3 Productivity Tools I Can’t Live Without in My Interior Design Business
As the CEO of your Interior Design business, you have to be in control of your schedule. As you grow there will be more pressure and more responsibilities. Managing email and orchestrating teams of people has the potential to drain your creative energy in addition to eating up your time. No matter where you are in your journey as an interior design business owner, it’s always a good idea to put into place habits that will protect your time and mental energy.
Here are my Top 3 favorite productivity tools that help me stay focused and reduce brain drain.
Boomerang
Boomerang for Gmail is a godsend for managing emails. It has many features but here are a few of my favorites.
Scheduling emails to be sent - I don’t want my clients seeing me work on the weekend or late at night - although it does happen from time to time. I can write an email then schedule it to be sent the following morning.
Have emails come back to you - Not ready to respond to an email? Schedule it to return to your inbox when you are. For example - If I need to pay a bill or ask my accountant about something, I’ll schedule it to return on Money Monday. (What’s Money Monday you ask? Check out this post about time-blocking for more productivity tips.)
Remind if you don’t hear back - If I want to make sure to follow up on a message, I’ll get a reminder if nobody replies.
Schedule a Meeting - While I use Dubsado to schedule most meetings, the one-click calendar scheduling saves time with back and forth emailing for quick scheduling anything that falls outside of that workflow.
Pause feature - After several hours of catching up on email today, it was time to sit down, turn off distractions, and focus on the actual work. So I hit the pause button. Now I can reference my emails without the temptation to read new ones that came through. In a few hours, any new emails will appear
Loom
Loom is a video screen recording tool, but there are so many features that make it stand out from others. It’s a fast and easy way to communicate when a live meeting is overkill. As we adapt to more asynchronous and remote work, it’s been a lifesaver for us. What I love most is when you finish a recording you are automatically directed to a share link. This makes sharing videos SO. Freaking. Easy.
You can also create folders to organize your videos for your team and clients.
Here are just a few of the ways we use Loom to communicate with our team, clients, and trades.
Give feedback to a team member - When projects are in progress, a designer can send me their work and I can review on my own time. I can record my thoughts as I scroll through the design docs so they know exactly what I’m talking about.
Provide Client’s a “Virtual” presentation - This is great for E-Design or a concept presentation as an alternative to a live Zoom meeting. Being able to elaborate on design decisions will help your client better understand the design than just documents alone.
Create Training Videos - We have an entire training video library available to new team members so they can get up to speed on our systems quickly and on their own. No more repeating ourselves!
Quick Collaborations - Sometimes just making a quick video to ask questions or get feedback is easier than writing in an email or marking up a PDF. Whether you are communicating with your client, your contractor, or your colleagues, Loom makes it easy to visually and audibly communicate your thoughts, ideas, and questions.
Template Emails
Having ready-to-go Email Templates or Canned emails is essential. While most of my canned emails are built-into my Dubsado Workflow, there are often scenarios where I need a template email that falls outside that workflow. And for that, I use Gmails Templates email feature. Currently, you do have to enable this feature. Here is how to do that.
I made a short video (created using Loom obviously🤓) showing you how to use this feature.
Here are a few template emails you might want to consider:
Invitation to book a call with you - Get a client inquiry that didn’t use your online booking system? Direct them to that page with this email.
Opening a new vendor account
Sending an RFP (Request for Proposal)
Sending clients an end of week update
Requesting samples
Scheduling a trade day
I hope that you find some of these tools useful for managing your time and running your business. I believe it’s important to think and act like the CEO of your company whether you have 1 client or a 7 figure empire. That means recognizing the value of your time and creative energy and implementing systems that protect it.
For more productivity tips check out the Time Management Collection
