Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, host Melissa Swink speaks with Mika Sagindyk, co-founder of Tackle, about the importance of time management and conducting calendar audits. They discuss how Tackle evolved from a simple calendar exporting tool to a comprehensive platform that helps users visualize their time usage. 

Learn about the significance of aligning time spent with organizational goals, the role of executive assistants in managing time effectively, and actionable strategies for improving productivity. You’ll learn how to reflect on your time management practices and consider how Tackle could enhance your efficiency.

Key Highlights:

• Understanding where time is spent is crucial for achieving goals.
• A lean team can lead to greater impact and efficiency.
• Calendar audits help identify time allocation and priorities.
• Executive assistants play a key role in time management.
• Setting time-based goals can enhance accountability.
• Reflection on time usage can lead to better decision-making.
• Creating a system for categorizing tasks can streamline processes.

About Our Guest: 

Mika Sagindyk is a co-founder of Tackle and works with top executives and leaders to run calendar audit on autopilot. She has extensive experience in the technology industry and has previously built a team at AWS. 

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and I am very excited to have a special guest with us today, Mika Sagancik. I pronounced her name correctly. I'm super excited about that. A win right in the beginning of our recording here. If you know, know, it's so important to me to pronounce names correctly, whether it be podcast guests or team members or clients.

Yeah

and such. And so it's like, all right, nailed it. First 30 seconds of the recording. But anyway, I wanted to share with you before I formally introduced Mika, I want to share with you a little bit how we got connected because I know that as a business owner and CEO and so many of our clients are always looking for quality connections, purely for not necessarily just growing the business directly, but

Also, people to collaborate with or bounce ideas off of or people who are in a similar space as us or even just to make connections and make friends, which is an added bonus for some of the networking work that essentially we do. But Mika and I got connected through LinkedIn and I share that. Well, you might be thinking, yeah, okay, I have lots of connections on LinkedIn. But Mika actually sent me a message on LinkedIn.

that was very personalized, very genuine, which I know for a lot of us, we get inundated with messages on LinkedIn and people offering to send me their HR guide or people to send me things about Medicare or they can grow my business to a million dollars next month, all these things where it's either information I didn't ask for or it's just so canned and...

not genuine at all. like 90 % of the time I get messages on LinkedIn, I don't even respond. But in Mika's case, it caught my attention because it was very simple. It was to the point. It was very personalized. And she reached out because she saw an article that I had written on the topic of doing a calendar audit, which is all about what her company does, which I'll share more about in a second. But I just want to encourage you that networking on LinkedIn isn't dead, first of all.

And there's a great way to do it. And I'm so grateful, Mika, that you reached out because we've had so many great conversations ever since then. I've attended a workshop that you hosted or I should say spoke at hosted, co-hosted. But it's just been so great to get to know you. And so I brought Mika on the podcast today because I am particularly interested in her work in the time tracking space and particularly how it relates to goals.

in organizational metrics because as I talk about in a lot of my content, my podcasts, workshops, work that I do with my clients, ultimately the way that you spend your time determines your results. And so it's so important to understand exactly where your time goes, just like you have money goals or you have a budget and you need to keep track of where those dollars are being spent. We also need to be keeping track of where our hours are being spent because it truly makes a difference.

So all of that being said, Mika Sagan-Dick is a co-founder of Tackle and works with top executives and leaders to run calendar audit on autopilot. She has extensive experience in the technology industry and has previously built a team at AWS. Mika, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast. This has been long overdue. I'm super excited to have you sharing with us today.

Amazing. Melissa, thank you so much for this introduction and for having me on the podcast. I'm very excited to do this.

Yes, absolutely. So before we talk about calendar audit and all of those details, because I realized that there are a lot of versions of calendar audit and you know, there's certainly different terminology for it. We all approach it a little bit differently. I want to dive into all of that. But before we do, let's talk a little bit about tackle. So how did tackle come to be like how did what tell us the story of how you started your business?

Yeah, absolutely. So where our story starts is actually from my co-founder. My co-founder was as a team leader, he was dealing with the complexity of managing his team, understanding where he's currently investing all of his resources into. It was just very hard for him to get the visibility of the day-to-day and the operations in the team. And I think one day he just got frustrated with it. He

He is an engineer, he built a very simple way to export all of the calendar events. So he had permissions to see all of his team mates calendars anyway, so he exported all of that and he started making sense of that data. And from that actually, I think the first thing he did is build an exporter. So it was a very simple tool where you just go.

and you share your calendar and it likes to export everything. And it was for free forever. And I think when him and I met, we started brainstorming, thinking what's the best way to provide value with this? Obviously there is this pain point of trying to understand where the time goes. And also it's such a universal problem because everybody has too little time. We're always talking about how we're always busy and...

when you start counting all the things you've done, it's really hard to even think, like, what did I do yesterday? What did I do on the weekend? Like, I always have to pause when I answer that question. And so from then on, we started brainstorming. And yeah, we offer a software solution today that integrates with Google Calendar. And we'll let people not only export, so we moved a little bit away from that, even though we still do offer it. But we'll let people visualize.

Yes.

how they spend their time and we've come to realize that it's especially useful for executives, for executives assistants, chiefs staff and that people do a thing that's called calendar audit, which I also, I was very, very intrigued by the term that it's been coined apparently in this narrow space of executive calendar management or executive time management and when I saw your article, I was very excited that somebody is contributing to this.

So I'm really glad that you answered that LinkedIn message.

Yes, so am I. It has been so wonderful getting to know you. And I've learned a lot about even the work that we're doing with our virtual assistants, which we'll get into a little bit later, like through the lens of how do we best support the business owners, the executive directors, the founders, you know, through our work with them. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. from, you know, just kind of continuing on with the business journey and things.

How has the business evolved since those early days? Like in terms of, certainly product, as you mentioned, originally it was just a simple exporting tool, but now it's so much more than that, which we can get into. But then also the behind the scenes of even the team, I would imagine, has grown and evolved since the early days. And when exactly was Tackle founded again? What year was that?

Yeah.

It was founded, yeah, so the first time we launched was 2021. But then with this product where we analyze everything, it was, I would say two years ago, a little bit under two years ago. Yeah. But how has it evolved? my gosh, so many things happened. I don't know if people remember, but we had the pandemic.

Okay.

Forgot all about that strange time in our world. Yeah.

I know. Absolutely. So back in the day, I mean, it was just an exporting tool. I know that when my co-founder was getting started, I was not part of that journey yet. He was trying to understand where do we go from here? And as people were still staying at home, working from home a lot, many people were kind of missing the, or many leaders were missing the right tool to understand how to manage their team, even though they're working remotely, for example.

and having something like the calendar or any other digital tools that we use in our day-to-day was really a great way to analyze the data instead of have people enter what they do and do activity reporting. So kind of like do work with what you already have and analyze that data instead of forcing people to maybe track what they do, for example. So that was an easy way to enter the space of maybe workforce management. And then from then on, because

building a product company is so specific because you're really trying to create something that many people will like and you can't really customize too much. It's gonna take you too much time basically. And so we've been on the journey of just trying to figure out who is the best fit customer, best fit persona for this. And...

We've had quite a few iterations. I said, time management is such a universal problem that it's just really hard to narrow down. And sometimes it's also hard, like, you know, this as a business owner, you're like, well, great, that's a new client. That's a new opportunity. That's something great for us to do. But then in product management, you really have to be very focused and say no to some opportunities to make sure that your product stays relevant to everybody else you're serving and not that you build too many things on top that may not be relevant to a large user base. And so.

We've been on the journey of figuring it out, but I would say that our direction of working with executives has proven to be the most valuable. And so this is what we decided to focus on.

That brings up an excellent point because I am not in the software space. Our business is very labor intensive, if you will. It's very labor focused. It's very service focused. So when you bring that up, you're right because the best software is very intuitive. It knows what I need. But there are people behind that trying to figure out what exactly do we need.

I would imagine that you have many suggestions coming your way and that you really have to narrow them down and figure out what makes the most sense, what is going to be most impactful for the people we're trying to serve and then build something to create that. That's fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a lot of, yeah, a lot of conversations. It's also in this day and age, people are so used to getting all the information they need online and like comparing tools very quickly. And so you really have to be fast at like proving that you that you deliver value. And yeah, but but it's a lot of fun. And I get to have conversations like this one.

A lot of market research, would imagine. lot of conversations with executives.

Yes, yes, exactly. so you have, it's you and your co-founder, you know, what does the team look like behind the scenes?

Yeah, so we're not a large team, we're five people in total. And that has really enabled us to be more efficient and to really prioritize very ruthlessly what we want to do. We went through a phase where we were more people and we were doing more. And that did not necessarily lead to greater impact. So we did not really see it reflected in the value that we were providing, in the feedback that was coming our way.

And so we kind of decided to keep things more simple and to be more lean as an organization. And ever since then, things we've been just so much better at prioritizing. And it's also interesting because that's exactly the product. Like we deliver product to help people prioritize and to see if something aligns with their day to day, their day to day aligns with their strategic goals, for example. And so we really just decided to live our mantra ourselves and, to make sure that everything we do is high leverage.

and everything else we either outsource or we make sure that it gets done in a different way. And so, yeah.

love that because bigger isn't always better. More isn't always more. I love how you really had to zero in and focus. Here are the roles that we need on this team in order to be most effective. So I love that. So in kind of a similar, I guess in a similar fashion, but also in a segue then, you know, this is the challenge that so many of the clients that I work with, so many of the people listening to this podcast are facing like

I've got all these things that I want to be doing. I have all these clients that I need to serve. have all just so much. We have so much on our plate, you even at home. We're talking about business today, but that doesn't even start to talk about home and all the responsibilities there with families and everything else hobbies, interests, all of that. But we're trying to figure out how do we maximize our time? And so and what do we invest in? Like we talked about we just talked about team.

Yeah.

team is great, but it doesn't mean that we need a large team in order to be impactful. And we don't necessarily need or want more hours in the day. We want to be impactful with what we have. So that being said, can you share a little bit more about how tackle automatically conducts calendar audits and measures the effectiveness of how we're spending our time?

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that you can think of tackle as kind of being this blank canvas of in general of your day to day. so usually the way people operate with it is they just really like the first step is really to reflect and to understand how you already spend your time. So what are the big buckets that are already taking your time? And then we let users basically create their own platform platform, but

We let them create their own labels of how they spend their time. So let's say it's personal things. If you're running a business, for example, what is operational or day-to-day or just running the business? And then what is growing the business, for example? So how much time are you spending growing the business? Maybe within growing the business, are some subcategories, for example, CEO internal meetings, or you have some big beds, or you have client meetings, everything that's really aligned with.

helping you grow your business is there and everything that's operational that just needs to get done so the business stays in business. Those are the operational things. And so I would imagine for everybody else, it may look very different depending on the market you're in and things like that. But I would say largely we help users. First of all,

you reflect, create those categories, and then you apply those labels directly in the calendar. And why people really love that, and it's so interesting because we started as an exporter, we have this Chrome plugin. And so when people have Google Calendar and they're already used to organizing everything in the calendar, you can see it as a plugin and you can already label everything under event description. And that automatically sends this data to tackle and then you can later visualize everything.

and so, yeah, after a certain while you, we automate a lot of the labeling, for example. And, also we've recently launched the AI feature that basically does that for you so that you only have to log in and see how, how you're spending your time this week, last month, maybe last year, if you want to reflect over the entire year. So all of that, is already here and that's how we do it.

fantastic. in summary, it's basically a plugin that it connects to. I know you mentioned Google Calendar. I would imagine that it connects with many other calendars as well, many other platforms.

Exactly, we're currently working on the Outlook integration that was by far the most requested one. But as I said, because we were trying to keep things very simple, Google Calendar already has so many users worldwide. So we were perfectly happy just serving Google Calendar users because that's already is a very huge space for us to be in. But we're currently working on the Outlook integration, especially because a lot of larger companies use Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams and stuff like that.

Okay.

Yes.

Yes, you're right. Hands down, when we're working with clients, the vast majority of them use Google Calendar. There are a few that use Outlook, just kind of depending on, I find if they have a more corporate background or if they're part of a larger team, that's where we find that people are using Outlook. But yeah, I can see that where you have to prioritize. And so I think that's a great track for developing your product.

So it's a plugin connects to your calendar. So you don't have to change calendars if you're already using a Google calendar. And it just goes right in there. And then you ultimately are kind of like tagging almost like the time entries in there. So obviously the effectiveness of the calendar audit is going to be as good as the data that you're putting in. So I love the AI feature.

You know one thing and this is just kind of a personal question for me which sometimes I struggle with when I'm looking at my own calendar audits is I'll have like Miscellaneous work time or I'll have learn where then it's not necessarily Getting down to the nitty-gritty of how I'm spending that time. Do you have some tips for some of that? Miscellaneous catch-all You know meetings are really easy to categorize I would say because we can say was this a networking call was this

Hmm.

a call with a potential client? Was this a call with a potential collaboration or referral partner sort of a thing? But some of that other miscellaneous time, do you have some tips for categorizing that?

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a very good question because at the end of the day, nobody's day goes the way they planned it. Even though we really like to plan as I think there's a saying that something like you can plan all you want, but then the universe sends you a very different.

Thank

I've heard, you know, you can plan, we plan and God laughs. You know, that's another way to say it. Mm-hmm. Yep.

something exactly. Absolutely. So we can do whatever is in under our control, for sure. But so the way that I've seen a lot of executives and executive assistants do, and I've actually I'm taking all of these user calls as an inspiration, because every time I talk to them, I'm like, well, I didn't think about organizing my life this way, or my work this way. And so I've seen people

do, I've seen people plan their week and they would basically say, I want to make sure that we accomplish this week, for example, they have a certain goal, they have a top goal for the month, maybe for the quarter, but then they have some weekly accomplishments that they want to make sure that happen. And I would see them create events or they already have some events in the calendar, but then if anything else needs to be done, they would add it as a task or as a Google calendar event as well.

And then a lot of people that come to us are already using color coding, for example. So they would specifically, they would specify, for example, anything that's client is red, anything that's team is green, and then everything that's miscellaneous, maybe yellow, for example, but then you already see just like by looking at the calendar that miscellaneous is not too much, it's not more than 20%, maybe. I mean, if the entire calendar is miscellaneous work, then you're probably.

you would probably want to know what exactly you're doing that week and what you want to accomplish. But I would say it's always I think for me, for example, personally, I think I'm kind of following the 80 20 principle here. I have to know that 80 % of the work that I do, I kind of understand where it's going. And I don't need to understand every single detail. So just like without spending too much time, have a big picture understanding of what's going on. And then

Mm-hmm.

sometimes at the end of the week I would go and edit what I did or did not do just to specify a little bit so that helps me reflect. If it's a habit, it usually doesn't take longer than five minutes per week, but then it gives you the illustration or the visualization that will help you make more informed decisions and maybe delegate some of the things. yeah.

love that. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's the 80-20 rule. If we're putting good information in the calendar, we understand that not every minute of every day is going to be very focused and productive time. There's those little chunks of time in between meetings where it's like, I've got 10 minutes, I can't really get started on anything significant, I might as well...

Yep.

Yeah, absolutely.

respond to a couple of those easy emails and then there's always that kind of fluff time, if you will. So I have written about calendar audit. I've talked about it on the podcast. I have an event coming up in December that I'm going to be talking about calendar audit and reviewing and reflecting on this year and what do we do with that information for next year. But I'm curious because everybody does this a little bit differently.

How do you walk executives through doing a calendar audit?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the most important question is what people actually want to accomplish with the calendar audit. So kind of having that main purpose for why and some people have very different reasons for doing that. It's sometimes it's actually mandatory in an organization to understand how employees are spending their time. Sometimes it's more of the I want to understand how much of my time is in work versus personal things and

So that already combines the personal aspect of it as well. So I think just understanding what you would want to achieve. And then based on that, you can have different questions that you want to answer with that calendar audit. And so what I've seen very effective executives do is they would have certain questions that they want to answer. I actually summarized that recently in a blog post, but...

I would say there's definitely a few questions that I've seen. It's a pattern that I've seen across many executives. And so usually the first question is obviously, where does my time go? So where did it go last week, last month, things like that. So kind of being the opener. Then there's another one that's very interesting. How well does my week reflect my key priorities or my organizational goals? So let's say the company is planning to enter a certain market or working on this product that's been

or on this introducing a new service and it's been in planning or work in progress for the last six months and now is the time to launch. And this is the highest priority. And so if the executive was responsible for it, maybe it's not putting more of 10 % of their time into this direction, but something is taking way more time for this, maybe in an old product division, we know that it may be not completely aligned with where the organization wants to go. And so in this moment, especially because you have such a busy calendar and you tend to just like,

attend everything and go to all the meetings because everything seems important as always. Just taking a few minutes of your time to understand if that aligns well with the organization already helps you understand if you're creating the highest value you can.

So we have to learn how to say no sometimes.

Absolutely. think that's, that's my biggest learning out of calendar, really calendar audit is just, what do I say? No to, and like by default, everything is a no unless I have a very good reason to say yes. And, that's one thing that I've, I've come to realize with a lot of executive assistants and executives in conversations with them, they are so protective over their time. They're just like, I only have this many hours to make an impact and it better be well spent.

No.

So how do I make sure that this counts? And yeah, it's been a great deal of inspiration as well.

you

That is fantastic. Okay, so I want to pause there and just acknowledge some of the most productive people and the most effective people are very defensive of the way that they spend. They defend their calendar, they defend their time, and they are very intentional about what they say yes to. For those of us who are recovering people pleasers or we know we're people pleasers, like for me in being the owner of my company,

I get approached to have different conversations or I get pulled into different things. And so for me, I tend to come from a place of yes. And so this is a really great thing to bring up even for me and even giving me some permission of, hey, I can't be in all the things. I can't have all the conversations. So I love that you brought that up.

Yeah, absolutely. It's been a great deal of inspiration for me as well. And also just this simple realization that it's not even about, like, it's not even that we reject certain things. We're making space for what really matters, for what's going to really make a difference and helps us live a more fulfilled life. so even though we started with this very, I would say, work context direction, like this is only about calendar audit, the conversations that evolved out of this was very much about

how to lead a successful and happy life and a fulfilled life and how to spend most time in domains that you actually thrive in versus something that may not add a lot of value to you, maybe emotionally, spiritually. And so I never imagined that these are the topics I would end up sometimes talking to with my customers, but they are. And I get to learn a lot from them as well.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, I love that. I love that. So really, the calendar audit, we want to know, you know, where is our time going? But then also more importantly, is the way we're spending our time in alignment with the goals and priorities that we've set. And so when we gather all this information, there's probably a discrepancy to some degree or another some of the best, the most intentional executives and

Absolutely.

I would say the most disciplined. They probably have fewer course corrections that need to be made. But for somebody who's doing a calendar audit for the first time, they may see huge discrepancies. Like here are the number one things, here's the number one thing that I'm working on. And then I was putting out fires and I was answering questions from the team or my customers. And if...

you know, when you have somebody who realizes, wow, I really need to make some big changes here, where do you suggest they go next?

That's a really good question. So there's a couple ways to think about it. Again, another pattern that I saw among executives is that they really want to understand how much time they're spending on growing the business versus building the business. And because a lot of them are also so protective of their time, they're also very protective of their personal time. So how they spend their evenings and things like that. they would also have this label, like personal things.

and so, a lot of them actually have a goal of how much time they want to spend in certain areas of their life. And what I've seen a lot of people do is have this, ratio of 50, 40, 10 roughly. so it'd be 50 % on growing the business, 40 % on running it, and then 10 % in personal things. And that was, that was super interesting because it's such an easy way to think about it. Just like, what are the...

Mm-hmm.

two or three things that really matter to me right now, what do I want to focus on, and what's the approximate percentage? And it doesn't have to be like every single week, it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned, but just having a rough expectation and understanding if that goes in the direction that you want it to, maybe for the next three months, for example. And then you can revisit if this is, that's what made you happy, that's what helped you contribute to the organization, maybe have a different type of ratio for the next quarter. But that's one way to make it very actionable.

Sure.

And we actually offer it in our product as well, something called goals. So time-based goals. People can set a goal of how much time max or min they want to spend in a certain area. It's interesting. For example, some people didn't want to spend too much time talking to clients that aren't, for example, super, super relevant for the business right now, but rather to customers that they see growing with, for example. And that's something that where they can hold themselves accountable to.

achieving those time-based goals. Yeah, so that's one way to think about it. I would say another way to think about it is also to review all the activities that you do and also understand what you want to delegate, what you want to keep doing, and what you want to completely just make exquisite so that it's not the most joyful thing to do, but you have to do it anyway, you're the only one who can do it. So just try to make it as joyful as you can.

Yeah.

Yeah, so different ways to make it actionable.

I love that. I was going to ask you about ratios. So you read my mind on that because I'm like, ideally, how do you see executives dividing their time? But then I also love how you brought in there, you know, what is your zone of genius and you know, what do you want to delegate or what are the things that fortunately or unfortunately, you know, you're the only one who can do and how to find joy and in those types of things because, you know, certainly we work with many clients who

our team is their very first hire, where it's been all them, where they're doing the running of the business, the growing of the business, the serving the customers and all of that. So inevitably, depending on the stage of business that you're at or where you're at in your career, there may inevitably be some things that you don't love doing, but you don't have other people on the team that you can hand those things off to. So I love that you acknowledge that.

Absolutely. It's very interesting that it's also giving us the permission to say, honestly, what did you enjoy apart from delivering value? And usually it's actually very well aligned with where we deliver value and what we enjoy. And so answering that question is also a really good way to contribute to the company and to your customers. And yeah, I enjoyed that.

I love that. Of course, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies when it comes to managing our time because we do get distracted by the shiny object or we do see the fire that needs to get put out over here or we do receive the interesting invitation, is it a line for us? Maybe not. That can be where a virtual assistant, executive assistant, or even a chief of staff

can come in and help provide that accountability when it comes to the way that we're spending our time or even put some of those boundaries in place around it for the different asks that inevitably come up. I also see in there where I've had clients say, I need them to be the gatekeeper for all of these things that I'm being invited to.

and things like that, or I'm getting inundated over here with requests and questions. I need somebody else to be the first line of defense for jumping in on those types of things. So in your experience, how have some of the most successful executives gotten their assistance involved in this process?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. think everybody I was talking to chief of staff about it and they were saying that it really depends on the personality of the executive. So they may like certain things this way or that way. And so I think just this personality alignment almost or there's like energy balance between the assistant and the executive is super important to get things right. But

I would definitely say like the trust layer is super important, just trusting one another completely. And then what I've seen people do is actually they would try to create some certain habits or certain workflows on how they actually work with their executive. So some kind of executive assistants that we work with, they have maybe a weekly or a bi-weekly review together with the executive on what the top priorities are.

if they're going in the right direction and what the highest leverage things that they could be doing. That's another question, by the way, that the calendar audit helps answer is what are the highest leverage and lowest leverage things that we have done in the last two weeks? So what has had the greatest impact and maybe the lowest impact on our top goals? And just that reflection and understanding.

where time went and if it added to the top goal or not already helps plan the next two weeks or the next week in a better and more effective way. so being able to even say that to like enabling your executive assistant to even say things like that and be very transparent and share their honest opinion is also a really great way to hold yourself accountable basically. And so I found that if executive assistant chief of staff

can actually go into that zone of holding their executive accountable, sharing everything transparently, and just being very, very open about how things go that can lead to true difference versus obviously if you only engage in other tasks and you may be too protective of this kind of topic, you may not be able to tap into that additional part of discovering what to do best. So yeah.

That is fantastic advice and that aligns with my team when I ask them, what are some of the habits of the most successful clients that you work with? Hands down, it's they communicate with me. They're very open about, here's what I'm working on, here's what's not working for me, how can you help? And they also trust them. So they trust their expertise, they trust their opinion.

They trust their intuition. And so it's that communication and trust that's huge, number one, for that relationship, like you said. And I would say even say taking a step back from that and developing, like you had mentioned, I think those processes. So for example, if we have an executive who is continuously being invited to speak at different events and things like that, they need to kind of pre-qualify, if you will. Who is the audience? What is...

What are they hoping to achieve through bringing the executive into speak? We can develop those processes to work with clients and executives so that we're able to filter out what are the most important things on their behalf. so that's another way that we can build trust, like you say, is communicating about those processes and things like that. The other thing is too that I was thinking about is particularly with

calendar audit in your software, executive assistants and virtual assistants, if they're doing email management and calendar management, they can even start to tag and categorize these meetings. again, is it networking? Is it building the business? Is it running the business? What are some of the details there? And so they can even help monitor and pull those reports and take a look at.

here's the bulk of how the time was spent in the last two weeks, where are the gaps? What went well? And then what can we do better? So having that added accountability and really that collaboration and partnership can be huge.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say 90 % of the cases, it's usually the executive assistant or the chief of staff, or maybe both of them actually managing the calendar and doing the tagging and talking with us, even if they need anything else, or if they need any advice. and then they would have a weekly bi-weekly meeting with their executive and they just basically share that page, the entire dashboard, and then they discuss what they would like to focus on in the next two weeks and the next month. and that,

that is super interesting. We've even had clients where the executives, I think it's their third executive already, and every new executive that comes in, the assistant and the chief of staff, they keep using the same way of categorizing everything and visualizing everything, which has been very fascinating. I didn't expect this to happen because usually every executive has their own preference. But in this case, the organization benefits so much from it that they said.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

this is what executives are gonna follow in their organization. yeah.

I was gonna say, or sometimes it's a, you know what? I don't want to come up with all the tags in the categories. If you have a system, just implement that system and then I can change it. Yes, we certainly have clients that we work with that will say the same thing. Like I can't make one more decision. You just set it up and then we'll fine tune from there. So that takes the guest workout. Yeah, so.

Absolutely.

Exactly, yeah, absolutely.

Tell us as we kind of wrap up here, where can we learn more about tackle or give that system a try?

So yeah, thanks for following up. Anybody can sign up anytime at timetackle.com and we have a free plan and also a free trial of any of our paid plans. So anybody can just go ahead and try it out and make sure to add the Chrome plugin so that you actually get the full taste of it and working with it in your calendar. And then if you ever want to connect and to change ideas, brainstorm or just

Yeah, request even a feature or anything like that. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I'm usually very responsive on both. And yeah, I'll be very excited to see how we can help more people.

Love this. Yes, and this is on my radar as well to get that installed on my Google Calendar. We use Google Workspace, especially looking at the year ahead because I know that as we continue to grow, I need to be more intentional. Increasingly, this is never done. feel like this is something that is always improving and evolving is being increasingly intentional about where I'm spending my time, but also then what I need to release.

and what I need to cross train and delegate to other members of the team. So I think that having that audit and having my executive assistant involved in that will be a game changer in the coming year. So I have that added accountability as well. So super excited to dive in to tackle. For those of you listening, I will continue to report back because you know me, this is a topic that I get very excited about and I'm always looking for interesting insights that might be helpful to our audience. So.

Mika, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was so good to connect with you. We always have such great conversations.

Thank you so much, Melissa. This has been super, super inspiring as well. And just to hear your thoughts on this and to learn what you've learned from your customers. So thank you so much for having me and to everybody else. Have a great end of year and have a good new year.

Yes, yes, exactly. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening and tuning into today's episode. I hope that this has given you a perspective on how you may be able to manage your time differently moving forward, especially as we're looking at resetting for 2025 and the energy and excitement of a new year. I encourage you to do a calendar audit and see.

you know, what went well and what do I maybe need to fine tune and tweak in order to be more effective in the coming year. So if you've enjoyed today's episode, please feel free to share this with, you know, an entrepreneur, business owner, executive that you know, who of course, you know, wants to do more with the time that they have and less of the things that they don't want to be doing. This is always a great way to share a little perspective with them. So appreciate your shares, appreciate you listening today.

and I'll be back next week with more tips and tools and tactics to grow your business beyond you. Have a wonderful day everyone. Bye bye.