Ready to Put More Life in Your Work-Life Balance?
As your Digital Chief of Staff, Charli Can Help You Do That
In my last article I spoke about a problem that all small business owners, freelancers and solopreneurs face: the burden of “work about work”, which sucks productivity, drains energy and causes headaches. 🤕
By “work about work” I mean the emailing, filing, managing calendars, doing expenses, worrying about taxes, swiping notifications, learning how to use new software that promises time-saving and more. This “work about work” never goes away, never feels done, and either takes up billable hours or gets pushed to the evenings and weekend, eating into personal time.
In fact, studies show that business owners spend up to 60% of their time managing all the boring, tedious “work about work” stuff. That’s a lot of time spent on “invisible” (aka non-billable) tasks, and I think it’s a major contributor to burnout – especially when you’re trying to do it all by yourself, while fighting to stay financially afloat or achieve the next milestone. 📄🧾🗓📂
I know this challenge all too well, since I’ve started businesses over the course of my career; and in a lot of them I’ve spent 100 hours per week working just to get it all done.
Yes, you read that right: 100-hour work weeks. They were the norm for many years.😳🥵
Looking back, it’s not something I’d never recommend or want to repeat. It can take its toll. Yet, I know I’m not the only one who has pushed themselves to the limits to get their business off the ground or to the next level of growth.
Meet Charli: A Completely Different Kind of Productivity Solution
When I started Charli, I knew I wanted this company to be different from my others. I wanted to tackle this massive challenge of “work about work”, while also making sure our team and myself lived our brand promise: that we put life back in the work-life balance.
In this way, Charli was born from a deep understanding of the problem small business and startup owners face (including our own at Charli) and a strong desire to fix how we work.
So what is Charli? Charli is a digital chief of staff.
That means Charli is not:
Just focused on completing single and simple general purpose tasks
Impersonal when it comes to knowing how you want tasks completed
Helpless in learning more about your work and preferences
Rather, Charli is:
A smart sidekick that expands your capacity without hiring and training someone else
An AI that continuously learns your work preferences to help you out
Clever in understanding the stuff you send including requests and documents
Relentless in trying to help you fire-and-forget some of that tedious and boring stuff
Charli is about saying no to the “work about work” hamster wheel, and yes to a more balanced life. In my case, Charli means work hard (at the things that matter most) and play hard (aka, more time for overlanding … where I can work from anywhere 😉).
Core Skills + Recipes = Less Work About Work
How does Charli accomplish this? Well, we’ve designed Charli to have core skills, just like a human does; which you can leverage to get Charli to complete the administrative tasks you need most help with. We call these tasks recipes.
Take a real-life example:
Charli can determine the difference between an invoice, receipt or contract (a core skill). Charli can smartly “read” information from documents (another core skill). And, Charli can classify and organize documents (yet another core skill). When combined, these core skills enable Charli to do the complex tasks you want it to do, just like a person would.
Say you received an email with an attachment that you want to save to your cloud storage. All you have to do is forward the email to Charli saying, “Hey Charli, file this”, and Charli will take care of the rest. Charli will find the most appropriate folder (or create one if none exists), determine any classification info needed to smartly tag the document for quick retrieval or reporting, and save the document for you.
If Charli recognizes the type of file you just sent, such as an invoice, Charli will jump on it and take care of that as well. This is an example of Charli using recipes for completing your work. Other recipes include scheduling assistance to manage your calendar, support with recording your expenses and much more. Imagine the best chief of staff paired with the power of AI. That’s Charli.
What would you do if you got more life back in your work-life balance? Share your thoughts in the comments.