Leveraging is everything! 10 Easy Steps to Owning your Schedule

I’m sure you have an everlasting to-do list that always seems to get even bigger by the end of your day. No matter how long or short your to-do list is, you’ll always have one! But what if you could leverage your time to get twice as much done in half the time? What could that mean for your personal life and business? Leveraging is everything! Are you ready for 10 easy steps to owning your schedule?

The key to leveraging, my friends, is to build yourself a block schedule and stick to it! A block schedule, if you’re unfamiliar with one, is a tool that you can use to build out every minute of your day into a time blocked structure to focus on a certain task or process during a specific time. This gives the structure you need for getting everything done (& more) in a day. Trust me – as a stay-at-home-mom and a work-from-home mom, this block schedule is the only way I get anything done for anyone!

So I’d like to offer you the 10 most important items I’ve found for maintaining great systems & procedures when you’re building a block schedule that will help your business succeed. If you can build in these 10 items into a block schedule that you live by – then this will be the #1 game changer for your life & business! Each one of these items could be (and probably will be) their own blog topic so I will move quickly in summarizing them so that you can get started on building your block schedule! Then we can dive a little deeper into them in future blog posts…so keep an eye out!

The #1 most important item to keep in mind as you build your block schedule is this. Discipline!

This means no distractions from others so you can stay consistent with time blocking and tasks in income producing activities. Stay disciplined to the schedule you set for yourself. Protect your boundaries, protect your mornings and your time, and protect your focus!

Determine what the income producing activities are for your business & do those first in the day. Then add all the extra little things throughout the day and you’ll end up getting everything done (and more!).

I’m sure you’ve heard of the rock analogy – that if you put a rock in a cup and then pour sand in it, it all seems to fit. But if you put sand in a cup then try adding a rock, it won’t fit! So if you do the big tasks first in your day and stay disciplined – then you will run your day vs. it running you.

Then comes important item number two… Organization!

As you think about your block schedule, you want to build an organizational system that can withstand growth of 5xs-10xs the business you have now. For each task & process that you commit your time to, you want concise, clean, charts or lists to keep everything straight. If you’re a checklist person, this will be your favorite part of the building process.

You will want to list your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual to do lists and build intentional time to do those into your block schedule. This is also an opportunity to list out your goals for the year and then build in small steps to achieve those goals into your daily schedule.

While you’re on this organization spree, you can also create an operations manual so that anyone could take over the job with clear expectations, and be trained easily as the business begins to grow. This will set roles, responsibilities & expectations, along with step by step processes to complete the day to day activities. You could even include links or QR codes to quick training videos in your operations manual. (Videos are a great tool to use that can easily scale any training process. Implementing them into the Operations Manual is a great idea to help keep your staff refreshed on the processes for important items!)

Each of the businesses I am involved in has an Operations Manual that break down every process, schedule, database platform & task. These have become the backbone of each of the businesses and excellent reference tools to keep everyone on track as we continue to grow!

Training and Management is the third most important item to build into your block schedule.

As you build, you always want to keep improving your management and leadership skills. You want to continue to sharpen your sword You enhance the business when you enhance yourself! You want to set aside time to evaluate & simplify processes, and to clarify expectations to clients or co-workers so that everyone is clear on what you do and don’t do. (If you are in a supervising role, this is very important! Make these boundaries very clear with your staff and clients).

Build in time to your block schedule to read books, listen to podcasts – I love Audible so you can listen to books as you clean, drive, cook, etc. (I love multitasking!) – and attend continuing educational classes.

It’s also important to build in time to role play objection handling into your training modules. This is a very important aspect so that when you come to an objection from a client or business partner, its nothing new since you’ve handled it before…and now its a piece of cake!

Then as you onboard new employees to the business or hire new admins to help you, you’ll want to make sure you have the systems and procedures in place to make the onboarding process smooth & easy.

When you focus on training and management now in your schedule (even if you think you don’t need it), when your business levels up you’ll already have a sustainable schedule to handle the growth and keep you always learning and growing in the process.

The fourth item to keep in mind is Accountability.

This is important to make sure that everyone stays in their lane as the standards are set & the business grows. You train the behavior you want repeated. So you need to set the standard & manage accountability to these standards that you want repeated for the staff.

You don’t want to touch anything twice in your schedule, backtrack, bottleneck, or spend too much time fixing someone else’s paperwork (or mistakes…yikes!). Make sure you are accountable to your responsibilities and the others are responsible for theirs in everyone’s schedule. Above all, hold yourself accountable to the schedule that you set for yourself! If you can’t stick to it, you risk becoming complacent with where you are and lowering the standard for others to follow. Be a game-changer! Take the initiative in leadership to hold yourself accountable to a schedule that will keep the business moving forward in a focused and intentional way.

The fifth item that is important to build into your block schedule is Social Media & Advertising/Marketing.

This can take a lot of time but pays off the most since it can easily grow the reach of the business if kept consistent and relevant. Make sure the marketing plan is clear and consistent across all social platforms.

You can put together client testimonials for the business, partner Q&As that would be helpful to clients, market posts that are of value to customers, etc. Just dedicate a little time to this every day and you’ll reap its benefits. If you think you don’t have the time to manage it, it is most likely because you are currently not following a time-blocked schedule & it has sucked you into its time vacuum! But if you stick to your block schedule & get in then out of these platforms when you have allotted the appropriate timeframe for yourself, then you’ll notice you will “mindlessly scroll” less and be intentional with the time you have.

The sixth item you’ll need to time-block is Income Producing Activities.

These keep the business running and the clients coming back. Important items to remember here are that no matter how you do this or what you do-you want to build in weekly updates with all parties involved in a project, transaction, deal etc. so that everyone is kept on the same page and communicated with excellent service. Email is always a preferred mode of communication instead of phone calls (for liability purposes. But if you do make phone calls, make sure the calls are recorded following applicable local/state laws to help mitigate risk). You want to build in weekly updates because people always complain about too little communication but they never complain about being overcommunicated with.

Then you want to make sure that no deadlines fall through. Implement checklists for quality control, and know every step of the process of every income producing activity. Introduce yourself to all clients & co-ops, input the data entry for new contracts or tasks into your system, then maintain follow up throughout the process until closing. Once a deal closes, enter the clients into your post-closing follow up drip campaigns in your Customer Relationship Management system if you have one (of if you don’t you could just start a Facebook Group for Past Clients), and make sure you enroll the clients into a follow-up client care program that you can maintain post-closing.

The seventh item important to your block schedule is Event Planning & Client Care.

It is important to have the capacity in your schedule to take on more tasks and projects while simultaneously maintaining your other obligations. Building this item into your schedule will ensure that you have the time needed to implement the event planning and client care (as applicable and necessary) for your business. If you’re not helping the business move forward, its moving backward. If you can build this into your schedule its an easy way to keep top of mind with people.

You can send handwritten cards to past clients for birthdays, anniversaries, or as a “Thank you for your review.” You can publish a weekly newsletter, host a monthly community outreach event or client appreciation event, coordinate a business partner networking event, awards ceremony, or whatever the occasion may be. These are always excellent marketing tools as the business grows as well.

The eighth key to building your block schedule is to allow time for Prospecting / Networking.

During this time you could spend time nurturing leads, cold-calling (if needed in your business), attending networking groups, recruit, or even join a Mastermind groups on social media. The possibilities are endless here for helping your business gain recognition and become a bigger name in the community.

The ninth important aspect to consider is to build in a segment of time for Bookkeeping & Reporting.

Even if you’re not a pro at bookkeeping or reporting, find a management system that you like (I use Google Spreadsheets for productivity tracking and reporting, and Quickbooks for financials) so that you can maintain all numbers in a “Profit and Loss” to match Bank Statements, and so that you can track every detail of the business. You need to ensure bills are paid and that any financial reporting or taxes, payroll, bookkeeping deadlines are always met. Maintaining an organized system for this is essential for your business.

Also, it is important to always track the productivity of your business, the sales volume, and the return on investment for weekly, quarterly, yearly reports on every expense. If you can’t track it then you can’t grow it. Keep this in mind when you build in the necessary time for this in your weekly block schedule. I focus on bookkeeping/reporting for an allotted time every Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday morning for each business, then at the end of every month I run detailed reports on each business to prepare for monthly meetings and budget review. Find a system that works for you and stick to it!

Finally, you’ll want to set aside time for all the extra inevitable admin tasks that will come up.

These include errands, tedious paperwork and filing, and other housekeeping items.

It is important to build in time to your block schedule for items like this that could steal your time away if you’re not careful! The goal would be to save any of this work to be done all at once so that you don’t get de-railed from your other income producing activities to do items like this throughout the day. Keep in mind that you need to prioritize the highest and best use of your time to bring the block schedule alive!

So what could a block schedule look like?

Here’s an example of the block schedule that I start all my administrative staff on and I tweak it for each of the businesses as necessary. Feel free to do the same!

(Also, as a work-from-home and stay-at-home mom with a toddler and infant, I would HIGHLY recommend a block schedule for your personal life as well! Without a strict schedule – that may give some people a headache to follow – there is absolutely no way that anything could get done around my house. The babies know their schedule and sleep, eat, play like clockwork to allow Mama with the time she needs to focus on work and all the other things! For suggestions on strict schedules for infants to toddlers, I strongly recommend “Moms on Call.” Both of my babies have slept through the night since 5 weeks and both take several long hour naps a day – all because of the schedules provided by “Moms on Call.” Check them out!)

Example

You could implement a 15 minute period of “flex time” in between each block that would allow you to make a list of anything that didn’t get done that needs to get done so that you can delegate to your supervisor, other admin, or to simply complete in the “Flex Time” hour at the end of the day.

9am-12pm: Lead generation and nurture duties that include:
- Lead follow up, lead conversion, answering the phone promptly, staying uninterrupted and consistent. Cold-calling as time allows.
- Communicating with current clients on their current transactions.
12pm-2pm: Assist Administrative Staff including:
- Past Client Care – and when appropriate asking for referrals and reviews
- Data Entry for Incoming Contracts
- Event planning like client appreciation events (annually) and community outreach events (monthly)
- Forms & Emails as necessary – and other housekeeping items as necessary
- Errands as necessary – post office, office supplies, etc.
2-4pm: Social Media Planning and Marketing including:
- Social Media and Marketing
- Editing any videos as necessary, gathering testimonials, etc.
- Scheduling special guests for videos
4-5pm: Emails, Calls Follow Up and Other “Flex time” including:
- Any Bookkeeping, reporting, errand running that may need to be completed.
- Wrapping up any lead communication received throughout the day, responding to any emails or communication received throughout the day
- Continuing any training in processes or systems that you need help in
- Touching base with the Agents and staff to make sure everyone is on track

Click below for a downloadable Block Schedule Template!

Block Schedule Template Download

Stay tuned for more posts on all of these topics that will help you launch your administrative expertise to the next level…In the meantime, go be a game-changer!

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