Who is in Control of your Day?
I have a few questions for you today:
- Do you pick up the phone every time it rings?
- Do you answer email as soon as it hits your inbox?
- Does your staff ask you questions all day every five minutes?
- Do you set appointments based on your clients’ schedules?
- Are you multi-tasking?
Who is in control of your schedule? Are you? Or – are other people?
I hear a lot of wedding pros tell me that their days are a series of tending to the most urgent issues and not always the most important ones. Here’s the TRUTH: few things are truly urgent. The phone doesn’t need to be picked up at all times. Email doesn’t need to be responded to ASAP. And, appointments can be set on YOUR schedule, not your clients’ schedules.
You NEED to have control of your day. (Or – have better control of your day.)
If you allow interruptions to rule your life, you won’t be able to accomplish what you want and need for your business. Here are…
Four ways to gain better control of your day:
- Have an hour or two each day (at a minimum) where you let your calls go to voicemail and you do not touch your email. Better yet: have two separate chunks of time where you do this. Focus on your work.
- When setting appointments with clients, give them options that fit within YOUR schedule. (This seems crazy at first. You really want the sale, and should you be accommodating your schedule to theirs? NO.) You will be better able to service your clients if you are in the right mind-frame. I try to stack all of my appointments on the same day or same two days each week (Tuesdays and Thursdays). When I’m in selling mode, I’m “in the zone”. When I’m interrupted to take a last minute meeting, I’m not giving the client my best. I’m distracted and thinking about the project I was working on. ALSO – people hire BUSY people. People aren’t as interested in hiring non-busy people. (The client says, “Hmm… she doesn’t seem that busy. She took my appointment immediately. I wonder why she isn’t busy. She seems desperate.”)
- Manage other interruptions. If you have staff people that ask a lot of questions, encourage them to save their questions and check in with them from time to time. I know from experience that if staff people are asking me a lot of questions there are 3 things happening: 1) I haven’t trained them well enough, 2) I haven’t empowered them to make decisions, 3) They are scared of messing up and need validation from me. Try to manage the question-asking by improving these 3 factors. And, if you really need to get work done – go find a coffee shop for an hour out of your office.
- Batch your repetitive tasks. Batch alllllllllllllll of your tasks: voicemail, email, client projects, staff training, and so on. The time that it takes for your mind to set and reset between tasks is a time-sucker. It’s also what makes you feel out of control with your day. It’s much more productive to go through your inbox for 1.5 hours and answer all email than constantly be interrupted every 10 minutes over the period of 4 hours and answering each little request. BATCHING will help you gain better control of your day.
Professionalism is the Priority
If you let your calls go to voicemail and let your inbox fill up, you still need to get back to people. Make it a goal to empty your voicemail and inbox before you go home. There may be larger projects that the calls and emails introduce. You don’t need to resolve them that very minute. For example, emails from clients often mean edits and redesign for me. This isn’t something that I can do quickly. And, if I’m focused on other work, it isn’t right for me to drop everything to start something new. I batch my edits so that I’m doing them about once or twice a week. I tell the client, “These are really great changes to your designs! I’ll send you a revision by the end of Thursday.” Put it on your to do list for Thursday.
Keep it REAL ~ Keep it FLEXIBLE
Let’s be realistic here… nothing is perfect. And trying to perfectly control your day ain’t going to work either. I’ve lost count the many times I’ve had a day all mapped out to have the school principal call me to pick up my sick baby. You WILL have interruptions. You need to have flexibility in your schedule or it won’t work. PLUS, I get super bored if my schedule is a little too strict. Some people like to have every Tuesday be client day. Some people want every Wednesday to be sample day. I can operate like that only for a couple months. I get extremely bored. I do mix up my days… but there are two things I live by: minimizing my distractions and batching my tasks.
What do you think? What do you do to have better control over your day?