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(disclaimer: Apologies for there only being one photo, I know in this day and age our attention wanes without images but this article is about information, not pretty pictures)
Today we find a lot of people who are using the Internet to be able to work at home. Sites such as Etsy, Twitter, and Facebook Pages are helping a new breed of entrepreneur to succeed. But at what cost? How many interviews have you read where the entrepreneur states they have an 80 hour work week and yet they earn only just enough to quit their jobs. At this point they are probably ecstatic to be self-employed but how long do you really think someone can keep this up? The problem here is that when this entrepreneur starts to tire their business is at serious risk of failing because it has been built requiring a work input for value output ratio that is not maintainable.
So how do we fix this? Well it can be a lot harder for business owners who are already well established and set in their ways. They not only fall under the mantra of "can't teach an old dog new tricks" but with time they have built a successful business which means they are going to hold onto their ideas, believing whole-heartedly that they know what is best for their business. Well you know what, this isn't usually true. Never mind the fact that every business owner stands to gain by implementing other people's ideas and seeking outside knowledge, the more important fact here is that very few of these business owners have approached their business from a business standpoint. They started because they loved their craft and it grew to be popular, or because they didn't want to work for someone else any more, or because they lost their job, or who knows why. But very few of them started thinking "I will build my business into this size, with this amount of earnings, and pay myself this hourly wage".
The sad thing here is that a lot of these people have really great business ideas which will not last more than 5 years before they burn out because of their refusal to think "hey, maybe I don't know it all". But chances are if you are at this website, you either have not started a business or you are new enough to it that you are still willing to learn (otherwise why would you be at a fashion and textiles learning resource website?). This is good news! For you anyway.
First Steps in Developing Your Schedule
The first thing you need to do is make a list of every activity you do. Email counts, so does twitter. You need to make a list of absolutely everything that you do in running your business.
Once that list is made get a bunch of coloured pens, markers, or pencil crayons and start circling things according to how often they need to be done and if they are related. For instance, I would say that email and answering order related PMs are equivalent to the same thing and also need to be done every single day. I would give them one colour. If there is something else that needs to be done everyday, give it a different colour because it is not related to the emails and pms and therefore does not need to be done at the same time.
Now here is where I'm going to introduce a concept you may disagree with. Give it some time to sink in though and you will see I am right. Are you ready? Is your mind open and accepting? ..... You do not need to be on twitter or fbook every single day and certainly not more than once in a day. Infact, there are probably several things on your list that you circled as needing to be done every day that absolutely do not need to be.
Sites like Twitter and fbook, message boards, community journals, etc are obvious and wonderful sources of relevant advertising however they can easily consume all of your free time. I'm willing to bet stay at home business owners spend at least 25% of their time on these websites. Time that is absolutely and utterly wasted. You may not realize it but even the act of opening these sites or picking up your phone every time a message beeps, takes time. Sure it doesn't sound like much but you will get a lot more accomplished if you consolidate these activities into one time. You will save the little bits of time wasted opening and reopening and refreshing the site.
Same with email. Email does not need to be checked more than twice a day; once at the beginning of your work day and once nearing the end (not quite at the end in the event that you need to act on an email, remember to leave yourself time to do that).
Social Networking and Email
Let's talk a bit more about these, as I feel they could use their own category. As I said, you absolutely do not need to be on social networking sites every day and you need to break yourself of the habit. Not only that but you need to break yourself of the habit of checking these sites continually throughout the day on the days that you do assign this task to.
Some businesses that rely completely on interaction with their users may choose to go on these sites once a day, but in general I would say 3 times a week is more than sufficient. Respond to everyone and use scheduling services to schedule tweets, partly so that it looks like you are on throughout the day but more importantly so that you do not annoy your followers but posting lots at once.
In facilitating the Fashion Students Online twitter account FashionStudents several services are used:
- To start with we use the scheduling feature built into our website software (Joomla and Wordpress do this, I don't know about Blogger) to schedule our articles so that if we have more than one article to post in a day it is not posted at the same moment.
- We use Twitter Feed to post our new articles to twitter by giving Twitter Feed our RSS's. If your website software does not allow you to schedule posts that is okay because with Twitter Feed you can specify that you want it to post new articles every X-number of hours which means you are essentially using their service as a scheduler.
- We instruct Twitter Feed to forward posts not to our twitter account but instead to our Ping FM account. We use Ping FM to forward these posts to both twitter and facebook at the same time.
- Because we are not able to have RSS feeds for our student blogs we use Letter Me Later to schedule short emails which we send to Ping FM and then Ping FM forwards to twitter and facebook. This again allows us to not make posts only at the one time each morning that we are working on new content for the website but instead to spread them out.
- TweetMeme allows us to search twitter for tweets people have made about our site. It shows you the previous 7 days so you could use it once a week but we use it twice a week because we think it's kind of tacky to wait a week to thank someone for their post.
- We use Refollow to find people who are new to following us and follow them back.
We schedule the student blog posts via Letter Me Later whenever a post is made because if we waited we would probably forget about it and it is most time efficient to do it at that moment but other than that we only do social networking twice a week. On those days we:
- check and respond to DMs
- check our mentions (click the @username link on your Twitter homepage) as well as use Tweetmeme to see who has tweeted links to our site and we post a message thanking everyone (if there were too many we could schedule one for later)
- use Refollow to add people to our follow list and make sure we have the twitter page open on another tab so that we can add them to our lists (as we keep lists of fashion students, fashion designers, fashion learning tweeters, etc)
- Visit Facebook and post new status updates as well as reply to messages and notifications and scroll through a couple of pages of the newsfeed commenting on things that are relevant to comment on in our personal account.
This whole process usually is an hour but can sometimes take up to an hour and a half. That's 2-3 hours a week. The thing is, is this takes us 3 hours a week when we condense it like this, imagine how much of our day it was taking up when we were checking the sites several times a day and visiting every time we got a notification email? I added it up one day, diligently recording the time I spent in minutes, let me tell you it wasn't pretty. I think it worked out to about 8hrs a week. Doing it this way I cut my time spent by 60-75% and the quality of my social networking interactions did not diminish one bit. If you don't believe me do it yourself and make sure you start counting the minutes from the moment your hand comes up off of a different work related item. Those of you that work 60 hr weeks or are checking your emails and texts outside of work hours and 7 days a week will easily match this figure if not exceed it.
Btw, I don't even do message boards or communities but if you do, you need to include that and you're going to be way over my numbers.
Time to Develop that Schedule
I did the same thing as I told you to do to develop my schedule: I wrote down every activity I do to run this site and I circled them. I ended up with ten items which are regularly occurring and can be schedule. Not included were things like adding new features, doing site maintenance, fixing things that break (this happens a lot), writing additional unscheduled content (such as this article), setting up new staff members (we're always looking for more!), or a myriad of other additional things. Here is my schedule, you can click on it to see a larger version:
There are a lot of things on this site which take a tremendous amount of time and so I have spread them out to try to get an average work day of 4 hours. Yes, I work four hours on this website every single weekday doing just this stuff. In a few months a VIP area of the site will be launched that will require a small fee and will pull another 3-4 hours of work out of me every day. A couple weeks ago I was working 8-10 hours a day on the site but through determination I whittled it down without loosing even one single activity and I want to help you do the same thing.
In this schedule you will see that I address emails and pms, ping student blogs, and updated the featured articles and blog posts on the front page (as required) every single day. I do these things at 8am and this is how I start my day. Other things I have spread out and you will see that even though I publish a site blog almost every day I actually only work on it twice a week using Joomla's built in scheduling feature for new articles. I have to do it this way because I just could not manage the time otherwise, it takes much too long. You'll see that on those days those are the only time-consuming things I do because they take a long time -- sometimes more than an hour per post.
On the weekend the only thing I require myself to do is my student blog posting and that is because I have class on Saturdays and often I am so exhausted that if I don't do it I will forget everything I want to say. The squiggly lines mark things that are optional - that I can do if I want. Often I do work on Sunday evening so that I do not have to do it on Monday. Monday is my boyfriend's day off and I like to spend time with him, which is why Monday's duties are actually the lightest.
You'll notice there are lots of blank areas on weekends and you might wonder why I don't just make them optional. Well you see, if I made them optional on weekends then they would become optional on other days and I would end up straying from my schedule. This schedule saves me massive amounts of time and it would be irresponsible of me to veer from it. Plus it's the weekend. I spend 4 hrs on a train on Saturdays for school and I'm exhausted, like most of you if I let myself I could work on my business non-stop. But it's not healthy and it's not productive. I need breaks and so do you. Giving yourself the weekend off, or one full entire day off (if I do work on Saturday I am not allowed on Sunday and vice versa) will increase your productivity immensely and will prepare you to move your business forward into a more professional state. Nothing says amateur like replying to business emails at 3am and having no set business hours.
Using Your New Schedule
Sticking to a schedule is HARD. Like, really really hard. I know and often at the end of the day I find myself sitting there refreshing pages, checking my email and generally wasting time because I don't know what to do with myself. For most people under 35 tearing yourself away from the computer is really difficult but if you sit there, even if you are doing personal things, you will end up checking your work email and your work social networking and the lines get so blurred that you are right back where you started.
Look at me: Today I was done at 1pm, it was a 5hr day because Thursdays can be long days. I should have got up and gone for a walk or done something else. But I didn't. I just sat here, chatted with my boyfriend and otherwise did absolutely nothing useful. Eventually I started feeling guilty so I started writing this article. It's 4:30pm now which means my work day has been 8.5hrs, 3.5hrs longer than it needed to be. Most days I literally have to turn my computer off and force myself to walk away but that being said I can usually do it, I am usually pretty good with the schedule but I falter sometimes and you will too.
Just stick with it and if you falter one day, don't get down on yourself or stress out. The biggest temptation in the beginning, the most difficult to resist, is the urge to check your email and social networking every hour, half hour, or five minutes as the case may be. I have at least gotten past that point. Today I blew the schedule by writing content, but I haven't checked my email since this morning.
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Thursday, 12 November 2009
(disclaimer: Apologies for there only being one photo, I know in this day and age our attention wanes without images but this article is about information, not pretty pictures) Today we find a lot of people who are using the Internet to be able to work at home. Sites such as Etsy, Twitter, and...
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