Hi there!
My name is Paula Burgess from Beyond the Maze, and today’s episode is about how to be more efficient at work.
Some days we can plan to do all these things that are on our to do list, but things happen where they just go out of control, and they don’t get done. Other days we have super-efficient days where everything gets done and you get to the end of the day and go Ha! – That was a pretty productive day!
So, what’s the difference with those two days?
Well, we can’t control things that kind of just pop up on us and need our urgent attention, like maybe like kids getting sick. You’re being called by the school and having to get them from school or something happening to a patient on the way to their appointment. Therefore, you had to readjust things or just things happening in general that have disrupted your day to move yourself forward.
How do you move on from those sorts of things?
Well, first of all, it’s about getting in the mindset of being able to control what you can control and accept what you can’t. Sometimes it’s really, really hard to get into that mode of asking how you can control things? What can I do? And then you get into this big mess of things about how to get back onto the right path but sometimes it’s nothing.
We can’t control the outside factors. We can’t control our child getting sick at school and the school ringing us to go pick them up. There’s nothing we can do about that. We have to go pick them up, or we have to stop and arrange someone else to go and pick them up.
Either way, it has to be attended to in some way, shape or form.
So that’s just accepting what’s happening at the time and accepting that you can’t change those things that are outside of your control.
The things that you can control, that are inside your control, here is where I suggest you can really get your efficiency absolutely moving along to become very efficient.
What I recommend, first of all, is finding yourself an APP that does time tracking.
There are a few different apps out there. We here in the office use Harvest, so let’s get Harvest.com and there’s other things called Timely and lots of other APPS. If you Google “time tracking software”, you will find it.
What I want you to do then is just track your time in the things that you’re doing for a few days.
Obviously, if you are seeing clients on a regular basis, then these clients are like very likely to be in your diary, so you won’t need to track that time because you’ll have that time in your diary knowing that maybe six of your eight hours of work are seeing clients.
What are you doing in those other two hours of work? Or whenever you’re not seeing those clients?
That’s the time that we need to be tracking.
Are you writing client notes?
Are you doing some newsletters?
Are you content writing?
Are you making appointments for the next day or confirming appointments for the next day?
Really tracking that sort of time and breaking it up, in a lot of these apps you can set up those particular sections so you can set up a category for checking emails, set up a category for making appointments, set up a category for travel so you can even track your travel time if you’re travelling to clients how long that’s taking.
When you’ve done a few days of that, maybe even a week of that you need to sit back and analyse. If you’ve got a really great time tracking software, you can run reports on that and see exactly how much time through the week you spent on emails or travel or things like that. You then want to have a look at where you can be more efficient with that.
Do you need to outsource your appointment setup or appointment confirmations – How can you do that more efficiently?
Is it just a simple set up in your programme? Can you set it up to SMS the night before, as that may not cost you anything. It might cost you the price of an SMS, but it’s saving your time to actually have to go and manually do that.
What about your emails? How much time are you spending on your emails? Can you outsource that?
Maybe you don’t think you can outsource that, but you probably can outsource that where somebody else can check those emails for you, or at least the bulk of those emails, and get things moving along the way.
Are you spending a lot of time travelling from appointment to appointment?
Can you change your business model where maybe you don’t need to travel as much, and you could do some Zoom calls? Or possibly you might be able to get invested in a driver and you can get work done while they’re driving for you, depending on what sort of business that you have.
What are other options out there? When you see how much time you are using for each individual task that you’re doing, it will help you to rethink your business. You will start speaking to the right people to make you and your business more efficient therefore spending the time in your work time possibly doing more higher income type tasks.
Let’s say, for example, that you are a tradie of sorts and you’re spending a lot of time during the day checking emails or writing out quotes or following up quotes, sending out invoices all those sorts of things.
If you’re charging your services out, let’s say at $150 or $200 an hour, depending on what you’re doing, and you could pay somebody under $100 an hour to do that for you. If you’re taking two hours a day on that type of work and you pay someone, let’s say $100/hour so it’s easy. That’s $200 you have paid for those two hours but you’re going to earn $300 or $400 for those same two hours.
Obviously, a VA doesn’t necessarily cost $100 an hour, I have just used that as an example so it’s going to be a lot better outcome than that. The point is to be thinking about it that way and how you can be more efficient and therefore where you can spend your time that’s going to create more money for your business.
If you would like to speak about how to be more efficient in your business, I’m happy to have a chat with you, free of charge, to see if we can assist in anything or if we can’t, we can probably refer you to another VA who specialises in what you may need.
So click on the link below and reach out to us – we are happy to chat.
Schedule your obligation-free call here: https://calendly.com/bossladycoach/15min?month=2023-03
——————-
