Don't Feed The Anger
The last couple of days have been a good example of things not going as planned.
For instance, I had planned to do a tutorial post on adding subscription options to your blog. That is still planned, but it won’t happen today. Instead, I’ve been dealing with a bunch of little things that keep coming up, and add up to one big draw on my time.
So, please accept my apology. However, I learned something (or rather I was reminded of it) while trying to deal with “stuff” and I thought it might be of benefit to others
On Wednesday, I was handed a project that needed to be completed by the end of the week. I knew that this was time sensitive, so I put it to the top of my to-do list. Spent most of Thursday morning working on it, and was able to fax it in by early afternoon.
I felt good that I had completed it ahead of time. I knew there might be some small revisions, but overall thought that project was done and I could turn my attention to other things.
I begin working on a press release for another client, and just as I complete that and get ready for another project, I get a phone call. The project needed revisions. Not surprising, but they were rather large revisions, and in my opinion, many of the were unnecessary. It just seemed like a waste of my valuable time.
So I tolded them I would not have the revisions ready that day, but when they could expect them. I was tempted to call a friend and complain. We do that for each other, listen when the other is working through issues, but decided this project had taken enough of my energy for the day. I then grabbed some other work, my laptop, and went to my patio to work. I sat outside, enjoyed the lovely evening, made good progress on the work, and put the project out of my mind.
It worked. I felt better, and in a better frame of mind to tackle the project when I had to, which hopefully will result in me producineg better work.
It is very tempting to give in to anger and frustration, and stay with it. I do it all too often. However, I find when I refuse to stay there, and instead move on to something else, even temporarily, it loses strength. The feeling may not go away, but it doesn’t control me anymore. Giving energy to your anger only feeds it and keeps it active in your life. Put your energy to something more constructive and watch how much you can benefit from it.
And now…back to putting my energy into the next blog post!
Subscribing To Blogs
Last week Denise Wakeman posted a poll on the Build A Better Blog blog asking whether readers prefered to subscribe to blogs by RSS, email, or another means.
All the blogs I subscribe to come by RSS to my Google Reader. I have three email addresses going onto my inbox, and I don’t need any more mail in there to go through. The new posts sit in my Reader until I have a chance to look at them. This is what works for me, and that is fine.
What isn’t fine is that I failed to realize that not everyone would use this method. As Denise pointed out in her post, most people don’t know what RSS is, and get their updates by email. She had been told, however, that more people were using RSS, and so conducted to poll to see what her results would be.
She’s followed up with another post, and the results are this: 52% use email, 44% use RSS, and 4% use other.
While the results may be closer than some people thought, what it told me was that I could be missing out on a lot of people wanting to sign up for my blog. (OK, humor me and let me believe that a lot of people want to sign up for updates!) I had only offered the RSS option.
That is now corrected. I took a few minutes to learn how to add the email option, and if you look in the column on the right, it is there along with the RSS option.
Feel free to take advantage of this and sign up for either option!
Anyone else find this interesting? Have you offered both options on your blog? If so, what were your results?
Not sure how to add one or both options to your blog? I’ll have a WordPress tutorial posted later this week – and if you subscribe to this blog you won’t miss it!
Time Is On My Mind
Time seems to be a recurring theme in my life lately. After my post on Monday, the theme of time kept coming up this week. For instance:
I was speaking to a potential client yesterday. While he wants to begin sending an electronic newsletter to his clients, and is interested in talking about ways he can use social media he said, “I just don’t have time right now to work on this. Maybe in a week or two.”
Schedules change, and he may be right that in a week or so the will have time to deal with this. But I also think that by spending time now, he will save himself a lot more time in the future . I reassured him that I saw my role as getting this set up and running with as little time from him as possible, then taking over as much as I could to keep the projects running smoothly without a huge time commitment from him..
The concept of time cropped up again in the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur blog. In a post about why now is the right time to begin your own business, 81 people gave their reason for this. (Including one by yours truly – I’m #72!) Read through them and you’ll see a central theme emerge – taking control of one’s life/work, and ultimately, taking control of how one’s time is spent. Unless a way is discovered to travel through time, we only get to go through this life once: make sure you spend your time in ways that matter to you.
And how is my time management system going after four days? In spite of quite a few bumps in the road, it is going well. The worksheet is helping keep me on track, and I am actually focusing on what has to be done each day, and getting it done. I am discovering, however, that I need a lot of adaptability to my schedule. I may plan to work for a two hour period, and I may know what I’m want to work on, but “stuff” keeps coming up that delays it. However, because I am so focused on what must be done that day, I can shift things around and accommodate it all. I know there will be more adapting and tweaking involved, but so far I am very pleased.
And now, I believe it is time for me to close! If you have any thoughts on time – how to manage it, how quickly it is passing, even how to keep track of it for billing, please leave a comment.
Focusing on Time
If you check this blog with any regularity, you noticed that I never got a post up last week.
Bad, very bad.
One of my goals is to make regular posts, and I am pleased that I have been getting up 1-2 each week. I even drafted a post to go up early last week, but I never got back to it.
Now, I can blame my schedule, but I knew what was coming, so it wasn’t any surprise; I just never planned for it. Instead of editing the post last weekend, I did client work, got my son ready to go back to school, and took it easy. Taking a break was a very good thing, but I believe I could have done that AND gotten the blog post done, if I had managed my time better.
Time management is one of my issues, or perhaps it is the lack of time management. It is an area I need to focus on to grow my business, and as of last Thursday, I need to focus harder than ever.
Thursday morning I received word that funding for my position was a bit iffy for 2010. This did not surprise me, but having it told to me made it very real. I’ve been looking at taking GS Business Resources full-time, and this might be just the opportunity. I spent the next several hours rolling that around in my head, thinking how I’d spend the next 4 1/2 months growing my business, saving money, etc.
Then, mid-afternoon I got another phone call. The funding that was expected for the rest of this year had been sent in 2008 – and spent then. So, the money isn’t coming, and the organization doesn’t have any extra to cover it.
Wow.
While this is certainly scary, it may actually be the kick that I need to go after my dreams. And in order to do that, I HAVE to get myself organized and manage my time much better.So where do I begin? First, I went to Christine Kane’s Uplevel Your Business blog and watched the video and downloaded the daily schedule worksheet. Just watching the video gave me enthusiasm to start planning each and every day. I’ve started using the worksheet for each day this week, and while I like the structure it gives me, I know I’m going to have to tweak it some.
There is a part of me that resists being told to do something at a certain time; I want to have flexibility in my schedule. But I know that I need more structure as well. The more I hear about time management, the more I believe that giving myself an outline to my day is actually going to free up my creativity. I know when something is going to be worked on, so I don’t have to think or worry about it. And since I am setting my daily schedule, I can adjust it as needed (as I’ve already done several times on my first day – my printer stopped talking to my desktop computer this afternoon, so I’ve spent 3 hours trying to make them work together. Will need to schedule time tomorrow to go buy another printer.)
Next, I am going to order Time Management In An Instant by Karen Leland and Keith Bailey. I was part of the blog tour for the book’s launch, and in reading through various articles and blog posts Karen has written on time management, I know she understands the issues I face, and has practical solutions to meet them.
With each day, I believe I’m going to get a better sense of how to plan my day – what time of day I do some things better than others, where I tend to get off track, and where I need to allow more time. Look for an update in the next week or two to see what is working for me.
I am curious to know what tips and tricks you use to manage your time. Everyone thinks and works differently, but you never know when a method you developed can benefit someone else. Please post a comment and share your secrets!
Multi-Tasking
Who out there multi-tasks? I confess that I do – or at least I try to. Even in light of information (such as this article I read today) that show multi-tasking to be inefficient, I still believe I can do multiple things at once.
In looking over a typical day, however, I have discovered that there are ways I can get two things done at once without actually doing them both. While these won’t work for everyone’s situation, see if they may at least inspire you to accomplish more.
1) Wash laundry/dishes while working. Yes, I know this works only if you work from home (and works better if you have a washer and dryer in your home so you aren’t schlepping your work along with dirty clothes), but if you do, this is a great way to get multiple things done at once. Put the laundry on or start the dishwasher, then go to work. If you are really organized, pick items on your to-do list that you should be able to finish about the time the wash is.
2) Cook dinner in a slow cooker. This works whether you work at home or not. Put dinner in the slow cooker first thing in the morning, then forget about it until time to eat. I love not having to stop work to prepare dinner (since late afternoon seems to be a very productive time for me), and my home smells great all day. Need recipes? I’ve tried several from A Year of Slow Cooking, and haven’t been disappointed yet.
3) On the phone and on hold? How much time do we spend doing this? What can you do with this time? How about clean out your inbox? Don’t try to tackle any email that you have to think about and answer, but see how many can be deleted or archived. Go through and find the 2 or 3 most urgent to work on after you get off the phone. Likewise, take a paper folder or two and clean them out. Anything you instantly know can be thrown out, do it! If you’re not sure, save it for another time when you can give it your full attention.
4) If you’re trying to sort out some complex answer and the ideas just aren’t coming, take a break from work and go outside and do some physical activity. Doesn’t have to be strenuous and it doesn’t have to be for a long period of time, but I find that going for a walk or a swim while taking my mind completely off the problem will at the least put me in a better frame of mind when I go back to it. And sometimes, solutions appear I hadn’t even thought of.
Those are some ways I’ve found to be a more efficient multi-tasker, but I’d love to have more ideas. How do you get two things done without having to work on both of them at once?
Edited 8-13-2009 – I found this article, and found it had some great tips in it. I really like the way it looks at multi-tasking certain tasks and mono-tasking others.
Google Docs – Templates
Google Docs can be an excellent way to store documents and share them with someone else. As a virtual assistant, I can save a document there and give my client access to view and edit. While we can certainly email documents back and forth, I think this is an excellent way to reduce clutter in my inbox, and to make sure we are both working with the most recent version of the document.
Google Docs also provides templates that are available for anyone to download and use. Most of them have been created by Google, but they recently added a new feature – you can submit your own template for other people to use.
What a great resources this can be. More templates will be available for use, and if you don’t see a template you need, you can create one and submit it to the gallery. Chances are good that if you need it, someone else will as well.
The submission process is simple. Save the document in your Google docs, then go to the link at the top of the page on the right hand side where it says New! Submit a Template. Follow the steps listed, and your document will be added to the Template Gallery. Please be sure and take a minute to read over the terms and policies (listed on the right side of the submission page). Understand that you are giving people permission to use the document that you created. Also understand that if you change your template in your docs, it changes it in the template gallery, so watch out for any personal information you might add. So if you want to use a template, save it under another name and make the edits you want. Anyone who wants to use it has to download it, so your original won’t be affected.
So far I’ve submitted one template, for a Fax Cover Sheet (and no one has rated it yet. If you use it and find it helpful, please rate it. If you don’t like it, please email me and let me know what you don’t like so I can made adjustments). I’m busy working on some more, but I’m wondering – what templates would you be interesting in having available to you? What template(s) have you looked for and not been able to find? Let me know and I’ll try to create something and make it available to you and anyone else who could use it.
