My Productive Summer Turned Upside
My son Jake isn’t the only one who gets excited when the school year ends. I do too.
It’s not just because we get to go on our annual vacation { if you missed the highlights on Facebook, you can see the replay on Instagram } and it becomes officially beach season for those of us who live in the Sunshine State.
I’m beyond happy every summer because I Know that I’ll get more hours of work in my day. I sign up Jake for summer camp and he goes and does all sort of summer campy things until I pick him up around 6pm.
There’s no more stopping in the middle of the day to sit in a car line for after school pickups. And I don’t have to worry about my change in schedule during those Wednesday early release days. Who ever came up with the idea to let kids out of school an hour early in the middle of the week has never owned a business where she worked from home.
But this summer … the first year of Jake being in middle school just turned my summer of productivity upside down. I discovered that he’s too old to attend the summer camps in our area and he’s not old enough to go get a part time job.
What was going to happen to my weeks and weeks of uninterrupted days of work? How was I going to deal with all those projects that I’ve put off to work on over the summer? What about all those program launches I was going to create content for my Fall launch?
I didn’t want to give up on my productive summer. I scrambled, called and texted to find a place for Jake to spend his days. I got lucky and found something for him to do for about a week and half in each month but I had to accept the fact that the rest of the days, he’ll be home with me.
Summer Santa isn’t real
Honestly, it took me a couple of days to move past the disappointment in my new summer schedule. It reminded me of the time when I discovered that Santa wasn’t real.
That day I found my letter to Santa in a kitchen drawer two days before Christmas was a shock. My mother sat me down and asked me if I ever noticed that Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy all had the same hand writing? And did I ever notice that it was the same writing as my mom?
Huh … nope I never noticed until that moment she said those words to me. I was disappointed and couldn’t help but wonder if I was still going to get toys that year. I did get my Christmas toys but I was never the same after that. { Funny how you remember stuff like that and it stays with you for years. }
I knew that I had to do something to stay on track with my plans for the summer. Dumping all my program launches and not working was just not an option for a single mom.
With shorter hours to work and less days for uninterrupted work in the week, how can I be more efficient with my time? It was time to rethink how I was working.
It was time to get serious about setting up a process to get things done and develop better systems.
Which comes first: the system or the process?
Let’s talk about the difference between a system and a process. Then I’ll show you why having both of these programs are so important to help you grow your small business.
A PROCESS is a series of ordered activities to help you get something done.
An example of a process would be the steps you take when you make a sale. Let’s say you sell an online product like a workbook – first you’d follow your steps to market your workbook. Then when someone buys the workbook, the sale gets processed through PayPal.
You get an email telling you the sale was approved and processed through the PayPal payment program. You email out the workbook to the buyer. Then you transfer the money into your checking account and cha-ching, another sale.
All of the steps I listed is the PROCESS you take to make a sale of your online workbook.
Put all of those steps together and you have a SYSTEM or specifically, your online workbook sales system.
Without these steps in place, you could easily be wasting your time by not knowing what to do next or worse, repeating steps and adding more work to your already overcrowded day.
Where does one begin and the other one start?
Think about all the things that you do in your day that just seem to take way to much time to get done. If it’s not something that will immediately make you money, you probably find yourself constantly putting it off and moving it to the next day on your to-do list.
I know how that one works because I catch myself doing it all the time.
When something on my list seems like it’s taking too long, it’s easy to just skip it and to chalk it up to saying, “Oh I’m just too busy to get to it right now.” Which then gets followed by this one, “We all get busy and my schedule is overloaded this week.”
When the same thing shows up in my list every week and I haven’t done it in over 3 weeks, then it’s a sign to develop a system.
But the main thing that I want you to take from all this process and system stuff is that it’s not enough to KNOW you need to create a system. You need to find some kind of program that will help you get all the steps from the process done.
Remember that online workbook example I shared with you? When I was getting ready to sell my social strategy workbook and Social Media Productivity Planner, I knew there was no way I was going to sit at my computer and email out a copy of the workbooks to everyone who bought one.
I did a little research and discovered ejunkie. This program did just what I needed it to do – process my Paypal payments, mail out a link to the buyer to download their workbook AND I can even set it up to send them a personal follow up note from me.
The only thing the program doesn’t do is the cha-ching sound for me. I still make that sound when I get an email that I made a sale 🙂
Programs to Create Your Systems
I’m still researching and reading about all the options out there to help me stay productive over the summer. For now, these three programs are my Business BFF’s and I know that they’ve saved me hours of time:
1. Schedule Once – this is the program I use to schedule my coaching sessions for the Pinterest Audits that I’m doing over the summer. There is a free version but I decided to upgrade to the Professional level so that I could schedule sessions for multiple services. I love that it’s connected to my calendar and that the program sends reminder messages to my client so I can just show up to my online session.
2. Evernote – If you know me, you know how much I love my Evernote! I still continue to keep all my notes in this program and my checklists for everything I need to get done. You can read more about how I use Evernote for everything from what to post in my Facebook groups to tracking the Pinterest strategy I do every day.
3. 17 Hats – I’ve just started to tap into the genius of this thing called 17 Hats. Right now, I’m using it to help me send out contracts, invoices and even a pre-work questionnaire for the Pinterest Audits. I’m more than curious to see how the Projects and Workflow features work but I’ll save that for another post when I’ve had the time to really get into how this works.
Other Project Management Programs:
Trello: I love the idea of this visual file system. It’s super easy to use this program to manage your projects with a team – and you can add as many people or boards that you want to with your free account.
Asana: Another visual tool to help you track your projects from start to finish. Their programming is cool that they’ve redefined how you’ll use your inbox.
Basecamp: This program is more for working on projects with a group of people or your clients. If you’re looking for something to keep everyone updated on what’s going, this program has a cool messaging feature and it syncs with your Google calendar.
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