To Survive a busy season ( You need to check out number 3!)
We have all been there, it’s half term or you are about to switch into holiday mode and the panic starts… how can we manage our work load whilst the kids are home or we are off travelling?
Well, I wanted to put together a guide with some quick tips to help you manage your workload and automate some key aspects of your business so you can actually take the break you need.
1. TIME BLOCK & MEETINGS
One tool I use on a daily basis is Calendy to automate parts of my business. This is a super helpful online tool that helps you schedule your meetings without all the emails back and forth. Instead of sending a 20 email long chain trying to figure out the best time for a meeting (business or personal), you simply need to fill out your availability on Calendy, then when someone wants to schedule a meeting you send your link out via email or you can even have it as a static contact me link on social media.
Your client can see when you’re available and book the date and time that works on their end too. Once confirmed, Calendy seamlessly integrates with Gmail so it just appears in your Google Calendar.
Also, this is a super simple one but add an out of office to your email, the best thing we can do is to manage our clients expectations, if they receive an email explaining you have received their email but are currently away on leave and that you will reply as soon as you can. They will be far less irritated than if they hadn’t heard from you at all and you will be less stressed as you know people are aware that you are taking a break.
2. SCHEDULE SOCIAL MEDIA AND THEN STAY AWAY
When we are trying to take a break from our business the easiest way to get sucked back in, is to check social media!!
Set aside an hour before you go away to set up your social media for time you need to be away. For Instagram and Facebook I recommend Creator Studio which a free platform native to Facebook so it doesn’t have any of the negative impacts using a 3rd party scheduling app can.
Related Post : How Time Blocking can Improve Productivity
3. RECYCLE EVERGREEN CONTENT
When creating content it is best to focus your efforts on creating content that has a long shelf life. Blog posts and and video content are great for this. But try to refrain from talking about specific dates or times of year.
Why do this?
Simple: you can repost it!
When you write a blog post, for example, you can re-share it with your audience as many times as you’d like. This gives you the most bang for your buck and makes it easier than ever to share high-quality content on a whim.
Only 5-7% of your audience will see something the first time you share it so you would actually be doing them a diservice to not share it multiple times and what better time than when you want to take a break as it saves you needing to do extra work.
You can save even more time using a website called Recur Post which us free and allows you to link your content and set it to automatically re-share built-in evergreen content. This feature will automatically re-post things that you mark as evergreen when there’s a gap in your posting schedule.
Trust me, this will save you a ton of time.
For Instagram scroll back a month or two and find some great performing images and re-share those, re-write the captions slightly and boom you have some content for the holidays with very little extra work. I often re-share content if I am running low on time and trust me no one other than you or your best stalker is going to scroll back far enough to realise that is what you have done.
BONUS: EAT THE FROG
Unlike the employed we cannot just step away completely and rely on someone to cover us while we are away. I can guarantee there is something that needs doing and is playing on your mind, so my biggest advice is wake up early and get one thing done before you start the rest of your day.
It seems obvious, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Often the most important thing can be the most daunting, so we keep putting it off. A task that seems too big to take on, chasing an invoice or dealing with a customer complaint. It’s too easy to get distracted by things that are more enjoyable or simply less taxing.
Your ‘frog”‘is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.
So do the hardest thing first and you’ll find everything else in the day seems so much less daunting and you’ll be able to properly switch off and enjoy your break.
Remember that while anything is possible, not everything is possible.
‘Begin by reflecting on how you will know you have had a productive day by the time you’re back in bed. Write these down and start with your most important thing first!’
