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Getting Organized
7:57 with Paul BoagPaul provides four steps for organizing yourself as a freelancer: dedicating time, sorting email, getting information out of your head, and delegating tasks.
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So your final big productivity killer—
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the final thing that you need to sort
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if you're going to run yourself a good lifestyle business
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so you can sit back and enjoy the world
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is you need to deal with being unorganized.
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Are you organized?
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Do you have a system?
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How do you organize yourself?
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There are probably four steps
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to successfully organizing yourself as a freelancer.
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Those are setting aside dedicated time
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to organizing things rather than just building websites.
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Sorting email is a big one.
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Get it out of your head,
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and then delegate it.
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Those are your four options,
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and we're going to cover each of those in this video.
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So let's begin by dedicating a block of time to being organized.
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What I recommend is at the beginning and the end of everyday
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you sit down and review what you're doing.
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At the beginning of the day you review
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what you're going to be doing that day—
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what you've got laid out for you.
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At the end of the day I recommend making sure
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you've covered everything through the day
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and then scheduling at least an idea of what you're going to doing the next day.
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It can, if you're feeling really busy, feel like a waste of time,
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but boy it's not.
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This is by far the most valuable thing you will do.
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Another thing you might want to do
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is set aside a little bit of time each week
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to do a more comprehensive view of everything that's going on.
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Set aside blocks of time for emails and phone calls,
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as I suggested earlier.
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And ring fence large blocks of time for actual production,
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especially coding.
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The worst thing in the world is being interrupted
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while you're coding something.
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You lose your train of thought, and you can waste
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a lot of time trying to get back in the zone again.
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When it comes to designing,
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I would encourage you to allow time to think about your designs.
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Design is a funny thing.
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You can't sit down and just churn out a design.
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Often it needs to kind of go around in your head for a while,
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so make sure there's enough elapsed time
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just to think about your design
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before you actually crank open Photoshop.
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I think another really important thing to do
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when it comes to running your own business
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is to work around your own natural body clock.
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We're all different—who says we should work 9 to 5 every day?
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If you are your own boss, you can work whatever hours you like, can't you?
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Some of us, like myself, are night owls.
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And so start later in the day and work into the evening a little bit.
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Whatever works best for you.
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Make sure that you're doing dedicated production work
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when you're at your most productive.
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Another thing that you really must do is sort email.
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So many people's emails is just chaotic,
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but it's such an important tool in our business lives,
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and we do need to take control of it.
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If you're one of these people that have got
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thousands of emails siting in your inbox,
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I recommend right now you declare email bankruptcy.
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You email out everybody in your inbox and say,
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"Look, I'm really sorry, but I'm starting again with my email.
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I'm going to file everything.
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If there is something that you need from me that I haven't responded to,
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please send me a new email."
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You need to get control of your inbox
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because ultimately your inbox and your email
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should be a place where tasks come in,
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you process them,
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and then they go out of your inbox.
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This is a thing called Inbox Zero.
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If you haven't heard about it, check it out
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because it will make such a difference
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in how efficient you are in managing email.
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Also with email, forget folders.
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I see so many people that get carried away
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with organizing their emails into hundreds of folders
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related to every client and project and all of the rest of it.
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Search is so powerful these days that you really don't need to be doing that.
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Make better use of filters and rules,
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and use something like Gmail.
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That can be an incredibly great way of getting rid of
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so much stuff that comes into your inbox
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that you don't need to be dealing with immediately.
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There are some great tools for using email these days.
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If you haven't checked out Mailbox for the iPhone,
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check that out.
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Great tool for using email as a task list basically.
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There are also services like Unroll.Me,
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which allows you to bundle up all those news letters
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and other things that you read
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and address them once a day
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rather than pinging every time something comes into your email client.
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Another little tip if you want to reduce
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the amount of email you receive is to send less.
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The less email you send out, the less you will get back.
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Reduce the number of emails,
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but also reduce the length of your emails.
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If you write short, snappy emails that get to the point,
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you'll find that over time people start replying in the same way,
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and you can save yourself a lot of energy and effort there.
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And then, as I've already said,
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only check email occasionally.
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To be honest, I'm at the point now
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where I check it first thing in the morning,
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lunchtime, and last thing at night.
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And that should be enough if you've got the right systems in place.
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Another important aspect of being organized
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is to get all of those tasks that you have to do
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out of your head.
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Your memory is rubbish, it's not the place to hold all of this information.
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You will forget stuff, and you will annoy clients.
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You need something more concrete than holding it in your head.
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Basically our memories just don't work particularly well,
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and also we put stress on ourselves
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if we don't have a nice organized place to hold all the tasks.
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We try and hold it in our heads.
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We try and—but we end up going over and over and over it,
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and that makes us stressed.
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Have a system that you trust.
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And I suggest a system that's outside of email.
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Email is not brilliantly designed for being a task manager.
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Use lists.
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I'm obsessed by lists.
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In fact, I am incredibly sad and nerdy when it comes to lists,
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but they work incredibly well.
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Personally I use a system called Getting Things Done,
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which is a system created by a guy called David Allen.
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But there are lots of other systems out there.
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The key is to create good lists.
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Finally we turn our attention to delegating.
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I'm a huge fan of delegating.
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Why do something yourself when you can get
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someone else to do it is my attitude.
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Maybe that's a bit extreme,
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but there are a lot of situations where we can
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delegate out the work that we're doing.
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What you need to do is establish what the right criteria are.
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I would suggest that you need to be
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spending your time doing what you're good at.
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If you're not good at something, get someone else
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who is good at it to do it instead.
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They'll do it a lot quicker,
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and you can charge out the time you would have spent doing that
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on things that you actually enjoy.
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And that's the second thing, do what you enjoy.
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What's the point of being your own boss
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if you're going to spend loads of time doing jobs you absolutely hate?
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It makes no sense.
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What you need to be asking yourself is
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where is your time most profitably spent?
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And you need to compare that to what you're actually doing.
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If you find that there are jobs that you're doing
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that are not the most profitable, not the most enjoyable,
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then delegate them.
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Great examples of that are bookkeeping,
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office admin, arranging meetings, invoicing.
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All this kind of stuff you really shouldn't be doing.
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The truth is that if you get yourself organized,
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if you delegate stuff, if you remove distractions,
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you're going to get so much more done,
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and you will end up working less hours,
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making more money, and be a lot happier at the end of it.
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