Episode 15: Productivity Hacks to Get More Out of Your To-do List
If you’re a personal stylist and you’ve got a CEO Day in place, then you’re on the right track, BUT if you’re still not feeling super organized, or you are spending too much time multi-tasking then you’ve still got some work to do.
No clue what a CEO day is? Give this video cast a watch here: https://www.chicstripes.com/blog/best-year-ever
Ready for 3 productivity hacks that will help you get more out of your biz?
ESTABLISH (and stick to) A SCHEDULE —> The #1 push back I get from personal stylists when I suggest that they designate certain days of the week as their “client days” is that they will loose clients. They feel like they have to be available 24/7. This my dear personal stylists is a LIE! You will NOT lose clients. In fact, making them wait shows that you are in demand, busy and a working stylist with a full calendar - if they want in with you, they better book, even if it’s a week or 3 out. If you have 100% open availability to your clients, they will think that maybe you’re not so good at what you do since you’re never busy. Think about THAT. Now, you can choose however many days you want as your client days. When I was working full time with clients, I designated Tuesdays and Thursdays as my days. Of course, every now and then I needed to be flexible, but by establishing these days it showed I was busy and helped ease my own guilt about being available 24/7 to clients because I know that within 48 hours I would have time and space to address their issues (I also made sure to CLEARY communicate my office days to clients ahead of time!.
TIME BLOCK —> Once you’ve got your schedule down, it’s SUPER important that you time block your days. Time blocking simply means that you’re expounding on your set schedule but you’re scheduling in ALL appointments in your calendar. For example, when I would schedule a client closet audit on a Tuesday, I would time block in their follow up work to be done on that following Thursday so that I could ensure it would get done and not schedule another client session on top of that one.
CHUNK PROJECTS —> Finally, chunk your projects into LIKE things within your time blocked schedule. This basically just means, try to put as many similar type of things on the same day as possible. If you are bouncing around from a client session, to doing your bookkeeping, to rushing back out to shoot marketing materials, you’ll feel scattered and stressed. This type of multi tasking (context switching), is actually more HARMFUL to your productivity than helpful. Your brain is working overtime in order to get done what you need to get done. BUT, if you have a day that is full of just client work: shopping, sessions, creating style plans, etc., now you’re in the flow! Even though those may be different tasks, they are still the same overall type of project.
We have to be flexible, but as CEOs of our businesses, putting in these parameters and boundaries around your work and when you see clients, you’re going to start to see a lot more flow, better process in your business, you’ll be able to turn projects around a lot quicker, work with more clients and make more money. And that’s what we all want right??