Growing your business with marketing, week 33: Chunking time

This is Week 33 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week here, on the podcast, and at the Marketing Mix blog.

I’ve tried (and failed) setting up a workable scheduling system a dozen times over—at least.

Among the various things I’ve tested and abandoned were:

• Scheduling like a lawyer, where I slotted myself down to the 15-minute “pod”
• Scheduling like a dentist, where I parceled my time out in 40/20-minute increments
• Scheduling like an actor/cowboy/hobo, where I plugged in my major, must-do’s & deadlines, and just did everything else around them

The problem, of course, is that scheduling like a lawyer, dentist or actor works best when you’re working in one of those professions; for me, in my new capacity as solopreneur wearing many hats, it was disastrous. I got a lot done when I carved my time up in tiny slices, put them in my calendar, and adhered to the program, but I quickly began to resent it. I didn’t go into business for myself to boss myself around. And the actor/cowboy/hobo-style of scheduling, where I basically went where the gig was (or the free meal and ride, in the case of hobo-style scheduling), was wildly inefficient for managing the many, many things I’ve got stacked on my plate.

Obviously, if you’re interested in a marketing calendar, you get that maybe there’s something to this scheduling thing, and to doing work incrementally. But the work still needs to happen in a way that fits your specific needs. The marketing calendar this project is centered around may be the result of years of experience and lots of hard work, but it’s still a serving suggestion, or a rough outline; even Ilise says adapting it to suit yourself is a good idea, provided you’re not adapting your way out of the work altogether.

After wrassling with my calendar for years, I’m finally starting to settle into a kind of rhythm, and an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. What works for me may not work for you, but maybe you’ll find some new ideas, or some reassurance that you’re playing in the right area for your own rhythms.

Rhythmic scheduling

My good buddy, Peleg, and I were talking about rhythmic scheduling this week at one of our occasional brainstorming breakfasts. He mentioned that since moving from a hard-core, 9-to-5-style approach when he was running a design shop with employees and had clients on the same kind of schedule, he’s had to adjust to the vast expanse of time available by looking at it from an energy perspective: when does he have the most, and when the least? How much energy does it require for certain tasks, and when should those be slotted in to maximize efficiency?

I’ve found myself asking those same questions this year with my move into consulting (takes LOTS of energy for me) and my commitment to expanding my writing practice (takes a very specific kind of energy for me). Tim Ferriss, who’s made a big project of “lifestyle design”, has noted in more than one place how his optimal writing hours are wee ones—between 1 – 5 am. My own optimal writing time happens roughly 3 hours after rising and lasts for about 4, so earlier this summer I began “firewalling” 10am – 12pm for writing. I’ll reschedule if I must (I had an old dentist appointment on the books, and travel can interfere), but basically, that’s it: no appointments for me until 1pm.

This is a bit of a conflict with consulting, since I have East coast clients that doesn’t always work for. My solution for now is to reserve a couple of Friday mornings per month, although I’m also looking at giving up a Thursday morning, as I get better about batching tasks like writing, and planning ahead for big deadlines like my monthly column for actors and my monthly newsletter.

Batching tasks

This is nothing new in the land of time management. It’s pretty much a given in productivity circles that processing all your email in batches, grouping errands and the whole “like with like” philosophy make up the path to freedom, time-wise. I’d long resisted it with the blog, though, since I like my essays to be fresh: I use my own life and travails as fodder, so it feels right to report them in as close to real time as possible.

My new commitment to writing 5x/weekly was killing me, though. The site started to feel like a hungry beast that had to be fed, rather than an outlet for my creativity and a way of sharing my knowledge with my people. Finally, about a month ago, I caved and wrote a few posts at once. The unbelievable freedom and ease I felt—the room it created—were so amazing, I became an instant, if slightly guilty convert.

I also have gotten much better about drinking my own Kool-Aid and keeping a sharp eye out for topics, capturing ideas when they happen, and all the other stuff I’m constantly telling other people about. Why I thought I could apply the rules to my own workflow only when the spirit moved me is anyone’s guess; I’m done with that tomfoolery, though, and ready to get stuff done.

On/off, open/closed

A companion to the rhythm & batching techniques is a nifty trick my friend, Adam Kayce, describes in an interview he did about Inspired Scheduling for the Business Oasis, Mark Silver’s membership support community. Essentially, it’s a methodology for approaching your calendar with your heart more than your head. I won’t get into specifics here, but you do a couple of passes where you decide which times feel like they should be devoted to work and which not, and then which feel better as time spent with others and which with solo time.

I was already doing a modified version of this with my own time. Mondays and Fridays have never really been my peak extrovert days, and I like using cave time on those days to get other, more introverted types of tasks done then. Ditto with late morning and writing: it’s a much more efficient use of my time to spend that chunk writing and use later in the day, when I’ve siphoned off all the crazy into my writing and am feeling more expansive, to focus my learning on client needs.

Calendar in action

Just to give you an idea of how this stuff applies in real life, here’s what last week looked like:

• Sun (I know, I know), Mon, Wed a.m.: writing for 2 – 3 hours (blog posts for Virgo Guide and communicatrix)
• Mon night: my weekly accountability group meetup
• Tue a.m., Thu p.m.,  client calls (note the one a.m. slot for an East coaster)
• Tue late a.m. – COB: dentist appointment and recovery time
• Wed p.m.: finish old client job; miscellaneous marketing tasks, including monthly Biznik meetup
• Thu a.m.: Brainstorming Breakfast, followed by client prep for calls
• Fri: catch-all day of phone calls, puttering and marketing tasks (redoing my business card for the upcoming Creative Freelancer Conference)

Some stuff I learned from this week’s scheduling:

• I need even more quality time for writing. I missed Tuesday’s communicatrix post, which was disappointing. These marketing calendar posts have gotten more intricate, and they “drop” on the same day as my big essay post on communicatrix. Something’s gotta give! (Looking for ideas, here, so lay ‘em on me.)
• I need to schedule my dentist appointments for late in the day. I’m worthless afterward—she’s VERY thorough, so the experience is a bit traumatic—so I might as well plan it for veg time after.
• “Mellow time” helps. The days I’ve taken my breakfast and lunch outside to eat on the patio and read a book have been far more pleasant, as have the days I managed to knock off before 9pm. (Again, I know, I know—it’s a work in progress!)
• I can do a maximum of one Full Monty per day. I love them, and so do the people who’ve done them. They’re a little intense for both of us, though, so I think the opportunity here is to raise the price, increase the time from 60 to 90 minutes (so hopefully, it can be less like a fire hose for the unsuspecting) and add some value in the form of screen sharing, audio recording and the like. As Peleg and Ilise say, pricing is a marketing tool, too, so I’m not really concerned about raising it; I just want to make sure I do it right, which is going to mean carving out some time to rephrase the offering, test some new collaboration tools and do a little promotion. (If you’ve been reading me for a while and are on the fence, I’m going to do the first bump in September, so you might want to sign up now while it’s still $250.)
• I still have unrealistic expectations of how much can get done in a day. I thought my business card revision would take an hour, tops; instead, it sucked up a half-day. My posts, this one included, usually take longer than I expect they will. Even email replying isn’t so simple, since a simple “yes” or “no” rarely suffices (and is kind of off-brand for me). Not sure how to deal with this beyond more trial and error. Again, suggestions welcomed and encouraged!

To head you off at the pass, I’m guessing that a few people might suggest I just do less. I know that’s true, and have been overworking a bit to get lingering stuff off my plate. I also gave notice to someone I’ve been subcontracting for that I was getting out of design entirely. I’ve committed to this project through the end of the year, but I’m rethinking delivery dates, and whether a Tuesday or Wednesday “drop” might not be better for my schedule.

In short, I’m probably fail-fast-ing like everyone else, figuring out as I go along. It’s still a great ride, and I wouldn’t trade it to go back, no matter how much effort it is.

So help me out here: what am I not seeing? What tricks and tips have you found that I might try and apply?