Gereon Hermkes: All right man, good to see you again.

Sebastian Krempel: Yeah, good to see you. How are you? Pretty good. It’s good to be back, yeah.

Gereon Hermkes: Yeah, yeah. We’ve been on a hiatus for a couple months now due to Corona, and we’re recording this in Berlin, but you are from another place in Germany, far, far away.

Sebastian Krempel: Far, far away. I have to fly in to Berlin. Yes. And so we didn’t want to do it online because the quality is a bit, yeah or so. So it’s also much easier in this way, right?

Gereon Hermkes: Absolutely. So it’s good to be back. It seems like the authorities have grown out of control for now, so life is picking up again. Um yeah, and I wanted to talk to you about Kad today, which stands for Kill, Automate, Delegate, which is a concept that I recently came across from Aaron Fletcher which really struck a nerve with me because um you know I have a lot of initiatives going on, a lot of stuff, such as this podcast. And um it’s actually a lot of work to get it done, right? Sure, you could just hit the YouTube button and just record on your earphones, but if you want to do it a little bit more professionally, then there’s a lot of a lot of stuff to it, a lot of little steps. And so if you do a lot of initiatives at the same time, what’s bound to happen is you you really broaden what you have to do. You’re expanding, you’re trying out new stuff, but at some point of time it’s just going to be overwhelming and you’re going to get stuck. And so, um this Aaron Fletcher guy, he has a very simple method for it which I think is interesting, and what he proposes is to go through the steps of Kad in in that sequence.

Gereon Hermkes: And the first one is to kill stuff, right? And that means if you’re doing so many initiatives, aren’t you really wasting your time, right? So which one of those um or why do you have to do several initiatives at the same time, right? Shouldn’t you just have one or two that are actually working, right? And so, and this is kind of the stuff that we do in scrum as well, right? So the product owner has to order the backlog and put focus on the first, the most important thing, and then the team is supposed to form to really get it done as quickly as possible. So there’s like a lot of connection to what we do in our everyday life, um but it’s true, you need to kill stuff, you can’t do everything and you really have to pay attention to to what you’re doing, especially if we go to the next steps, automate or delegate. A lot of people actually make that mistake that they delegate work that they should have killed before, right? So it’s it’s not really worth the time to do it, but then they say, „Oh well, I can have somebody else do it for 10 bucks an hour or something like that.“ But in reality, this work should not be done. You shouldn’t delegate it because delegating helps you, but it still takes up some portion of your time. It takes up the money to have somebody else do it, you have to train that person, etc. So the first step is always to try to kill stuff so you don’t have to do it.

Gereon Hermkes: The second point is to um to automate stuff, and that’s really an area of interest of mine lately. And we have the whole auto-optimization thing in in coding, right? So we want to automate as much as possible, but you you also can do that in a lot of private stuff. So let me give you a very simple example. Um some people use a tool called Calendly, which is um a tool for your calendar as as the name implies, and what you can do is you can open up time slots on your calendar that other people can book appointments in. So if I open like the Friday, all of Friday, then you, for example, if you wanted to talk to me, you wanted to have a meeting, you can just go to currently and put my name in and book an appointment for that day. And that’s super helpful for arranging meetings, but also if you do online coaching, stuff like that, it’s super helpful. And so a lot of people are using Zoom to have online meetings, and a very easy step to automate is to connect those two. So there is a function where you can connect those two, and whenever somebody sets up a meeting, the Zoom meeting is automatically established, and everything is like seamless, right? So you don’t have to, „Okay, Sebastian has booked an appointment with me, now I have to think, oh, did I already set up a Zoom room for that or not?“ And then I have to email it, and all of that is already gone, right? So it’s completely automated. It doesn’t even cost anything, so it’s really powerful. And my feelings that a lot of people don’t know about this kind of stuff because it’s basically built in in most of the web platforms that are there right now. And even if you if they don’t build it into their own platform, there’s a there’s a tool called Zapier, and what it does, it it doesn’t do anything about that, right? So you can say, „Oh, I have this one software here and this other software there, and please connect them, and if somebody does something on one platform, please do something else on the other platform.“

Sebastian Krempel: Yeah, it’s super awesome, it’s really cheap, and it allows you to connect software platforms that weren’t necessarily intended to be connected, right? And so it’s super easy, and so you can automate a lot of stuff. And that is super powerful, and that is if you want to keep an activity, you can automate it that takes makes it take up less of your time, and you can just, you know, instead of spending your time sending out Zoom rooms the whole time, it’s it’s just done and you never have to think about it. It’s like, I don’t know if you if you’re using Outlook for example, and you’re just getting emails every day and you are sorting them manually, you can add filters rules for it, right? And these are these small things that are say a few seconds but multiple times over the day, right? And if you automate your stuff, then you just can free your mind with these jobs of, I don’t know, sorting things, think of have I create a meeting room for whatever. So these small things that are keeping your mind struggling with organizing stuff, right?

Gereon Hermkes: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a that’s a very important point because I heard somebody else talk about it. I forgot his name, but he said as an entrepreneur, you’re constantly trying new stuff, right? You’re constantly expanding, and then you have to take the time to contract again. And contract means like to really structure everything that’s going on. So you’re expanding, you’re seeing that something is working well, then you need to take the time to actually structure it. That’s kind of like the automatic automation part, because otherwise, for example, you do something like this podcast and then maybe do one other initiative, and just the upkeep, just you know like work on the sound or post it to different social media channels, it’s just going to take up a certain amount of your time. Let’s say that’s four hours a week. So you don’t have an unlimited amount of time, so if you can get that four hours down to one hour because you automate everything, and there’s really a lot you can do, then suddenly you’re freed up, like you say, to do more innovation work, yeah, and also do to do more initiatives at the same time. Sure. And so there’s a lot to be done there.

Gereon Hermkes: And one thing that I really like as well is to just create workflows for the stuff, right? So there’s a really cool free tool, so you can use Vizio from Microsoft for example, to just map out your workflows. And if you don’t want to spend the money, you can obviously use Word or Google Docs, right? Um but it’s actually very helpful to have dedicated workflow tools because it’s much easier to to put it in in a way that works. And there’s a free tool called yEd, and and it’s it can be found at yworks.com, and it’s actually from a German university and it’s really nice and free, and you can just put all your workflows in there and and work on them because that will help you to not forget stuff but also to see where you can actually um not kill the whole initiative but kill maybe steps in that in that whole part of where you can automate, right? So if you see that you have to upload something to 10 different social media channels, is there isn’t there actually a tool that lets you push the button in it uploads it to all of them? And of course, there is, right? Because there’s this whole cottage industry of autumn optimization in the background for all these little tasks because a lot of marketers, a lot of entrepreneurs, they have this problem. They can’t spend a day eight hours out of 12 hours on on uploading stuff, so there’s tools um everywhere.

Gereon Hermkes: And lastly, if that’s not possible in this Kad model, what you should do is delegate it. Usually there’s some part of your work that you cannot delegate, right? The contact to the customer or maybe the content creation in this um in this podcast, you probably don’t want to farm that out to somebody um because it wouldn’t be you, it wouldn’t be authentic. But let’s say they weren’t a tool to automatically upload the video to all the platforms, well then maybe it makes sense to have somebody that cost you 10 bucks an hour to do that. You know, set up the processes which you’ve already done in the last step, train the person, and have him or her do it because most likely you can earn more than 10 bucks an hour, right? And if you earn 50 bucks an hour or 100 bucks an hour, then it doesn’t make sense to right it. The minute you you give that hour to the other person, even if they take two hours where you would only take one hour, you have made money, right? And so um yeah, that’s sometimes kind of difficult, especially when entrepreneurs start, they want to save costs, and I totally get that, and you have to do that, you can’t just start hiring people left and right, but if you’re actually focusing on the important stuff with the kill and then you have automated what is possible with the automate, then there shouldn’t be that much left. So yeah, right.

Sebastian Krempel: You don’t need to hire three people to do that. You can probably have somebody in part-time, maybe a virtual assistant in the Philippines or somebody like that, who can who can do it for you. But as you said, you you can’t delegate everything. So there are processes or tasks that you can’t delegate because they are not authentic, right? Or the another person can’t do it because they have that background, the knowledge, whatever. So as I said, you have to choose the right task for the things that you delegate, right?

Gereon Hermkes: Yeah. And I just want to quickly put it into a scrum context because like in in the back of my head, I can already feel people starting to add a new event, a new meeting to scrum because they think this is interesting. And I think it is super interesting because people that work with scrum usually do innovative work, right? They constantly build new stuff, and then sometimes they don’t pay enough attention about the processes and the background about the upkeep, about the maintenance. And so this is actually already built in because they’re product owners when they order the backlog, they’re supposed to order it by business value, and the business value can come from different sources, right? It could come from a new feature that lets us raise our prices or that gets us more customers. And that’s what people tend to focus on, but this is also creating value, right? Because you don’t have an army of people doing simple click work in the background or you know stuff that could be simply automated. But my impression is that a lot of product owners don’t realize that enough, and so they always, and this is not, I’m actually not trying to blame the product owners, I think it’s kind of systematic in a sense because there’s always a yearning for new features, right? You want to be in the review, you want to show the new feature, what what can you do now, right? But sometimes it really makes sense to see, well, what are we doing already and how can we make that smaller? How can we lessen the burden on the team or some other departments that actually have to work with that? Yeah, cool. That’s it. All right, so remember nothing changes until you do, but the good news is you’re ready.