Where will you get the time?

Time is on everyone’s mind dur­ing the hol­i­days. Last minute shop­ping stops and last minute scram­bles to top-​off sea­sonal sales increase aware­ness of our tick­ing time bombs. Here are five ways to save time – if you have time to read them.

1. Con­trol the flood of email. It’s hard to remem­ber doing busi­ness before email. I wouldn’t like to depend on snail mail today, still email can decrease pro­duc­tiv­ity. Com­bined with a good spam fil­ter, we took con­trol of our email by set­ting hours of the day to check email. First, turn off all notices that urge you to check incom­ing mes­sages. Next set aside three or four times a day to spend a spe­cific amount of time read­ing, respond­ing and send­ing emails. First thing in the morn­ing, at lunch, just before quit­ting and pos­si­bly a few min­utes at home to answer per­sonal email. Yes, you have already thought of times when this won’t work for you. Me too, but hold­ing to the gen­eral con­cept will get you through the pile of mes­sages with more time to spare for Oh, sip­ping a cup of tea maybe.
2. When we are on a tight dead­line, we turn off the tele­phone ringers, and apply the same idea to phone calls as we do to email.
3. Draw up list of pri­or­i­ties. Sched­ule your time based on what is impor­tant for you in a par­tic­u­lar day, week or month. When we first started our graphic design busi­ness, we would work our tails off mak­ing calls, net­work­ing and mar­ket­ing to find new clients. Then an avalance of work hit and we had no time to find more new work. So, a no-​work cycle fol­lowed, with no money going into the cof­fers. These up and down cycles can be bro­ken when you set aside time every day, week or month find­ing prospects and meet­ing with them. As web design­ers we climb a con­stant up-​hill learn­ing curve. Fig­ur­ing out how to find new clients, get the work done wasn’t leav­ing us much time to keep up on the lat­est soft­wares, tech­niques and tech­nolo­gies. To plan time for that, we deter­mined that late spring and early sum­mer were our slow­est time of the year. We made con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion a top pri­or­ity then.
4. Just Say No. Decide what con­tributes to your bot­tom line, then do only those things that do. You don’t need to forgo every non-​revenue activ­i­ties. Just look­ing at your activ­i­ties in that way will you make smarter choices for your time. Next time some­one asks you to vol­un­teer for an impor­tant com­mit­tee when you are feel­ing pres­sured and up-​tight, you may want to decline rather than resent­ing the time it will take up.
5. Hire some­one to wash win­dows. In other words, do what you went into busi­ness to do. Out­source every­thing else. Many small busi­ness own­ers try to do it all – CEO, book­keeper, IT man­ager, mar­ket­ing maven and win­dow washer. Then they won­der why they have no time to take care of busi­ness. If you refer back to #4 above, you may see some of these activ­i­ties don’t add to your bot­tom line. While you are doing what you do best at $80 an hour, it makes sense to hire a win­dow washer for $40 an hour, and keep the change. Around here, we out­source every­thing that costs less than our charges.
6. Let the folks who have the exper­tise, equip­ment and prac­tice to get the job done. In
   “Seven Rea­sons to Out­source”, Steve Hartkopf, Man­ag­ing Part­ner at Aligned Mar­ket­ing, LLC, puts it this way, “Few com­pa­nies can afford the money to pur­chase or the time it takes to learn the lat­est tech­nolo­gies avail­able in every func­tion – sales, mar­ket­ing, IT, logis­tics, etc. Out­sourc­ing allows you to rent the best tech­nol­ogy avail­able from the best providers.”

Instead of bog­ging down in rou­tine admin­is­tra­tive work, look into a vir­tual assis­tant to han­dle some tasks. A local or book­keeper can get your books back in order, and rent­ing cutting-​edge tech­nol­ogy will com­plete a project while your com­peti­tor is tak­ing classes or still inter­view­ing poten­tial new employees.

Note:

In a recent arti­cle about self-​promotion, on SCORE’s web­site, Nicole Amsler stated,“Before I even had one client, I made sure to have an attrac­tive web­site, a pro­fes­sional logo and accom­pa­ny­ing mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral and a sep­a­rate phone line. I have taken my busi­ness seri­ously from the begin­ning and made sure I gave off a pro­fes­sional image.“
These are exactly the graphic design projects we excell in. A cus­tom designed web pres­ence could save you time and money. See if we can help you.