine
actions that take up time you could use for better things.

Advanced recipes
Now that you have a basic understanding of IFTTT, I hope you
will create recipes of your own to make your life easier. Here are
some more advanced uses of IFTTT, some involving third party
services, that allow you to really supercharge your productivity.

You may notice that most of these are specific to the user and
may require website login information or other private data.

38
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Since we wouldn’t want to share that kind of data, I’ve mostly

provided descriptions and, in some cases, links to articles. Here
are some more sophisticated things you might want to do with
IFTTT:

Automate your virtual assistant and outsource your out-

sourcing 
Remotely start downloading a torrent while on the go 
Back up your Pinterest images to Dropbox and share the
folder with your team
Find a new job 
Get notifications of important emails while travelling inter-
nationally – even without a global data plan
If you have grandparents or friends who aren’t very tech
savvy, you can make it so any time you post a picture with
a particular tag (like a child’s name) to Facebook, or Insta-
gram, or a Dropbox folder, then it gets send via email to
that person. If they are really in the dark ages, you can set
it up to email the picture to a service like UnityFax and the
picture will be faxed to the person. 
A client told me they had a nanny who didn’t do email
and was bad with scheduling, but she could text. This client
set up the Google Calendar channel so that if there is an
upcoming item in the child’s schedule, the nanny automati-
cally gets a text message alert with the time and details.

39
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Using the WeMo Motion channel, keep a record in the

Google Drive spreadsheet channel of every time your pet
goes to the bathroom in a certain area, to establish a
schedule and be more vigilant to avoid “accidents.”
These and any number of events and actions can be set up using
the 70-plus channels available in IFTTT. (And, for similar interac-
tions between more business oriented services, check out Zapier
and its interaction with over 200 different channels!)

How I use IFTTT

In a nutshell, I use IFTTT to automate as many things as possible.
Tasks YOU automate may be complex or simple. They may affect
only you, or they may reach out to numerous friends, associates,
or contacts on your mailing lists, using a variety of channels. What
they all have in common is the ability to free up the time you
used to spend on repetitive tasks.

Here are some more examples of recipes I use:

Whenever an email comes in with a particular keyword,

IFTTT sends that email to FancyHands with instructions to
answer it personally, using information that I’ve provided.
It’s kind of a human autoresponder.
If I save an item on Feedly, which is my replacement for
Google Reader, IFTTT adds it to Buffer.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Once a week, IFTTT sends an email to FancyHands asking

them to check and make sure all of my blog posts were
posted correctly.
15 minutes before I have a phone call in my Google Cal-
endar, IFTTT sends me a text message reminding me to
turn off “Do not disturb” on Google, so the person can
call me.
If I bookmark something on Pocket, IFTTT automatically
adds it to Delicious, which is where I keep everything for
my virtual assistants to create a weekly post of things I
found interesting.
Any time I add something to Buffer, IFTTT adds it to Ever-
note, Zootool, Storify, my Facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
On a certain date each month, IFTTT sends an email to
Fancy Hands, instructing them to check that all of my rent
checks have come in and explaining how to do that.
If I pin something on Pinterest, IFTTT gets it from the RSS
feed of my Pinterest and adds the item to Buffer and Tum-
blr.
If I like a video on Vimeo, add a YouTube video to watch
later, or post a podcast to SoundCloud, IFTTT posts it to
Tumblr.
Every week, IFTTT posts a Facebook ad for a vacation
property I rent out. It also tweets about my courses each
week.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

When a blog contributor sends an email with a specific

subject line, IFTTT sends that email to Fancy Hands with
instructions on how to post it to my blog.
If I call in a note to myself, IFTTT will automatically send
me an email with a transcript and the audio file.
Whenever my “Interesting things of the week” post is pub-
lished, IFTTT will send an email to Fancy Hands, instructing
them to post it on Pinterest. You can’t automate posting
on Pinterest, but I’ve automated outsourcing this task.
If I post something on my blog, IFTTT will automatically
post it to Facebook, LinkedIn, Buffer, Storify, Diigo, and
Zootool. It will also automatically send an email to Fancy-
Hands, instructing them to submit the post to Stumble-
Upon. StumbleUpon is responsible for 40% of my blog
traffic, and you can’t submit to them automatically, so again,
I’ve automated the outsourcing of this task.
Every Friday, IFTTT sends an email instructing a Fancy-
Hands VA to create my Succulent Saturday post. Every
Thursday, it instructs Fancy Hands to create my “Interesting
things of the week” post.
If I weigh myself on my Withings scale or take my blood
pressure with my Withings blood pressure cuff, IFTTT adds
a note with my weight or blood pressure to Evernote.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

If I check in at an airport, IFTTT will send an email message

to my wife and my parents, letting them know I’ve arrived
safely.
If I change my Facebook profile picture, IFTTT changes my
profile picture on Twitter to match.
Any time I star a message in Gmail, IFTTT will save it to
Evernote.
When a new workout of the day was posted at the
Crossfit gym I used to use, IFTTT would send me that
workout by email.
Whenever I like something in Instagram with certain
names in the caption, IFTTT will add those pictures to
DropBox. (I use this to automatically save pictures of my
kids to DropBox.)
If I check in on Foursquare, IFTTT makes a note in my
Google calendar, so I can keep a record of I’ve been.
If I take a picture in Instagram, IFTTT adds it to my Drop-
Box.
Again, the goal is to automate everything possible. As you can
see, the variety of tasks you can automate with IFTTT is truly
mind-boggling. The bottom line is the amount of time that this
automation saves each week or every day – the time saved is ab-
solutely phenomenal!

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

How I use Zapier

You’ve seen how to use IFTTT to automate the tedious tasks of
your life. Zapier does some of the same functions, but it offers
more complexity and integrates with an enormous number of
services, including more business functions, like BaseCamp, Chat-
ter, GoToMeeting, MailChimp, Crypt, Osmosis, PayPal Business,
Streak, TaskRabbit, and Zendesk. It also allows you to create your
own linkages or use it in conjunction with IFTTT.

Whereas IFTTT is mainly focused on personal services, Zapier

has more of a business focus. Because of its greater number of

44
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

linkages and the greater complexities it allows, Zapier offers even

more power than IFTTT for automating your life.

I want to show you a little bit about how I use Zapier, so you can
see how it works. I currently have five zaps running.

Two of my zaps automate what happens when I record a pod-

cast. Every time I record a podcast, I want messages to be sent to
my virtual assistant, directing them to edit the podcast and post
it.

I used to have to remember to send those messages by hand, but

now, if I just upload a new file to Dropbox with a particular key-
word, it automatically triggers these two zaps: one to send a mes-
sage to the virtual assistant, directing them to edit the file and
giving instructions on how to do that, and the other directing
them to post the podcast and explaining how to do that.

Automating these tasks saves me three or

four steps. More importantly, it saves me
from having to remember to send those
messages.
The next zap is set up so that when someone signs up for my
Pro membership, a message is automatically sent to my virtual as-
sistant, directing them to invite the new member to the Vimeo
group. The zap is triggered when TinyPass processes a payment
and sends a message notifying me of the new member. There is

45
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

no automatic way to add someone to a Vimeo group, but this is

another example of a task where I’ve automated outsourcing.

Another zap I use is one I created to re-

place someone else’s service that wasn’t
working.
This service was called Mention Notifier, and it did one simple
thing: it sent me an email when I was mentioned on Twitter. I
don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter, but this allowed me to par-
ticipate in conversations where people were mentioning me,
without wasting a lot of time.

The problem is, the service was unreliable. It would go down, and
I’d miss mentions and never realize it, so I created my own re-
placement right here in Zapier. Whenever someone mentions me
on Twitter, it automatically sends me an email notification.

The great thing is, Zapier allows me to set up custom, dynamic

fields within the message to tell me the user’s screen name, num-
ber of followers, the text of the tweet, and a link to the tweet.
There are also many other options that I could include.

Finally, my last zap is triggered any time I move an email to a spe-

cial folder called “Unsubscribe.” When that happens, it will auto-
matically send a message to my virtual assistant with instructions
to unsubscribe me from that list and an explanation of how to
do that.

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The great thing about this is that when I’m processing my Op-
tional folder, I can select seven or eight messages at a time and
move them all to my Unsubscribe folder, and an actual person
will take care of the rest, whether it requires simply clicking on
something, or actually contacting the company to get me off the
list.

I hope these zaps have given you a taste of

what Zapier can do. I encourage you to try
it out, and it’s free for the first five tasks.
Zapier can really take your business a lot farther than IFTTT. For
example, I recently posted a case study of a company that has 14
processes that automatically take place when a customer signs up
on their website, and all of those processes are done by Zapier.
Previously, they had humans doing these tasks, and it was taking
half an hour each time someone signed up.

The time savings for that company add up to hours and hours,
and it could be the same for you. Give Zapier a try!

47
 Chapter 3:

Virtual
Assistants
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The last essential productivity tool that we’ll cover in this book is
virtual assistants. Virtual assistants make up the third step in the
Art of Less Doing. For any tasks that can’t be eliminated or auto-
mated, you can get them done without wasting your time by out-
sourcing them to virtual assistants. This is one of the central
tenets of the Art of Less Doing: less doing means creating more
time in your life for living.

Why everyone should

have a virtual assistant
Everyone wishes there was more time in the day.  Whether an
investment banker or a stay-at-home mom, an architect or a col-
lege student, everyone could use an extra set of hands, an extra
hour to get things done, or a little extra time to themselves. Re-
gardless of whether you’re short on hands, short on time, or
short on ability, multi-tasking, (accomplishing more than one thing
at a time) can be the key to filling your shortfall.

The truth is that most of us are poor multi-taskers, and most of

us don’t even know it.  Having several tabs open on your web
browser is not multitasking, nor is eating a meal while
reading.  Truthfully, you’re just reducing the quality of your per-
formance for each activity.  We all need a little help, and fortu-
nately that help is within reach.

49
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Virtual assistants are individuals who operate from remote loca-

tions, whether they are off in the Far East or nearby in your own
city.  They typically work for several clients at once, cost less than
full time employees, and are more efficient at getting things
done.  Simply working with a virtual assistant will teach you to ef-
fectively communicate and delegate your tasks to someone
else.  This frees you to focus on your core competencies and do
more of the things that you are passionate about.  

Activities that you consider tedious and un-

pleasant are easily delegated to a virtual as-
sistant.
This clears as much time as possible and frees your mind to think
about the things that really matter to you. And with so much
time made available, you will find that you are free to come up
with better ideas than you’ve had in a long time.

Just to be clear, EVERYONE can benefit from having a virtual as-

sistant:

• Students can get help with research and paying bills

• Entrepreneurs can maintain the image of a more estab-
lished company without consuming cases of Red Bull in
order to accomplish their goals.  
• Parents can get help keeping their home stocked with sup-
plies and finding new ways to spend time with their kids.

50
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

• “9 to 5ers” can make sure that their personal life isn’t con-
sumed by their professional life
• Retirees can make sure nothing is ever forgotten and pa-
perwork is handled promptly
But most importantly, working with a virtual assistant is an educa-
tional process that helps you learn how to relay and delegate
tasks as efficiently as possible. When you are in a situation where
you are assigning work to someone you have never met and in
some cases will only speak to once, that places a very interesting
focus on how you explain what needs to be done. It forces you
into a better understanding of the tasks you need done and how
to do them, and it develops your skill to see those things faster
and more clearly.

Two types of virtual

assistants and how you
can use them both
There are two types of virtual assistants: on-demand and dedi-
cated. Depending on what you need them for, one type may be
better for you than the other. Many people will use both.

Generally speaking, if you are an absolute beginner or an ex-

treme expert at what you need done, you should use an on-de-

51
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

mand assistant service. If you are somewhere in the middle,

where you’re not sure what you need to outsource and want a
more personal touch, then a dedicated assistant is for you.

The on-demand assistant

With an on-demand assistant service, you send in a task (either
by emailing it or leaving a voicemail), and then any one of hun-
dreds or even thousands of assistants will pick it up and do it. You
may never deal with the same assistant twice. They won’t have
any stored personal information like your children’s birthdays or
your Gmail password, but they can still provide valuable services,
make purchases for you, and interact with your calendar.

On-demand services tend to be cheaper

than a dedicated assistant.
And, because there are many assistants, you benefit from 24/7
service and the ability to issue a high volume of tasks in a short
amount of time, with each one starting right away. On-demand
tasks tend to be defined as anything that can completed in about
20 minutes (not including holding on the phone or waiting for
someone else to respond).

My recommendation for on-demand service: Fancy Hands

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

The dedicated assistant

With a dedicated assistant, you get more of a relationship. When
you call or email, you will always get the same person. They get to
know a little about you and the way you like to do things, and
they can keep lots of information on you to help streamline fu-
ture tasks.

Working with a dedicated assistant, you can develop the trust

needed to give them access to more financial information, email
accounts, and other personal data. A dedicated assistant can do
more recurring and long-term projects, and even help you with
outsourcing jobs to more specific contractors like graphic design-
ers or mobile app developers. This type of services tends to be
more expensive than on-demand services, and workload is lim-
ited because you are dealing with one person.

My recommendation for a dedicated assistant service: Zirtual

Using a specialty assistant

For some tasks, neither a dedicated nor an on-demand assistant
quite fits the situation. It may be that you need a specialist or
someone for a really big project, or maybe you want just the op-
posite: a very limited but free experience with a sort-of virtual
assistant. These are special cases, but they’re not unique by any
means. When you have one of these situations, there are places
to go for help.

53
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

When your task is a big project or a highly specialized technical

one, check out Elance, where you can post a description of what
you need to have done (from legal work to transcriptions to
ghost writers) and get bids from around the world.

At the other end of the spectrum, for micro-tasks and very nar-
row information or service needs, check out TalkTo, a service that
allows you to text any business and get a text response. You can
make a reservation, find out if something is in stock, or pretty
much anything else.

For just about anything you need to have done, regardless of the
type of task it is, there is an assistant available who can accom-
plish what you need, while freeing you to focus on the kind of ac-
tivity that suits you best.

What can a virtual

assistant do for me?
If you’ve never worked with an assistant, you probably don’t real-
ize 90% of what they are capable of doing for you.  With the
right techniques and tools, a remote assistant can do just about
anything an onsite assistant could do for you. This long list is just a
fraction of what’s possible. Take a look and see if you get any
ideas.

Perform receptionist duties, answering and routing calls

54
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Research
Contact people or businesses for information
Schedule meetings
Make reservations
Manage your social media profiles
Manage a blog
Follow up with clients
Archive and respond to emails
Send thank you cards
Submit insurance forms
Check, transcribe, and respond to voicemails
Take dictation
Make purchases
Edit writing
Graphic design
Create PowerPoint presentations
Create Excel spreadsheets
Compile mailing lists
Cold calls
Fact checking
Summarize documents
Craigslist Postings
Classified Ad Submissions
Event planning
Website analytics

55
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Meeting minutes via speaker phone

Travel planning
Customer service
Accounts payable
Accounts receivable
Content moderation
Document formatting
Mailing letters
Budgeting
Financial analysis
Tax preparation
Expense reporting
Statement balancing
Photoshop
Web programming
Lead generation
Market research
Mobile application development
Editing
Ghost writing
Meal delivery
Grocery delivery
Meal planning
Check deposit by mail
Scanning documents or business cards

56
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Sending handwritten letters

Paying bills
Birthday cards
Comparison shopping
Selling or donating old home items
Wakeup calls
Waiting on hold
Translations
Viral marketing
That’s a lot of time-consuming tasks, and I hope the list suggests
other ways that a virtual assistant can let you do less of the things
that keep you from spending your time how you want to – and
how you should – spend it.

Remember, when it comes to Less Doing,

we always try to optimize first, automate
second, and then outsource what little is left
over.
If there are a lot of items on this list that you could have a vir-
tual assistant take off your plate, then you are already way ahead
of the game. However, you should realize that just as you should
be offloading nonessential tasks to your VA, you should automate
as much as possible before handing off the tasks that require an-
other person’s attention. The more efficient your system be-

57
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

comes, the more you’ll gain, as your assistant’s time will be opti-
mized for greater effectiveness.  

How I use FancyHands

Now that you’ve had a chance to think about some ways you
can use virtual assistants to help in your Less Doing, I’d like to
give you an idea of how much impact using virtual assistants can
actually have on your time and your life.

Over the last year, my FancyHands dashboard shows I’ve had over
1300 calls placed for me – including more than 3700 minutes of
phone time – plus nearly 300 emails sent and nearly 1800 requests
fulfilled. Just think about how much time and frustration would be
involved in doing all of that yourself – and how much distraction it
would be from more important things!

So what do I do with all those tasks to FancyHands? Personally, I

do about 150 tasks in an average month. Here are the most re-
cent ones showing on my dashboard:

Find a food testing company

Learn how to get French passports
Add a podcast to my blog
Research Adobe Presenter Express problems
Find a doctor specializing in hormone testing

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Post weekly motivation video to my blog

Find international services providing complete meal cook-
ing ingredients
Locate the nearest clothes donation drop boxes
Arrange a Task Rabbit to pick up and drop off clothes do-
nation
Find sources for bullet-proof doors
Find DVDs of a rare video
Pay bills that can’t be handled by autopay
Find a source for my wife’s favorite perfume
Find [anything] from an undocumented picture seen online
Locate and order exotic or international foods
Correct my son’s birth certificate
Remove me from an email list that has no source info or
unsubscribe link
Find best price on a toddler bed and order it
Automatically have blog posts pinned on Pinterest, Stum-
bleUpon, and others
Find a nearby source for tuxedo studs and one to dry-
clean in about 5 hours
Stop paper statements from a business on autopay

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Learn the lead time for ordering a particular ceramic tile

Add an article to my press portfolio
Get a quote for exterminating carpenter ants
Cancel an order that’s been delayed
Check status of an order
Get recommendations for a pediatrician in Ohio
You’ve probably noticed that I actually have a lot of personal
tasks and purchases handled by FancyHands. The reason: time is
time. Any time that I can save is time that I can use for something
else. And any time that I can use for something else pays multiple
benefits, because I don’t have the distraction of worrying about
all these minutia. Look closely, and you’ll probably find that a lot
of tasks that don’t really need your own attention are taking up
the lion’s share of your time!

Creating the Manual of

You
Making the concept of Less Doing work for you means crafting
your processes to work for you.

In the first fundamental of Less Doing, namely, the 80/20 rule, I

talk about the importance of tracking your resources. You need
to understand how you spend your time and get things done in

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

order to optimize all of the processes in your life. While some

people might complain about the vagueness of IKEA instructions,
you have to admit,
they have broken
down the process
of building some-
thing, into a set of
instructions that is
language-indepen-
dent, requires as
few steps as possi-
ble, and is mostly
fail-proof. The goal
with your processes
should be exactly
the same. Ikea In-
structions. Photo credit: jon|k

You need to break your tasks down to the fewest, most explicit
steps possible so that they are easier for you and, more impor-
tantly, so that they can be automated or outsourced entirely.

What processes?
We all have processes that we go through on a regular basis.
Yours probably include how you do things like checking your
email, writing reports, doing research, generating content, review-

61
Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

ing materials, making meals… The list goes on and on and in-
cludes so many things you do daily or weekly, or even just once
in a while.

The problem is that most of these activities have become so rou-

tine that we do them without even thinking about them, almost
as if on autopilot.

That might seem like a good thing, but the

truth is, if you can get a task done on au-
topilot, then someone else can probably get
it done for you.
It’s easy to fall in the trap of thinking you are the only one who
can do the things that make your world spin, but have you ever
stopped and considered the steps you actually take?

As an exercise, think about something you do often. Now de-

scribe, on a very granular level, each step you go through in order
to complete that activity. Think about it as if you were creating
“The Manual of You,” as if you were going to give the Manual to
someone who doesn’t know you or how you work, and they
have to get that task done. This can and should be applied to
most of the things you spend your time doing.

I have clients go through this exercise with incredibly complex

and precise tasks, with the same results: the perfect instruction

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

manual. I had one client start with a process that was 10 pages
long and end up with 11 easy-to-follow steps.

A personal example involved providing a discount code to a po-

tential student for one of my Skillshare classes. If a student can’t
make it to a session they paid for, I have my assistant generate a
discount code for them so they can sign up for a future class for
free. The process for generating the discount code looks like this:

1. Go to http://www.skillshare.com/

2. Login using user name ****** and password *******

3. Go to Dashboard at the top of the page

4. On the left hand side, you will see upcoming classes.

Hover over the date of the specified class and
hit manage (it should pop up in orange).

5. On the right hand side you will see discount

codes, choose create new code and a little box will pop
up. 

6. Enter a name for the code – the name can

be whatever you want. (Example: for August 15th, I would
name it: AUG15). 

7. Put in the appropriate discount amount and the number of

codes you would like to create, then hit create.

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8. Note the URL of the page you are on – that URL is what
you will send to the student in an email with the code for
where to sign up.

9. Finally, email the discount code with the URL and instruc-
tions to the person on the original email.

Now, the first time I wrote this out, I left out the third step, and
the whole process had 16 steps instead of the current nine.
When I initially wrote out the 16 steps, I looked at it and immedi-
ately found redundancies, which I removed. Then, the first time I
sent the task off to a FancyHands assistant, they quickly pointed
out that they didn’t know where the “upcoming classes” link was
(which prompted me to realize I had glossed over the step ex-
plaining that they had to go to the dashboard first).

The second time I sent it off, I got a different person (and hence,
a different perspective), since FancyHands is an on-demand assis-
tant service. This new assistant pointed out the superfluous as-
pects of some of the latter steps.

Just getting the process down makes it easier to understand your

process and see where things were missing or where they were
repeated.

And, integrating other people’s interpretations of your the in-

structions is an invaluable help in making them fail-proof and easy
to use.

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In tweaking a process, it’s also important to get in the mindset of

“If This, Then That.” By that, I mean you want there to be little or
no communication needed between the time you assign the task
and the time you receive confirmation that the task has been
successfully completed.

In order for that to happen, you need to an-

ticipate problems or forks in the road.
In the task above, I might have added a line that said, “If more
than one upcoming class date exists, provide discount code for all
dates” to avoid the question of “Which date did you want the
code for?” Even if it means adding an additional step for situations
that come up less often, it’s worth adding that step. You only have
to write it once, and it will save you from having to take the time
to deal with it over and over in the future.

The point of all this is that, in the end, I was able to break this
task down to an incredibly efficient, error-proof process that any-
one can follow and complete. Once a process has been per-
fected, delegating out of your sight and out of your mind is about
as easy as can be.

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Tasks and tools for

advanced outsourcing
Using virtual assistants can help optimize your life, but optimizing
outsourcing your tasks to a VA can save you additional time and
headaches. A variety of tools are available to help in optimizing
your outsourcing. The key to reaping their benefits is recognizing
where they can help. What follows is a sampling of tasks that
need additional tools:

Processing Voicemail
For checking, transcribing, and responding to voicemails,
use  Google Voice to get voicemails by email and simply forward
them to the assistant.

Dictation
For transcribing audio or dictation, use your favorite voice-
recording program (I like DropVox) to send your assistant an
audio file for transcription. This can become one of your most
valuable tools, whether the content is a short blog post, a letter,
or even just an idea you want to get out of your head without
losing it.

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Scheduling Meetings
Use ScheduleOnce to share your schedule with the VA and allow
them to make appointments for you. Your ScheduleOnce link
should be in your email signature.

Above: Sched-
uleOnce allows you
to specify your avail-
ability for meetings.

Right: When oth-

ers want to meet
with you, they can
choose among your
available times.

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Mailing Letters
Using PostalMethods, a remote assistant can send a pdf through
postal mail to individuals or to entire mailing lists.

Sharing Passwords
To provide information access by securely sharing passwords, use
LastPass.

Tasking an Assistant
For outsourcing complex or repetitive/reusable
tasks, CannedResponse allows you to create template emails in
Gmail so you can write something down step by step and save it
as a template. That way, it’s just one click away the next time you
need to have the same task done.

For repetitive tasks, you can use FollowUp.cc to send recurring

messages (which may be one of your CannedResponses). An ex-
ample would be having an assistant log in to a site (with details
provided in the template), check stats, and give you a report each
week.

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Real World Physical Tasks

Use Dealing with paper for general tasks and RedBeacon for
home services.

Bookkeeping
Combine weekly check-ins with the virtual bookkeeping services
of Less Accounting.

Image courtesy of LessAccounting

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Lead Generation
Using  CannedResponse, FollowUp.cc, recurring messages, and a
script, an assistant can do systematic, weekly lead-generation
work.

Blog Content Moderation

Use CannedResponse to provide login information and
Boomerang to task an assistant to moderate your blog com-
ments on a regular schedule.

Craigslist or eBay Postings 

Use CannedResponse to provide login information and a content
template; you just provide specifics and photos for each item.

Expense Reporting
Use CannedResponse and a shared Google Docs Spreadsheet
to allow you to send a photo of a receipt and have it parsed and
entered into an expense report.

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Sort and process postal mail

Use Virtual Post Mail to receive physical mail virtually.

Manage Incoming Payments

Using Virtual Post Mail, checks can be reconciled, and deposits
can be made by mail.

Research
Task an assistant to research interesting blog/news items – fa-
vorite a tweet and use IFTTT to automatically archive the item
and share it for further research

Tasks that should be

automated
As time goes on, you should be getting better at finding which
tasks are consuming most of your time, defining and optimizing
the processes they use, automating the processes you can, and
outsourcing the ones you can’t automate.

We’ve looked at many tasks that could be outsourced and a

number of ways to outsource them with tools to make that

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work, but remember that outsourcing is best reserved for tasks

that cannot be automated. In that spirit, here are a number of
tasks that could be outsourced to a virtual assistant but would be
better done by automation, including suggested tools for au-
tomating them:

Wake Up Calls - WakerUpper

Waiting on Hold - Fast Customer or Lucy Phone
Add Business Cards to Address Book - CardMunch
Make Dinner Reservations - OpenTable
Follow up by Email – FollowUp.cc
Send Thank You notes – Ink A Note
Meal Delivery – SeamlessWeb
Text message/Phone reminder/Escape call – IFTTT
Order a car service – Uber or GroundLink

The ultimate: automate

your virtual assistant
Once you know how to work with a virtual assistant, the pinna-
cle of achievement in outsourcing is to outsource, not just the
tasks themselves, but also the process of outsourcing them. Even
better, automate the process of assigning tasks to your assistants!

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I’ve achieved this with IFTTT. It started with a simple assignment

to my Fancy Hands virtual assistant: “Find out how to automati-
cally submit new blog posts to StumbleUpon.”

It’s pretty unusual to stump a Fancy Hands assistant, but the re-
sponse I got back was, “There is no current method for automati-
cally submitting blog posts to StumbleUpon.”

I held my breath for the briefest of moments. Then my mouth

pulled into a smile. I like challenges like this.

I didn’t realize this would open a completely

new realm of outsourcing for me.
It’s one thing to use an on-demand virtual assistant for standard
tasks, but recurring tasks are tricky, since your tasks are assigned
to different assistants each time. Initially, I got around this by cre-
ating a reminder from Resnooze.com with the task instructions.
You can have this message sent to you at a certain interval; when
it arrives, simply forward it to the assistant.

I thought that was a pretty slick solution, but it still required a

moment of my involvement. The issue with Resnooze is that it’s
not trigger-based, only interval-based. So, the task might say, “Add
new posts from the past week,” but it couldn’t say, “Add the post
that JUST went up.”

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Another approach I tried was to create a forwarding filter

through Gmail. The problem was the resulting email didn’t origi-
nate from my own email address. Because of that, most virtual
assistant routing services wouldn’t recognize it; they rejected the
task.

This time, I approached the task backwards

and on a very basic level: how can I assign a
task to my virtual assistant without having
to initiate the request at all?
I was seeking the holy grail of outsourcing, the perpetual motion
machine of the outsourcing world: I wanted to outsource my
outsourcing.

Since mind control of Gmail doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be a real-

istic solution anyway (why use my mind for that?), I started to
scratch my head. I remembered that IFTTT has a Gmail channel,
which I’d never used before. You can create triggers based on
searches or starring an item, but you can also send an email.

But wait, does this sent email originate from your own email ad-
dress? YES, IT DOES!!!

I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself. That’s when I cre-

ated the first IFTTT recipe, which has resulted in 32 outstanding
and amazing automated actions that I never have to think about
again. It couldn’t have been more simple: If a new post (based on

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the RSS feed for my blog) is created, Then send a Gmail email
message to [email protected] and say, “Visit this {FEEDURL}
and submit this newly published post to StumbleUpon.”

IFTTT gives you several options for automatically propagating in-

formation, so FEEDURL is replaced with the most recent post
address. That’s all there is to it. According to the 80/20 Rule, I
should only be focusing on the things that only I can do, like cre-
ating original content for the blog. Everything else should be han-
dled by someone else if possible.

IFTTT has about 50 channels at this point, most of which can

cause an email to be sent to your virtual assistant. I set up a trig-
ger so that every Friday morning, my assistant receives an email
telling him/her to create my “Interesting Things of the Week”
post, based on my Delicious links from the past seven days.

You may ask, why not just give your assistant one instruction:
“create the post every Friday”? But if you don’t have a dedicated
assistant, you can’t do that. Even if you do have a dedicated assis-
tant, what happens when that person gets sick or takes a new
job?

Doing things my way makes you future-

proof, bomb-proof, and idiot-proof.
Think how much fun you can have with this! How about if every
time you take an Instagram picture of a cool product and tag it

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with the word #buythis, your assistant gets an email instructing

him or her to find it at the best price and order it? Maybe on
rainy days, you decide to indulge in an Uber car instead of walk-
ing to the train. So, you set an IFTTT recipe that checks the
weather, and if rain is predicted, it sends an email to your virtual
assistant asking him or her to order you a car to take you to
work.

The more you can make things happen based on the things you
are already doing, the less stressed and more productive you’ll
be. Let your imagine take the reins and watch how far it takes
you!

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Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything

Bringing it all together

Processes… Optimization… Automation… Virtual Assistants…
Applications that interact with the physical world… Once you
understand how to use these tools, you can start to combine
them for some amazing results, including something I call The
Human Autoresponder!

One of the most difficult things to outsource, much less optimize,

is email. It’s exceedingly difficult to let go of control over some-
thing that’s so personal, and in many cases, critical to a person or
business’s way of operating. Even if we accept the notion of let-
ting go, most of us probably have no idea how and where to
begin.

I’ve developed what I’m calling “The Human Autoresponder,” and

while the components are not necessarily that ground-breaking,
the compilation and final outcome really has me salivating over
the possibilities.

My first attempt
My concept was something that would work like this. You start by
picking some keyword or combination of keywords that you
often see in your incoming “essential” mail. In my case, I get a lot
of inquiries regarding Crohn’s Disease. Maybe you get a lot of
email about a particular product or service you offer, or maybe

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you work in real estate and particular addresses are mentioned a

lot.

In my case, to respond to inquiries about Chron’s, I set up a stan-

dard canned response in Gmail that would respond to any email
that had the word “crohn” in it. The autoresponder tried to cover
all possible questions relating to Crohn’s and give a general an-
swer, pointing people in the right direction for the information
they were seeking. I even had an intro stating that it was an auto-
matic response and I hoped it answered their question, but if it
didn’t, then I would get back to them with a personalized answer.

I was pretty satisfied with this setup and started testing it, but
within about two hours, I realized that it was a horribly bad idea. I
got a newsletter email from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation,
and when Gmail autoresponded, it bounced back and created an
endless loop: newsletter… response… bounce… response…
bounce… response… repeat ad infinitum!

Someone else emailed me with a question that wasn’t covered at

all by the canned response. To make a long story short, it did not
work.

The Upgrade
I decided that I needed a different approach to the autoresponse.
I created an Evernote notebook called “Autoresponders,” with
each note referring to a different keyword. Now I have a note in

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Evernote, and rather than contain a canned response about

Crohn’s, it tells my story and gives bullet points for every Crohn’s
resource I know of, including those on my site and on other sites,
and even my coaching services. Now, as you’ve probably figured
out already, that was too much information to send everyone.

The Human Autoresponder

At that point, I turned to our good friend IFTTT. I set up a recipe
so that if a new email comes in with the word “crohn,” the email
will be forwarded to my FancyHands assistant with these instruc-
tions:

“This email has been automatically forwarded to you based

on certain keywords. If the message is obviously spam or there
was some error in the forward, then let me know. The task is
for you to personally respond to the person below using the
information provided in an Evernote note. You will use your
best judgment to create a personable and informative re-
sponse. If you don’t have enough information in the notebook,
then let me know. Otherwise, visit this Evernote note for full in-
structions: https://www.evernote.com/xxxxxxxxxxx.”

Now an assistant has all of the information they need and can
extract just enough to provide the correct answer to the inquiry.
I even included an opening paragraph that basically explains how
I feel it’s more important to give someone the information they

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are seeking quickly than to delay just to give a personal response

with the same information. It’s not about arrogance and being
too busy to answer them: quite the opposite, it’s how I get them
the best information I can as quickly as possible. The fact that this
process results in Less Doing for me is just a great side-benefit.

One nice feature is that IFTTT recipes run every 15 minutes, so if

you happen to be working in your email and you see one of
these messages come in, you have the opportunity to deal with it
yourself. Otherwise, you now have a method for a virtual assis-
tant to craft an “automated” yet personal and charismatic re-
sponse to your emails.

Be even more effective

Now that you’ve read about the top three productivity tools –
Gmail, IFTTT, and virtual assistants – I hope you’ll dive in and start
using these tools to optimize your life and make more time for
doing what you love.

This book has given you a taste of The Art of Less Doing. Along
with the ideas presented here, I hope you’ll visit LessDoing.com
and find more of the tools and techniques that can help you get
to where you really want to be in life! If you’d like to learn more,
make sure to check out my blog and sign up for the newsletter.

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The concepts of Less Doing make up a methodology and frame-

work that’s the core of my business. I work with people who
have any variety of problems, from health issues to business is-
sues or even relationship issues.

My vision is based on the belief that I can

help people become more effective at any-
thing they do.
I have helped clients attain goals ranging from outsourcing a busi-
ness’s bookkeeping to running a seven-minute mile to achieving
lucid dreaming.

I offer a different way of looking at things – a fresh perspective to

fill in the gap that stands between my clients and true accom-
plishment and satisfaction in their lives. That’s often all it takes, and
my job is to supply that vital perspective and help people find it
for themselves.

I offer courses, corporate programs, and individual coaching to

help anyone become more effective at everything. Please get in
touch if you’d like to discuss how I can help you. Good luck and
thank you!

- Ari

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