Good morning,
Over the past few months I’ve tried to automate my schedule and communications in a more streamlined fashion.
For my pickleball clients, I use Textedly to let folks know when I have last minute openings. I also use Calendly to sync my bookings and my iCal and to automate reminders to clients a day before the lesson. (BOOK A SESH @ EXTRA RELISH! )
When I started this letter, I used Gmail and then Substack and then both and now only Substack.
This Friday I’ll be running my first ever pickleball tournament. It’s a fun mixed-level social event for a friend’s birthday party. While procrastinating writing this letter on Saturday morning, I looked into a couple apps that a friend sent as well as an email with various formats that a local tournament organizer uses. All of these digital tools and documents will help me to better facilitate my friend’s party and hopefully lay a foundation for future events like this. But I felt stuck. Frustrated. Annoyed that there’s a learning curve. I know these softwares and formats can help me, but I have to learn something new.
With my attention jumping all over, I logged onto my old standby ChatGPT to “manually” organize the tournament. Here are my prompts, culled by ChatGPT after I asked it to list the ones I used:
i need help running a friendly pickleball tournament
i need help organizing
format all names with capital letter and uniformize adjacent numbers
put them in order by numbers... high to low
how many people are there
organize all names with capitals and adjacent info
organize these names into pairs of two, varied by adjacent numbers
try and make it so male names and female names are combined in each line
Now I have a list of 11 teams organized by level and formatted in a coherent way. I still have some hurdles to get it rolling, but now I can breathe a little more knowing I have a foundation to work with.
As a kid I wasn’t naturally good with computers or software. I remember my mom saying she wanted to sign me up for a summer program to learn basic computer programming (this was in the mid-90s) and I rejected it. I’d rather play sports outside. Plus, computers were boring. Looking back I regret that decision but am also okay with it. As usual, I feel more than one thing at a time about most things.
Same with automation. As I grow my business and offerings (life coaching clients, pickleball instruction and event planning (?), I need to automate more and more. After I work through the initial trial and error and troubleshooting, simple software and tools work well, even for unintuitive tech users like me.
This reminds me that in order to make life easier, I usually need to do something hard first. Whether it’s streamlining business operations or having healthier food choices in the house, once I start and get going, things click over time. To invoke another one of my favorite nuggets I heard from my dear Bob B., “There’s no pain in change. Only pain in resistance to change.”
What in your life is changing? What are you resisting? What pains need to be worked through to get to the other side?
Until next time,
Matt
Reading: The Teacher by Freida McFadden, Grief is For People by Sloane Crosley
Stopped Reading (for now): Molly by Blake Butler, Splinters by Leslie Jamison
Watching: “Baby Reindeer,” “Monster (2023)”
Listening: Duke Ellington, Waxahatchee, Martha Beck on Tim Ferriss