Work Yourself Up!

Managing Phone Calls

Call center workers are drilled over and over in how to get information and get off the phone as rapidly as possible.  They either make money or lose money according to the time spent on each call.

Actually, you do to, but perhaps you never saw it that way. Even though email and instant messaging are increasing popular communication methods, if you are like most workers, you will have a ringing phone.

In fact, you probably have at least two phones; desk phone and cell phone.  Unless you know how to manage phone calls, more phones just lead to more interruptions and more disruption of your time management plan.

Do you start each day vowing to keep those phone calls under control then get sidetracked without realizing how much time goes by? Here are some simple strategies to avoid wasting so much time on the phone:

1.)    When you make the call, have a purpose in mind before dialing. You aren’t just calling to see if your client likes the product. That’s too vague. You are calling to ask how the client is using the product today and is there any question for you that was not covered in the start-up guide. Then quickly move into the next stage, which may be to tell the client about a companion product or ask permission to include on a newsletter about product updates. Then get off the phone! These are the 4 most important words in telephone time management.

2.)    If the caller starts storytelling or rambling about non-business matters, politely redirect the call; “That’s great, however my boss has an important project for me so I need to go now.”  Or you can give the caller one more chance to get back on track: “Is there anything else that I need to do (look up, work on) before we wrap up this conversation?” For most people, this is sufficient hint to regain control of the call   and complete it.

3.)    For the client or coworker who wants to chat after handling business, you need to get off that call promptly. The longer you try to listen and be nice, the more you let them know that they can run over your time management schedule. “That’s all the time I have for now, I must get back to business.” “My desk is piling with work and I must get back to it now.”  Or you can bring in the third party motivator: “I have someone in my office who needs my immediate attention.”  That last one isn’t lying. You are in your office and your work needs your immediate attention!

4.)    With long winded people, offer to summarize the key points of the call in an email and get off the phone.

5.)    Set an egg timer at your phone and work toward completing most routine business calls in 3-5 minutes. The timer will help you see how much time you are wasting that isn’t necessary to do the job. Get it done then Get off the phone!

Time Management for Dinner

Back in the day all you could hear all the neighborhood moms calling the children home for dinner. Today, families are so busy; going in so many directions that it’s almost unusual for everyone to sit down for dinner together in the evening.

When the family does arrive at home, there’s often little time to get food on the table so Mom reaches in the freezer or phones for pizza delivery. You can find time for a healthy dinner in the evening by applying time management to dinner management.

Start by giving every family member a job to do in preparation for dinner. Whether Mom or Dad actually cooks dinner, the other parent can spend time with the smallest child. Older children can set the table, pour drinks then clean up the plates and load the dishwasher after dinner. Teens can take a turn preparing dinner, even choosing what they would like to cook.  If everyone pitches in, a healthy dinner can be on the table in an hour or less.

Choose quick-to-cook foods such as those shown in cookbooks for easy dinners or microwave prepared dinners. A stovetop grill is also useful for quick grilling. The idea of dinner at home is a little bit about food and a lot about spending time together.

The time you invest in talking with the children at dinnertime helps to cement the family bond. Dinner is not the time to multi-task; that means turn off all the cell phones, televisions and other distractions. Invest your time in talking with your family, not just eating in the same room.

If you plan ahead, you can cook double portions of dinner and freeze several items for a busier evening or to take to work for lunch. You might also cook a large roast or chicken that serves as the basis for several dinners in the same week.

Before putting away all the foods during cleanup, fix lunches for the next day. Package all the lunch items together in a simple recyclable paper sack or group all lunch items together so each person can quickly grab these items and pack them into a lunch box in the morning. 

One of the reasons that office workers eat so much junk food or fast food is that they don’t take time to prepare a healthy lunch.  Don’t wait until you are rushing around in the morning to make lunch, that’s when you’ll ignore it because you don’t have enough time.

A secondary advantage to finding time to prepare your own dinners is that you can save money on both lunches and dinners. You need to plan a shopping time weekly to get all the essential ingredients. If you don’t plan ahead and dash into a corner market every night, you’ll spend more money than by shopping once a week at a larger grocery store.

The time you spend preparing and eating dinner with your family or significant other, is time that you are talking and actually listening to each other.  As you are enjoying dessert or after dinner coffee, it’s the ideal time to synchronize everyone’s schedules for the next day.   

Who needs a ride? Who will be home for dinner tomorrow? Who needs help with homework tonight? What do we need to get done as a family to free time for a weekend trip? This takes possibly ten or fifteen minutes that saves so much time later by coordinating as a group.

Time Management and Energy Flow

Just as electrical equipment functions best when receiving a solid surge of electricity, so do you.  In your case, the power you need is energy, which gives you stamina for the day and the ability to kick into high gear when necessary to deal with a problem. 

It’s not that you have to be perky all day or load up on four shot espresso coffees on the way to work. But you do need to know your own energy flow. When you understand how your personal energy patterns ebb and flow, you can use that knowledge to support your time management strategy.

Are you a night person, who works late but starts slow in the mornings? Are you an early bird who can get up before dawn, exercise, arrive early at work and have your in-box cleared before your boss arrives?  Or are you a mid-day person who starts slow, picks up speed then tapers off in the late afternoon? 

These patterns relate to your natural energy flow also called biorhythms.  Some people chart these monthly and literally use them to make their schedule, work or travel commitments. You don’t have to get that involved in the process.

You can observe yourself and note which hours are your prime working hours, the times when you can be highly productive with the least effort or tiredness. Just make a simple chart of the day either on graph paper or on a spreadsheet based graph. List your waking hours on the bottom and a high, medium, low rating along the side.

Then Make an “X” for your energy level at each hour of the day. As you connect the dots, you’ll notice a pattern of energy highs and lows. Do this for several days and see how consistent the pattern is.

Knowing your prime working hours (early bird, midday, evening) is extremely helpful in how you schedule the complicated tasks in your workday.  If you have a choice in scheduling the time to make a presentation at a conference and you are a midday person, ask for a time between 11am to 3pm.

Don’t say yes to the 8am presentation time. You will wake up sluggish and not be sharp even though you know the material. The same is true for dividing tasks. With a large project, divide the elements so that you plan to work on the creative writing or material calculations during the prime energy time of your workday.

Your mind will be more alert and you will have the energy to focus on complicated work. During your off-peak energy times, gather related materials or do some aspect of the project that is less detailed and does not require a high level of creative energy or decision-making.

After using this approach for a few weeks, you’ll see what happened on those days when your time management plan seemed to derail even though you were motivated to do the work.

You simply scheduled the wrong task for your lower energy times and so your output was less than anticipated. As with electrical power, peak periods are more expensive. Peak periods in your workday are more valuable, so allocate them wisely and use that high-energy surge to get the work done faster and better.

Paralysis of the Plentiful

With so many electronic gadgets and office systems to help with your time management, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. At some point, it’s “paralysis of the plentiful”; or so many options and so little time to use them all.

This is like “analysis paralysis” where a person gets so wrapped up in making the right decision based on endless amounts of information that nothing gets done. The same is true for “paralysis of the plentiful.”

You’ll see these people; they have a cell phone, a Blackberry ™, a wireless headset, online calendar, to-do list on the computer, calendar posted on the refrigerator at home and day planner in hand.

This doesn’t even count the myriad of yellow sticky notes at home and at the office. This person has “paralysis of the plentiful.” If that sounds like you, then you have to make some tough choices.

When you find a new device that claims to save time, you grab it then add it to whatever you are currently using.  Before long, you have several time keeping options but you are still running late to meetings or forgetting to prepare reports on the date due. This is a case of working for the time savers instead of making the times savers work for you.

Start by choosing the most comprehensive, easiest to operate scheduling system. Don’t feel like a low-tech co-out if you find the paper and pen day planner is that system for you.

If you are spending time programming an exotic phone or hand held organizer, then you are wasting time. That’s not the point. Another problem you may have encountered is using more than one system.

Maybe you use the electronic planner for work items since it hot syncs with your computer, but you keep the paper day planner   for your personal life. That’s a huge mistake. The more systems you have, the greater the chance for forgetting an important appointment. 

Do you spend more than ten minutes daily updating your time management system? If you do, you may be working with more than one device or planner and that’s what’s wasting time.  Let’s face it, you will not your improve time management by spending more time with “paralysis of the plentiful,” trying to keep all your systems synchronized.

Time management systems once engaged are supposed to give you a sense of relief and security that your schedule is under control. If you have the opposite feeling, take a look at what you are using for your time management. 

If you have more than one schedule method, cut back to one and use that until you are confident in the system. Later you can experiment with a new method, just resist the urge to add more and more options. Otherwise the time savers become time wasters when they throw you into “paralysis of the plentiful.”

Taking Back Time After Work

Does the excitement of arriving at home in the evening get ruined when you open the door to see a pile of unfolded laundry and a week’s worth of newspapers scattered around?

It’s not that you are a slob; at least you don’t want to be. The problem is, you have so little spare time. At the end of the day all you want to do is grab dinner and collapse on the sofa exerting only enough energy to work the remote.

Instead of berating yourself about not having enough time to clean your home, decide which jobs that you are willing to spend time on and which you can delegate. Yes, you can delegate housework.

When you delegate, you free time for what is more important to you. Start with the laundry. Find a full service laundry that’s on the way to work and drop it off weekly. The next day, you pick up clean, folded and pressed clothes.  If the laundry doesn’t do dry cleaning, then find a drive-thru drive cleaner that opens early so you can drop the clothes on the way to work.

Stop ordering pizza or Chinese food when you are too tired to cook. You’ll save money and time after work by purchasing frozen dinners that were made just for you with your favorite recipes by a personal chef.

Some personal chefs cook in your kitchen twice monthly while others deliver the foods. What you spend on custom prepared meals frees your time in the evening and offsets all the foods that go to waste in your refrigerator because you don’t have time to cook.

If you do enjoy cooking but only when you have enough time, then use the same concept as the personal chefs do and plan an all-day cooking binge once or twice monthly then freeze the meals.

Hire a maid service to come in once or twice monthly to do the heavy cleaning, floors, carpets, scrubbing and so forth. Then you can keep the place clean with twenty minutes of speed cleaning on alternate days.

Don’t fool yourself by promising to clean all day Saturday. When the weekend comes, you’ll find more interesting ways to spend your time than cleaning. Rather than set yourself up to break a promise to yourself, find a combination of maid service and your cleaning that works within the time you are willing to consistently devote to cleaning.

Gardening and outdoor spaces are wonderful but only if you have the time to keep ahead of the weeds. If gardening is relaxing to you, then you’ll gladly spend the time to do this. But if you simply like the look of a beautiful outdoor space yet lack the passion for gardening, then get help with the yard. You can save money by hiring a student or retiree to weed and prune a small garden. If you have a full yard, hire a lawn service.

Running errands for routine matters can take hours when you are disorganized and too tired to focus on the task. Keep a list in the kitchen where you add items by location. Have a section on the list for groceries, beverages, cosmetics, personal care items and clothing.

Choose stores where a large number of items can be obtained. That saves time and gas. Bring your list and make one shopping trip each day until it’s done. Or spend Saturday as your shopping and fun day, because you’ll have more time after being freed from other routine tasks.

SMART Time Management

You’ve probably heard the acronym, SMART; Specific, Manageable, Attainable, Realistic Timely.  This is an ideal way to create a time management system for your work or personal life.  Or you can use these criteria to evaluate a time management and day planner system that you might purchase.

Specific: Your time management system must be able to record each task and have enough room to add necessary details. That’s why those small, freebie calendars that you get from local businesses doesn’t have enough space to be specific about your tasks and what’s needed to accomplish them.

Manageable:  Some time management systems can be so detailed and complex that using them is a part time job. That’s not helpful and can discourage you from doing any type of scheduling. 

If one system does not work for you, find a different one, but don’t give up. And don’t get a planner book that’s too large to comfortable carry with you when you are out of the office. That leads to the sticky notes scattered around and missing important appointments.

Attainable: Yes, you can get your frantic, over-booked life under control. In fact, you have to do it for your health as well as for your business. Why add needless stress to your workday by trying to remember your schedule instead of planning it on your calendar. You can complete more work in less time if you have a big picture of the tasks and prioritize those tasks each day.

Realistic: No matter how you try to stretch it, there’s still only 24 hours in a day. If you work 8 hours, travel 1 hour, sleep 7 hours, then you have 8 hours remaining to get dressed, eat meals, spend time with your friends and family, exercise and socialize.

You can enjoy more variety in your personal time if you schedule special events on your calendar. Knowing that you have tickets for the Broadway touring company of a stage play on Friday evening, then you’ll avoid over-scheduling tasks so you can leave work on time and be ready when the curtain goes up.

Timely: Time does not stop for any of us. When you take on too many tasks for the allotted time, you know how it feels as if time is moving in hyper-speed. The purpose of time management is so that you can accomplish what you need to do and balance each deadline with other work plus those unexpected interruptions.

If you delay a difficult project by claiming that you “work better under pressure,” you are only fooling yourself. What actually happens when working under pressure is a higher tendency for error.

As you choose the right time management system for your work style, you are preparing to simplify your life. You’ll also gain a sense of mastery over your time so that you know what you can add to the day and when to say no to over-commitment and when you can say yes to enjoyable activities.

What Really Matters

Do you think that the idea of time management is so that you can cram more work into fewer hours? That’s what many people think but it’s not the correct answer. Time management allows you to make the most of your work hours while still having a life outside of work. Now that’s a concept too many people miss.

Does it matter to you to have leisure time or time with your family? Some people have missed out on this for so long that they don’t miss it anymore. They have given up the idea of having time for themselves.

That’s really unfortunate and unnecessary. It’s like the old saying, “Some people trade time for money while other people trade money for time.” Then there are those entrepreneurial types who insist that you can have both time and money if you plan effectively.

If you could find the time to do what really matters to you, what would be included in that time?  Make a list and be specific. Don’t just say, “travel” - put down your real dream.

Maybe you have dreamed of taking a month off and backpacking around Europe or camping at several national parks on a drive across America. Those dreams take more than money, they take time off. If you only have a week or two of vacation, how would you get the time needed?

Or would you like to go back and finish a college degree or earn an advanced degree? When you work during the day, you have a limited amount of time at night for classes. That might mean you work full time and take longer to complete the degree.

Another option is to reduce your lifestyle expenses, cut back to part time at work and free more hours to complete your degree faster. What really matters to you? How can you balance time and money to make these dreams become reality?

Whatever your dream, you can begin to align your time toward achieving that dream. It may mean that you work overtime to save money or take a second job for a year. Or you may have to extend the time to reach your dream to accrue enough vacation time to make the time off possible. It’s all about planning your time as well as your money.

Time management is so often thought of as a way to do more work in a given day. It’s also your ally in arranging your life and work so that you can fulfill your dreams. If only you could see this positive aspect of time management, then you might stop looking at it as if it’s another burden. Hours tick by whether or not you plan them. Hours become days to months and years while many people only talk about the dreams that they “don’t have time” to enjoy.

If you wait for extra time to magically appear in your life, you’ll wait forever and nothing changes. By using time management to support your dreams, then every day you get closer to what really matters to you.

To start, you can look at the calendar three to five years from today. Make the time you would like to leave for your extended vacation or the semester you want to enroll in college. Then count backwards for the number of days (months). As you divide that time into blocks of smaller preparation tasks, you begin to prepare to make the dream possible.

Even while waiting, you have the satisfaction of doing something regularly, investing time in planning and taking action toward your goals. When you identify what really matters in the big picture, then you find it easier to use time wisely today to set up your future goal.

Time Management and Goal Setting

I've had a lot of requests come through for help with time management.  Working on some new stuff now and will start posting it within the next couple of days.

If you're interested in time management, make sure you get on the feed to keep updated.

How to “Drill Down” a Niche

Finding a niche topic requires more than just identifying your interests. You need to divide the topic down to a very specific area so that you can better target the audience. Let’s look at how to break down a niche idea using a popular online search topic:  how to make money with online marketing.

That’s much too broad and difficult to market. You’ll also bump into many competitors. Think of the process as an upside down funnel. Or, if you’re mathematically inclined, it’s like reducing a fraction to its lowest terms.

Overall Topic: How to make money with online marketing.

Sub Topics from initial brainstorming include:

•    People who want to work from home

•    People who want to work anywhere using a computer

•    People who want freedom to choose their own work hours

•    People who hate their job and want to get out of the cubicle

•    People who lack advanced skills or degrees and need to learn a skill fast

•    People who lost their jobs due to downsizing or outsourcing

•    Baby boomers looking to supplement their retirement income

•    College kids needing to earn extra money

•    Stay at home moms who don’t want to go back to work

Wow! That’s an entire set of niche topics that can be developed merely by taking time to analyze why people might want to earn money from online marketing. Out of the six topics generated, select two that really interest you or represent areas where you have personal experience.

Take the first topic you chose and brainstorm five to seven key questions that people might ask in searching for the topic. Next, start a niche search using the keywords you developed and see what you find. Using Google Notebooks or designated files, collect this information. Add to your research those websites that deal with the niche topic.

Finally, look in ClickBank and on similar sites for affiliate products that you can use in developing the niche. If you decide to write your own information product, create an outline for each eBook that you’ll prepare. Then get ready to dominate your area of expertise.

How to Set Prices for Information Products

The prices for information products are largely determined by the product owner. That’s far more freedom than that of a book on the shelf at a major retailer. Print books have to make enough to pay the author, editor, printing, marketing, publisher profit and cut to the retailer.

Information products only pay the owner and affiliate sales. No inventory to store, no big upfront costs and if it doesn’t sell, just transfer it to an archive file or hit the delete key. When you consider all of those factors, the information product owner has freedom to set the prices with one exception - what will the market pay?

That’s the tricky part. Ebooks are well established in every genre from textbooks to popular topics so the price is dependent on the market and the following of the author.  Let’s say you’re starting out and lack that major following, how do you price your product?

Start by surveying the prices on comparable information products on at least a dozen sites or vendors. Have you noticed that many information products end in “7?” Popular pricing is $17, $27, $47.

This price seems to click with many buyers.  Other frequently used price points are $9.95, $19.95, $39.95. The “.95” is borrowing a retailer’s trick of making the price sound less than it really is.

After all, $19.95 isn’t a full twenty bucks since buyers tend to ignore the impact of retail tax or shipping. With information products delivered electronically, the $19.95 is the true price, leaving a big nickel for whatever a nickel still buys.

It’s not the nickel - it the psychological satisfaction of spending less than twenty dollars. The $17 products have the same appeal of spending less than twenty dollars.  Look for the middle ground in pricing.

Avoid starting too low or the value of your product won’t be seen as worthwhile. Even if you start slightly higher than comparables, you have room for a price reduction or a “special offer” at the next lowest price point.

Think of how many times you see the infamous television infomercials that flash the price as $129 with reductions that end up at $39.95. The buyer gets excited about getting a discount when the product was never going to sell at the inflated price in the first place. It’s about letting the buyer win.

Price only matters as part of the equation.  Don’t give your buyers a reason to focus on the price. Keep them focused on the product and the excitement of the purchase and they’ll be willing to pay based on the perceived value and not the dollar amount you put on your product.