Ep 107: The Digital Studio Toolkit: Automation Systems for Creative Teams
Freeing Up Your Creative Energy
SUMMARY
Are you spending more time on administrative tasks than actual creative work? In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, we explore how the right digital tools and automation systems can free up your creative energy while boosting your team's productivity.
As creative professionals, we often find ourselves caught in the paradox of wanting more time to create while drowning in repetitive tasks. By identifying which activities generate the most value and automating the rest, you can reclaim your time and focus on what truly matters—your creative work.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: Apply the 80-20 Principle to Your Creative Work
80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. The key is identifying which creative tasks generate the most value so you can automate or delegate the remaining 80% that drains your creative energy. Conduct a time and energy audit to identify where your time is going and which tasks only you can do.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: Automate Repetitive Business Activities
Several common business activities are perfect for automation, including:
Client onboarding and intake forms
Project milestone notifications
Invoice generation and payment reminders
Social media scheduling
Email responses to common inquiries
Tools like AI (Claude), CRMs, project management software, and email automation can save you countless hours by handling these repetitive tasks.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: Regularly Evaluate Your Tech Stack
Ask yourself these five questions quarterly about each tool in your digital toolkit:
Does it help you save time?
Does it clear up mental space?
Does it reduce stress?
Does it set up future you for success?
Does it fit in your budget?
If a tool doesn't meet these criteria, it might be time to look for alternatives or simplify your tech stack.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Your technology should serve creativity, not complicate it." - Chris Do
💬 "Focus your creative energy on high-impact tasks while systemizing everything else." - Chris Do
💬 "The goal isn't to automate everything, but to free up your time for the highest value creative work—that 20%."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Time & Energy Audit Template - Free template based on Dan Martell's book Buy Back Your Time.
⚡️The Futur - Chris Do's website mentioned in the episode
⚡️ Recommended Tools Mentioned:
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Are you spending more time on administrative tasks than actual creative work? Today, we're exploring how the right digital tools and automation systems can free up your creative energy while boosting your team's productivity. Let's get into it. Creatives from chaos to clarity.
Welcome back, everyone, to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, and all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical and actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. We do that a lot with systems and processes. I'm your host, Dustin Pead. Creative process coach and consultant. I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.
Before we get started on today's episode, I want to invite you to like, subscribe, ring the bell if you're watching on YouTube. If you're listening to this podcast on the audio podcast platform, I would love for you to leave a five star rating or review, whatever your platform allows that really helps get this content out further to those like yourself who can benefit from it. You can follow me on social media at Dustin Pead. That's P-E-A-D and you can find out everything that I have going on at DustinPead.com including some exciting new tools and events coming up.
But today let's get into this digital studio toolkit automation systems for creative teams. So I'm a mild tech geek. I don't necessarily go looking out for every single new thing that's coming out. But I am a huge fan of efficiency and I'm a huge fan of automating things to save me as much time as possible. And we're having this conversation here in the year 2025 and we have to bring up AI, right? And so there's two major tools, one being AI that I use, but Claude is the AI tool that I use and my CRM is a white label version of Go High Level. I've talked about it on here before called VidLead Studio.
Those two have automations that have saved me countless hours, whether I'm just kind of processing out an idea and what it could look like. I really use Claude to have conversations with. My wife makes fun of me all the time because I'm saying I having a conversation with Claude the other day as if it's a real friend of mine. But we have these conversations back and forth and we're able to kind of flesh out some ideas and some different things. And it prompts with a lot of really great questions that I had not considered before.
And then that leads to certain automations, one of which I just donned came upon earlier this week where I'm getting ready to onboard a virtual assistant. And a major part of a virtual assistant is email management. And so what I wanted to do was I wonder if there was a way, cause I'm only given a certain amount of hours. So this virtual assistant, I wonder if there's a way, for to have like an email recap automatically sent to her, every day at the end of the day, here's what, here's the came activity that came in on the inbox. Here's the activity that happened going out. The things that you need to know, action steps that need to be taken, things that need to be followed up with yada, yada, yada, right?
Simple kind of a summary rather than having every single email to pour through and look through that could take hours every single day. So Claude just recently announced that they have a Gmail integration. And so I went into Claude, I had a conversation with it for about 20 minutes on the other side of it. Now I have a system set up automatically where it will email out a synopsis to me and my VA every single day, Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern with a customized summary from clients, new business opportunities, all these different things, right? And action steps that need to be taken.
And so that's just one of many, many, many different ways that your digital studio can help you automate some systems that will save you and your team lots of time. The paradox that we face here as creative teams is that we want more time to create, but we also are drowning a lot in some very repetitive tasks. So building on last week's podcast discussion where we talked about project timelines and profitability in those timelines, and today I wanted to explore how the right tools can help protect those timelines.
Let's kick it off here with what's known as the 80-20 principle. Now, the 80-20 principle means something different in every single context, but the Pareto principle, how you pronounce it, essentially says, listen, 80% of the results come from 20% of our efforts. And so if that's true, which I believe it is, and I think if you look at kind of the past six, 12 months or so, you could probably even say that's true about you in your life as well, that it's really most of the results are coming from the very few things of the efforts that I'm putting in.
And so what's critical here is that we identify, right? We identify what that 20% of creative tasks are that generate the most of our value. If that way we can target automation at the remaining 80% that drains our creative energy. So there are some common business activities that are perfect for automation. Here's just a few of them, right? Client onboarding and intake forms. This is something I help my clients with all the time, specifically inside of a CRM. How are we bringing in clients? How are we onboarding them and moving them through the process of becoming a client of theirs?
Project Milestone Notifications. I'm going to talk a little bit, I think I talked a little bit about this last week, but really just like having some of that CRM automatic notifications built in customized to their project through their customer journey. Last week I talked about that pizza delivery system. You can go back and listen all about how that works. Invoice generation and payment reminders, like all that stuff, you should not be sending manually. All of that stuff should be automated.
Social media scheduling. This can go either way, right? Social media, especially ones like Instagram and Facebook, they, as far as organic reach is concerned, they prioritize those that use their app and use their platform organically. And so sometimes scheduling some social media may not be the right way to go for your reach, but if your purpose is more consistency and less reach, then social media scheduling could be a huge time saver for you, and you can do that through most CRMs as well, so it's kind of all in one platform.
And then email responses to common inquiries. There are so many different mail programs out there. I, being an Apple loyalist, have used Mac mail on my laptop and on my iPhone ever since I had a Mac laptop and an iPhone. But just recently I switched over to Spark email. One of my clients uses it and recommended it. And inside of Spark, you can have some automatic email responses to certain inquiries that come in.
Yes, you can do a simple out of office reply for when you're on vacation or you're not or it's in the time frame of the day that you're not generally going to be checking your email. But this is kind of a hey, listen for smart words and then respond accordingly back to that. So there are many, many, many ways to automate the other 80 percent of your activities. But this is just a few of them that I wanted to hit so far. So we talked about identifying the 20 percent.
So here's how I think you can help identify that 20% that brings the most value. Dan Martel wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. I talk about it all the time. It's a fantastic book. My favorite part of the book, is in it he talks about doing a time and energy audit. So what I created for myself and for others in my circle is just a simple Google spreadsheet of how to be able to do this time and energy audit. But essentially, what it is is every 15 minutes or 30 minutes or hour or however often you wanna do it, you will write down exactly what you're doing, the task, right, that you're doing during that time block.
You're gonna also choose in mind, I have a dropdown menu of green or red. Did it give you energy or did it take away energy from you? That's important to know with the time and energy audit. And then, there is a value drop down menu as well. $1 sign up to $5 signs. Now it doesn't mean value in terms of monetary like financial value. It means the value that you are bringing to the table for your organization, right? What am I adding the most value here? Is this something that someone else could easily add value to? So $5 signs would be like, these are things that only I can do. No one else in the organization can do this and be real about it. Don't be so fully yourself to think that all your tasks are $5 signs because more than likely according to the 80-20 rule 80% of your tasks are not $5 sign value tasks.
So you go through there and you do that for about a week 10 days no more than that and then you can step back and look at the full picture and see as Dan Martell teaches us where your time and your energy is going to and so that's an easy quick way to go Okay, there's my 20% and everything else, the 80% I need to figure out how to automate or delegate or eliminate, right? Going back to that focus funnel.
There's a guy blowing up on social media right now, a professional creative as well. Fantastic dude. His name is Chris Do, D-O, and he is from his, his website is thefuture.com. There's no E on the end of future. What he emphasizes, we're going to talk about him a few times in this podcast episode. What he emphasizes is that focusing your creative energy on high impact tasks while systemizing everything else is what will create the best future for you and your company and you and your organization. So emphasize or focus on focus your creative energy on high impact tasks while systemizing everything else. That's exactly what the time and energy audit is telling us.
Now, if you want that template for the time and energy audit that I made from based off of Dan Martell's book, you can go to DustinPead.com slash free and click on the time and energy audit button and it will automatically send you a copy of that to use. So let's get into the next point. All right. The common water cooler talk when it comes to digital tools or the tech stack, if you will, around the water cooler is, tell me what you're using.
I love to hear what other people are using because if it's something that can help me and improve my systems and processes and help me be more efficient, then I wanna know about it. And it's just like, I've used Mac Mail for so long, but now I'm using Spark and it's really helping me kinda navigate through some things without having to check my email constantly, right? So I just wanna give you my kinda essential tech stack that I use. And this is not everything. This is just a handful of them, right?
But if you're brand new to the podcast, you've never heard me say this before. But if you've listened to five minutes of any other podcast episode that I've done, any of the previous 106 episodes that we've done here, you know that my project management system that I use is Asana. And I love to use Asana because it's easy for me to create templates to duplicate every single time when someone, when a new project comes in for me or one of my clients, I don't have to recreate the wheel every single time I go, Oh, you want this product? No problem.
I have a template for that, for that project, but timelines and everything, I'm going to duplicate it I'm going to, and then I'm going to quickly assign who it goes to and when the, when, when it needs to be done or you can have your project manager do that. Right. And so easily boom in a matter of seconds, we are up and running in the project and it's all added to our to-do lists.
A client communication platform that I use as part of our Chief Creative, which is my LLC, Chief Creative Consultants Community. We use Slack, which is just an internal communication tool, often like a Google chat or something like that. I love Slack because of some of the automation features in it. Has a ton of integration, like an integration with Asana. So let's say a client slacks our team and says, hey, could you guys take a look at XYZ for us? Sure, no problem.
What we're going to do though, in that exact moment, is we're going to click the button next to that Slack message that came in and we're going to create a task in Asana and we're going to assign it to somebody on our team and we're going to put a DO date on it. Right then and there from Slack, we don't have to leave the program to go do something else and worry about mind shifting or getting distracted. We're going to do it right then and there and then we're going to share that automatically back to them and say, look, we're on it. We created a task for it. It's in, it's in our Asana. Don't worry about it. We will get back to you on it. We will take care of what you asked us to do.
The other cool part about that. And then a little bonus like feature is that when that task comes up for us to do in the task description, there's going to be a link to that exact Slack message where the request came in at. So if we, again, we talk about future you all the time and understanding the context of what we're dealing with immediately, all I have to do is click that it opens up my Slack and shows exactly what the context was of the conversation. Why this was a thing that is automatically in my Asana now. And I can boom off to the races, go ahead and take care of it. So I love Slack channels, DMS, all of it. So, good.
I'm not going to, there's not a product breakdown for Slack, but definitely, I recommend it a lot for client communication and internal team communication as well. My file management and asset storage, I just use Google Drive again because it's connected to so many different things. I talked about Claude earlier and my CRM. Google Drive just works so seamlessly with both. You could see already from my email thing that I was talking about earlier with Claude and then my CRM as well, all of it works in calendar and scheduling, also my CRM. Again, I like to try and do as much as I can in one central location. So calendar and scheduling is in my CRM as well.
And then time tracking, I'm testing out a couple of them right now and I'm mostly using time tracking for efficiency. I want to know how long are certain tasks taking me so that when a client or someone on the team asks, for a certain thing that we can go, okay, I know from experience and from documenting this, this is how long it's gonna take for us to do that. Or if I can look at it go, man, it took me three hours to do that. Why? I must've been distracted. I needed to kind of tighten up. And so I use my time tracking as a bit of an internal coach for me and my team. So I've been switching back and forth between Harvest or Clockify. Harvest works really well with Asana, which I really love.
Clock and both of them work really well within the like Google Chrome kind of web browser harvest costs. Clockify is free. You kind of get what you pay for, you know, when you're when you're thinking about these these little tools, but obviously costs all add up. So choose what's best for you. And then let's see what else do I have. The last one I want to talk about is Loom. I love Loom. Loom is a simple way to record what is on your screen with a little circle in the bottom corner of you while you're, while you're talking through and showing anything that you want on the screen.
So I use this two ways. I use it for client and team training. I can record it once, make sure that I'm addressing a generic crowd, not going, Hey Lauren, let me just show you this thing. You can, if it's for that one particular individual and a unique case, but this really allows us to build up kind of like internal courses and videos on here's how we do these things if they're done digitally on a computer or a phone. It has an app as well for your phone. So even if you're trying to show somebody something on your phone, you can do that through loom as well. That's L O O M.
I use loom every single day. But all in all, it's important to have whatever systems you use, whatever digital tools you use. It's really, really beneficial if you can have those systems talk to each other, create a connected ecosystem in your digital stack or your tech stack or your digital tool belt. But listen, we've all been there before where we put too many things in our pockets or refill the backpack or the luggage too thick or too heavy. And it's so exhausting to carry around. So sometimes less is more. It's why I love my CRM so much because I can do a lot in it with one tool. So just think about that as you're going through your tech stack, which we'll talk about here in a second, but another quote here from Chris Dew at thefuture.com. says, your technology should serve creativity, not complicated.
So let's get into automating some client communications and approvals. You can set up automated client onboarding sequences. We talked about that already. There are different client, or there are different templates that you can create for, for common client communications. It's difficult to say. So project kickoff emails, status update reports, feedback request forms, milestone celebrations. I know all this sounds like a lot of work, but you do all that work up front and then it frees up 80 percent of your time later because you've built out these processes and systems.
So implement approval workflows that reduce the back and forth, right? Use automation to maintain consistent client touch points. There's value. Right. There's value of creating client education materials once like we talked about on loom and then deliver them automatically over and over again. Listen, client portal systems. They're nice. Let's talk about that for a second. But for project communication, again, I use my pizza delivery method, which is just a simple way to be able to say, this is where you're at in the project. You think about the client journey, you ping them on those points of the client journey. You say, this is where your project is at right now. Same way that you would order a pizza for delivery. Simple.
So maybe you've built up a lot of tools over the last however long, or you're just getting started and you're like, I don't know which tools to use. Either way, there comes a point where you need to kind of reevaluate your tech stack or your digital tool belt. Here's some things to ask yourself. Number one, does this tool help you save time? If it costs you more time, now it's probably going to cost you a little bit of time in the beginning, right? Cause you're setting everything up. But overall, over a span of let's say three months or so, does this tool help you save time? If it does check, you're going to want to keep it and move on to the next, next part.
The next, measurement is does it clear up mental space? Your mind is the central processing unit. It is the central computer of everything that you do, your creativity, your thoughts, your emotions, everything comes out of your mind. So if it doesn't clear up mental space, then it's not for you. Number three, does it reduce stress? If it doesn't make you feel better, then it's probably not better. Easy, right?
Number four, does it set up future you for success? We talked about future you knowing that, the future you doesn't have the same context as what you have going on today. So does it set up future you for success to understand that context so it can pick right back up where you left off? And then lastly, does it fit in your budget? Do not break your bank trying to use all these tools. I think most of everything that I sent that I told you about today, I spend less than $300 a month on any of that stuff. And it's so, so easy to get things kind of caught up, just like in your subscription services, right? And next thing you know, you're breaking your bank for your digital tool belt. But listen, you don't have to do that.
So ask yourself these questions quarterly, just to ping yourself, set yourself a 90 day reminder on your phone or your project management task, project management tool, and just say, hey, it's time to ask yourself these five questions about the tools that you're using. Does it help you save time? Does it clear up mental space? Does it reduce stress? Does it set up future you for success? And does it fit in your budget? And if it doesn't, cut them out. And then you can keep your eye out for something else.
So before we wrap up, I want to remind you that you can get the time and energy audit that I created off of Dan Martel's book at dustinpead.com slash free. And remember a few things, technology should enhance creativity, not replace it. Just like Chris Dew says, start small with one automation, build up from there, right? The goal isn't to automate everything, but it's to free up your time for the highest value creative work, that 20%. And remember the best systems, they evolve gradually over time. Don't try to overhaul every single thing at once. And it's such an honor and a pleasure to be with you today. Cannot wait to be back with you next week, episode 108 of the Creativity Made Easy podcast. We'll talk to you then.