Most Common Scheduling Mistake
Most Common Scheduling Mistakes I See Business Owners Make
I had the opportunity to be a guest on a podcast, Don’t Waste The Chaos, with Kerri Roberts of Salt & Light Advisors. In preparation, she sent me over a few questions, which I SO appreciated.
One of the questions was, “Scheduling is often a pain point for entrepreneurs. What are some common scheduling mistakes business owners make, and how can they create a more sustainable work schedule?”
It was great timing, as I had just wrapped up with a client. This was a big part of the work we did, so it seemed like a fun topic to talk about today!
In my opinion, the most common scheduling mistake is that we underestimate.
We underestimate how long things take to do and how many things we can fully accomplish.
“It doesn’t take that long”
Is the biggest lie clients tell me when we’re mapping out their tasks (and I’m also guilty) 🙃
When clients are working to audit their own calendar or create a process for their service that is currently overwhelming - we break down each and every task.
Then (and this is where it gets fun) we put a time to each task. Even if it’s 5 minutes or 30.
Once we finish and fast forward to them implementing these tasks they often realize they were very much underestimating on how long it took.
With this also comes being realistic about what we can actually accomplish in a work day or work week. It’s hard to remove things from our list, but it is beneficial to have some white space to breathe and not stare at our screens.
I love some implementation, so here we go!
I wanted to show how this works for clients, specifically looking at calendar help. Here’s the process we work through:
List out all of the tasks that you touch (not some, all of them)
We note how long they take and how often they do them
We pull up a blank weekly calendar broken into hours
We fill in when they start work, when they want to be finished working and when they take lunch
We then fill in when recurring meetings/obligations are
We then start to fill in the tasks from the brain dump we did based on how they work best (time blocking, scheduling things that are similar, etc.)
Then we step back and look at it and talk about how it feels to look at it.
Some feel good, some feel very overwhelmed, and some see exactly why they’re stressed to the max and why they often feel like they’re in reactive mode.
If they want some changes, we then talk about that:
Pulling back on meeting availability (this can be tough)
Hiring out some tasks that don’t have to be completed by them or some automation
Extending delivery time for projects
Utilizing project management software
Fun huh?! It’s the work that’s hard to make time for, but is so incredibly powerful to help build sustainable businesses.
So what's the real takeaway here (besides checksing out the podcast episode!)? Time is a precious resource as a business owner, and ulitizing it in the best way for you starts with honest assessment. When you map out your actual workload against your available hours, you create the clarity needed to make strategic decisions – not reactive ones.
This is what we do in Strategic Intensives. If you feel like your business is running you and not the other way around, book a free discovery call and see what could help!