Posted by: Daniel Levis
September 5, 2007
Issue #222

How to Fire Yourself from Busy Work

And Get More
“Money Stuff” Done …

In this issue:

• How to hire help without offering up your first born or giving yet another pound of flesh to the social safety net …
• How to just say no to e-mail, before it mushrooms into a time sucking vampire that slays your productivity and butchers your hourly income …
• How to put the time you’re not working to work … doubling, or even tripling your creative output …
• And more!

Dear Business Builder,

This issue is dedicated to freelance copywriters and marketing consultants. There has never been a time in history, where more opportunity has existed for folks like us …

The biggest bugbear is time. How do you prioritize and manage it in such a way as to avoid being consumed by the administrative vampires that threaten to overwhelm your ability to do what you do best? As one man or woman, you are a sitting duck for every little piece of $10 an hour “busy work” that comes along.

Between actually doing the creative work that you are paid to do, you’ve got all of the other sundry communications that go along with it … the task of staying on top of income and expenses … dealing with customer questions or complaints from past projects, and so on. Not to mention having to go out and get new assignments to replace the ones you’re working on now.

Here’s how to fight back …

Get An Assistant – Now please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about the E word here. I don’t think you should touch an employee with a ten-foot pole. There’s just too much obligation, red tape, and expense.

What you need is contract help. Someone who will wait at your beck and call to do your “busy work” … doesn’t ask much money in return … and whom you can disentangle yourself from at a moment’s notice without consequence. Sound like a pipe dream? It’s not.

There are well-educated, honest, talented people waiting in India and other developing countries who fit this bill quite nicely. There’s no reason to wait, or even have a plan as to how you’re going to get the most value out of this arrangement before you begin.

Just having the ability to take even a few pieces of “busy work” off your plate will give you a tremendous psychological boost. You can figure out how to leverage your new virtual assistant to the max as you go.

Get Strategic with E-mail – After you’ve relieved yourself of the role of chief, cook, and bottle washer with a virtual assistant, the next thing to tackle is e-mail. Don’t get me wrong. I love e-mail. I think it’s the killer Internet application, both from a marketing perspective, and from a consumer perspective.

But it’s one of the biggest time vampires going. There’s something about e-mail that just pulls you into it. I suppose it’s just the years of conditioning. When someone sends you a message, you read it. That’s one of the reasons it’s such a killer marketing app.

But when you’re trying to stay focused on the “money stuff”, it’s a distracting and counterproductive force.

You should be working toward being able to shut it off, checking it once a day, or once a week. This takes a little planning, of course, but with the help of your virtual assistant, it is within your reach.

As you’re working toward that ideal, you can easily avoid getting sucked in by letting your e-mails pile up for days at a time, just responding to the ones that are truly urgent.

A Change Is As Good As A Rest – One of the reasons you’re addicted to checking your e-mail is because you’re getting bored sitting there grinding it out at your desk for hours on end.

Answering or reading an e-mail or two gives you a momentary diversion, and a sense of instant gratification in the middle of a long-term project where the promise of gratification is delayed.

A healthier and more productive way to deal with this is to simply change your environment. Put your files on your laptop, and head outside on the deck to work for a while, or down to the local coffee shop, or wherever you please. You’ll be amazed at how much more productive you become, simply by changing your environment.

Put The Time You’re Not Working To Work – Just because you’re sleeping doesn’t mean you can’t be getting things done. One of the biggest things you can do to improve your productivity is to plan your days the night before.

The last thing I do before going to bed is create my “to do” list for the following day. Not only that, I give my subconscious a specific task to work on during the night. When I wake up in the morning, as if by magic, I’ve got ideas.

I’m brimming with creative answers to the specific questions I’ve asked my subconscious to work on. And often I’ll wake up with better ways of approaching the action items I’ve listed as being on my agenda for that day.

The nighttime isn’t the only time you can take advantage of this, but it’s definitely the safest. Just the other day I caught myself carrying my guitar out to the mailbox for no apparent reason as a blinding flash of copy brilliance flooded my brain. Be careful while driving or operating machinery.

Set Deadlines – Give yourself an unlimited amount of time to do something, and that’s exactly how long it will take. There is power in deadlines. My friend Steve Manning in his book How to Write A Book On Anything in 14 Days, GUARANTEED! recommends setting a timer, and writing in 5 minute spurts.

I do this sometimes, and it is very helpful. It focuses you on the task at hand. I find it most helpful when I am writing numbered points like what you’re reading right now. It’s kind of a unique way of leveraging the power of a deadline, but it’s just one of many.

When you think about it, your “to do” list is a kind of deadline isn’t it? You should take your “to do” list very seriously, and never fill it up with so much junk that you don’t finish it that day. There should be just a few high priority items on it.

I keep two “to do” lists. One with just a few items that come-hell-or-high-water are going to get completed that day, and a second one filled with things that I hope to get to at some point. Then at the end of each day when I’m preparing tomorrow’s “to do’s”, I may bring one of these items over. This second list is very important, because it allows me to offload random ideas that I have while I’m working without becoming distracted.

Apply Leverage – Of course one of the biggest problems copywriters and marketing consultants face is the feast and famine cycle. This is the problem that arises when you have too much work, and can find little time to prospect for new clients.

Eventually the projects get completed, and you’re left with nothing. I could tell you to be disciplined and set aside time each day to make introductory phone calls, send letters to prospective clients, and pursue other self-marketing activities designed to get people to hire you, but I’ve never done any of these things to get copywriting or marketing consulting work.

My approach is entirely different. The way I get clients is simply a by-product of my information marketing business. I actually get paid to have clients approach me and ask me to do business with them. And because my information marketing activities are a source of revenue to me, they get done.

Every consultant should be in the information marketing business, if only for this reason.

Swiss Cheesing – What I like to do is plan my days so that I can create the perfect balance between focused attention and variety. That way I can create both short and long term deadlines, and create dual workflow tracks. My conscious mind can be executing on one task, and my subconscious mind can be working on another.

The idea is to chunk down your projects into manageable pieces, and then set internal deadlines to work toward. There are a few good reasons for working this way …

First, have you ever noticed that the closer a deadline looms, the more productive you get? Chunking down with deadlines keeps you focused, and always chewing on the work with a sense of urgency.

Second, by chunking your project down into milestones, complete with faux deadlines, you can reward yourself for a job well done, sooner rather than later. Instead of looking at a daunting and incomplete project stretching out for miles in front of you, you take your gratification in small bites along the way.

And third, working on your project in parallel rather than serial like this breaks down the monotony. You can charge at one project full-bore for an hour, then put it aside and tackle another one with equal intensity.

Bottom Line:

As wonderful as all this time-management stuff is, if you’re good at what you do, you can expect your working life to be chaos. When you’re in demand, there’s always more work for you to do than hours in the day to get it done.

Clients will get angry at you because you cannot meet their deadlines, projects may slip past their due dates, and you may have to turn away work that you really would have enjoyed doing. It’s all just part of the consulting game.

But it all works out in the end. The really good clients know that what you’ve got is in low supply and high demand. They want the very best they can get, and are willing to wait.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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1 Comment »

1. Comment by Pam Magnuson — September 6, 2007 @ 12:04 pm

   Great article, Daniel. Some of things I do, and some I will do in the future.
   Pam