Nicola Cairncross: Slack, Infusionsoft, Books and Podcasts Galore and Living in the Moment

POWER to Live More with Jo Dodds

Slack, Infusionsoft, Books and Podcasts Galore and Living in the Moment with Nicola Cairncross of ClicksAndLeads.com

What We Recommended:

Tools & Apps

• Sleep Cycle “I have an app on my phone called ‘Sleep Cycle’ where you set an alarm to say, wake me up in the hour before this time when I’m at my lightest part of sleep, so it doesn’t actually feel like an alarm clock goes off at all, and I have it set to play Kanye West and Jay Z’s ‘Otis’, which is not what you’d expect but it makes me smile every morning, a little bit of hip hop. Yeah, you know, it wakes me up when I’m coming up to my lightest part of my sleep cycle and I just love it. It’s completely revolutionised my life. It’s got rid of my jet lag when I travel.“
• Slack “which is a way of communicating with your team. I swapped to it, we were using email and Skype, and it was working all right but you can’t search either of those very efficiently. The thing about Slack is, all your in-team communications go on inside Slack and it’s highly searchable, it integrates with lots of other things, so for example, if you put a YouTube video URL in there, it will actually bring the YouTube video into Slack so you don’t have to go off to YouTube and get distracted by other videos of cats and things.”
• Trello “I love. I don’t use it massively for myself but we do use it to set up our systems in and for the team to follow the systems. I don’t use it for my own to do lists but it is a really nice tool and we have client Trello boards and all sorts of things, and Trello comes into Slack, so every time I go into Slack, I can see what’s been happening in the Trello boards without having to go into Trello itself. They work really well together.”
• Infusionsoft “I know other people use other things and I know there’s other things that are just as good and I’ve been using it for a couple years and I love it and LeadPages, couldn’t live without LeadPages.”
• ActiveCampaign “which has a lot of the really nice features of Infusionsoft without being quite so difficult to learn, but if you’re not even ready for ActiveCampaign yet, I would be looking at using ConvertKit, which is an email list host with automation features, i.e. if someone takes an action or clicks something they get moved automatically to another list, and I would probably team that up with Steli’s Close.io which is a customer relationship management system.”
• Stripe: “I use Stripe nowadays, to take my money. It’s cheaper than PayPal and you don’t have the thing that if someone has your goods and services and then wilfully asks for a refund, you know, PayPal will automatically refund them.”
• Gumroad – an all in one solution to sell your work and grow your audience (and gets you round the VAT issues for small businesses selling into Europe as they do it all for you).

Books

• ‘Choose Yourself’ by James Altucher “you know, the podcast guy. He’s a startup founder and went bust, you know, had a lot of problems with drugs, I just find him quite a fascinating character.”
• I’ve read ‘Get a Grip’ which is by Gino Wickman who wrote ‘Traction’. ‘Traction’ is one of the best business books I’ve ever read after ‘The E-Myth’, in fact it’s like E-Myth for grownups. ‘Get a Grip’ is a version of the ‘Traction’ story but it’s written in a story as if it was about a real company.
• “I’ve also read, this week, Yanik Silver’s new book which is all about entrepreneurs with passion, you know, people who want to make a difference in the world. I can’t remember exactly what he calls it and it’s upstairs so I can’t even dig it out.”
• “There’s a book called ‘Learned Optimism’ which I’d like to recommend which has popped into my head, by Martin Selligman, and he says, “50% of us are pessimists and 50% of us are optimists and you can change”. You know, you can change your language. You can change how you expect things to be. You can go from being a pessimist to being an optimist. It’s worth trying to do, because optimists are not only happier, they’re more successful in life.”
• “I have what I call my bug-free mind. I lost a 5 bedroom house, I lost the car, the kids had to go live with their dad. It all happened very suddenly. When you’ve been through something like that, everything else just seems wonderful, and the art of learning how to be grateful for tiny things like, you know, I’ve got a bed to sleep in tonight and I’ve got a hot shower and I can eat this evening. You stop worrying about things so much. It’s the true secret of happiness, learning to be grateful, no matter what’s happening to you. My friend Andy, he went through a similar kind of thing at the same time, and he wrote a couple of books called, “Creating a Bug-Free Mind” and “Using a Bug-Free Mind” and they are really, really genius books. I highly recommend them to everyone.”

Films

• Biggest Star Trek fan ever

Tips

• Not getting up early! “You know, when you’ve got small children, your sleep is the most precious thing, and when you get to the point where you don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn, then why would you?”
• Keeping a notebook: “I do number the pages so if I’ve got anything particularly meaningful, I’ll go and put at the end of the book what page that thing was on, so that I can find it easier again, because what I hate is, I like to look for things and not know which book they’re in.”
• Getting to sleep: “Listening to podcasts helps me. It engages my brain enough so that I can relax to go to sleep, learn something at the same time and gradually relax”.
• Diary Zoning: “Diary zoning helps me very much because I can batch jobs into certain types of jobs. For example, Wednesdays, all about podcasting, all about telephone calls, all about interacting with other people. Then Mondays and Fridays are working on the business and Tuesdays and Thursday mornings is calls with clients / potential clients, then the afternoons are all free. I find diary zoning works really, really well for me. I work much more efficiently if I don’t have to chop and change and do different things.”
• Making Time for Exercise: “The first step in the ‘exercise’ process for me was clearing my diary in the afternoons. I think my next step is to go and join a luxury gym, because I don’t want to go to my local swimming pool and, you know, be uncomfortable and cold, trying to get changed with a bunch of kids, you know? I think I’ve got to turn it into something that’s a treat.“
• Having More Time: “I don’t have the day to day thing of having to look after kids, which, you know, you won’t realise Jo ‘til it stops how time consuming it is. Also, having a husband! Those people want demands on your time, whereas my partner doesn’t live with me and so he’s not expecting my attention all the time, and the kids don’t either, so, I do have more time than most people, I think.”
• Being Happy in the Moment: At the same time when I lost everything, I was … It’s not that I don’t have ambition now and it’s not that I don’t want nice things and it’s not that I don’t want to earn good money, it’s the striving. I’m not constantly striving anymore. I can stop and enjoy and … You’ve always struck me as a very down to earth person and a very grounded person, and perhaps that’s what people mean when they say someone’s grounded. They’re able to be happy in the moment.

Podcasts

• SuperFastBusiness with James Schramko
• Think Act Get: TAG with Ezra Firestone and James Schramko
• Sales Marketing Profit with James Schramko and Taki Moore
• Bootstrapped with Kids with Brecht and Scott
• “The Startup Chat is possibly my favourite now because it’s got the mental Steli Efti and I get Steli, a mention of Steli, in everything I do. He’s just a bonkers Greek who went to America and he’s got a successful software company himself now, but he hooked up with Hiten Shah, who started Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, and together they are dynamite. It’s just the funniest, fastest paced, but also most thoughtful and emotionally intelligent podcast I know.”

To Contact Nicola

• “I’ve got a personal website at NicolaCairncross.com which, really, talks about my books and my speaking and you know personal stuff like that.”
• “ClicksAndLeads.com is where you can come to either find out how we could do your Facebook ads for you or how you can train to do your own, if that’s what you prefer.”
• “I’m always on Facebook. Facebook’s my thing, obviously doing Facebook ads I’m on there all day and on Facebook just put in Nicola Cairncross and connect with my page”
• “Twitter, I like Twitter as well so connect with me on Twitter, clicksandleads”
• “Our podcast is called ‘Own It’ and you can find it on iTunes and Stitcher and SoundCloud I think. Coming soon on Google Play, because that’s the Android platform they’re just opening up.”

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