#74 | 20 Time Saving Tips for Interior Designers

Welcome to the Designers Oasis podcast. I'm your host, Kate Bendewald. If you're tired of one-size-fits-all all advice to running your interior design business, you're in the right place. Join me each week as we dive into topics to help you run a thriving interior design business. Without the hustle. We'll talk about the business of design, but also mindset and mental health because I know when you thrive, so will your life and business. It wasn't that long ago that I stepped away from my corporate interior design job to build my own design business so that I could realize my own creative dreams, have more time with the people I love, and serve my clients at the highest level, while making more money than I ever could have working for someone else. It wasn't always easy, and I made my share of mistakes along the way. Fast forward to today. And I've learned a thing or two. Since then I've built multiple six-figure interior design businesses on authentic word-of-mouth referrals with many repeat clients. And I want to share it all with you the ambitious, inspired, and I get it occasionally overwhelmed interior designer who shares this dream of transforming lives through the art of interior design, You can do this. Thank you for letting me spend part of this day with you. Let's get to it.

Well, hello there party people. Welcome back. This is your host, Kate Bendewald. Welcome to the designer choices Podcast. I'm thrilled to be here with you again, today. We're talking about time saving tips for interior designers. And I am so excited to talk about this because, you know, one of the things I realized long ago was that, you know, I had I had an employee she was trying to get her to use hotkeys shortcuts for SketchUp. And she was like that saves like half a second, I'm like, Yeah, but a half a second here and a half a second there in a minute there. When you start thinking about all the different ways that we utilize time saving standards and our business time saving strategies, it adds up. And we all know that time is money doesn't matter how you charge, time is money, and it is valuable, you can always make more time you can make more money. So we're gonna get into these strategies, because I am certain I've got 20 of them for you today, I'm certain that there's got to be at least a few of these on here that are going to be new to you. Hopefully, some of these you're already doing in your business. But I really do feel like this is a strong list of things that are going to help you. Specifically, I've narrowed it down to three categories.

The first one is sourcing and designing right? I'm an interior designer. So I know that the process of designing, we often underestimate how long things take specially when it comes to the sourcing part of our work. And so if I can help you shave off some time during that sourcing phase, that's going to mean that you earn more money. So we're gonna get into that. We're also going to look at things like email management and just some general time management tips. So we're gonna get into all of that and more here in a second. Before we do a quick announcement that the doors to the interior designers business blueprint are open right now. If you are listening to this episode, the day or soon after it goes live, then head over to designers oasis.com forward slash blueprint where you can learn about our program, we have masterclasses, we have a live q&a. We have monthly guest experts. We have a huge resource library of templates and checklists and many trainings. And then of course, my favorite aspect is our lovely community of interior designers guys, these are smart, savvy, big hearted, generous interior designers that this is not your typical interior designers Facebook group. This is a really wonderful exclusive group of designers who are here and waiting to support you and to cheer you on and so we're hoping that you will join us this is the last time thedoors will be fully open to this program for quite some time, most likely not again until the end of the year. So we are really hoping that we canbring some some folks in so that we can help you build a thriving interior design business. It is what I'm most passionate about. And why do we do it this way, we really do it this way, because it's important that I am spending most of my time nurturing the folks in the membership. And that's hard to do if I always have the doors open and available. So when those doors closed, it allows me to pivot my attention to the designers that are inside the program. And we have a lot of fun. My My favorite is the first Thursday of the month when we get together for a live q&a.

All right, so we're gonna get into it, I've got 20 strategies for you to help save time in your interior design business. And we're gonna start with the first category, which is sourcing. Alright, so the first thing is, we use a SketchUp library of template sizes for everything. Now real quick, if you don't use SketchUp, whatever software, whether it's AutoCAD or whether it's Chief Architect, I'm sure that you can create something like this actually, in AutoCAD, I know for a fact you can, I haven't used the other, so I don't know. But you can create something like this for yourself. But what this is, is it's one file, it's a single file. And inside it, there are 2d drawings of just about everything you can think of that we might utilize furniture, such as standard bed sizes, king, queen, twin, so I'm lighting, Cabinetry, appliances, plumbing, what this allows us to do is to very quickly build a concept floor plan for a client. Now keep in mind, we utilize 2d drawings are primarily in SketchUp, before we ever move into 3d, so if this was a three dimensional five, everything, all of these components in here were 3d, you could use it, but it would be a very, very, very large file. And it may be a little hard to handle. So these are all 2d drawings, everything is organized beds, and furniture, and lighting and plumbing and appliances are all in their own little areas. And what we can do is we can copy and paste those into a client file, when we're just starting to build that conceptual floorplan quick break for stream of consciousness that the day of this recording, this SketchUp file is not available on our shop yet, but it is something that we're most likely going to add to our shop, we have a big plan to add a whole lot of new resources to our shop later this year.

So right now it's not in there, you can build this yourself, right? It's gonna take time, ours took a lot of time, two years, in fact to build, but the plan is at some point to deliver this to other designers who can can utilize it. So keep an eye out check back, depending on when you're listening to this, it might be available at that point. But anyway, my point is you can build something like this yourself. And it would just take time, but it is a huge, huge time saver. Okay, my next strategy is to utilize buying groups. So buying groups are companies that offer you access to designer net pricing to designer to the trade manufacturers, without requiring a unique manufacturing manufacturer account or,or a rep account. It's just a single account. And what this does is it it actually is twofold. Number one, it saves you time opening and managing many different accounts. Okay, so if you've opened up any sort of a trade account, you know that there's some back and forth and some forms and some waiting, and then you get your information. And then you got to save your information, all of that. And so this just sort of streamlines that. I will just say real quickly from a from a design standpoint, this is not to say that I would shop exclusively from those lines, we like to utilize a lot of artisans, and small vendors and hand makers, things of handmade goods, right. And so we incorporate a lot of that into our work. So this wouldn't be exclusively where I would source from, but it can be a huge time saver for a lot of us big companies. The other way that this saves you time is that it allows you to order from multiple manufacturers in one single order.

So instead of having to place multiple orders across and track multiple orders across multiple accounts, you can do it under one account. So that's really, really nice. Couple of names to throw out there. And I just want to say I have no affiliate to any of these. So you do your own diligence and decide which and this is there's certainly more than this, but a couple of names that I hear quite a bit are Daniel house club, designers Inc, which is one I've used myself and design trade service. Of course there are more but those are some buying groups that you could look into and seeing if that's right

Are you? My next strategy is to ask your reps for help sourcing. Alright, so I just talked about the benefit of using these buying groups. And it is really great in terms of being a time saver. But one benefit of having relationships with your reps and your showrooms is that they're going to be able to guide they really should know their, their lines and their products really well. They're getting trained on those all the time. So the way you can lean on them for support. And we did this just this week, I have a concept image of a of a sort of a built in banquette moment. But it's really a piece of furniture, but we need very specific custom dimensions. And so I sent the image of the concept image to my rep at the showroom, and I said, Hey, this is the look we're going for this is the line I was thinking might be the right fit for it, does anything jump out at you or come to mind that you think could fit the bill for this? And within minutes, she was like, oh, yeah, I think Lee industries would be a good one. And here's the bank app that I think would work. And they can do custom dimensions, if you send those along to me, I will give you a quote. And we had that back within 24 hours. So you can do the same thing with a lot of manufacturers tile, lighting, furniture, but you can if you have a concept image, or if you even just have a mental image, and you want to describe what it is you're looking for. If you have good relationships with your vendors, and your reps, you can sometimes send that information along to them, and they can send it back to you some ideas. I've done this with my rep at Ferguson for plumbing, and I said, Hey, we're looking for, you know, an unlacquered Brass, we need a whole bath suite, we need a shower tub, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he sent back a full spec sheet for everything with pricing and saved us a tremendous amount of time. So utilize your vendors for help sourcing.

Okay, moving on, we're continuing to talk about sourcing and how to streamline that aspect of your work. And so we're going to continue along with that this idea might not be new, but I want to share with you specifically how I do it. So this idea is to create a resource directory of all of your vendors and manufacturers and reps and showrooms that you'd like to work with, or would consider working with. Most people keep something like this in a spreadsheet, and spreadsheet is fine, right. But I like to keep this in air table. And the reason I like to keep it in air table is because it provides you with a lot more functionality in terms of how you can organize and see your lists. So you can create a list where it just shows you your lighting manufacturers or your plumbing or your furnishings and that sort of thing. So I do like to use air table for that. And I'm just going to real quickly while I'm doing this episode, I'm going to open mind and I'm going to mention to you what are all the things that we keep track of for each of these vendors.

And this is really important. Because if you think about it, if you've been in business long enough to know, you probably know that you're gonna have lots of accounts with lots of different vendors, manufacturers rep showrooms. And not all of them do business the exact same way, you're going to have larger and more contemporary companies where they have a cart, you know, if they're not, if you're not doing custom work, there's a there's a cart situation, and you can add what you need and do a checkout. That way, it's pretty hands off, you've got some companies that still require a purchase order to be sent and some sort of old school forms. And that's how they do it and ordering samples, some are gonna say, send us an email with a list of the samples you need, or here's the form you need to fill out or here's where you request samples online. So trying to keep track of all that information would absolutely make your head spin. And you would waste a lot of time trying to remember God, how do I order samples from this company again, you don't have time for that and you need to keep that information somewhere. And I recommend that you keep it alongside your trading inside your trade account directory. Now I call it a trade account directory. Hopefully you're using mostly trade accounts. But if you know we definitely have retailers in there, we have artists, we have artisans. We've got a lot of stuff in ours. We've built it over 10 years, right this has been a labor of love but we've we've got everything in there. But here are some of the things that we track. So we've got their company name, their URL, we've got a column for what are they known for? Right What are they known for custom furniture or ready to ship furniture, lighting, wallpaper, so on and so forth in a lot of companies have some crossover so they might be known for let's say dashing Albert, they're known for rugs. But did you know that you can also buy bedding and furniture from them? So we have a column where we can also can say a lot. That's what they're known for, but they also carry X, Y and Z We have a column called features. So if they are a woman owned, if they are a sustainably made product, if they are made in the USA, those are things that will note under the features. We have a rating system, if it's a company that we have a long standing relationship with, they're one of our like, Go twos, they're gonna get a five star rating. But if we've worked with them, and we have had a really terrible experience, we're going to blacklist them and say, you know, keep the information there. So we have it, but like, this is not a company that we want to use, again, we have our account number was all of our login information, price points, how to get samples, if there's a standard discount, like 30% off or whatever that's listed. How do you get pricing? Do you just simply log in? Do you have to email to request it? How to Order right? Do they have a cart system? Do you need to send the vendor, the PIO? Again, we've been doing this a long time. So we have lots and lots and lots of manufacturers, but we do this and we still streamline with using a buying group. So we're using these strategies in tandem? Do they have a minimum? Again, minimums are something you can use, usually get around through buying groups? Do they require a receiver? Yes or no? Some companies only ship to receivers? And in that case, you would want to know that? Do they have standard shipping or freight charges? And then of course, all the contact information? So do we have a direct manufacturer contact? Do we have a representative who's their company? Are they in a local showroom who's that contact. And so again, it would be impossible to keep track of all of this in one place. So we use the we use air table to keep all of that organized. My next strategy has to do with keeping a super organized old material library, and one that we just did a huge overhaul of all of our samples, which I will be showcasing to you guys. In the near future, I'm not quite done, gonna finish a few little things. But keeping things really well organized. Using a hierarchy is really important.

I do have an old blog post, which I'll share in the show notes about how I like to keep our material libraries, or material library organized. But one of the key features of a well organized library is this pricing on your samples. And the way we do this is whenever we order samples, and they arrive, there is a little bin and they go in the bin and they are not allowed to get cataloged until it gets pricing. And so we just choose a small little sticker and we say our for retail, and then the price, why do we do that, we know that there's a good chance that our client is going to see some pricing on there. Oh, and we also date it like 224, right month in the year so that way, sometimes we have samples and they sit around for a little bit. And if we see pricing on there, and it's like, well, that pricing was from 2019. We've been through a pandemic since then, then we know we need to check on pricing. But if it's pretty current, then we know that we're we're in good shape. But so we not only put on retail pricing,but we also include a date, we make sure that we put the retail pricing so that if a client sees it, they're seeing the max that they would pay, right? That's honestly not typical. And most people don't know what like our 150 means, right. So that's sort of an internal system for us. So the pricing aspect is really, really important. I just want to say this, that it's super important that if you start to do this, that when you're specking for a client that if you have committed a material or of any kind to your project, that you've double check to make sure you get the most accurate and current pricing. That's where that date comes in handy. But pricing can shift very quickly. So always, always, always check before you send that final proposal to your clients.

Okay, the next one on my list, which is actually the last one in the sourcing conversation has to do with using a standard shipping rate.

In years past, whenever we were putting together a proposal, we were specking and sourcing for a client, we would figure out prior to the presentation, what is the exact shipping cost for this exact item to go from here to here. And we all know that that takes a lot of time, especially if you're doing it across multiple manufacturers, vendors transactions, and that it can fluctuate and sometimes you don't know the exact pricing until after you've already committed it to the cart and all of that that's a lot of work to do, especially if a client hasn't even seen it yet. So we worked with our bookkeeper to develop a standard ship been read It was 20%. And I think we're in the process of maybe bumping that up to 25%. But when we did that, what it allowed us to do was we just completely ignored what the actual pricing was. And everything had a 20% shipping rate. And we did this using historical data. So we looked back at past projects and knew that with 20%, there were going to be some projects were or excuse me, some orders were, the shipping costs exceeded 20%. But many of them are going to either be free or substantially lower than 20%. And so it just didn't make sense for us to try to pull that we knew that we could average it, and that my friend has saved us lots and lots and lots and lots of time. So develop a standard shipping rate that you use across your whole company, make sure that you get help with this either with you need to look at past data. And if you don't have that work with a bookkeeper and see if you can come up with something that you feel would be good, but just make sure you're going back checking it because you know, if you're using trade resources, then even if you go over a little bit 20%, you're still gonna make plenty of margin, right? But you want to make sure that you're kind of in that nice healthy range to just check in on it once in a while. Okay, cool. So I loved having that conversation, talking about time saving strategies for when you're sourcing, but we're going to move into email, because email is one of those things that we all know can be a huge time suck.

And so I've got a few of my own personal strategies that I love, and I want to share them with you right now. So canned emails, right? If you're using any sort of automations, you probably have canned or template emails already established inside your let's say your your CRM, your customer management system, right? But sometimes you're gonna have emails where they are not ever touching your CRM tool. But these are emails like, Hey, are you hiring? Or hey, would you like to learn more about this new product that we're selling or a random inquiry into your business and you want to direct them to how to get started with you here book a discovery call that sort of thing? There are lots of reasons why you might want to have template emails ready to go right inside your Gmail? I'm a Gmail user, I, I would I have to think that outlook would have something like this, if that's what you use. But in Gmail, you can create your own custom email templates so that when you get that inquiry for, Hey, are you hiring, here's my portfolio, you don't have to flesh out an entire thought on that, you can simply go to your template emails, and fire off a response, customize it just a little bit if you did, too. But that is a huge time saver. Now don't go trying to think about all the scenarios that which you would need to have these unless you just have an abundance of free time. But instead, what I would suggest is every time you come up against an email where you're like, Hmm, okay, I keep getting requests like this, or emails like this, and I want to, I have a similar response, then utilize that moment to create those template emails and just build it as you go. Okay. So I'm not talking about the automated emails that go inside your CRM tool, I'm talking about your template or canned emails that live right inside your email platform that helps you respond to those everyday emails that are outside of sort of client relationships. So that's what I'm talking about here. The next one, and this is kind of silly, but I just have to share it with you.

Every now and then, usually it's like, right when we're, we've just done a presentation for a client, right? We're pretty heads down those days before, we're making sure that everything's buttoned up and ready to go. We put a lot of pride in the quality of our presentations. And so what generally happens is that my email gets a little constipated, it gets backed up, and it needs to be fleshed out.

And usually, for me, my threshold is like if it's more than 30 unread emails for me, I have I know people handle their email, different ways. For me, if it's unread, it's undealt. With, okay, that doesn't mean that I need to deal with every email, it just means that it either needs a response or it hasn't been looked at, right. So I do this typically, if I have more than 30 emails that are unread, or undealt with what I do is instead of using going through my email on my inbox, excuse me, on my computer, my desktop, I will actually use my phone. Again, I'm a Gmail user. So this platform makes it really easy.

Many, many, many of those emails do not need replies. And you can swipe left or right, you can swipe, I don't remember one way to trash it one way to mark it as red. So depending on what it is, I can very quickly, if I've got 100 emails, I can whittle that down to like two that I need to deal with by swiping. And then the other thing that I do is, if I see an email that I know just needs a quick, little quick reply, I can audio, I can voice text my response. So I, I dictate my response, I'm not sending them an audio recording, I'm sending them an email, but I'm dictating the email using my phone. So if I have a large batch of emails that I need to get through, I get off my computer, I go on my phone, I swipe left or right to either delete it, or mark it as read.

The ones that have quick replies, I will send a quick reply to using diction. And then if it's actually something that needs me to like, sit down and think through a thought or put an attachment or like it needs work, then I just leave it unread. And that's really cool. Because it allows me to, when I'm on my phone, it forces me to not get into action mode, right? When I'm on my desktop, I'm like, Oh, I can respond to this and type it out and attach my thing. Now I've just spent like 30 minutes on that one client, instead of getting through my inbox, and then it feels like the inbox takes all day. So instead, I get rid of all the junk. And I only respond to what I really need to so that's my like email swiping on the phone situation. And I love to do this on like a Friday afternoon while I'm sitting on the front porch hanging out, what do you think it's like? So you can do this kind of anywhere I've done it while sitting in line for pickup, you know.

Okay, next, we're still talking about email management, pause inbox feature. This is a Gmail feature. But with this, have you ever I know, I know, if you are a human being, you will feel me on this.

You're working on something, and you need to reference an old email. So you do move over to your email, open it up and you are going to search for the email that you're looking for. And all of a sudden you see a new email that just came from a client or a new project inquiry, or literally anything that's in your inbox, and all of a sudden you open that up just to see what it's about. And lo and behold, an hour's past, and you aren't completely off track from what it was you were initially trying to do in your inbox. Guilty as charged. So the way I get around this is if I'm really in some heads down space, if I'm really in my focus, deep work, which I'm going to talk about in a moment, then inbox pause inbox gets turned on for the rest of the day. And what this allows me to do is to reference my inbox reference emails without visually seeing anything new come through. And what happens is, you can set it up different ways you can save pause and bucks till the end of the day or for an hour or indefinitely, you get to pick but I usually will do till the end of the day. And then all of those emails just show up at whatever time they were sent. And they're still time stamped and all of that. But it avoids the temptation to dive into any of that fresh, those fresh emails that are coming in. So inbox pause, again, as a Gmail feature, I don't know if it's in some of the other web, excuse me mail platforms, but it'd be worth checking. Okay. And then my last one related to email management is using labels that are odd rules that are that automatically tag emails. So we have a number of tags set up in our email so that depending on the nature of the email, it would get different tags. And there are really two to three that I'm going to talk about right now. But one of them is the clients name. So let's say any email that comes from Jane Smith gets automatically tagged with Jane Smith. So if I need to go look through Jane Smith emails, I can just click on that tag. And it's going to show me all of the emails related to that client. This is something that we set up right at the beginning of a project. And we set up that rule and once it's done, anything that comes from her or anybody else related to that project is going to get that tag. Another way that we utilize these tags is with procurement. And so we have and the other nice thing about tags is you can create hierarchies. So hierarchy for the last one I talked about might be client. And then the next level down would be clients name. So all of those are gonna go under clients and then ordered by the clients name. The next one that we utilize quite a bit is called procurement. And then within procurement, we have a number of other labels. So those labels would be things like order acknowledgement. to shipping acknowledgement order received acknowledgement. And so we can tag emails as they come in to get tagged with whatever stage of procurement it's in. And we can also tag it with the clients name. So we can very quickly filter through and see all of the emails from Missmiss projects, all of the items that we have acknowledgment that they've been received. It's just a very easy way to reference your inbox and reference your emails in an organized fashion. So those email tags are super critical to our business. We also use a few more such as like new client inquiry, that sort of thing. You can sort of develop your own but those are a few that we use in our business.

Hey, designer, are you tired of wasting precious time with prospective clients who are not a right fit? Do you experience impostor syndrome because, you know, the back end of your business is kind of a hot mess. Perhaps you're experiencing growing pains and you don't have the tools, resources or team to support you. I get it. I've been there. As an ambitious interior design business owner myself, I know the roller coaster ride this can be over the years I've learned a thing or two about running a profitable word of mouth design business, and I want to help you find success too. How would it feel to wake up and face the day knowing exactly what to focus on next, having a roster of enthusiastic clients including a paid waitlist, and having the space time and creative energy to develop projects that you are proud of, and our portfolio if not press worthy. I want to invite you to learn more about the interior designers business blueprint, a business coaching program designed exclusively for interior designers who want to serve their clients at the highest level while making good money. But without the burnout and overwhelm. If you're ready to get off the roller coaster, you don't have to do it alone. Join me inside the interior designers business blueprint and get the tools teaching and community you need to pave the way for an interior design business your clients love and you are proud of. To learn more, grab the link on your audio player or head to designers oasis.com forward slash blueprint. That's designers oasis.com forward slash blueprint.

Okie dokie, we're ready to move on to time management. It sounds like everything we're talking about was related to time management. But these are just kind of some general strategies that we utilize in our business. I think the first one is probably the most obvious and that is utilizing automations. The place where automations come in most heavily for us is in our CRM tool. Now we've used dubsado In the past, and I absolutely love dubsado. But my team who is now managing the automations that our business, they really loved honey book and they wanted to switch. So we've switched to honey book. I'm still on the fence, I'm still deciding which one I really like. There's features about both that I love, I will let you just read for yourself I am I do have links to share it with both of you. But both dubsado and HoneyBook are really excellent CRM tools to help you keep track of those client leads and nurture them all the way through the sales cycle. And so that's where automations really come in handy for us. So this is mostly seen through the onboarding process. So when they book a discovery call, they're gonna get an automatic email reminder, reminding them or excuse me, confirming that. And of course, it's written in our brand voice, we do not use the template emails that are typically built in these kinds of software, they're gonna get a reminder email maybe the day before or an hour for. Same thing for consultations.

If we send a proposal, and we haven't heard back, there's an automatic reminder that goes out to them. That just is a gentle nudge. Again, all of this is using really thoughtful copywriting for each of those tools. By the way, if you are interested in getting your hands on all of our emails, we have a huge business email templates suite available on our shop, we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes. But this really takes the guesswork out of all of it. You can plug and play for every single automation you could possibly think of inside your business. So the onboarding is where it really comes in handy. But automations also are sometimes our weekly reminders that pop up our invoices are invoice reminders to our clients, which that goes through our project management software, so it's a little bit different than dubsado HoneyBook but all of these business automations are what helps save us a lot of time, tremendous amount of time. And it also makes sure that things don't fall through the cracks. Because if it was left to me, I'd forget and it wouldn't happen. So I'm not reliable.

Okay, moving on.This next strategy has been a game changer, which is time blocking. I've talked about time blocking plenty here on the podcast, so you know that I'm a big fan. So time blocking is really this idea of setting aside specific times of the day during the week to do specific tasks, and to batch your tasks, because your brain is much more efficient when it's doing the same kinds of tasks over and over again, so wouldn't be efficient to invoice one client on Monday and then realize on Thursday, okay, you need to also invoice this person, or you need to follow up with this bleed on this day. And then, Matt? No, we do? Well, at least here at kbit. We do one type of tasks typically batched in a group. So here's a couple of examples of how we batch our week, we have Money Monday, which is where we do things like Bill or clients, we send invoices, we prepare proposals. It's where we do all of our checking bank accounts, moving money around cashing checks, having meetings with our bookkeeper, reviewing stuff that the bookkeeper has sent us and asked questions about, there's a list of things that we would do on that. And so that way, if we get an email during the middle of the week, that is, let's say, a money related finance related task, we would just save that to our list to do on Monday, Wednesdays we dedicate to deep work. So really try to avoid any meetings on Wednesdays. This is where we allow ourselves to have some white space for creativity. And to get into that flow state, which is really fun for my brain. It's like a massage for my brain to not have any meetings or phone calls or need to be anywhere. And so I am really, really, really dedicated to protecting that time. And for us, it's on Wednesdays, which is nice, because we use Mondays to sort of get ourselves organized, we use Tuesdays to have calls and meetings to sort of kick off anything that we need to with clients or whoever we might be talking to. We preserve Wednesday for our deep work. And then on Thursdays was really when we like to do any errands are running around town. And then Friday, I really like to button that up, I if I'm not taking Friday off, I want to try to be done by noon. And so I've got a couple of things that are always wrapped up on Fridays. If I want to take the day off, then I will do it Thursday afternoon. But that's generally the flow of our weeks. So our clients know that we don't have meetings on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays are usually say for Tuesdays and Thursdays. But that said, we have to be a little bit flexible. And from time to time, we can adjust but very, very rarely. But time blocking is really important because when you batch those tasks, it prevents context switching, and it helps your brain work more efficiently. Because when you're switching from a creative task to a logical task, it's going to take your brain minutes to sort of sink in and think about what it is you're doing right? Have you ever had a cold call from somebody like a client and you're in the middle of doing something else? And all of a sudden they're asking you questions about something else in your brains? Like, what is even going on? What are what are we even talking about right now? It's because your brain is context switching. It's like backfiring. And it just needs a minute to catch up. And so when you batch your task, you eliminate that. Okay, so the next one is I use a Google Doc, that is tied to a calendar event on my on for recurring events. So let me explain. I just mentioned to you that we have I have money Monday, which is a couple of hours set aside on Monday afternoons, it's on my calendar, as a recurring event on Mondays. And if you go to that calendar event on on my Google Calendar, and you click on it, you'll see a Google Doc and sustained Google Doc that lives there forever. And that's my money Monday checklist. And it's like, Okay, here's all the recurring things that I need to do. For Monday, I need to, you know, we have multiple accounts because we use the Profit First mostly model. So we might be moving money around, we might be responding to questions from the bookkeeper, etc. But that checklist and any new things that are sort of a one time thing that we need to do is also attached to that Google Doc. So what this helps us do is not have to hunt down the checklist for that event, other ways that we use this as for our weekly agenda, so on that calendar invite under that you can click on it and you can see the agenda, and that is just an ongoing document that stays updated week after week. Another way that I use this is with quarterly tax

Is it has the SOP attached to it. So taxes are paid quarterly. And you have to use different URLs and different ways of figuring it out and handling it. And if I had to try to remember all of that every three months, I will, first of all, I wouldn't. I don't, which is why I created this in the first place. But instead of having to hunt for that, where's that SOP for how to pay quarterly taxes, I have a recurring event on my calendar for the week before my taxes are due. And I pay three different taxes, actually, four. And on that calendar event is the SOP attached, which shows me step by step how to do how to how to record and pay each of those taxes. So attaching those Google Docs to recurring calendar events can be super helpful to keep you from having to hunt for things, I find this works especially well with those recurring events that have sort of the same sort of tasks that you would have repeatable. That's where this really shines and works the best. Okay, moving on to our next one, the if you've been here for like a hot second, you know that I feel strongly that we should all be tracking our time. And I use harvest for time tracking, it's my absolute favorite. But I love to utilize the time, excuse me, you can access harvest three different ways. First, you can use the web browser and record your time that way, you can also download the app. So it is a dust, there's a desktop app that you can use and the phone app, I specifically like to use the desktop app and the phone app because it has more functionality. So to track your time using the desktop app, there's just a little icon up top of my computer with a drop down. And I could say this start tracking time for this client for this task. And then I can put a little note in there if I want and then the window disappears. But the little timer starts going. So I have this little tiny visual reminder in the top corner of my screen that my timer is running. And this is not only helpful to keep me accountable and on track for my time and just be mentally aware of it. But it also helps me remember to stop that timer when I move on to a different project because it's always sort of their shining, you know, sticking out. So it's easy to see. And it's easy to use. The other nice feature about the desktop version of harvest is that if I were to get up and let's say go make lunch for myself and come back, it's going to as soon as I move my mouse, it's there's a little window that pops up that says, hey, you've been idle for 30 minutes, how do you want us to treat that time harvest doesn't know that I was making my lunch for all harvest knows I was over at the materials table putting together a scheme for my client. And I actually want to keep that time. So I just simply kill it, keep keep the timer running, you know, or eliminate that time it wasn't for the client, that sort of thing. So that's a really nice check in I know, keeping track of your time, if you're if it's not a habit you're in, it's a hard one to start. But once you start it, it is really a game changer. And so I, I feel strongly that harvest is a great option because of these functionality features that I just simply cannot find in any other time tracking software. And then the last one I just want to think I want to say about this is the mobile app is super helpful too. Because you guys know we're often in the field visiting a client or at a showroom, or something of that nature, where you need to track time for a client, but you're not necessarily at your desk. And it's super simple to open your phone app and just say I was at the showroom for one hour for this client on this date done. You can also track your mileage that way too, so that you're not having to think about this all at the end of the week, where it's you've got brain fog, and you're done and you're ready to go. Enjoy your weekend, right. So if you're doing it in real time, which is the best way to track your time, then harvest makes it super simple. And I think the desktop version and app, the phone app are the best ways to get the most out of it. So hats off to harvest I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.

We also have a past podcast episode related to this, which I will be sure to share as well. Okay, so the next strategy we've sort of touched on a minute ago when I talked about time batching but this is really around protecting time for deep work. And I call it whitespace Wednesdays because because I love alliteration What can I say? So protecting time for deep work. What is deep work? Deep Work is that dedicated time that is especially important for I believe, creative work that allows you to get really deep into the flow of what it is you're working on. If your day is broken up by a meeting in the middle of The day or an errand that you have to run, that is going to dramatically throw off your efficiency and your ability to sort of like sink into the thought processes of design work. So, especially for design work, I like to protect, you know, one day a week for that deep work. And for us, it's on Wednesdays, why Wednesdays, it's because we got we checked a bunch of boxes on Monday, Monday, Tuesdays and Thursdays at our meetings or phone calls. So everybody should be happy for a little bit. So this way, we can go into that deep work without any sort of a nagging feeling of like, somebody's waiting on to hear from me, or do I need to be checking my email to hear back from somebody else, because everything can wait till tomorrow or the end of the day on Wednesday.

We also like to schedule when we're kicking off a project, a couple of days of deep work as a team, where we're really starting to think together as a team on how are we going to approach this project, right. And also do it again, for sourcing so that deep work is super important, but you have to protect it, you're going to be so much more efficient, you're going to be so much happier with the results of your design, when you give it the space to breathe and just be able to think without feeling the weight of email and finances and logistics and all that shit. Like just It's all behind you. So the whitespace Wednesday's is my go to strategy for protecting that deep work. Okay. Time Timer. So the Time Timer, you might think it's redundant to harvest but the Time Timer is this little desktop timer. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see we've got this little timer here, oops, and it's a visual timer. And what I love about this visual timer is, especially when it comes to sourcing, it can be very easy to feel like you need to go to the ends of the internet to find the perfect thing for your client. And that would be great if you had infinite time. But that's just simply not the case. And so the visual Time Timer helps me stay accountable. I can set it for 20 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever and say, Okay, for the next 20 minutes, I am going to look at lighting, and I'm going to narrow it down to some options. Okay. And the visual aspect is what keeps me accountable. Yes, I've usually got my timer going, but the timer is counting, excuse me, harvest is counting up, right? It's, it's counting on my minutes, and the Time Timer is counting down. So it's almost like a little bit of a countdown timer. And there's just some psychological difference there that I respond to really well. So that visual timer is essential for me. And so we use the Time Timer again, I'll link to that but on Amazon, and it's been super helpful. Okay, next number seven. Well, this is number seven. This is actually number. Oh, I don't know, it's number seven on the time management list. But we've got 20 strategies overall, but we're getting we're rounding a corner here. Okay, so SOPs are essential in your business, SOPs, or standard operating processes or procedures. I've heard it said both ways tomato tomahto. I don't care, we call them SOPs. But this is a document that shows you how to do things, you or anyone else in your business how to do a certain thing. Some examples of SOPs that we have, how to invoice clients, how to start an automation, how to purchase an item for a client how to handle claims how to pay taxes, we were talking about taxes a minute ago, I mentioned that I have three

taxes that I have related to my business, it's actually four if you count income tax that we pay quarterly. But for me, I'm in Colorado, we have a state sales tax, we have a city sales tax, they are filed differently. It is not one single filings, it's two different websites to different filings. And then we're also lucky enough to have what's called an occupational privilege tax, whatever the hell that means. I don't know, but I pay it. It's a little bit each quarter.

But, you know, I would never, ever be expected to remember how to do how to calculate and report and pay three different taxes on a quarterly basis. So those SOPs I can open up very quickly, and reference and it shows me oh yeah, here's the URL, here's the login, here's what you do, and then move on. So that keeps your brain from having to like, recreate the wheel or figure it out every single time.

When you're a solopreneur when you're working for yourself SOPs can feelunnecessary, but I, you know, use them for myself all the time.

So that I don't have to have brain damage trying to remember how to doa repeatable task. But also as I've grown and I've had staff members, I don't have to reHelp someone how to do something, I can send this SOP or they have access to the SOP documents say the instructions are right here. And so SOPs are critical to helping you keep track of how to do things and be able to delegate that to other people. Alright, so the next one is creating explainer videos. To communicate with people, we use loom. We also have a believer and a podcast episode on how we use loom.

So loom can help you screen share your screen, you can create videos of just yourself talking. But sometimes showing something is just so much more efficient than trying to explain it in an email. And so the loom videos help us do that very, very, very quickly.

I will say we have utilized, we do use the upgraded pro version, so not the free version, and it's worth every penny 100% Hands down, it saves us so much time. We use it for everything just this week.

I used it to record some weird things that was going on my website and I could send it to our website gal and say, hey, you know, first of all, I know I can figure that out. But I've got somebody that can help me do it, that's gonna do it much faster. But I could just quickly take a video of it and say, Hey, I don't know what's going on here. And I'm gonna use my mouse to point show or it was fixed within 10 minutes. Okay, another way that we used this this week, we're working on a kitchen concept. And we had a sketch that we wanted to show the cabinetry company. So I scanned this sketch, and I pulled it up onto my screenshot, excuse me on my screen on my desktop. And I used loom to sort of explain the sketch and what I was hoping to achieve, because I knew that the sketch alone wasn't going to communicate everything that I needed to. And I think the cabinetry lady had never seen a loom video before. But she was blown away. She was like, wow, that was so helpful. Thank you so much. So it not only saved me time writing an email and trying to explain it, it allowed me to quickly record and share my thoughts and share it with somebody, but it allowed her to very quickly arrive at an understanding of what it was I was trying to achieve, so that she could get on with it and get back to me what I needed quicker. So loom for explaining things is a beautiful tool to have in your business. You can use loom if you're not presenting your concept designs in person. Maybe you previously we used to just email our concept designs and ask for feedback. But now we will actually present our concept designs through loom if we're not doing it in person. So a really large project, we're going to present a concept package in person, a much smaller project, we might opt for loom to sort of talk through our thinking and share that so that they can give us feedback on their own time. So that could be one way that you do it. You can also go through a proposal, let's say that you've got a really busy client, and it can be hard to get them on the phone or get them on Zoom or whatever it real time, you could use loom to explain or break down information in your own voice. It also just adds a real personal touch. So we use loom for so many things. And I highly recommend that you use it to just very quickly get through things. And you can send it to anybody and anybody can watch. All right, we're getting around to the very end here, guys, this is a big ol list. Last one is using polls for creating meeting times with groups. So if you've ever said to yourself, holy cow, I've got a meeting that I need to coordinate with two clients that work full time, right? They've got jobs, the contractor, and the whatever else. I don't know the architect, right. So you've got six stakeholders who need to be at a meeting and trying to navigate that through email would be monstrous. So we use polls. You can there's a lot of tools out there that can do this. We are currently using Survey Monkey.

But Calendly also does it. I wish that some of our existing tools like HoneyBook would come up with this feature also I mentioned. Well, I mentioned. I haven't mentioned it yet. It's my last one. But anyway you can come up with you can figure out what tool you want to use for this. But if you've got to get a meeting on the books with multiple people, reading a poll is a much faster way to get buy in from everybody. So you don't have to go back and forth. So survey monkey has an easy way for us to do that people can pick all of the times that would work for them and we pick the one that has the most availability for everyone. All right, and last but not least on our lat last but not least on ou list we have a feature for Gmail that's called Boomerang, I've talked about boomerang before, it has a lot of really cool features. But also when it comes to scheduling, and scheduling can be complicated, it can require a lot of back and forth. So the polls that I was just talking about, I would put in a couple of date options into a poll and send that to them. And then once I got it back, I would create a calendar event and send it to them and invite them. It's kind of a double step. But I don't have to use that all the time.

Just when I have to coordinate lots of people. But sometimes if I'm just trying to meet with one person, and I need an ad hoc meeting, Boomerang offers a feature called suggested times. And this suggests times feature is really nice for this reason. Yes, I have HoneyBook, where I can have a 30 minute meeting or a 60 minute meeting template that I have set up and I could send them that link, right. And I sometimes will. But sometimes, because I am really particular about protecting things like my whitespace, and let's tie it like maybe this day, I'm picking up my kids, but maybe tomorrow, I'm not doesn't matter. I know that HoneyBook can connect to my calendar and read it and I can create rules.

And so to all of the other scheduling software's, but what's different about this is you can specifically pick a few specific times. Because I like to keep my availability tight. If I send them my link, which again, sometimes is appropriate. And I'll do this, when I send them my link to schedule a 60 minute call with me, that means that if I have availability that day, they can pick any 60 minutes slot that whole day. And yes, that's nice. But I don't want them to have access to my whole day, I will send them a few specific spots, maybe I want to have that meeting right at the top of the day, so that I can move into my deep work, then I can send them the suggest times, and it puts it right into the email. And I can pick whether I want it to be a phone call or zoom. And they pick the time that works best for them. And it automatically puts it on both of our calendars. That's the key part that I love so much. It's done. And I don't have to have a conversation about it anymore. So this is the boomerang feature for email.

Excuse me, it's boomerang for Gmail, I do think that they have a an Android, not Android. I don't whatever the other is, I don't know, I just clearly I'm a Gmail user. Outlook. That's the one. I think they have it for Outlook too. So if you're an outlook user, you can use it. But the other cool thing about Boomerang, which would actually be number 21. On that list, it has other features, such as remind me later about this email or send this email later. And those features are also really nice. And the free version gives you a certain limited number of times you can use it within a month before it resets, which I find to be ample. But you certainly could opt for their paid version as well. So boomerang for Gmail and Android, or Outlook or whatever it's called. Highly, highly, highly recommend, it's just gives you just a little bit more control over your calendar so that you can protect whatever time you need to protect in your day.

You guys feeling like this was a lot, because it truly was a lot. Keep in mind, all of our show notes are detailed. So if you want to reference this and you want to come back to it, just know that we've got that available for you, along with all of our links and suggestions to anything that I might have mentioned here today. And but at the end of the day, what is most important is that you really start to recognize the value of your time, how important it is to manage it and control it and protect it while still remaining flexible, because that's a really important aspect of being a business owner.

And, and knowing that when you do that these little tiny bits of time that you save here and there might not seem like much, but when you add them up and you really start to think about a list like this, you can start to be a time saving ninja, which I don't know, maybe I'm there, maybe I'm not.

But I hope that you found some highlights here that are going to help you save more time and be more efficient. And hopefully you'll go do something fun with that free time. You know, go get an ice cream or something. All right. That's all for now. I love you guys. I'll talk to you real soon. Bye for now.

Hey, friend, thank you so much for letting me spend a part of this day with you. I'm so passionate about helping designers like you. And I believe in a rising tide that when one of us does well we all do better. So if you share this attitude of abundance with me, I want you to do just one little

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