Increase Your Productivity By Working In Themes

Are you a solo-preneur? If so, you know exactly how many hats you need to wear each day to accomplish everything on your list.

And while you probably manage to get most of the important things done each week, I’m sure there are always a ton of items left at the end of the week – the things you keep moving from list to list each week, hoping to get to them eventually.

While you are probably getting a ton of things done, are they the right things?

For instance, lets say you really love production. You love editing your images, printing them out, placing them in albums, and framing them for your customers. Yet you hate marketing, and frankly don’t really understand all the different pieces you should be doing to put an effective marketing plan into place.

You may be able to check off all of your production work each week with flying colors. Yet the marketing tasks keep moving week after week without the “check”. And the more you push marketing aside, the greater chance you have of seeing your business fail.

There is a way of stopping that trend in its tracks. Develop your own internal theme days.

In this case, the definition of “theme” is: to give a particular setting or ambiance to. Which means you are defining a certain aspect of your business by a special topic. The best thing is you can use “themes” in so many ways, and in every way it will make you a more efficient person. Let me show you how.

Start With The Days Of The Week

How do you approach your workweek? Do you take what’s thrown at you, reacting as you go? Or do you make solid plans?

One way to be more affective is to plan out each day in advance to guarantee you find the time to work on everything.

Monday – New Projects
Tuesday – Marketing
Wednesday – Production
Thursday – Management
Friday – Customer Service
Saturday – Planning/Strategy
Sunday – Off

By theming each day, you are dedicating time to specific projects that can help you move your business forward. For instance, if Monday is New Projects day, each Monday you are required to spend time brainstorming new ideas for future projects and solidifying parameters on ideas you’ve come up with in the past. You must find a way to take ideas from concept to fruition, whatever the final outcome may be.

Scheduling Each Day

As a small business owner, theme days may seem difficult. With so much to do, how can you dedicate one day to one thing? In that case, start smaller. Schedule timeframes each day to specific items:

6am-8am – Work online with social sites and creating a blog post
8am-10am – Office work
10am-3pm – Shooting time – Meeting with clients
3pm-5pm – Office work
8pm-9pm – Strategy/Planning – creating to-do lists

While you may need to adjust the schedule due to special circumstances, once your schedule is in place, attempt to stick with it whenever possible.

Working Towards A Common Goal

You can also use the theme concept to put all of your focus on bringing in a certain type of business.

Lets say you determine March to be Wedding Month. Every day in March, you must put your focus on working towards building your wedding business. You create blog posts on weddings. You can create a new brochure for your potential wedding clients. You can find and network at wedding related events. You can put together sample albums to share with your favorite venues.

By putting all of your focus on one specific niche in your business, you are more likely to see a spike in your business performance simply because you focus your attention on it day in and day out. It opens your eyes up to more availability because you are more aware of what is available to you.

“There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.”
Alexander Woollcott

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clientexperience@todaysgrowthconsultant.com' About Virtual Photography

We're the co-founders of VirtualPhotographyStudio.com and have been writing on this blog since 2004. We started Virtual as a way to help photographers stretch beyond a part time income, and develop strategies to become a Five Figure Photographer or a Six Figure Photographer. Ultimately its all about lifestyle, and if your goal is to live as a photographer 24/7, we think you should have the knowledge and the tools to do so. Welcome!