[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hi. Welcome to Confessions from the Home Office podcast. My name is Wendy Hill, and I've owned Market Momentum, a marketing consulting company.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: In Greenville, South Carolina.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Since 2005.
I've worked out of my home office while raising two children. Now they're both in college and many rescue dogs. This podcast will give you insight into what life has been like working from home from the past two decades, mixed with good information on how to grow and market your business. Today's episode is all about time management when working from home. Stay with me here. We've all seen the webinars, we've all read the books, and we've all been like, I can't take this or these people are crazy. But in some of that information is great that people have put out there. But by the end of this episode, you're going to have a few tips for prepping for your day. How do you keep your to do list in check? How you keep your projects moving forward? And I'll talk to you a little bit about how I keep from getting distracted working from home and how I keep my energy up because I have a lot going on. So let's get going. For many remote business owners, working anywhere is possible. Unless I'm dealing with a lot of paperwork or I need a lot of monitors or I'm recording content or I'm on camera, I can work anywhere. And so juggling from juggling home life with business can be tough. There's appointments, there's different family members. Things happen, things are unexpected, and they can turn any day upside down. I try to work ahead every day, but life happens and I can't stand to get behind and have to play catch up. Marketing is a fast paced business. Even though I do a lot of business to business marketing, a lot of times people think, oh, you can do business to business, set it and just execute it. There's always changes and there's always things that are, that's going on. So it's rarely a quiet day. I may not have a lot of clients calls or meetings or have to go out on a certain day, but we usually have a ton of things to do. Our team, we looked at the numbers the other day. On average, we have about 75 tasks that have to be done every day. So we can really churn out the work. But here's how I juggle. I don't believe in balance. People talk about having a balanced life. That doesn't really just for me, balance doesn't work. I juggle, and I like it that way. Everything I do in life is stuff that I like to do, and that's. And it's important to me. And if it's not, I get it off the list. So I'll keep all the balls juggling in the air until I'm too old to do it. So let's talk about staying on top of things, staying on top of the task list. Let's not talk about the morning first. Let's talk about the end of the day. I don't sleep at night until I don't go to bed at night until I know what's on the list for the next day. I know surprises happen. A kid wakes up sick, a dog wakes up sick. I wake up sick or something else. But I try to keep those surprises to a minimum. I try to make sure I know what the flow of the day is going to be like, when calls are going to be, if I need to go anywhere, what time that needs to be. And I do all this planning for the next day and know what's going on at the end of my work day, whether that's at 02:00 because that's the time time I have to stop working that day or if it's 10:00 at night. So, like the experts say, don't go to bed mad. I believe don't go to bed without knowing what your schedule is like the next day, just so you don't wake up feeling like you've been shot out of a cannon, panicked. So let's talk about morning routine. I used to roll my eyes at the people that talked about getting up and stretching and journaling and meditation and yoga and gratitude and all that. And then I realized it doesn't matter what you do, as long as it works for you. And you're consistent routines really train the brain and keep you moving. So here's what my morning looks like. 615 or so. My golden retriever, cash, swats me the arm or sometimes on the head, and basically says, the backyard's calling, get up, let's go. So we do that. I take him out along with his litter mate, Lola, my dog that eats all the socks, usually about 15 minutes later after they're back in. I have a 17 year old terrier mix. She's so old and so sweet Annie, that she starts tap dancing, wanting her food for her. She has a special diet because she has kidney disease. So I work on that. Get her fed, get her out. So as you can tell, I work on the dogs first. We have a lot of dogs. I'm not going to tell you how many that's classified information.
So after that, I check the kitchen, eat a little breakfast, maybe throw in some laundry, move some laundry. Once they're handled, the dogs go out to sleep for hours and not bother anybody. Then I try to do a little bit of exercise. Not great at this, but I've got a little bike in my office. I have a treadmill in my office. I have weights in my office, and I've subscribed to every program you can subscribe to. So I try to do that for a little bit. I track my steps every day. I try to make sure that I'm moving a lot just because I have to sit a lot, doing what I'm doing or stand and work. So then I get ready for the day. I get dressed. I get dressed, hair, makeup, everything, in case I need to get on camera, in case I need to run downtown to a meeting, in case I need to meet somebody for lunch to talk about work.
So by then, that's about 745 and I'm in my office working. And I start popping my vitamins and my supplements and drinking all my water. And I usually call that my second breakfast.
For me, it's important to have a consistent schedule to train my brain and to really help keep my family on track.
I know some days are going to start earlier because of conflicts or appointments or start later, but I can adjust when needed. When I start working in the morning, I usually block off about an hour, hour and a half to get a lot of the small things done, things that maybe have come in overnight. Somebody has a quick question, but I try to knock those things out.
A lot of people will say, do the hard thing first and get that out of the way to clear your brain. That's not how I work. The shorter the to do list, the more that my brain can process things and think and be creative. So it's better for me to get a lot of things off the list. So then after all that's done, I take a 15 or 30 minutes break, deal with the dogs again, do a couple things, make some phone calls, start some meetings, and I kind of repeat that process several times throughout the day.
At the end of the day is when I work on new business. That's when I follow up with people that I've talked to about possibly coming on as clients or sending out proposals. That just kind of gets my brain towards that, clearing out the to do list and figuring out what's going to be on tap for the next day. So for now, let's shift gears and talk about how I keep marketing projects efficiently. Moving ahead. So there's a lot of pieces to marketing projects and our team. Like I mentioned earlier, we have a ton of things going on all the time. So some weeks we even work six days a week, just if there's a lot of deadlines coming up so we don't miss them. So the first tip that I have for you is to use a project management system. And there's all kinds of project management systems out there, like Asana, ClickUp, Trello. Some people just use spreadsheets. We use Trello, and it helps us keep track of all the projects, the steps, the files we can check off when we finish things. I can assign things to other people. If I take notes when I'm on a call with a client, I can upload those into their file on Trello, and then we have a permanent spot for them.
We also use shared notes on our iPhone for quick things. So we do kind of a hybrid between Trello and the notes function on our iPhones and check those throughout the day. I prioritize the work the week before and the day before and send instructions to the team. That way they know what to do without me bugging them all the time.
The other thing that I do is I try to batch work. I try to knock out things at once. If we've got some social media content, things we need to do, try to do those all at once. If we have podcast editing, do that at once. If we have a lot of writing to do, try to do that at once. That keeps me and other team members from jumping around, and it'll wear you down if you do that.
Also automating. If there's tasks that we can automate, we do it, such as sending follow up emails, sending invoices, sending out project information between the teammates. It's really time consuming at first to make sure all the steps work and all the timing is right, so you feel like you're checking, rechecking, and sometimes I think you feel like, is this really making my life easier? But once that's running and going, I'm really glad that I've done that, and I know that you would be, too. And then delegate. This has been the hardest thing for me. I've always tried to take everything on and do everything myself, and I think I realized maybe two, three years ago that I just don't have any more hours in the day than anybody else, even though I wish I did.
So I try to think through after every call. Maybe, you know, if I get a couple of emails from a client. How can I divide this out? It's not to push it off, so I'm not touching the client work. It's so we get it done and the best person is doing it. So that's, that's been a big learning curve for me. But once I got over it and it was no longer like a pride thing, I feel like delegating has really helped me to be able to go after new business and think of new things and research new tools that we can offer our clients. It's been a good thing I'm getting better at this over time.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Are you getting started or restarted with marketing? For your business, visit my site, wendyhill.com and download the Market Momentum Kickstart guide. Inside, you'll discover a step by step roadmap to launch your marketing that delivers results. Don't leave your marketing to chance. Firing off bottle rockets is not great for your budget or for your results. Grab your free market momentum kickstart now and launch your next campaign with confidence. Visit wendyhill.com to learn more. That's Wendy with an eye.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: So here's the big one. I get asked a lot. How do you work from home without getting distracted? If I work from home, I'd be doing laundry all the time, or I would be playing with my dogs or I would be mopping the floor. And let me tell you, I am domestically challenged. But. So here. We'll get to that in a minute. Here are my tips. I have a dedicated workspace in my house. I used the formal living room of my house and it didn't have doors on it. So when we were tearing down my great grandparents house, I took the interior french doors from there and then had them put up in my living room. So it's a closed off office with a great view of the entrance of the neighborhood, but it's cut down on a lot of noise. And the only other thing that this is used for is where the goldens, cash and Lola, they sleep on the treadmill in here. So that's their, their nap spot during the day. So I try to leave everything in here. My family would say my office is a wreck most of the time because I'm thinking of all kinds of things. Do I drag my laptop around the house? Yes. Sometimes. If I'm gonna watch something crazy on tv like I have to watch, I'll drag it in there. If I'm still working on something or if I need to start dinner or do something quickly and I'm still working on something, I'll drag it in there. But I try to keep the laptop back in my office.
So my daughter is still living at home with us for a few more weeks before she goes to college. I let her know, I let team members know and I let my husband know kind of what my day looks like, what my week looks like, so they know not to interrupt if there's a meeting or a big Zoom call or that type of thing.
My daughter's pretty good about that. Sometimes she'll still call me during a meeting. My husband's the quietest person in the world, so he would never interrupt Airpods when there's just a lot going on. Sometimes it's best for me to pop in the Airpods, turn on some music or turn on a show I've watched 5000 times and just kind of tune it out and then we'll get back to would I rather do the dishes in the laundry rather than work? Are you kidding me? I am very domestically challenged. Or I pretend to be and I get away with it. So am I going to do the laundry instead of do work? Nope. I'd rather do client work than do laundry. I would rather do client work than start dinner or anything like that. So housework's way down on my list and if I'm not feeling at home, I'll park it at a coffee shop for a couple hours. I try not to do that a lot because I feel like that I don't get on the phone enough, I don't interact with people enough, and I think it's really important to stay in contact with people. But if I need to get away for a few hours and just a change of scenery, a coffee shop is a good place to go.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Are you struggling with marketing? Visit my site, wendyhill.com and let's figure out how to take marketing off your list of stressors. Whether you're a startup or an established business looking to outsource, I have solutions tailored for you. From kickstarting your marketing efforts to completely outsource services will help you tackle your to do list and reduce your stress. Visit wendyhill.com today. That's Wendy with an I and let's transform your marketing strategy.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: And the last topic that I was going to talk about for today is how do I keep my energy up? We have a lot of clients, we have a lot of projects. That doesn't mean that we're too busy or anything like that. We're just, we're growing and things are good and I like to have a lot of things going on, but I can't do that if I'm tired.
I feel like time management has a lot to do with managing your energy.
So I have to think about when do I get the most things done. I am an early riser. Like I said, cash is the best alarm clock that I'll ever have. He's consistent, getting me up every morning. But I get the most done between 745, sometimes earlier and 11:00 in the morning. Then about after 830 or 09:00 at night, I'm probably going to be asleep. I may fall asleep in the recliner, or I may just go to bed. So I like to get up early. My husband always says, wendy Hill, you should have been a farmer, because I get up a lot earlier than anybody else in the house. And the other thing that I like to do is I watch my heart rate and my blood pressure, they will creep up. I get excited. I have a lot of things going on, a lot of things going on in my head. And I started watching. I bought a blood pressure machine, and I've got an apple watch. And I'm like, well, I have a lot going on, or I'm stressed, or pressure's on, stuff's going through the roof, and that is not good.
So over time, I've really watched that, and I've gotten on a regimen of magnesium, drinking a lot of water, and just keep an eye on my numbers. And, you know, I always laugh at the people who talk about deep breathing. It works. So every time I feel like I'm healthier just because I'm more aware and I've gotten my pulse down and my blood pressure down lot.
The other thing is, I say no to some things or not right now. I get asked to come to a lot of networking events, or I go to women's groups, or to be part of a volunteer or project for, you know, marketing an event or a nonprofit. And if it doesn't feel right to me or feels like it's going to just take over my schedule, I have to say no. Or maybe please ask me again some other time. For a while was just filling up my calendar and feeling like I need to be everywhere and be seen by everybody. And I realized that that wasn't helping anybody at all, and it was just making me tired and grumpy. So just try to scale it back and make things easier.
I also try to get out to the country. This is something that makes me really happy. Just in the last year or so, we've started cleaning up my grandparents property. They had a lot of property out in on the farm, probably about 45 minutes from us, and it's been sitting kind of idle, nothing going on over there for about 20 years. So about the time I started my business, we've been cleaning that up and trying to get some things ready to hopefully start a business over there in the near future. And getting out there and getting away from the computer and away from the phone and getting dirty outside has really helped my mental health. So, you know, some people go hike, some people go to yoga class, some people run. I like to go and dream and plan and work and do things outside there. That's been great. It has sparked a lot of creativity, just not being in front of electronics.
And, you know, one of the last things I allow myself to be flexible. So if I need to start a day earlier, if I need to start my day after lunch because of things going on, I do that. I take a hard look at the week on Sundays and then look every night at my schedule for the day and talk about it with our family. Do we have somewhere we need to go? Are we all meeting up for dinner mid week? What repairs are we spending on the house this week? Last week, it was the h vac unit.
So just trying to know that every week's not going to be the same. I try to be as consistent as possible, but to be flexible. So overall, if you're struggling with time management, it doesn't come easy. And you can't just flip the switch and all of a sudden be organized. You can go buy your new notebook and write everything down. And three days later you might be frustrated because you feel like you're back in the same spot that you were. But pick one thing and try to improve on that for a couple of weeks. Not even a couple of days, I'd say for a couple of weeks. And then add from there. And slowly, over time, you'll start getting in a rhythm with a few things, but it takes a long time to get your time managed. It really does.
But I'd love to hear your time management strategies. I want to know what works for you, what challenges you face. Maybe I can help. Or maybe you have some ideas for me, too. For some things I said today, I want you to share your thoughts on our social media channels, or you can email
[email protected]. dot so with that, I'm going to wrap up this episode of Confessions from the Home Office. If you stuck with me, thank you, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode. I'll see you soon.
