Creative entrepreneurs who leave their job to start a business have an AH-MAY-ZING work ethic. Like, the best!That’s why so many of them love Trello and Asana :: they approach their workload with that same task-based, checklist mentality – which is great for the boss when your role is the employee – but not so much when you’re supposed to be the leader.

You can’t lead when you’re operating with a checklist mentality.

You’re wearing the bossy pants now, right? That means it’s YOUR job to make sure your tasks and workload are directly related to and account for your big picture goals.A lot of project management systems out there don’t foster that habit. Instead, they almost game-ify the creation of these mile-long To Do lists. Worse is that those lists aren’t usually aligned with getting you closer to where you want to be.But this is where AIRTABLE comes in. (If you don’t have an account, register for one here.) I’ll spend this post making you a believer as to the reasons why it’s worth making the switch to Airtable.

I mean, aside from the whole “ditching the never-ending To Do list” thing. 😉

ALWAYS SEEING THE BIG PICTURE

As the boss, you’re the one who has to be accountable to your business goals and targets. And yet, as a solopreneur, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the “doing” and the urgency of it all that you lose sight of WHY the work is important.That’s how you start getting side-tracked into doing work that isn’t actually important. You start adding things to the To Do list that – in reality – have very little to do with your big picture goals. This is also how you end up working 18 hour days and feeling like you didn’t get anything done.

Allow me to introduce you to Airtable’s LINKING feature :: with it, you can see the impact one action has on all areas of your business.

For instance, let’s put this into the context of planning your CONTENT CREATION. Your brilliant, creative mind comes up with a conga line of brilliant, creative idea, right? But how do you know which ideas you should work on and which ones you should let go?

Easy! Get intentional with your content and make sure it fits the criteria of either 1) GROWING YOUR LIST or 2) GETTING YOU PAID.

Content that isn’t linked to your MESSAGING or your OFFERS doesn’t serving YOU or YOUR BUSINESS, no matter how brilliant or share-able the subject matter is. Airtable’s LINKING feature makes damned sure that everything you hit “PUBLISH” on is directly related to both. Here’s how ::

As you create your content, you have this built-in qualifying system that confirms ::

  • WILL CREATING THIS GET ME PAID?
  • WILL CREATING THIS GROW MY LIST?

If you don’t have an offer – free or paid! – that relates to this idea you have, it’s easy to see that this not worth your time, energy or focus to create. The decision essentially gets made for you on this one!

Meanwhile, other project management systems will let you create an endless list of ideas. With Airtable, you can quickly and easily qualify whether even the best idea is actually worth it – in numbers! – for you.

BTW :: Knowing your numbers? That’s very boss!

Which brings me to our next point…

GETTING SHIT DONE – YOUR WAY!

Your creation process is unique and you absorb information and process data in your own way. So WHY are we pretending that tasks and projects can be managed in a one-size-fits-all approach?

You should be able to CUSTOMIZE EACH PROJECT to the way your brain wants to see it. Airtable – in the glory of all of its views – allows you to visualize your work exactly as you or anyone on your team wants to see it. Yes, even if you both process information completely differently. And yes, even if you both have totally different areas to focus on.

DATABASE

Everything starts with a Grid View and these are essentially spreadsheets. Anyone who tells you Airtable is “just for spreadsheets” isn’t making the most of this free platform! Because yes, it IS spreadsheets and it does work like a database… but nowhere near is it “just” about that!

VIEWS

The Trello lovers in the house will feel at home in the Kanban View, which is the framework around which Trello is built. If you’re more of a Post-It Note type, you’ll love how the Gallery View lays out every project in sticky note style. When you need to collaborate or collect information, the Form View will auto-populate the fields you need others to submit to the project in question – hands-off-the-wheel for you! And, of course, the Calendar View will help you track your timelines, deadlines and deliverables.

FORMATTING

Layer on top of those views-on-views-on views the fact that you can SORT, FILTER and GROUP whatever fields are important to you. Suddenly, you can get very granular and focus on the one area that’s important for you to work on – right meow! – without losing the big picture of the project as you #GSD.

ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS (LIKE, ACTUALLY!)

I approach working with Airtable from a very specific angle :: helping creative entrepreneurs be more efficient and be more profitable. I know how sucky it is to set quarterly goals… only to fall short of them on a 90-day rotation. I get it, even I’ve been there and Airtable is one of those unicorn FREE tools that helps me do that.

My signature course AIRTABLE LIKE A BOSS isn’t a tech tutorial; it was designed specifically to EMPOWER CREATIVES like you to wear the bossy pants when it comes to things like ::

  • Planning that SABBATICAL you keep talking about;
  • Understanding and planning for exactly what it takes to POCKET A 6-FIGURE SALARY in your biz;
  • Being able to keep your sanity in-tact during a launch because you planned it like a boss;
  • and a bunch more, yes including the whole video on how to set quarterly goals you’ll actually achieve.

The feedback I’ve received from most people is that they already feel empowered to ditch the To Do list within 15 minutes of AIRTABLE LIKE A BOSS and they’re ready to boss up to their potential.

BUT BACK TO CONTENT THAT PAYS…

The best place to get started with those empowering a-ha moments? We go back to the beginning where I spoke about creating content that either gets you paid or grows your list – every! dang! time!

I share the exact base I use in the video and walk you through making the most of it – for FREE! – which makes for a pretty sweet ROI when you realize how much time, energy and focus you stop wasting on publishing ideas that don’t pay you back in any way!