Putting the Brakes on Swivel Chair - Jason McFeetors

let's move forward with the last talk so jason aka teflon dude is joining us from canada will demonstrate how to use anytime to increase the efficiency and accuracy of data inversion and how to distribute data automatically among the systems thank you davidson thanks marshall um welcome everybody and uh thanks for

joining us again today so i just needed to start the whole uh conversation off i'm gonna maybe explain a little bit by what i mean uh about swivel chair so this is a term i don't know if it's north american specific or even just specific to my house um but there's been some confusion around that so when i'm talking about swivel chair i i'm typically talking about when you are jumping from application to kind of get a process done so you may have one application and you're working over here on this screen and then you've got to copy some information copy it over into another screen put paste that into there then you get some information from there and put it into another one and it's just this long boring arduous process and using nad is a fantastic way to eliminate some of that soil chair so what i've done is i've actually created on purpose a relatively common type of a personal flow that you would have to follow in order to get a task done and i've recorded doing that whole task because it actually takes much longer than i would want to force you guys to sit through and so i'll kind of run you through the task and video and then i'll show you how uh i've automated all of those tasks using n8n with a workflow and taken that task from the manual task that it was to a simple entry of information into a an n8n system and uh so what i'm going to do is i'm going to share my screen if i can even remember how to share my screen too many screens here there we go so i'm assuming everybody can see my

screen now so this here is kind of the overview of the workflow so what we have is an individual you receive a client's name you have to go look up the client the client's files they have to find it amongst a bunch of files figure out what city they are located in based on that file name then you need to take that city name and look up an agent in an excel spreadsheet so that agent that you can take that agent information find their agent number do a request an appointment request for that agent so they can set up a meeting you need to record the appointment in the database and then you have to email out the client so i'm just going to kind of walk through very quickly here like i've recorded it and you can see at the bottom here's our timer showing how long it takes and so this is we're already into the first step of the process and they've put the person's name in and now we've got to find it in this whole list of pdfs which as you can see i've actually used a little trick where i can do a review of what the what's in the files so i don't actually have to open up the file but we're literally working through like a hundred different files to find the right person so we've had to actually go and see if we can get that person we'll speed this along a little bit oh looks like we actually found the person there it is victor heap so now that we've found who that person is we're just going to jump ahead here we got to get their city so we're already almost a minute into this process that's manual so we're going to copy that over and we're going to jump into yet another system and we've got to cross-reference their cities so now we've got the city now we've got to find out the agent reference number which is stored in an excel spreadsheet so now we've got this excel spreadsheet of all these roads you got to filter through it try and find the right city again there's nothing here that isn't a process that somebody hasn't went into before we've all done this type of stuff so we're you know we're getting in further in here so we're going to keep moving ahead so there we go we got the agent's reference number now we've submitted it to the web page and we've got the reference number for the meeting set up so now we can go and we'll just keep moving ahead here grab that reference number and we can move on to the next step let me speed us along here so now we've started entering this information into we're using base row here entering that information in to the base row session that allows us to record that data and we're going to keep moving along so now we've got the agent reference number we've got the reference number for the meeting and then we have to go back again and find the name of the person victor heaps that's who we're where we're setting this meeting up for and we put that into the database so there you go so now we've got this running in the database so we're two and a half minutes into this process next we're gonna set up the email so you gotta go in you gotta write the email you gotta find their email address here it is again jumping back and forth once we find their email address we can put it in there we can throw in the subject name we type it in and i've even made this faster i've already tried to optimize it a little bit by um by having a template built up so here's the template that we're going to use and we're going to take that template we'll copy it and tweak it a little bit paste it in and then we've got to find all the different variables we've got client there agent phone number so on so like we're almost five minutes into this process as you can see it's boring watching it and fast forward let alone trying to do it manually so we get that all done we grab all the right information again paste it all in and we'll speed this up here a bit and there we get to the final uh the final email which gets sent off and and then from there we can we're done so we go back and so we're seeing we're at about seven just over seven minutes here for this entire process so that's not an insignificant amount of time so what i did is i jumped and i built a workflow so every single one of the things that you saw within that presentation uh is represented here in this workflow so for example where we have to um look things up in the file folders well that's represented here by the by this piece of the workflow uh we have to go look into the exchange uh or sorry um the excel spreadsheet that's all in here this piece here will actually um take the information and submit it automatically and grab the reference number from the web page update the base row create the email and send it out and if we go back to our video and because this one is so short we can almost do this in real time we're going to grab the person's name again that we have to do this for paste it into the uh the web interface that i created this is all in nan you hit submit and so we're about 15 16 seconds in so it's a little bit of work that's happening in the background it takes a little bit for it to process and we're done 20 seconds so what was a seven minute process now got converted down into seven or sorry uh about 20 seconds of effort and there you go there's the proof that the uh stuff actually all went out so this is something that i want you to start thinking about and i'm going to stop sharing um what you start thinking about for when you're working with uh with your own business working with your uh your employer if you do consulting for consulting this is something to start focusing on so anytime you get these types of processes that are relatively drawn out they're all fairly manual take a look and see are there ways that you can put anything in to replace the whole process or maybe even replace a part of it and this would make you know people's jobs so much easier so now we've got you know a process that was taken seven minutes well if you have to do that you know 100 times a day you go from 700 minutes a day down to about you know 30 minutes a day to do all of that work and there's a significant time saving those are the types of things that people really like to see and that employers will look at this and go hey that is the type of employee i want to keep on so there's a real advantage to that anyway uh if you have questions more than happy to answer them