Automate Your Busywork with Aytekin Tank

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like I Digress. Today, we'll be breaking down how to automate your busy work. To drop these value bombs, I brought it to ITECK and Tank into EO Fire Studios. ITECK is a founder, productivity expert, automation enthusiast, and the author of Automate Your Busy Work. His entrepreneurial passion and firm belief in creating tools to make organizations more productive led him to build JotForm, a bootstrapped global SaaS company that provides powerful online forms to tens of millions of users.

0:41And today, FarNation, we'll be talking about how busy work is the worst, how to focus on your most important work, how automation is democratizing innovation, and also how to develop an automation-first mindset to unlock our productivity potential, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to iTekken and our sponsors. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litters, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyberattacks.

1:26Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, has been helping businesses streamline accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more for 25 years. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire. Aitekin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? Great to be on your show. People believe that you need to have this superhuman work ethic.

2:06You need to work from morning to night, weekends. You need to have all these productivity strategies. There are all these books and podcasts about productivity. and these are all good, but I think success requires something else. I believe that success requires believing in, you know, working on the important things. Well, this is a good thing that we're talking to you today because that is the entire theme of the episode, Fire Nation, automating our busy work. And I, Tekken, I want to be the first to say it. busy work is the worst. It's literally the worst. So how can we move from busy work to less work so that we can focus on our most important work?

3:00There's a great Eisenhower quote, and he says, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are never important, and the important are never urgent. So our problem today is we are buried under busy work. Like we have too much busy work and we are spending all of our time for with things that take our attention. And, you know, we need to check our emails. We need to answer messages, you know, texts. We need to, you know, we check the news. We check the social media. Like there are all these things that feel like they're urgent, but they're not really urgent and they're not really important.

3:43And we leave the important things to later. And what happens is that later becomes never. So the approach to solve the busy work problem is being able to work on the important things. And for me, the solution was automation. But I can tell you a little bit about the history of that. So when I first started JotForm during the first years, things were going well. And, you know, people responded, you know, I started having a lot of customers. I had some few employees and things were going well. But at the same time, I was buried under so much busy work. Like I was spending all my day answering emails, doing accounting, legal, HR, you know, ordering supplies for the office, doing all those things was taking all my time.

4:40And right at this moment, something else happened. Google actually came up with a competing product. So on top of all this busy work that prevented me to do the important things like really improving my product and really growing my business, now I had to compete with Google. So that was a turning point for me. And I took a few days and I decided, okay, the solution is automation. And that's what I did. I started automating things. Like one of the things that took a lot of time for me was like I was spending like at least six hours a day processing my emails and I was able to reduce that to two hours.

5:20I was able to automate many other things in my business like HR. And doing that allowed me to work on the important things, not the things that feel like important, not the things that, you know, that feel like they're urgent, but really important things. and that made a big difference for me. And, you know, as a result, today JotForm is a successful company. You know, we have over 500 employees, over 20 million users at JotForm. And, you know, I believe that this happened because I was able to, you know, use the power of automation to work on the important things. and because I believe in that, I actually have, I just released a book.

6:11I wrote a book, Automate Your Busy Work and it's been recently released and it's on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. So one thing I want to talk about right now, Aitekin, is delegation and automation because you believe that we can use both of these things, delegation, automation, to achieve timefulness. That's the state of having enough time. Tell us more about this topic. One of my idols is Steve Jobs. Because I'm a product person. I love working on my product. And I started JotForm 17 years ago in 2006. And I still love working on JotForm, like working on the product. And Steve Jobs is also a product guy.

7:04But one of the things that when I read about Steve Jobs was how he took meetings by walking. Like he would just like if there's an important topic he wanted to discuss, let's say Johnny Ivey came to him about a topic. You know, they would actually take a long walk, like an hour walk, and slowly, you know, talk about all the things and what's important and, you know, make decisions that way. And timefulness is like that. You know, when you're rushed, when you try to do things very quickly, when you try to accomplish things, you know, one of the things I hate about Zoom meetings is like, you know, it's not the same as like in-person meetings.

7:51because it feels like you have to talk about things and you have to finish it because other person is on their location as well. So for example, when I start my work every day in the morning, when I start working, what I do is I will launch IA Rider, a Mac app, and I make it, it's a text editor, but it can become like full screen, You know, it can have like black background. So in the morning, I just launch iRider and I have this black screen, full screen and only a cursor blinking. And I start typing like, you know, and I write what's the most important thing I can work on today. And I make sure that I don't check my emails.

8:43I don't check news. I don't check the social media. I don't check, you know, anything on my phone. So what I do is for the next two to three hours, I work on the most important thing. And that's that's timefulness for me so I can, you know, spend that time on the most important thing for me. And, you know, when we don't have to think about other things, I can actually think things truly. if I need to think about a product strategy, if I need to write a chapter for my book, write a blog post, I can actually spend all that time really focused on that work. And let me ask you this, Fire Nation. Are you spending time on timefulness every day?

9:31Are you actually giving yourself the space, the time, the energy to just breathe, to just think, to just write, to just plan? because I'll tell you, just diving into busy work, that's not going to get you there, as you can tell from what we've already shared on this interview. And we have so much more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Can you believe we're already in Q4? This year has flown by, but Q4 is an exciting time and not just because the holidays are right around the corner. Something magical happens when the third quarter ends and the fourth quarter begins.

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12:47Everything you need, all in one place. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free, at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire to get your own KPI checklist. Nessuite.com slash fire. Aitek, and we're back, and you believe that the future of business is something called no code. What does this mean, and what does it look like in the real world? For small businesses, we are living in such a great age because there are three revolutions going on. And the first one is software is eating the world. this was this was actually called out by Mark Anderson and everything is becoming software cars travel agents, whatever you think of everything is becoming software because software is flexible, cheaper it allows us to do more things and so the second revolution going on is the no code SaaS revolution And JotForm is actually a no-code product as well.

14:01But if you go to a website like G2.com, you'll find thousands of products that you can use to automate things. And in the past, like, only big companies had that. They would go to, like, companies like SAP or Oracle. And then, you know, they would spend, like, millions of dollars and automate everything. But today, any entrepreneur, startup, small business, they can go to G2.com. They can find the product they need and they can start using them. And they can integrate those products together like Lego pieces using products like Zapier or Make so that they can build solutions on their own. And what no-code really does here is no-code allows people to build their own solutions.

14:52For example, at JotForm, you can create your own form by just dragging and dropping fields into your form. You can create logic in your forms, like we call that condition logic. You can create custom emails, automated emails, custom documents. so you can build anything you want by just bringing the pieces together. And the third revolution is the AI revolution. And that's a big one because AI is actually making these two revolutions even 10 times bigger because now these things are much more flexible. They are much easier. AI can even write code. So this means that AI is kind of like ultimate no quote product because you just tell it what you want and it understands what you want and it can produce the solution for you.

15:49And this is a great age to be an entrepreneur, to be a startup. Fire Nation, it is a great age for all the reasons that Aitekhan just shared, especially when you can get into an automation first mindset by using these tools. And you're a big believer in that, Eitech, and you believe that we need this automation-first mindset if we are going to successfully unlock our productivity potential, which of course we all want to do. So how do we get there? How do we get to this automation-first mindset? I talk about the automation-first mindset in the book, and there are four principles that you need to take so that automation is like the first thing for you.

16:35Like it's a really natural thing for you to do. And the first one is the prioritization of your work. And so like if you ask yourself two questions, what should I spend my time on and what shouldn't I spend my time on? And the real important question is the second one. Because the time you spend on things that you shouldn't spend your time on are things that you should automate. So that's how you know what you should automate, because the things that you care about, that the important work shouldn't be automated. You should actually be able to, you know, spare more time for those things. The second principle is hardness, impatience and laziness.

17:18Bill Gates has a great quote. He says that I would always hire a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. So if you're impatient with doing the same things again and again, and if you take the time to find a product that can actually automate those things, that you will be able to save time. And you will be able to, like, a day of automations can save you a year of work. So it's really important to be kind of being impatient and lazy. The third principle is you need to make time to save time. You need to take the time. And in the book, I talk about all the examples about this, how you can actually learn about products, like how you can research automation products, how you can understand your workflows, how you can divide your work into workflows and pieces so that you can automate these pieces and build systems for yourself.

18:22but you need to make the time to do research. Like you need to go to websites like g2.com and find the products you need. And then you need to take the time to learn the tools that you already have or the new tools so that, you know, you can actually automate things. And the fourth one is embrace systems thinking. There's a great book by Danella Meadows. And she talks about, and this book is about systems thinking. and how everything in the world is a system. Everything is a cause and effect. And if you want to make change in the world, you need to understand these systems and you need to apply pressure at the right point so that you can make a difference.

19:07And in your case, when you want to automate things, you need to build your own systems and you need to understand and improve these systems so that your automations can work by themselves on autopilot. Fire Nation, I hope you can understand the benefit of building towards these systems, building towards this mindset and unlocking your productivity potential. And I want you to kind of take a step back now. And of course, today, we've been talking all about automating our busy work. What is the one thing that you want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? If you want to be successful, it's important to spend your time on the important things.

19:52And it's important to take the time, you know, ask yourself the question, what should I spend my time on and what should I spend my time on? You could even do like a time audit and figure out like how you are currently spending your time on and how you can actually make sure that you spend more of your time on the important things. for me it's like you know product strategy are communicating about my you know my experiences with the world for you it's different for everyone else but it's important to understand know what you should spend your time on and make sure to really spend your time on those things what is your call to action for our listeners today get the book automate your busy work and automate the things that you don't want to spend your time on so that you can become successful as an entrepreneur.

20:53Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with AT and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type ITECN in the search bar. that's A-Y-T-E-K-I-N in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And iTekin, I want to say thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and iTekin for sponsoring today's episode.

21:32And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? how about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment. My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a revolutionary 17 step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs. And you can get it all in one place when you visit uncommon success book.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litters, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

22:16The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyberattacks. Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, has been helping businesses streamline accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more for 25 years. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire.

22:51That's netsuite.com slash fire.