3 Tips to Free Up Your Friday Afternoon

Show Notes:

When we have a lot of things on our plate, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of our workload. For people who are able to manage their time wisely, it will never be a problem. If you’ve just begun your career, you can get lost along the way pretty easily and that might even lead to procrastination.

 

And of course, we don’t want our time to go to waste! So today, I’m going to share with you some tips on how you can build your own system to effectively manage your workload and documents. Once you’ve successfully done everything, you’ll notice how easier your career has become and that you also get to spend some time on yourself.

Hello, and welcome to the Traveling Introvert. Today, I would love to talk to you about some solutions for de-stressing your business that you can do right now.

So, what if you could say, around an hour a day starting tomorrow, that's five hours per week, or more than half a day off? Imagine closing up shop at 11:00 AM every Friday without worrying about the stuff that didn't get done, or just stop working. Close the computer and go and have a nice Friday afternoon. Well, you can do that when you put these solutions in place, and you can start this week.

So, the first thing I wanna talk about is proper project management. If you're still managing your team with email and Skype messages, stop it. Stop it right now. It's not great. We all know that emails turn into to-do lists and Skype is unreliable to say the least. Things get lost. Messages are forgotten or never received and balls have dropped. Not to mention the time you spend shifting through the list of emails and searching for that one piece of information you need.

I highly, highly recommend that you sign up for project management assistant. You can start with Clickup, Asana, Trello, start putting all your projects in one place. You'll have one place for all the tasks that are all outstanding, ready-to-do, then you'll be able to tell at a glance what needs your immediate attention and what needs tweaking. Having one central location for everything is super important.

Pick one that's right for you, you'll often have free sort of things that you could do, free months trials what have you. The first one you find might not be the best one for you, there are so many out there, but there's the top ones, there are Notion, Asana, Clickup, and Trello, oh, and Basecamp. Pick one, and put everything in there. Everything, everything, everything, everything, everything, have it in this one central place.

Then there's proper documentation. Do you find yourself sort of reinventing the wheel every time you have to record? For example, a podcast, or a video or write a blog, or get pins for your Pinterest, or Instagram. Take five minutes and document the steps, and then the next time you have to do it, or better yet, when you have to hand it off to somebody else, you'll be able to get it done quickly and figure out what needs to happen and there will be fewer mistakes. So, there'll be a checklist and the work will get done.

Proper documentation, that's my thing right now for a couple months ago, what I did was, my thing was document everything, and so, no matter what it was that I did whether it was for a client or for myself, I would document the steps that I took. And so, that documentation is there if I ever have to hand it off or if I forget or something happens, then I can be like, "Here's the documentation." And it's just super, super helpful. And when you have to look back at something, or if you forgot something or something changed or you drop something and then come back to it a year later, you'll have that documentation.

The next thing I'd like to talk about is time blocking. This is super important. Get out your calendar and start making ... and I've talked about this before ... start making appointments, but not just for yourself but for your clients. Work on certain clients on this day at that time, and you'll get into a habit and then you become on auto-pilot, like, "Monday morning at 9:00, I always work on this client, and then at 2:00 PM on Tuesdays, I always work with this client."

When you start getting some rhythm and some sort of less decision-making that you have to do, it's like, "What should I do next?" Putting time blocking in your calendar for your clients as well as yourself is super duper helpful. So, you just come in and be like, "Okay, now I'm going to do, and do this, and do that, and do the other." It helps keep you focused, rather than wasting time, maybe on Facebook or Reddit or whatever black hole that you turn to go into when you're procrastinating.

And you can space those time blocks out and you can put gaps in them, whatever you need to do, but time blocking is really important, and also then you'll be able to see at a glance, like, "Oh, I have an appointment with such-and-such, so, I need to move this thing over." So, just those few things will help you be more focused and know in advance what you need to do, and just documentation project management all of these things can be set up more or less in an afternoon or a day.

But the time that will save you consistently will be phenomenal. An hour a day is just the beginning, but you have to actually take the action and do it. You have to put the work in first, so you can get the rewards afterwards. But you know what? The benefits are sweet. That Friday afternoon off is a wonderful thing, and in the end, you'll wonder how you ever managed before you did these things to improve your business and your life.

So, why don't you give them a try? If you have any questions about them, please email me at janice@thecareerintrovert.com, and I will sort of have a little ... I have the A to Z of systems in my membership box should you wish to join that. There will be a link at the bottom of this podcast. So, thank you for listening, this is janice@thecareerintrovert.com, and I look forward to helping you grow your business and your career in line with your introversion.