Three Tips for Effective Time Management for Professionals

Is time management one of your biggest challenges? You are certainly not alone if that is the case. Many small business owners and other professionals are always looking for ways to make better use of their time. If finding a way to implement strategies for effective time management is something that appeals to you, you may find the tips and ideas presented here to be beneficial. Keep in mind that not everyone has the same time management problems. Look for tips that can have a positive impact on your own personal time management challenges.

3 Time Management Tips for Professionals
1. Get Organized – If you are disorganized, you’ll end up spending a lot of time each day looking for things, which is a complete waste of your time. Instead of wasting time searching for items, set aside a chunk of time to get organized and include time in each week’s to-do list to spend time getting re-organized. When you get in the habit of doing this, everything in your office will be in it’s proper place so you won’t find yourself wasting time searching for items that aren’t where they should be.

2. Reduce Socializing at Work – If people tend to stop by your office regularly to socialize, and you find yourself getting embroiled in lengthy conversations that keep you from taking care of your work responsibilities, you have a time management challenge caused by too much socializing. Consider rearranging your workspace so that it’s difficult for people to camp out in your workspace for long periods of time. Try placing the visitor’s chairs in your office so they aren’t right by the entrance to your office, or place stacks of books or files in the chairs. You may also want to get into the habit of standing up when people enter your office. This can be a signal to them to keep the conversation short and sweet.

3. Plan Your Work Wisely – When coming up with a plan for getting your work completed, think about what times of day or days of the week seem to work best for certain tasks. If you experience a drop in energy during the afternoon, schedule tasks that you consider mundane – such as filing or updating your computerized contact directory – for that time of day. If you are at your most energetic during the morning hours, use that time to contact prospective clients and to work on those parts of your job that require maximum creativity and energy. If the phone seems to ring endlessly on Friday afternoons, make sure that you’ve taken care of all of your deadline work for the week before then.

Article taken from the Small Business Channel at American Banking News - October 11

A Day Without My Sunshine (My Blackberry)

I hear many successful business owners state that they will never get a blackberry or any other PDA, because they don't want to be THAT accessible ALL the time. While I get that, I think of my PDA as my friend that keeps me in the loop with just one glance. Since I manage other peoples' businesses/business operations, I have multiple email boxes including my own and just one look at my Blackberry keeps me in the loop with everyone.

Well today, was the day the Blackberry was not with me - well it was, but AT&T had inadvertently deactivated my SIM card and cannot transfer the data until I go into the store AGAIN *I was just there yesterday*. So I had an inactive PDA all day - very annoying.

BUT, I survived even though I felt like a piece of me was missing. This experience really helped me to practice what I preach regarding productivity - checking email at an appointed time and not all day, and batching. This happened by necessity and not by choice. But the experience taught me that I can, in fact, survive a day without my blackberry and leads me to think...

Blackberry and other PDAs....
Do they really assist with efficiency or are they just cool distractions?

Recent Workshop Given at the WBO "Its All About Me!"

Increasing Productivity Workshop Presentation

View more OpenOffice presentations from adminpartners.

New Variety of Services Starting This Month

administrative partners, llc has enhanced their services to better meet the needs of small business owners. Please refer to the list attached for new services we are offering starting this month.

Project Management
Do you have multiple incomplete projects- just waiting for your attention? To distracted to see a project through to the end? Having a designated owner of your projects and task makes all the difference. A project manager manages resources, time, money and scope of projects. administrative partners, llc keeps your projects moving while you focus your time and energy on thing that only they can do.

This service includes:
-o- Responsible for a projects from start to finish
-o- Leads teams in negotiating multiple relationships within any project
-o- Functions as the “hub” of the project
-o- Maintain a healthy client relationship throughout project
-o- People Management: Find, Hire and Manage Virtual Teams

Administrative/Productivity Consulting
Work more efficiently. Revaluate methods that are not working so that you can continue to grow your business.

This service includes:
-o- Productivity analysis
-o- Recommendations for productivity
-o- Streamline and simplify systems and processes
-o- Maintain accurate reports of the business metrics – helps business owners make informed decisions about their business
-o- Implementing and managing new revenue streams

Getting Started Package*
(6 month trajectory)

The Getting Started Package assists small business owners in realizing their vision of owning their own business. The package coordinates the start up activities that need to occur. These services include:
-o- Registration of Company Name
-o- Research and secure domain name registration
-o- Business Plan Consulting
-o- Marketing Strategy
-o- Pricing Strategy
-o- Logo Design
-o- Business Card Design
-o- Letterhead Design
-o- Website design
-o- Marketing brochure

Next Level Business Package
(6 month trajectory)

The Growing Your Business Package is designed for the business owner who has been in business for a while and who is looking to streamline their business.
-o- Includes our Productivity Consulting service (3 months)
-o- SEO Management
-o- SEO Reports and Analysis
-o- Website Optimization
-o- Link Building Website Promotion
-o- Virtual Assistant services (10hrs/mo)
-o- Internet Marketing
-o- Upload a Video
-o- Set-up and maintain social networking profiles
-o- Website maintenance
-o- Autoresponders
-o- 1Shopping Cart set up
-o- Newsletter template design (print or online)

Specialized Services

-o- Order entry
-o- Order tracking and follow up
-o- Marketing campaigns
-o- Billing and invoicing
-o- Manage Company Store capabilities


Transaction Coordination
-o- Keeping tasks on schedule
-o- Tracking contingencies
-o- Listing Presentations
-o- Buyer Consultations
-o- Manage Drip Campaigns
-o- Design and mailing of postcards
-o- Management of farming areas
-o- Website updates
-o- Special Projects as needed

Managing Multiple Clients and Projects

Managing multiple projects for multiple clients can be a little daunting for new or even experienced solo and small business professionals. Without a system for keeping track of deadlines, client feedback, and team activity, you might quickly find yourself on the other end of an angry phone call with an unhappy client.

Here are three tips to help you work more effectively with multiple client projects:

Communicate More Efficiently
Clients are like everybody else, they get stressed and uncomfortable when they don’t hear from you. But they don’t want to hear from you just because of your charming wit and soothing voice, they want to know the status of their important projects!

A weekly status call or email might be sufficient when you have just a couple of low-key clients. However, when your client and project load increases, you could quickly find yourself spending precious hours on the phone just to provide status updates.

One easy solution is to keep task information online so that clients can login at their convenience (even at 3am) to find out the latest status of their tasks, and even more detailed information (optionally) like time tracking information or how much retainer time they have remaining.

Keep Files and Comments in One Place
Another simple way to keep things organized is to gently move your clients towards accessing files and giving feedback in a central location. Online project management software can help your clients easily upload or download project documents that you’re collaborating on, as well as make comments on a specific project or file without sending dozens of emails back and forth.

The key advantages of this approach is that your responses won’t get lost or misplaced - you’ll have a clear, coherent record of your project conversations. You’ll also be able to reference the latest version of your files in a consistent way.

This winds up saving lots of time that might otherwise be spent with a client providing feedback about the wrong version of a file, or missing your response to a query.

Track Deadlines Proactively
Even with the above measures in place, you still need to keep an eye on the dates you’ve committed to clients. At a minimum, you can adopt a simple system to prompt you about upcoming deadlines, and also to update clients if you are unable to meet those due dates.

One way of doing this is to keep a project or task calendar for each client that shows each upcoming deadline. You can refer to this calendar once a week or more frequently as needed to make sure you’re clear on client commitments. If you have a team, you can also add their commitments for more timely followup.

If you are using an online project management service like ClientSpot, you can also have the system remind you and your team of upcoming deadlines by email a couple of days before the fact. You can also monitor the status of tasks across all projects, clients and team members, or check just the work assigned to a specific person.

By staying on top of deadlines, you can also pro-actively notify your clients if things start to slip. Most clients will not only be understanding of an occasional delay, but will appreciate the early notice so that they can adjust. Not that you want to make a habit of missed deadlines, but at least by monitoring them carefully, you can still provide excellent customer service by informing clients early and giving them options to reschedule work.

These tips were written by Client Spot. No doubt they want you to use their service, but I think the overall message is the same. In order to provide a better more efficient process of tracking projects and keeping clients in the loop, there has to to be some type of system in place and an online project management tool, such as Client Spot or Basecamp can do wonders for your productivity.

Building Confidence in Selling Yourself and Your Products/Services

Confidence to exceed in business cannot be faked. Therefore, it is important to build a core level of confidence so that even in times of nervousness or uncertainty, you will not be moved.

1. Continuous preparation and action assure unshakable confidence.

Everything thing that you do contributes to how people view you and your business. Do you follow up after meetings and sales? Do you stop and think during the day “What is the most productive use of my time right now?” Do you pour your heart and your mind into everything that you do?

We build confidence by planting seed for future opportunities and not by being complacent or unproductive. Once we stop and coast along, our skills decay. Success breeds success; that because we come to a point in our actions where our enthusiasm is the culmination of all the hard work that went before.

2. You must solidly believe in who you are and the value of what you are selling.

Do not second guess yourself and what you believe in; improve who you are rather than try and be like someone else. Are you operating from your core belief system and taking the actions your gut tells you to take. Most people don’t realize how powerful they become when they don’t have to think through their actions.

We become unsure when we don’t prepare enough, read enough study enough or work hard enough. Our confidence comes from knowing we have put the work in and prepared for success.

So here’s to success in business.

Taken from Entrepreneur magazine Sept 2008 – Solid to the Core by Barry Farber

What do you do in your “slow periods”?

Although none of us are happy about it, all business owners go through "slow periods" in their business. It's all about what you do to benefit your business in other ways during those periods. Even in busy times there are challenges with using time wisely; this is even more important in slow times. According to Peggy Duncan a personal productivity expert, "The biggest time-management mistake people make is not knowing how much time they waste." When there is a slow day, it needs to be approached differently in order to make it a productive use of time. During the busy times it might be a good idea to start a file of projects that you can do when times slow down. For example, promotions or marketing strategies, new contacts that would be beneficial to your business, or new business processes to implement. In a recent Entrepreneur (August 2008) magazine articles, it was suggested that multitasking when doing tasks such as developing relationships, organizing or designing new systems could hurt efficiency. By systematically approaching these during an inevitable downtown turn those times into ones of productivity.