Archive for the ‘Task Management’ Category

Have you ever patted yourself on the back for being a good at multi tasking? I have, plenty of times. But I am beginning to wonder if it is truly something to be proud of.

The fact is, multi tasking is often the wrong answer to the problem. The problem, of course, is that you have way too much to do. So you try to do it all at once.

For me, this typically means simultaneously checking my email, my Twitter feed, working on an article, doing research, and maybe sprinkling in some marketing work. The problem with this approach is that everything ends up taking longer. For instance, this post would take me maybe 4 or 5 times as long to write if I spend a minute on a couple of paragraphs and then check some email and then come back for a few more paragraphs.

The answer is simple. Instead of multi tasking, you should be micro focusing. This is not really that hard to do, even for multi tasking veterans like me (and you?). Micro focusing means spending time on just one thing and focusing on just that. Revolutionary, I know.

If you have a day that is full of tasks, do yourself a favor and separate those tasks out at the beginning of the day and give each a time limit. The time limit is very important. If you do not stick to it, your tasks will start to get muddled again and you will find yourself multi tasking. The more you plan your day out, the better. If you need some wiggle room, just plan in some miscellaneous time.

One thing that I found that really helped me to stick to this is to set a timer. I might give myself a half an hour to work on a blog post, for instance. When the timer goes off, time is up. If you find yourself constantly running out of time, it is because you haven’t been realistic about how long something is going to take you. Either that or you have been sneaking a look at Twitter again.

Give yourself a break and get more done by learning the power of micro focusing. You can still get the experience of multi tasking without all the downside. Simply move between tasks quickly. But while you are on any given task, give it your full attention.

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Hello, I am Bradford Shimp. I write this blog and run a web design and marketing company call Broad River Creative. Follow me on Twitter, but be sure not to check for my updates while you are working on something else.

photo credit: daveograve@

Have you lost customers because you just haven’t stayed in touch? Do you look back at your list of past customers, see a good one, and think, why aren’t we still doing business? Throughout the course of running your business, it is too easy to lose touch and lose customers. Here are a few tips to help end unnecessary customer leakage.

1. Have a Good CRM

Having all of your customer information together in one place is essential. A good CRM is accessible, no matter where you are. It is easy to use. It also should integrate with your other tools, such as email and invoicing. Use your CRM as more than a file cabinet. Learn to interact with it on a daily basis. Send your emails out from there. Record your phone conversations there.

Make use of tasks and to-dos for each customer. Every customer in your CRM should have an upcoming task, even if they are not currently in the sales process. Schedule several points of contact throughout the year. When you make a contact, be sure to add another point for later on. Stay on top of this and you will never forget a customer again.

2. Stay in Contact with a Regular Email

If you don’t email your customer list regularly because you are afraid you might annoy them, you are crazy. The simple solution to that is, don’t be annoying. Its not don’t send email. Instead, send emails that will be useful and enjoyed by your customer list. Be personal, informative, educational, funny, etc. Don’t send sales pitch after sales pitch. The idea of the regular email is to keep the conversation going and the relationship warm so that when you need to do a sales pitch, you will have ready and willing ears.

3. Have a Follow Up Plan

What do you do with a customer after you make the sale? This is the best time to establish a long term relationship and to make additional sales. Yet, many companies have no follow up plan.

You could start by sending a nice thank you. Large sales can even get a gift. From there, get them into your email system. Get them special offers for add-on products or services. Whatever you do, don’t ignore them. Someone who just bought from you is your most qualified customer.

There are three things you should try to get from a customer who just purchased. Another sale, a referral, and a testimonial. Start tapping into the potential with a good follow-up plan.

4. Have a Reason to Get on the Phone 4 Times a Year

While automated emails and other points of contact are great, you also want to make sure that you maintain a personal touch with your customers. If you can, go ahead and visit your customers. A little face time can go a long way. If not, try to do at least 4 phone calls a year. You may want to call your customers on their birthdays. Another idea is to offer a special discount over the phone. Even if you have a lot of customers, you can call a few each week with the special discount offer.

You can also plan some service phone calls. You could do a survey. Heck, it doesn’t hurt to just call to say hi. The point is, finding a reason to get on the phone with your customers is not that hard. You just need to plan it and do it. This will only help you reinforce your relationship. You will also have a better chance at noticing any issues that may be driving a wedge between you and your customer. And if you are on the phone with them, you can deal with it right away.

If you look up from the grind and find that you are missing customers, start implementing these steps right away. No customer deserves to be ignored.

photo credit: Commutr

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

To reach the widest audience possible on Twitter, you should be updating all day (and night). Of course, you can’t sit in front of the computer all of the time. So instead, you can schedule Tweets to go out automatically.

Don’t Let a Computer Take Over

Before we get any farther, let me add a pretty big warning. You don’t want a computer to be put in charge of what you do on Twitter. It is frowned upon to do auto-DMs when someone follows you, for instance. While it may bring in some clicks for your newsletter, it is far more advantageous to connect personally on Twitter. Twitter, after all, helps to make the internet personal again.

You also want to avoid pushing tweets all day long that are either the same, or obviously generated by a computer. No one wants the same tweet to show up ten times that says, “Hey, check out my awesome site!” You should commit to keeping Twitter personal.

Scheduled but Personal

That being said, you can be personal and use scheduled updates at the same time. Here’s how. Use a tweet scheduling tool like Hootsuite to write personal and interesting tweets for the day. Then just schedule them to go out at various times.

You should plan on spending some personal time on Twitter throughout the day to reply, retweet, and engage in conversation. If you never do this and always schedule your updates, you will be missing out on the most important part of Twitter, which is interaction.

The Tweet Schedule Formula

So, how should you tweet schedule look? Lets say that you blog for your business every day. You also have an offer that you want to extend to your followers, lets say a free ebook for signing up for your newsletter. Here is how you should consider scheduling your tweets for the day:

40%- Tweets about your new blog post, with a different message in each one. Make the message itself interesting and useful, whether or not the reader has time to click on the link.

10%- Tweets about your offer.

25%- Tweets that point to another blog post you have read that you think your readers will find interesting. Again, make the message itself interesting and useful, as long as it has something to do with the post.

25%- General message tweets without a link. Could be quotes, inspirational messages, or personal updates. Or just about anything else.

You can play with these numbers to find a formula that works for you. The idea is to include more than just your self-serving links. Not that its bad to share them, as long as they have true benefit for your followers.

If you use Hootsuite, you can track your click throughs. This is helpful because you will be able to fine tune what time of day is best for posting your linked updates.

photo credit: Yandle

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

As a small business owner, it is very easy to get overwhelmed with tasks. If you are an inveterate entrepreneur, you might even have a long history of piling up extra work on new idea after new idea. As fun as it is to explore a new idea, you need to be careful. With each new task that you take on, you are throwing one more shovelful of dirt back on your head.

So, what do you do when you are doing too much? Its pretty simple in concept (but a bit more difficult in implementation). You need to set a clear destination for your business and yourself.

Know Where You Are Going

A destination is important in any trip. With your business, you should have your destination clearly written out. It doesn’t have to be complex. You could want to be the most popular pizza shop in town. Or maybe your destination is that you want to sell your business in five years.

Identify a Route

When you know where you are going, you will be able to identify a route to get there. For instance, if you want to create a franchise business, you know you will have to systematize everything down to a T.

If the route you are on now doesn’t have any clear destination, how can you be sure its leading you anywhere?

You are still going to have plenty of work to do. But when you know exactly where you are going, you can start to determine whether or not the tasks that you are doing are going to get you there. You will have a much easier time prioritizing and saying no to that new idea that is tugging at you. At the same time, you will be able to say yes to a lot of exciting new things, as long as they result in moving you toward your destination.

Stay On the Main Road

The trick to reaching your destination is taking the most direct route possible. This isn’t that summer road trip you took back when you were in college. You want to reach the destination with your business as quickly as possible. After all, you have new ideas you would like to pursue once you get there.

This means not doing busy work, not pursuing certain ideas, and avoiding certain things so that you will have more time to focus on tasks that get you closer to your goal. You need to look at each and every task that you do and ask yourself if doing it is getting you closer to your goal.

In some cases, you may be taking left turns down side streets. These are things that you are doing or playing at that have no direct impact on your business and just distract you from your end game. Stop doing these things. If its not going to have a direct impact on the success of your business, avoid it. At least for now. You can always come back to it once you get your business where it needs to be.

In other cases, there are tasks that are vital to the every day life of your business, but are just eating away at your time. Don’t try to keep doing these and then hopefully fit in other tasks that will move your business forward. Read this article on time-eating tasks for a little help in that regard.

Do More Of Less

When you know where your business is going, it is going to be easier for you to identify the things that you can do to help it get there. If you want to be seen as an expert on car repair, you can see the increased importance of speaking and writing on the issue. Make time for the things that will move you toward your goal.

There are some things that should have such high priority that you do them first, every day. Don’t put off building your business to the evenings and weekends. Its just too important.

Identify those few tasks that are going to have the biggest impact on getting your business to its destination. Then do those things religiously. If you spend more of your time doing these few highly focused tasks, you will soon see movement, which will lead to momentum.

Before you know it, you won’t even miss all the busy work or side paths that are burning up all of your time and energy right now!

photo credit: drs2biz

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

Do you ever have a day at the office where it seems there is just one problem after another? Maybe every day is like this for you. Dealing with issues is a natural part of business, and is especially prevalent in start ups and businesses going through changes.

Getting Overwhelmed

The problem with being hit with a series of issues, one after another, is that you can quickly get overwhelmed. Suddenly, the good idea you had to expand your business doesn’t look so bright. But you need to accept the fact that problems are inherent in any business. How you deal with them will set you apart.

You need an organized approach to dealing with things as they come up. If you just react to each situation, you may find yourself surviving today just to deal with the same problem tomorrow. For instance, if you have a customer who was not happy with the service they received when they called in, you may personally apologize to that customer and make it right. You may even reprimand the customer service rep. But if you don’t spend a little time looking at the root of the problem, it is bound to occur again. In this case, there probably needs to be better training and/or better customer service procedures.

Start a Spreadsheet

The reason you don’t do the in depth analysis is that you are overwhelmed and too busy at the moment. So you just do the short term response. You may think you will go back and work on the problem when you get some time, but without a plan that is very unlikely.

So here is a simple solution. Start a list of all of the issues that come up during the day. Write them on sticky notes, a notepad, your hand, or whatever. Noting the issues is very important, because just by doing that you will start to see patterns and will have a road map to underlying issues.

At some point in the day, put those issues in a spreadsheet. If you are too busy, have an employee do it for you. If you have a lot of different issues, it is a good idea to use separate tabs in the spreadsheet for each category. Yours might be “office issues”, “customer service issues”, “product issues”, etc.

Once you have a column of issues, add three more columns. The first will be labeled Short Term Response. This is where you write in what you did immediately to fix the issue. The next column will be labeled Long Term Response. This is where you will write in the solution that will make the issue never happen again. It may be some time before you get the right response for this column. The last column will be Notes. Here, you can write down your thoughts, discussions, or whatever as they relate to the issue.

Patterns and Solutions

As you begin to write down all of the issues that come up during a typical day, you will see a story unfold in front of you. Just as interesting will be the story of your immediate responses. Do you react with an even hand and a cool head, or not?

You may find that a lot of your issues stem from one procedure (or lack of procedure) or from one employee. This is what you want to know, because then you can go to the root of the issue and fix it for good.

What’s more, as you build your list, you will have it handy to refer to when you do have some time to work on the business. I suggest scheduling time every week to work on your list of issues. If you have other people that can help you do this, all the better. Schedule a weekly meeting. The ultimate goal is to have the Long Term Response column filled out for every issue, and to gain the upper hand on your business issues. You have better things to be doing every day than putting out fires.

Take Action

Today, write down any issues that come up. Then, create a spreadsheet and fill in the issues column along with your immediate response. And remember, even if you put off dealing with the issue, that is a response. Just write in “ignored”.  Schedule a time this week to review the list and start to solve your recurring issues.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BradfordShimp.com

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