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Time management in direct sales is always a popular topic. Most of use aren’t used to running a business. Plus, it’s super easy to get bogged down with all of the day to day tasks of your business. Not to mention the demands of your family. Here’s how time blocking has made it all more manageable for me.
What Time Blocking Looked Like For the First 2 Weeks
What Time Blocking Looked Like For the First 2 WeeksThere are a million ways to time block and everyone has their own system. For the first 2 weeks, I did nothing but write down what I spent my time on. And I mean EVERYTHING I did- business and personal, including when I go to sleep and when I wake up. How long it took me to make and eat breakfast. How many times I took the dog out to pee (man, that was an eye opener!). How long it took me to schedule content for my social media channels. Things like that. This way I could see what tasks I could batch together (like graphics).
This also gives you a somewhat accurate account of how long it takes you to complete each specific task. C’mon. We’ve all, at some point, thought that we could do something in 10 minutes but it ended up taking 35 minutes and the whole plan for the day was shot! I know some of you with toddlers are feeling that real hard.
Batching
Earlier I had mentioned batching. WTH is batching? It’s seeing what tasks are similar enough that it makes sense to complete them at the same time. This eliminates the need to stop and start things a bunch of times. Here’s some examples:
* meal prepping for the whole day instead of just making breakfast
* making graphics for the whole week instead of just today’s post
* writing a bunch of blog posts at once instead of stopping and making all the graphics for them, too
* visiting the post office and the grocery store on the same day since you’re already out
* setting up all of your parties for the week in the back office at one time instead of going in every time you book one
* assembling a bunch of host packets at one time while you have the supplies out instead of one at a time
Chances are pretty good you are already batching some tasks naturally already. This is just the step of sitting down and actually examining your tasks to be able to put them in the same time block.
When you’re thinking about batching, remember breaking out the month’s work into daily actionable steps will help make sure that you don’t start to suffer from overwhelm and also that you’ll know exactly what needs to be done that day. Meaning you’ll save at least 10 minutes every day wondering “what do I need to do today?”
Start with these two tasks. Time management in direct sales isn’t a task that can be mastered in the first 24 hours. Give yourself a little grace, but always record your tasks!
Ready to record your daily tasks? Grab your FREE Time Blocking Worksheet now!
