Get organized with a daily schedule!

OK, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. If you’re like me, your desk is covered with paperwork, your voicemail box  is full of half-listened to, saved messages that you mean to return later and your to-do list is about a mile long. *big sigh*. Alright, that’s enough whining – time to roll up your sleeves and make yourself a daily schedule.

Quit laughing.

The secret to digging yourself out of the black hole of work is to prioritize and schedule it.

Here’s my general daily schedule to give you an idea of how it works.

5AM – Wake up (yes, seriously!). My husband’s alarm clock goes off at 5 and he is out of the house by 5:45AM. This is the perfect time to get up with him, have some coffee  and do a little stretching and yawning. This is also the time when I grab the laptop and check my email to make sure there’s nothing majorly important that I need to answer right away. If there is – I know that I have something to address first thing when I get into the office. This is also my online time. I check Facebook and Twitter for messages and I write  blog posts and schedule them to be published at a certain time. Presently, I’m writing 3 articles a day for Wootness™! and I schedule them to be posted at 6AM, 12 PM and 6PM. Each morning I try to write the 3 articles for the following day.

7:30 AM – Hit the shower – make a pot of coffee, grab some breakfast and head to the office. My office is in the loft of my house and my studio is attached to my house (former 2.5 car garage) so my commute to work is quick.

8AM – Answer those pesky emergency emails and hit the to-do list for a major priority item. My best energy level is in the morning, so this is the time of day when I try to do a major item or two, such as retouching and placing a print order, designing a wedding album or any other project that needs 2-3 hours of steady work.

12PM – Grab lunch (maybe). From 12-4 I have studio sessions scheduled. Most days I’m not booked solid – so I can go back to the office and work on low priority or quick to-do items. Most of my studio appointments last about 1 hour and I usually tack 15 minutes onto the beginning and the end of the session to turn on/off lights, meter my settings, get out sample items I want to show the client and other housekeeping items. Between sessions is the perfect time to do smaller to-do jobs (proofing sessions, uploading client galleries, returning phone calls, updating my accounting program, opening mail, packaging orders & calling client for pickup, etc)

4PM – My husband gets home from work at this point, so I take a break and go back into the living space to spend time with him. Out comes the laptop where I check and return emails as well as do social media updates and finish writing blog posts that I didn’t finish in the early morning hours. You will generally find me on the couch, sitting by my husband and watching the news with one eye. Yes, this is not the picture of “husband and wife quality time,” but it works for us. He’d rather have me sitting beside him than up in my office – and I find the news quite boring, so it gives me something to occupy myself with while he curses the politicians/weather/gas prices.

6PM – this is about the time I officially knock off for the day, although I do have 2 evenings a week where I schedule sessions and classes in the studio. At times I will also use the evening hours to spend time on long-term projects (website updates, pricing brochure design, etc).

So – there you have it – a simple outline for how to organize your day. Now, my schedule may not work for you – as you can see it is geared toward my personal waking/energy schedule as well as the schedule of my husband. Our children are adults and no longer live with us, so I don’t need to worry about kid/school/activity/childcare issues (thank god!). Take your own needs into consideration and make yourself formulate a basic schedule.

And then stick to it!

PS – Did you do the math? That was a 13 hour day with maybe 1 hour at the most taken off for eating and personal care. This is a VERY typical schedule for a sole proprietor photographer. Do some thinking about whether or not this is the kind of schedule you can keep.