Time Management Tips That Take Away Feeling 'Overwhelmed'

Time Management Tips That Take Away Feeling ‘Overwhelmed’

Whether you are just starting up your home staging business or you have been doing it for several years now, I know your mind can be a good influence on you sometimes, and sometimes the negative just won’t stop. I talk about ‘mindset’ a lot because if you have constant chatter that says ‘you have to be all things to all people’ you will exhaust yourself and start feeling resentful. You’ll forget why you became a home stager in the first place – and for most of you it was to be creative, be your own boss, have fun, create gorgeous spaces, be independent, work the hours you wanted to have more family time, make a difference and help others who just don’t see beauty the way you do. And of course, you love shopping and spending someone else’s money so you make money!

Research shows that successful businesses spend about 10% of their time with operations, about 20% with production and a whopping 70-80% in marketing and sales. So it’s no wonder that you start feeling overwhelmed with all the things you need to get done to create a successful home staging business. If you are just starting out these numbers will most likely be reversed but in time, you want to strive to reach these percentages.

So let’s take a look at your work week and we’ll assume it is a Monday to Friday or any 5 days that work for you. You must have days of rest…

Here are some TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS to take away some stress:

• Decide how many days a week you dedicate to your work and work your schedule around that
• Pick a day and time(s) that you are going to do admin work. Many home stagers like to make this a Monday or a Friday. This might be paperwork like invoicing, returning phone calls, doing quotes, etc. . In time you want to delegate this to someone else.
• We are all inundated with too many emails. Set up a time each day that you check them and stick to that. Many emails will go unanswered and that is okay. You don’t have to answer every person that sends you an email – prospects/clients of course.
• Set up a ’personal’ email for family and friends and a separate one for business.  That way you can keep the two somewhat separate.
• Perhaps you choose to provide your home staging services ‘production’ like shopping, sourcing, consultations, staging, destaging, etc one or two days in the week.
• You need to schedule your marketing time for attending networking events and some of these may fall at night. If they do give yourself permission to start a little later than usual the next morning.
• You may find that Friday is a great day for focusing on sales calls – returning calls or talking with new prospects to set up appointments for the following week.
• If you do go to Open Houses on the weekend then give yourself some time off in the week for those extra hours you put in.
• Social media needs to be part of your marketing plan so plan on doing about 15 minutes a day with it. You could also take ½ morning a week and do all of your blog posts (your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) for the entire week. If you use something like Hoot Suite you can just write one post that goes on all of your sites.
• Whenever possible schedule your ‘down time’ – time with family AND time for yourself. This is critical to your well being to continue to grow your business. If all you do is work and do things for your family, then you will feel stressed. Setting good boundaries is critical to staying healthy.

The good news is as you grow your business you will be delegating more and more work to competent individuals that have skill sets you don’t. Even if you have the skill set, let go of the control and focus on what you do best. This is where you start working ‘on’ your business and not ‘in’ your business.