From the Desk of Janet Barclay

I have long been a believer that despite what some of the "experts" say, there is more than one way to manage time effectively, and what works well for someone else may not work for you. To prove this point, I’ve interviewed Australia’s multi-award-winning Certified Professional Resume Writer, Gayle Howard of Top Margin. Although she is outstanding at what she does, she does not in any way attribute it to her organizing skills. In fact, she admits that her typical workday begins and ends with one word — procrastination. She explains,

"I never seem to be able to do anything unless I’m under an extreme and stressful deadline, and then I can knuckle down and start working. It is almost like I am in teenage rebellion mode, but the person I’m rebelling against is myself!"

Gayle describes her daily routine as follows:

"My day starts as I stumble bleary-eyed downstairs to read my email while having a coffee around 6 am. Email tasks are usually finished by 7 am and I have the rest of my breakfast. I then get presentable to meet my public (the ones I never see!) and I pretend to start my first project for the day about 9 am — an action that kids no-one, least of all me. From 9 am to 10 am I mess around. Write two words, look for a meaning for a word on the internet, answer a query from a course student, write another two words, have a friendly email discourse with a résumé writer or two, read and respond to e-list postings, jot down a blog entry and read the newspaper. I’ll do this until a mental calculation tells me that I won’t be able to finish the writing project I have scheduled if I keep messing around one minute longer. After this mental calculation I then mess around about a half an hour longer only to panic, act surprised like I don’t know where my day could have possibly gone, and then knuckle down and start work. By 5:30 pm, I have met my deadline by finishing the work I had scheduled for that day."

Did you notice that, despite the lack of a structured time management system, Gayle is able to complete her work on time? I’m sure she is not alone in this, although I’m one of the people who needs structure if I’m going to accomplish anything. As time management guru Donald Wetmore explains it,

"There are racehorses and tortoises. Racehorses might schedule all their activities in one day, and a tortoise might spread it out. At the end of the day, both of us have accomplished the same, but gone about it differently."

On the other hand, Gayle also confesses that she finds this rather stressful. She concluded by telling me,

"Five minutes later I vow I cannot live like this and with my hand over my heart, swear it’s going to be different tomorrow. I’ve done that for the last decade and it’s starting to feel like Groundhog Day."

How about you? Are you a racehorse or a tortoise?

I recently asked Karen Silins, President of A+ Career & Resume, LLC and the Association of Online Resume and Career Professionals (AORCP), about her typical workday, and she agreed to let me post the information on my blog.

A typical day for Karen includes the following activities:

• Reviewing and responding to emails
• Calling potential clients to discuss her company’s services (at a time which has been scheduled in advance, to eliminate telephone tag and ensure that both parties are able to be fully engaged in the conversation)
• Answering phone calls from potential clients and setting a time to speak with them
• Preparing for and then meeting with two to four clients daily in person or on the phone (typically a mix of coaching and resume clients)
• Taking care of any administrative activities that aren’t handled by her  Virtual Assistant (yours truly), such as planning website updates and marketing initiatives, or booking speaking engagements
• Writing resumes/cover letters, or other career documents for clients
• Networking with colleagues – sometimes lunch or dinner, sometimes a phone call or email, sometimes online networking such as LinkedIn.com
• Forwarding information to clients, such as links to assessments, questions to be answered, weekly assignments, resources (including book and website recommendations), appointment reminders, and any handouts being covering in the next appointment

In addition, she conducts evening seminars a few times a month.

Karen’s Tip:

With such a busy schedule, in order to make sure that nothing is overlooked, Karen takes time each night to review what she wants to accomplish the following day. She also does this each Sunday for the next week.  This helps her to formulate a plan that she can execute the next day or week. 

Do you have a time management tip to share?

Do you know what day it is?

If you have a traditional job, you’re probably thinking, "Yeah, it’s Monday. Big deal. It comes around every week about this time."

But if you’re one of the many people who work from home, today is your day! Today is the sixth annual Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day, a time to celebrate the freedom offered by home business ownership. If you don’t believe me, go to http://www.businessinyourbathrobeday.com and see for yourself! While you’re there, you can even enter a contest for some really great prizes, including – you guessed it! – a bathrobe. I actually found out about Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day from Red Deer College’s Virtual Assistant Program who also held a contest, which closed yesterday.

Some home-based business owners, when hearing about Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day, laughed and said every day is Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day! Yet others expressed concerns about creating a negative, unprofessional image. After all, there are people who teach that to be successful, you should dress the same as if you were going out to a corporate office every day. There may be some people who need to do that in order to apply themselves to their work, but I suspect that how they dress is not going to make or break the deal! Personally, I am happy to dress slightly more casually than I would if I were going out to work, but I love the fact that I can drink my morning coffee and check my emails before getting showered and dressed for the day – and that is the type of freedom that Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day is all about!

I couldn’t let International Coaching Week go by without stopping to celebrate the business success I’ve experienced over the last couple of years, because it wouldn’t have been possible without the support and guidance of my coaches.

When I decided to leave my job and work in my business on a full-time basis, I knew I needed to speed up the growth process to bring my income to what it had been. I had a lot of good ideas, but didn’t know how to decide which ones were worth implementing or even how to go about it in some cases. The best decision I made was to team up with a business coach, who helped me to analyze my competition, identify my niche market, and strengthen my branding, among other things. I still had to do all the work, but with someone to guide me and to be accountable for, I was able to accomplish much more than I had been able to do on my own. As I’ve mentioned before, I later took part in a group coaching program based on the Law of Attraction, which further developed my awareness of my ideal client and helped me to take my business to the next level.

If you’re a new entrepreneur, you may have limited resources available, but I strongly encourage you to find a way to make the investment. Group coaching tends to be less expensive than one-on-one, and provides the added support of the other group members. Another option would be to offer your services in exchange for coaching.

Just make sure that the person you choose as your coach is someone you respect and feel comfortable with. And remember, you will have lots of homework! Like so many things in life, you will only get out of coaching as much as you put into it.

There are a number of coaches in my blogroll, whose specialties include executive, marketing, productivity, and careers. Why not pay them a visit and see what they have to offer?

People often ask me how I stay focused on my work without getting distracted by housework and other personal matters. I’m such a workoholic that for me, this isn’t really an issue. It’s more a question of "how do I remember to have a personal life when I live at work?" But I realize that for other people, this is a real challenge. I’ve even met people who rented office space, even though they work alone and don’t meet with clients in their office, simply because they need to go through the process of leaving home and going to work before they can get in the proper mindset.

If you’re one of the people who faces this challenge, there’s a great article on Career Journal.com which outlines Five Tips for Staying Productive When You Work Where You Live.