I'm still trying to figure this out, so let me know your thoughts. When I get sick, I'm one of the biggest babies out there. I find that I prefer sleeping to most medications, maybe because a lot of medicine doesn't really take away my side effects as well as I would like. As much as I like sleep, a good portion of the time, I have things that HAVE to get done. Like this week, I do a decent amount of production work for some decent size companies. 2 of them are have rush seasons at the same time. With a can-do attitude, I thought that this wouldn't be a problem, sure it would be busy, a little stressful, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into. Right?
Wrong. While working a lot harder on my company and trying to juggle a personal life, production sewing, and my 3 businesses, I found that I'm not as good at time management as my day planner might lead you to believe. Gasp! I know, hard to think of. However, it's true. A few of the steps that I've been trying to learn and use are...
- Write it down! If I have something to do in a week, I write it down in my day planner. Pen and Paper works best for me, I find that I get far more annoyed at my phone or laptop when I don't want to work. Part of writing it down means that I can add subcategories with something so I recognize that simply doing something might not be as simple as I'm realizing. I find that when I write it down there is less of a chance that I'll forget about a conflicting event and I can quickly adjust or alert a potential client that the deadline will not work. Wich leads me to my next point...
- Keep Your Word! "Hello Potential Client that I really want to work with, yes, the day that we scheduled to meet, yes today in less than an hour, sorry, I can't make it because I didn't get a first grade education of how I can't be in two places at once. Can we reschedule?" I haven't had too many unfortunate instances like this, only a couple. Some of those gut-wrenching calls were made after I missed the meeting! I have burned some bridges that took a long time to rebuild. Please don't let this be you. Accidents happen, and sometimes when you think you have a clear schedule you do, but I am learning to always check. If you're like me and have enough running around in your head, remembering a meeting just might slip through the cracks. Fortunately there are a lot of nice people out there that are willing to give you a second chance, at least I found a few. BUT, let's just make it a rule to not have to back out of a silly instance like this because of poor management skills. Ok? Ok. I am doing my absolute best to keep up with my schedule write it down and give the people that I want to meet with the respect of keeping my word and meeting time or deadline.
- Plan for Interruptions! I'm not suggesting to plan to have distractions, but we all know they are going to happen. I am trying to get into the habit of giving myself an extra 10 minutes for every hour of project to complete. This may be a little backwards from some suggested time management lists, however this seems to best way for me to be realistic with my time. As an example, my next deadline is Monday. I'll need to have the sewing complete and ready to be shipped out by 6pm. Based off of my previous experiences with this product, I can get the amount of work I have done in 30 hours. If I add 10 minutes on to every hour I end up with an additional 5 hours. Now this may seem like a lot and I ultimately should get better at time management, but for now while I'm working on it I'm assigning 35 hours to this task. The idea is to get faster and less distracted, if I am able to accomplish these, I will have extra time set aside for this deadline and either get ahead on next weeks deadlines or use this time in another way.
This leads me to my particular interruption this week. Being Sick. BLECK! There are some great blogs out there to give your more advise and how to consider going about letting clients know about being sick and if you can meet deadlines.
Today I got a nasty little stomach bug that's just not going away. So I made sure to take extra naps and work where I can. This may or may not be do-able depending on it is what you do. If you're able to be proactive and just work on what you can when you can, it will help move things along and help you feel like you're accomplishing something while you're having to rearrange your day.
On a less dreary note, here's what I'll be working on next with Commuty:
| A Beautiful Mess |
And then, you have days like I had the day after this post where I slept through most of the day and had to cancel 3 of my meetings. OY! Just keep moving forward, that's all you can do.
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