How do you make the most of your time? As a busy wedding planner, you may need to spend your week doing a wide variety of tasks such as, meet with new brides, visit new venues, and meet with vendors to discuss wedding details. Of course, you also need to market and run your business and have a personal life.
One of the best ways to fit more tasks into each day is to “batch,” or group, similar tasks and do them together.
Here are 5 tasks you can batch:
1) Write blog posts
If you post to your blog two or three times a week, you can sit down and write all of your posts at the same time. If you write one that is particularly long, split it and create a series that you schedule to post automatically throughout the week.
2) Make phone calls
Make a list of the calls you need to do and sit down and do them together. You might want to do this once in the morning then again in the afternoon. If you let phone calls interrupt you during the day, you will not get many of your tasks done.
If you give consultations to brides over the phone, select a particular day or days in which you are available for appointments so you can get and stay in a “consultation” frame-of-mind. This way you are more focused and will do your best for your brides.
3) Attend meetings and appointments
With the price of gas being so high, grouping meetings, appointments, venue visits, and errands not only saves time but also money. Plan a day when you can do a majority, if not all, of your outside-the-office appointments. Be sure you leave plenty of time between them to allow for problems in traffic or meetings that last a bit longer than scheduled.
4) Handle administrative tasks
Schedule a few hours in your week to write contracts, pay bills, reconcile your checking account, and handle your mail. If you don’t schedule and batch these tasks, you might not get around to them in a timely manner.
5) Post to social media sites
Decide on a particular time each day to work on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and any other sites where you are active. These sites can be additive so if you don’t limit your time each day, you will find that you have lost a good part of your day. Use a service such as HootSuite to schedule messages and Tweets.
Before you batch, take the time to write a list of all of your tasks so you can see what they are and group them easily.
