I have more than 60 courses approved for continuing education credit, and over the last 12 years, I’ve written more than 200 courses. That’s a lot of content. Just filing the courses for approval takes time. What I do is sort of set up an assembly line where I do a single task a bunch of times, then I move on to the next task and do it a bunch of times. For instance, if I have 10 courses to file for approval, I don’t do one start to finish. Instead, I create a file folder for each on my computer. Then I paste in the course overview template and course outline templates that I use for a new course filing. Then I open the documents and add the title of the course on each of the templates. Then I write the course overview for each. It’s required, and it helps me gather my thoughts about what I want to teach about. Then I go back and use the overview as inspiration and as a guide to help me put the outline together. Once the paperwork is done, I submit them all at the same time. As for the actual presentations, I will then create 10 blank powerpoints with the course title on each one. Then I insert a bunch of blank ppt pages and use the main subjects in the outline I created as my section dividers in the powerpoints. If I added additional details to the outline, each point becomes a separate slide in the powerpoint – remember, thoughts are things. I then add some pictures and use the design tools in PowerPoint to make the slides look fancy. While not complete, in just a few minutes I have a presentation put together that, if I needed to, I could present as is. It’ll only get better as I do more research and add additional information, but I have the skeleton of the presentation prepared from the initial outline I created, and to someone who doesn’t know better, it actually looks like a finished product.
Another example of the assembly line idea is when we run comparison quotes for our clients at renewal time. There are several steps that need to be completed: download the renewals from the insurance companies’ websites, send them securely to our clients, run comparison quotes using our quoting tool, analyzing the quote, and sending the quote and our recommendations to our clients. When we have dozens of renewals every month, it would take entirely too long to do one renewal start to finish before starting the next. Instead, we do all of one task before moving on to the next step.
Group like things together. That way you can achieve economies of scale.
Rinse and Repeat. Do it again.