One way to beat overwhelm in your career and business is to make specific windows for calls.
In this way you're deciding when you want to be available to your clients or colleagues.
Most people think they have to be available at all times, but the opposite is true.
Experimenting with a window for calls can give you a feeling of more freedom
When you are deciding to create windows for calls here's 5 steps you can take:
1. Decide your work hours:
For instance, if your business is to help B2C customers and you want to call them, it might be wise to do your calls from 6PM on.
But if you're not, your work hours might be 9 – 5.30 PM.
2. Look at your week:
What are the days that you're most energized and ready to take on calls?
For me for instance, my Mondays are only reserved for my Big Business Club call and Fridays is my favorite ‘deep work' day and I rarely take on a call.
Also Wednesdays are the days when my husband works from home, so preferably I'm not available on that day either.
So for me, Tuesday and Thursday are my favorite days of the week to be available for calls.
3. Look at what your clients are doing
Of course you can decide you want to open up your calls from 4Am to 9Am, but chances are there won't be many people booking their calls with you.
So check your client's behavior.
For the past few months, I noticed my clients prefer to plan their calls with me on a Tuesday or a Thursday, so deleting the Wednesday is not gonna harm their schedules.
4. Which time fits you best?
After months of experimenting and seeing what works best, I've decided my time slots are between 11 AM -15 PM, those are the moments I'm most productive and available to my clients.
This way I can still get in my morning run and not rush to get into a call, or I can do 2 hours of deep work before I'm heading into calls and at the end of the day, after 3, I can run errands or just read a book.
5. What if your clients want to reach you 24/7?
Charge extra.
I wish I had done this in the past, but I was always available. You can still be flexible, but making people very aware of each quick call which might be charged, will help them prepare for your meetings more. Last year, I wrote up an offer including 5 calls and every extra phone call was going to be €99,- a call (even if it was 5 minutes).
And guess what? I never had to charge extra.
Also, if this is a dealbreaker for your client, it probably is for you too…
Have fun experimenting with this. I'm still figuring it out and I'm changing my availability every month through my favorite tool: calendly (this is not an affiliate link, I'm just a big fan).
In this week's podcast
One of my clients has a brick and mortar practice and hires freelancers to help her in her business.
One of her main challenges is not to find clients (she has plenty, everyone wants to work with her), but to streamline her business and to give the tools to her team to work on their own and without her having to explain every step of the way.
It is time for her to delegate.
So in order to prepare her, I helped her created SOP's, Standard Operating Procedures. Listen to how I've helped her and how you can implement these into your business through (also if you're not hiring a team):
Do you have a question for me for on the podcast?
It's really easy!
Happening in my business this week:
I'm celebrating my staycation and I've pre-written this newsletter, so I'll probably be sunbathing, swimming or visiting a museum!
Have a great week!
All the best,
Sarah
P.S. You can still join my free Art Profit Masterclass through: bureausbb.com/artprofit
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