Tag: scheduling

I Can’t Spend All My Time Marketing!

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

And you don’t have to. You shouldn’t. Marketing, rather than being a flood of information about you and yours, should be a steady drip, drip, drip, like watering a delicate plant, not hosing down an elephant.

I’ve spent my adult life working with automation and efficiency using computers so any time there’s a task with repeatable steps, I look for a way to make those repeating parts automatic. It allows me to spend my time on the unique bits, the parts I can do better than a computer because they require creativity or special knowledge.

Automating and scheduling your online marketing is smart. Create messages (that’s the ‘unique to you’ bit) and schedule them in a single monthly session. (We use and recommend Hootsuite but there are a number of social media automation tools available.)

You still have to check in daily to interact with the real human beings who touch your social media messages, but you don’t have to be online 24/7 to keep your message (remember those 80/20 principles, both of them) in front of potential readers and fans.

Scheduling Your Time

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

scheduling your timeDo you sometimes feel there’s not enough time to get all the tasks done in a day? Virtual Assistants usually have several clients – each with a variety of tasks to be completed. Often these tasks are done on a daily basis. If you have a dozen clients and need to touch their account daily and complete three different tasks for each of them every day, that’s 36 different things you need to schedule that day. How do you manage your time to get everything scheduled done?

Here’s what I’ve found is working best for me at this time. (I find that works best for me sometimes changes depending on how many clients I have and how many tasks I need to accomplish. Feel free to change how you schedule your time as the need arises.)

1. My Google calendar helps me see at a glance for the day, week, or month what client calls I have scheduled, what projects are coming due, and gives me a daily reminder to check my daily task list.

2. Currently my favorite way to be sure I get everything done I need to do everyday is to use a spreadsheet similar to the one pictured here. Each Monday morning I print out my daily task list and then physically check off each task as I complete it each day. I had tried to do this on the computer without printing it out. However, I love the feeling of having something in front of me I can see, touch, and write on. Since I have so many clients with so many different things to do, I actually have a 2-page task list. It sure has helped me accomplish a lot.

Everyone has their favorite time management tool. I’d love to hear what works best for you.