May 19th, 2011
This month Andy and Jon talk to Simon McVicar of the PCG about the latest developments on IR35, and how the PCG are attempting to advise the UK’s Government on future reforms. We also get an accountants perspective on how the changes brought about in the Budget will effect the nation’s freelancers from Steve Crouch of Crunch Accounting. This is a long one, so pour yourself a cup of tea.
March 4th, 2011
In this months podcast, we’re looking at how you can promote your services as a creative in the increasingly-populated freelancing marketplace. Andy talks to Scott Belsky of Behance, an online portfolio platform catering specifically to freelancers working in creative fields, about how they can utilise their service to better market their service. He also interviews portrait photographer Andy Deighton about the realities of promotion online.
January 4th, 2011
In this months podcast we’re talking networking, both on- and off-line. First, Andy speaks to Ryan Healy about Network Roulette – an online professional networking solution which helps you build your business network by borrowing from popular self-exposure site Chat Roulette.
We also take a stroll around the new offices of Crunch Accountants, who have been reaping the benefits of the recent explosion in freelance workers in the UK. (more…)
November 18th, 2010
This week in the Freelance Advisor Podcast we’re talking tech – with a man who knows all about tech, Carrypad‘s Steve Paine. Steve is a full-time blogger and mobile computing expert – if you need to get stuff done on-the-go, he’s the man to talk to.
Andy and Jon also lament Darren’s absence, talk tech a bit more, and answer your Twitter questions. Apologies if your question didn’t get answered – we’ll be taking more soon!
October 26th, 2010
26th October 2010
In part two of our Time Management special, Andy continues his conversation with business coach and author of Time Management for Dummies, Clare Evans. They cover the following topics -
Clare: Hello, Andy.
Andy: So let’s go on to number six, which is setting time based boundaries. Tell us how this works.
Clare: Setting boundaries are pretty important for helping you to manage your time more effectively. If you’ve got boundaries around your time them you’re better able to split your home and work life. It’s the simple things of working 9 to 5 Monday to Friday if that’s a pattern that you want to adopt, it could be you’re quite happy to work 7 till 3, three days a week. Set the boundaries around your time both for yourself and your clients so that they know what to expect from you, it’s all around setting boundaries and expectations. Quite a few people, particularly when they run their own business and quite a few of the people I work with, may have to see clients outside of normal working hours because they need to see them in the evenings or weekends – which can be a bit of a danger in that you could end up working every evening. Because your client has said “Can I talk to you on a Monday night and a Wednesday night and Friday nights”. If you keep saying yes or not having your boundaries set, you may want to set your boundaries that you only see clients in an evening two evenings a week or two or three evenings a week max and that you don’t see clients at weekends. If you have those boundaries set, they will work around you and it may be that seeing one on a Saturday morning is something that happens when it’s a good client or when you can’t avoid anything else but if you set the boundaries up front, you know where you are and so do they.
Andy: I think this is quite personal actually because I’ve got this theory that it’s very closely related to your circadian rhythms. I don’t know about you, Clare, but I’m at my best in the mornings, I often flake out in the afternoons and then have a second wind in the evenings. So I will often work in the mornings, I’ll do a short afternoon session, finish early – it’s not sciving off it’s just finishing early – and then do another 2 or 3 hours in the evening like 8 till 10, something like that. What do you think of that?
Clare: If your running your own business, and with freelancers you have some flexibility about your time – that is great – I do much the same, I can have a day off in the week or a morning off, then I’ll fit in the rest of the time. But it’s about not ending up working early every day, and then late every day and not having those boundaries around your time. If you want to have that flexibility of being able to work in the morning, have the afternoon off, particularly if you work from home, there night be other things you want to get done, you might want to get down to the gym, do some exercise, meet friends, and then you work in the evening. If that’s what works for you that’s fine. The danger is that you end up working right the way through so you end up doing a 50-60 hour week – not such a good idea.
Andy: No, definitely not. So it’s the idea of knowing when you should stop I suppose, isn’t it.
Clare: Knowing when you should stop for yourself and also from the client/customer perspective. When they phone you up at 7 o’clock in the evening and expect you to respond, that actually that is not your working time so, no, you’ll talk to them in the morning. Equally, those clients that phone up at five to five on a Friday and say “Oh. I need this done by the end of today”. You know what your boundaries are and they know that you are not going to be working over the weekend, that you don’t work ore the weekend.
Andy: Brilliant. OK. Number seven, this is very similar to number six – physical boundaries. This is all to do with where you work isn’t it?
[04:02] Clare: Yes, it is. It comes into the boundary setting of – particularly from a home working basis, and also out side the home – you have your area which is work, you have your desk if you’re lucky enough to have a separate office environment, then that is were you work. If you’re in that environment, if you’re in your home office you’re working, if you’re outside of your home office you’re not, which can be very useful if you’ve got other people around you at home – of helping them to understand that when mummy or daddy are in the office they are working and not to be disturbed so you don’t get those constant interruptions coming in which you invariably do. The other good one is friends. Friends are very good if they know you work from home that your obviously not really working so it’s fine for them to knock on the door or phone you up and ask for a cup off coffee or invite you out somewhere. So if you’ve got those boundaries set around your time and your physical space then you can protect it. Andy: So am I right in thinking that the physical boundaries are only relevant to people that work at home – would you say or not?
Clare: No. They also apply to people that work in offices and again it’s important with that 9 to 5 Monday to Friday but if your boss expects you to be working until 7 or 8 o’clock in the evening or is going to phone you up at the weekend saying “Well. Where are things? Can you come in?”, that you can turn round and say “No. These are the hours in which I work”, and they shouldn’t be expecting you to step over those boundaries without there being some repercussion or some compensation for that. I think it’s important that you get that clear in your mind about where your boundaries are.
Andy: Like charging double time if it’s weekends and stuff like that?
Clare: Exactly.
Andy: That’s going back to the time boundaries isn’t it.
Clare: Yes, particularly from a client perspective – yes you can work outside of those boundaries but it’s your choice and if your working with clients it maybe something you want to consider that is yes you’ll do that or yes you’ll do that as a rush job. Or you’ll do things last minute but there is an impact and a penalty from their perspective, which will stop them doing it again.
Andy: Which is a wonderful segue into number eight, which is all about learning to say no – which is a huge one – this could be a show in it’s own right I think – how to say no.
Clare: Again, it’s one of those key tips which can make a huge amount of difference to the way you use your time and how other people respect your time – is being able to say no. It does link in quite closely with boundaries actually, if you know what your boundaries are then you can say “no” when people are either stepping over them or expecting you to step outside of them. We’re very good at saying “yes” a lot more readily than we will say “no”. So being able to say “Well no actually I can’t do that” – the classic which we often get a lot is “Have you got a minute?”.
Andy: So how do you tell someone very nicely that you haven’t got a minute?
[07:08] Clare: You say, “No I haven’t got a minute” or “No I’m really busy at the moment” and a useful word to go with that is “because”. “No, I can’t talk to you at the moment”, or “No don’t have a minute because I’m working on X, Y and Z. Can I come and talk to you when I’ve finished? Can I phone you back?”, “I’ll call you back at the end of the day” or “I’ll call you in ten minutes when I’ve finished this”, so you take the ball back and it’s now in your court to decide when you’re going to deal with that. So you can say “No” in a nice way, and there are lots of different ways of doing it, or “Can I get someone else to do that?”, or “so-and-so can do that for you”, or “I’ll talk to you next week”, so you can defer the conversation from where you are at the moment.
Andy: Do you think it’s a cultural thing? Do you think us British people are very bad at saying “No”?
Clare: Yes.
Andy: (Laughter)
Clare: (Laughing) Yes, I think we probably are. The impact it has, is when you keep saying “yes” to things, you end up getting busier and busier, because people say “Can you do this?” and you say “yes”, or “Can you join this group/join this network/sign up for this/sign up for that”, we all say “yes”, and then you end up being really busy. We want to be seen to be helpful, we don’t want to let people down by saying “no”. Whereas what you’re doing is saying “yes” and then letting yourself down or your having to let them down at a later stage because you realise you’ve taken on too much, and then you have to say “no”, whereas if you’d said “no” in the first place, it wouldn’t be an issue. So a good thing to try, for the course of the next week, say “no” a lot more often, and see where that gets you. Another useful deferrer on that is “I don’t have my diary with me at the moment, can I get back to you?”.
Andy: I use that one.
Clare: Yes. Then you can say “no” and it might genuinely be the case. So rather than saying “yes”, then getting back to the office and realising that you’ve already got something booked in at that time, you can defer it genuinely saying you don’t know what your diary is so instead of guessing say “no”, and getting back to them when you do know what you’re doing.
Andy: The power of “No” – which sounds very negative but it is very powerful I’m sure. OK. Number nine is another huge one, there all pretty huge aren’t they. I’ve come across this before, this concept of working on your business, as well as in your business. You do them together at first don’t you?
Clare: You do, particularly when you’re busy and you find that you don’t have enough hours in the day that you’re working in your business on a day to day basis, you’re doing all the things that need to be done. It’s important to take time out every now and then to work on your business. So thinking about the goals side of things where you’re going, what you’re doing, how things want to change, are things going OK, are you moving things in the right direction, what’s working, what’s not. So just taking that time out every now and then. [10:19] Reviewing on a weekly basis is always a good idea, but it maybe that you want to set aside a half a day a month, a full day every quarter to go through that process about “OK. Where am I? What am I doing?”, or if you’re in a small business “Where are we going?”. Think about those goals, think about what’s working what could you change. Some of the delegation aspects can come out of that, “Well actually, there are these things that we’re doing that we could get somebody else to do” or “perhaps we need to look at our marketing side of things”. This is when you can think about the strategy, the number of people I talk to that say “I need to redesign my website” – just thinking this one through myself (laughs) – maybe I need to set some time to actually get it done. It’s the things we need to do for ourself and our own business that tend to get put at the bottom of the list.
Andy: It does remind my of the story of the lumberjack – I promise this isn’t a joke, it’s a morally story – about the lumberjack that walks into the lumberjack yard and says “What’s the record of trees felled in one day”, and he’s told “Oh, it’s five”. So the first day he just chops and chops all day and he gets to four and half and in the evening they say “Oh how did you do?”, “Oh I’ve only got four and a half trees down”. The next day he does the same again and he gets three and a half trees down, and the following day he only gets two and a half trees down and he’s in the canteen in the evening. They all say “How did you do?”, “Oh – only two and half trees”, and then one bright sparks says to him “In those three days did you ever take time out to sharpen your axe?”. It’s very similar to this isn’t it.
Clare: It is, yes. That’s definitely what it’s about. We’re so busy just getting on with it, we’re too busy trying to chop the trees down without realising that we’re loosing that efficiency and not sharpening our axes and that’s about working on your business.
Andy: It also reminds me, Clare of a habit I used to have which I need to get back in to. I used to spend the last hour and a half of every Friday afternoon reviewing my week and planning the next week which falls into this category as well. Do you do that?
Clare: Yes I do. I use a lot a check lists so it makes it quite easy to review my progress, look at what I need to be doing and tick things off. That’s part of the planning process, it’s the plan and review. You get to the end of the day. Did you achieve the things on your list? yes or no. Part of that is, if you’ve got fifty things on your list, which some people do, what realistically can you actually do? That review process is also part of the goal setting and business planning of knowing what you’re doing and how it’s going and where the practicalities are…
Andy: Do you use software, Clare, for this?
Clare: Not as such – is use spreadsheets a lot. They’re things I’ve set up within Excel and Word that I use as documents. I think sometimes we can get very bogged down with technology and software – if it works for you that’s fine if you can find the right utilities but sometime we just need the simplicity of pen and paper to do some of these things.
Andy: At the moment I’m using something called Omnifocus which only works on the Mac, and I’m trying to get to grips with it – I’m not really quite there yet.
Clare: Yes. You find that with quite a lot of things and I know Mac has some great time management tools which Quite a few of my clients use and it’s getting to grips with it and getting it set up as a habit and then using it . A lot of people will try these things and then move onto the next thing, then they’ll find something else and try that for a while then move onto the next thing. So it’s about getting the habits, but find what works for you.
[13:46] Andy: OK lets move onto the tenth and final tip which is another huge one, they’re all huge, which is distractions. How do we reduce distractions? I know the biggest one for me is probably the phone and email. Clare: Hmm. Reducing distractions and interruptions throughout your day is another great way of improving the time that you have available. There was a recent study that was done that worked out that on average we waste about two hours a day on distractions and interruptions.
Andy: Do we really?
Clare: Hmm. Which is quite significant if you think “I haven’t enough hours in the day”, if I could give you two hours, that’s a huge chunk of time that you’re getting back that’s been wasted. So, most of our distraction will come through email, is a big one, phone as you mentioned and people, technology (Internet, social media is another one that’s grown in there). Email – a technique for dealing with that is checking your email only a couple of times a day, once maybe twice a day. More frequently if you need to but in reality you can probably survive checking it twice a day in the morning – not necessarily first thing because the you do end up getting sucked into email and you find the morning’s disappeared. But mid morning so you can do some of the important things first…
Andy: Like planning, goal setting…
Clare: The actual important tasks that you need to done first. They say do the most important task first and it’s out of the way and the rest of the day is plain sailing.
Andy: I think mid morning is a good time to do your first checking of email, about 10:30 or 11 or something like that.
Clare: Yes. Do the planning first thing, or last thing the day before, so you know what it is you need to do. Get some of those tasks done the you’re ready to check emails. Very rarely is there an email that is so urgent it needs to be dealt with there and then.
Andy: Hmm. Now I know me and you, Clare, have been on the receiving end of automated emails from certain people, that say “I only check my email once or twice a day so if it’s urgent phone me”. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Clare: It is. Again, that comes into setting expectations with people. Quite often you get these out of office replies coming back, which I frequently do when I send out my newsletter, and it’s interesting to see how people are managing those out of office messages and what they’re saying in there. These can be quite informative and direct people to the right place. There was one person in particular and it said “I check my email at 2 o’clock. I will get back to you within 24 hours. If you have anything that’s urgent please contact this person. If you need to contact me urgently here’s my mobile number”. So you knew that person was not going to read the email that you’d sent in the morning until 2 o’clock, you also knew that they were going to get back to you within 24 hours, so you knew when to expect a reply.
[16:50] Andy: So he was checking his mail only once a day, interesting.
Clare: Yes, which obviously works for him and actually would work for quite a lot of us out there – it might be a bit scary, but yes.
Andy: I’ll make a note of that actually: I shall start doing that.
Clare: Try it and see.
Andy: Now the other one is the phone. Apart from a pair of garden shears to cut the cable, what would you recommend with phone distractions, how do you deal with those?
Clare: Switch it off is quite a good technique – as long as you remember to switch it back on again. A technique I do with my mobile is to switch it onto silent and then forget to switch it back on again, which is not too much of an issue because I just get voice mails which I can deal with as and when I’m ready to get back to them. Mobile, yes, you can switch them on to silent, you can even switch those off. Another good technique for getting away from everything, particularly phones if you’re in an office where phones are ringing, is to go somewhere else.
Andy: Physically relocate?
Clare: Physically relocate and coffee shops…
Andy: Temporarily presumably – don’t move house.
Clare: (Laughs) It helps if you’re fairly laptop-based and you can pick up you’re office and take it somewhere else with you.
Andy: You see, this is me Clare. The nomadic worker.
Clare: Yes. Which is why I set business up as it is, have laptop, have phone, can work, yes. Go and find a coffee shop to work in, even if it’s a noisy coffee shop, because it’s away from your normal day to day distractions, and even if you work from home so you’re not in an office environment this can be very useful. You don’t have your normal distractions. My favorite place to go and work is the Seattle, down at the marina. It can be really good to just spend 2 or 3 hours in there and I will get so much more work done if I haven’t got all those other distractions around me, at home even if the phone doesn’t ring that often, you just have a more intensive focus on what you’re working on by going somewhere else.
Andy: It’s also like the bursts technique we spoke of earlier isn’t it, it feels a bit like it because you’re in a different place. Maybe it’s because you know you’re only going to be there for a certain amount of time.
Clare: Yes. You don’t have the normal distractions you might have around you – you can switch your mobile off, I also make a point when I’m going to these places, unless I need to, even if they’re WiFi enabled, of not connecting to the Internet.
Andy: Ah. Interesting.
Clare: So you don’t have that added distraction of, “I’ll just go onto social media”, you don’t have the email coming in, you don’t have the Internet distraction as well. You can focus purely on the newsletter I’m writing, the article I’m doing, project I’m putting together where it’s just me, Excel and Word.
[19:36] Andy: You mentioned social media there, Clare. We have to talk about Twitter and Facebook. These must be some of the biggest Internet based distractions we’ve got.
Clare: Yes. Again, that’s about time focus, about thinking about the importance of it. Why am I using it? Is it part of my business plan making me business? And being focused in the time that you’re spending on it. So you go onto it in the morning, you do a few tweets, you’re very focused about what you want to achieve, the sorts of tweets that you’re doing if you’re using Twitter. You might pop in again at lunchtime, which is what I tend to do, I do about 2-3 times throughout the day, unless I’m particularly busy and I might leave it alone completely. Doesn’t happen that often. Then again in the afternoon, evening, which from listening to one of your other podcasts, 4 o’clock is a really good time for posting.
Andy: That’s when America wakes up. They get up very late in America don’t they.
Clare: (Laughing) They do! Very lazy. Another very useful tip is using tools and techniques which enable you to feed from one into the other which again, saves time.
Andy: Well Clare, ten fantastic tips there, thank you so much. Just very quickly where can people learn about you and get hold of your book and things like that?
Clare: They can find out more about me and the book on my website http://www.clareevans.co.uk, and that’s
Clare without an I, so c-l-a-r-e e-v-a-n-s, and you’ll also find my free time audit on there which you can download and check your own time habits and see how those are.
Andy: Definitely worth doing. Clare Evans, thank you very much indeed.
Clare: Thank you, Andy.
(Music)
Andy: So I’m with Darren Fell again, co-founder and MD of Crunch.co.uk, hello Darren.
Darren: Hello, Andy.
Andy: Some fantastic insights there again, and I know that you specifically wanted to talk about your opinion on handling email. What’s your strategy, Darren?
Darren: I actually listened to Clare’s fantastic points and I really loved what she came out with. Could I really check my email twice a day? It does create a bit of a fear. I can almost feel the fear now thinking about not touching it from when I start at 8 o’clock in the morning until 12? Could I do that?
Andy: But you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, Darren. So you’re going to want to respond to things very quickly and follow opportunities up and…
Darren: On that respect, absolutely, I can’t help myself with email but I want to become disciplined, so I want all of the listeners of Freelance Advisor to become equally disciplined. You can do it, you could set up those auto responders to handle it. So you actually tell people exactly wen you’re going to get back to them and if it’s an emergency they can call your mobile – it’s perfectly understandable. Some people get frustrated when they send you an email and they don’t get an instant response – how dare that person to come back to me. Now, my theories on this – and this is built from the GTD approach – and again this is built on Clare’s excellent points – David Allen talks about dividing the email out into folders. One of them is action, one of them could be read, and the other one could be waiting for. So you must not spend more than 2 minutes on any single email, if you’re going to spend more than 2 minutes on it you flip that into the action folder. Which means that when you get to your email – again following Clare’s points – at the 12 o’clock point of the day you go in there and you absolutely rattle through them and maybe you give yourself three quarters of an hour to rattle through them to make sure so you don’t get completely caught up in email. You then have rattled through everything, you’ve got some urgent emails dealt with, and then you go to the action. Now the action folder could contain much longer tasks in there and that could be plugged in for say 3 o’clock in the day – these are almost like project based stuff, someone’s actually asked, they’ve responded finally after six months of you selling your services in there and they want a detailed quote and they’ve put together an email describing what software they need or what project they want to run or what events they want to set up across the country – and that’s going to take time. So you can then set aside – go into the actions and go “Actually that is a project in itself so I’ll allocate between 9 and 11:30 tomorrow morning to go through that”. So actions take longer than 2 minutes and could itself be time-requiring projects in there own right. Anything that you’ve sent mails out to – say asking suppliers for information so you can build a quote or anything you’ve your waiting for information back on that – so simply put it back in your waiting for folder sitting in your IMAP or POP3 and then that’s the thing you can review on a daily basis or review once a week say on a Friday, “Did these people all come back to me?”, rather than it playing on your mind, you’ve got it all neatly in that folder all the people to go back to. “Why didn’t that guy come back to me? Does he not want the business?”, and it’s all listed there for you and you don’t loose it. So waiting for, action and read is just for learning stuff, just to read and keep up with things – get it in that read folder so if you’re on the train to Edinburgh say for example, then you can sit there and go through your read folder and catch up on stuff. [25:20] Andy: Good tip there, Darren. Now I know that you also had a thought on reviewing the day. Have you got a reviewing technique that you use at the end of the day or the end of the week?
Darren: Yes, I really wish I could action it. Every Friday morning when I’m in the office at 8 o’clock, it comes up with the review the week thing and often I’m too caught up. I think I’m going to become, after listening to Clare, more disciplined about looking back at the week, going through the waiting for email folder in more detail. Just going through and making sure everything’s fine. I’ve seen the people who do it effectively, they are calm, collected and very organized so by the time they shut their computer down on Friday at 5:30 or 6 o’clock, they know everything is absolutely rock solid – wouldn’t that be a beautiful feeling.
Andy: They have closure. They have full closure.
Darren: I think that’s a fantastic way – so if you can do it out there, then do it. It really does put you at peace – everything you know is in place, or you know what needs to be chased up for the following week.
Andy: And just very quickly at the end, Darren, can we have another quick chat about software, I know we mentioned it at the end of the last episode and I know that you use Omnifocus. Do you know of other software out there that could help?
Darren: I’m not so good now, I was actually, just before we came in to record this, looking at PC software. Something that’s non platform dependent – so Remember the milk has been reviewed on Freelance Advisor before by a freelancer called Mark, and that I know my marketing manager Tim is using now. That looks a fantastic system, it has an iPhone app, it’s a web based app so it doesn’t matter what system you’re using even Linux, Ubuntu, it doesn’t really matter. So remember the milk looks really good, I understand a lot of people really respect it. So for anybody that’s non Mac, look at remember the milk – I don’t think it’s that much money…
Andy: They have a free version, and it also, if I remember correctly, it integrates with Google Calendar.
Darren: Ah. Fantastic.
Andy: Well, Darren Fell, co-founder and MD of Crunch.co.uk, thank you very much indeed.
Darren: Brilliant. Thanks, Andy.
Podcast 28: Ten top tips for great time management (part 2) [ 28:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
October 12th, 2010
Andy talks to Clare Evans, personal business coach and author of Time Management for Dummies. In part one we cover:
Plus a great round-up from Darren Fell of Crunch.co.uk and some inspiring ‘Getting Things Done’ advice.
Andy: Hello everyone and welcome to episode 27 of Freelance Advisor and I’m sitting here today with Clare Evans, personal business coach and author of Time Management for Dummies – which has also become an audio book as well, Clare?
Clare: It has indeed, yes.
Andy: Read by the author or someone else?
Clare: No. Read by someone else.
Andy: Never mind. Maybe you can do your own version.
Clare: (Laughs) Yes.
Andy: So today’s show it’s ten top tips for time management and we’ll be splitting the show into two halves so we’ll be doing five in this show and five in the part two show.
So Clare, lets talk about the first one which is planning, time management planning.
Clare: Probably my number one tip for anyone that wants to start using their time more effectively is to plan your time. There’s that well known expression “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”, and it really does help, just taking a few minutes each day to plan what it is that you want to get done on a daily basis, and ideally on a weekly basis and monthly basis and building up from there.
Andy: Now what’s the best way to plan, Clare. Do you write things down or…
Clare: Yes, writing things down is always a good thing because then you don’t forget about them, but it’s that five or ten minutes, “What is it I need to get done today?”, and write down your, not necessarily a todo list, but an action list, “What are the things I’m actually going to get done today?”, and don’t overextend yourself. So don’t have fifty million things on your list that you know you’re not going to get done, it could be just two or three things.
Andy: Now I’ve heard this strange word which sounds slightly dodgy to me called chunking. What’s chunking all about? Does it involve someone else?
Clare: (Laughs) Chunking is about splitting your day up into chunks of time and similar tasks. So you divide your day up into the things that you need to get done. So you allocate chunks of time perhaps to email, perhaps to phone calls, writing if you do a certain amount of writing you might want to divide your day up. So rather than doing tasks sporadically throughout the day you can group similar tasks together and that’s what I call chunking.
Andy: And presumably this makes it more efficient because…
Clare: It does, yes. Particularly with things like phone calls. If you get into phone mode you can make a lot of phone calls more efficiently in a short space of time instead of doing them as and when you think about them.
Andy: Now what about diaries, Clare. I know that you use Outlook don’t you and I love Google Calendar.
Clare: I do, yes.
Andy: It’s this idea of having just one calendar or one diary.
Clare: Again, it’s one of the tips that goes with the planning, is having one diary. So rather than having your work diary and your home diary and you might have a personal diary, you might have a family calendar that you all use, is try and have one diary. So all of your appointments whether they’re personal, social, business meetings are all in the one place. That can be paper-based or electronic, obviously a lot of people these days have smart phones and those sync quite nicely up with your computer system so, yep, use that, but if you’re happy with the paper-based one, that’s fine too. But make sure you’ve got one that’s appropriate to what you want to be using it for so it’s big enough to put all your appointments in within the time slots.
Andy: OK. Brilliant.
Now the second thing on my list that I’ve got is a huge one for me, because I’m very bad at it, and that’s goal setting. How do we set goals properly?
Clare: Well, you can go through the classic SMART goals, it’s about the big picture view of what you’re doing and where you’re going. It relates in particular in this situation to having a business plan. So if you don’t know what your business is doing or where it’s going then it’s going to make things much harder from a planning perspective. So setting good goals at the beginning of the year is the traditionally good time to do it and it links in with those new year’s resolutions we’ve all given up by February…
Andy: What? Like going to the gym?
Clare: Yes! Having personal goals and business goals and making them specific so it’s not just a “I want to grow my business”, it’s how much do you want to grow it by, put a figure on it, put some stats on it that you can actually measure it by. And then you can track your progress, you can see how you’re doing. Are you getting the number of clients that you set out to do, are you making the amount of turnover you expected. And put a time boundary around them as well, that can be useful. That’s where the SMART concept comes in, of making it very specific, being able to measure it, being realistic as well, “I want to rule the world by the end of the year” may not be entirely realistic, but you might be able to achieve a certain number of clients or a certain amount of turnover. And make it challenging as well, it doesn’t have to be something you know you can achieve. You can make it challenging, it gives you something to work towards and you can adjust it as you go.
Andy: Now I’m interested in business plans, Clare, because in my view this falls into planning. I hate big, long documents, is it OK to have quite a short business plan?
Clare: It is, and there is a version of a business plan that I work with with clients which is a one page business plan. It’s as simple as that. So it doesn’t have to be that long, complex document with lots of figures and stats and analysis and all sorts of things that you might have given to your bank manager when you first started up. But it is something that has a layout of where you are at the moment, where you would like to be in the next year, two years, five, ten years if you want the longer term plan, and what you’re going to do to take you through that process and to get you from A to B essentially.
Andy: And do you think that a business plan is something that you should be looking at on a regular basis or should you just put it in the drawer and forget about it?
Clare: (Laughs) It’s the one question when I ask people do they have a business plan, if they say yes it’s probably collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. It is what you should be using as part of the planning process on a regular basis so you should be looking at it monthly, every six months, just to see how you’re doing. You include that as part of the planning so that you know that the things you’re doing on a daily basis are part of the bigger picture, they’re part of achieving those goals in the business plan.
Andy: OK. Let’s move onto item three, which another huge one that I’m also very bad at. Delegation. I think we could probably do a whole episode on delegation couldn’t we.
Clare: We could, yes. There are good ways and bad ways of delegating and people are saying “Oh well it takes too long I might as well do it myself”. But delegating I think is one of those key strategies that will potentially double the amount of time that you’ve got. If you can hand over the tasks that are not the best use of your time and your resources then that’s the thing to do. The classic things to delegate, particularly with small businesses, are the book keeping and the admin side of things. the things that you end up doing in an evening at the weekends when you have to because you haven’t got any money coming in because you haven’t sent your invoices out. Get someone else to do those tasks and it leaves you to get on with the work that is core to your business that only you can do.
Andy: What do you think the biggest barrier is to delegation? What’s going through most people’s minds, Clare, when they hear the D-word?
Clare: There is the “Oh, but I can do it better myself”. People want to stay in control so they don’t like delegating. “It will take too long to show someone how to do something, I might as well do it myself”. They may also have very set ways about doing things and some of it is about acknowledging that there is more than one way to skin a cat, that their way may not be the most perfect way. So it’s getting through that and helping to realise that it’s far better use of their time to get somebody else to do their book keeping, somebody else to come in and help with the admin, somebody to send out emails on a regular basis than for them to do it. Particularly if they’re pushed for time and they never have enough hours in the day and they’re in that situation of thinking “Well OK. What are the things I could delegate, I could get somebody else to do?”, and make them part of their business. And it’s getting over that… understanding what can be handed over and then finding ways of handing it over to somebody that’s better able to do that for them.
Andy: Do you think it’s OK not to delegate if you’re at a stage in your business where you’re not working at full capacity so you’ve got a bit of extra time, maybe you haven’t got as much turnover coming in and it’s just cheaper to do it yourself. Do you think that’s OK?
Clare: Yes, that’s fine. If you’ve got the time to do it and you’re happy to do everything yourself then that’s fine, particularly when your starting out in business. There is the finance point of view about “Well, I haven’t got the money to hand it over to somebody else”, but then if you had more time to bring the money in then potentially you would – so you can get into a bit of a catch 22 with that. But if you have the time to do all your invoicing, to do the admin, to keep up with the filing, you don’t need to delegate, there isn’t a requirement to. It’s when you realise that you’ve got too much to do and there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, you want to then potentially look at delegating, outsourcing…
Andy: And it gives you some leverage doesn’t it to actually expand your business effectively.
Clare: It certainly does, yes. You work on what’s core to your business that only you can do and you get somebody else to do that, you can automatically double or treble the time that is being spent on your business without you actually having to do it.
Andy: Brilliant. OK. Well, lets move onto the fourth one, which is prioritising. I prioritised this to the fourth one. I suppose it’s deciding what to do first isn’t it. How does prioritising work, how should we be prioritising?
Clare: Prioritising comes in because essentially, most of us do not have enough hours in the day to do everything that we want to do, therefore you have to think about what’s the most important, or what’s the most urgent. Most of us are dealing with urgent things so you’re probably thinking “Well I really need to get this done because it’s become urgent now”. And the prioritising links in with the planning element and also what your goals and business plan are. Are those five tasks that you’ve got on your list of equal priority? Which one is more important? Which one is going to make a difference to your business? Is it important that you spend two hours doing your email or half an hour on Twitter or is it more important to pick up the phone and call that client or that customer or arrange that meeting? So there will be tasks that are higher and lower priorities and you can look at it and say “Right will I’ll rate them one, two, three or A, B, C. I’ll make sure I’ve the high priority tasks done by the ned of the day”, and not “I’ve ticked of all those little unimportant tasks”. It also comes into rating things as being important and urgent. If you’re always working on urgent things then you need to start working on them when they’re important before they become urgent.
Andy: Yes. Yes.
Clare: So that’s another way of looking at things. I find that with a lot of people, they can be quite reactive. If you’re always reacting to things then you’re likely to be working on urgent rather than the important so try and take that step back and work on the important before it becomes urgent.
Andy: Yes. Because that’s the thing about urgent things, they usually happen quite quickly don’t they. So a bit of forward planning. I supposed it comes into planning as well doesn’t it?
Clare: It does and it can be a bit of a catch up process to start with particularly if you’re locked into that “I’m always dealing with everything because it’s always urgent – I’m always reacting”, so you have to take a step back from that and you can do that at any point and say “OK. Hang on. What is important? What’s urgent? What do I need to get done today?”
Andy: OK. Brilliant.
Lets go on now to number five, which is quite relevant, because we’re about to come to the end of the first show, taking breaks.
Clare: Yes. It can sound like an anathema to say “If you want to use your time more efficiently take more breaks”, but it is very true. A lot of people don’t take enough breaks during the day, they don’t have that five minutes just to recover from what they’re doing before they go onto the next task. The longer you work on something and the more intense that task is, the less efficient you’ll become. Our brains can only concentrate for about 20 minutes at a time so once you’ve gone beyond that you’re effectiveness is going to be dropping off, so that’s a good time to take a break. I’d normally recommend taking a five, ten minute break every hour and a longer break every two to three hours. That might sound like a luxury to a lot of people who aren’t used to doing that, but you will be a lot more productive, a lot more efficient. Because you know you’re only working for an hour you’ll be a lot more focused in the time that you’re working so that links in with having a time limit.
Andy: I was going to ask you about the patented Clare Evans oven timer in the other room technique, could you tell us about that?
Clare: (Laughs) Unfortunately it’s not quite patented but would be a good idea. I think the other room is a good technique actually. If you’ve got a kitchen timer, brilliant things, set it for 30 minutes, if you’re going to check your emails for 30 minutes, or even 15 minutes, and when that timer goes off, then you switch to a different task. The idea of having it in a different room is that it forces you – I’ve got one which is incredibly loud and noisy – if it’s in a different room I have to physically get up which means I’m taking a break because I can then get up and have a stretch and go an make a cup of tea or something. Then you switch to the next task so when you get used to using that technique you’re a lot more focused in the time you’re working on it because you know you’ve only got 30 minutes to do your email, you’re then not going to get distracted by “Oooo, I’ll just have a look at that link”, and then you go off onto the Internet and then you find something else or you spend too much time responding to emails. Emails, again, is probably a whole podcast in it’s own right, there’s so many tips and ideas around how you manage your email…
Andy: Hmm. I think we’re going to talk about that in part two aren’t we. Now I’ve heard this effect that you’ve just described known as the “edge effect” where the brain craves completion and if it knows it’s got a time limit it will tend to work more efficiently on the job. A similar technique that I sometimes use myself – I don’t know what you think of this Clare I’ll run it past you – is you set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and you have a list of things that you do and you cycle through each one for 5 or 10 minutes then cycle through in that way. I find it a good way of moving multiple tasks forward, whereas perhaps they wouldn’t get moved forward before.
Clare: Definitely. That’s the Mark Forster technique – I’ve seen that in…
Andy: (Laughs) Is that where I read it, Mark Froster?
Clare: (Laughing) Quite possibly. Again, particularly if you’re putting things off – which is another whole challenge – is if you know you’re only spending 5 or 10 minutes on it, it’s not as intense as saying you’ve got to spend an hour, two hours on it and you say “Ow. I really can’t do that”. If you know it’s just 5-10 minutes it focuses you, you know it’s only a sort period of time and then you can switch onto the next one. As a technique it’s great, as you say, for moving things on because you can work on several tasks at once.
Andy: Yes. I have to be in the right frame of mind though because sometimes I just need to focus on one thing. I find that technique is especially useful when I’m in a little bit of a quandary, when I’ve got so many things to do I’m not quite sure which one to start on first, they’re all equally urgent. It’s quite good for moving about five separate projects forward quite effectively – as long as it’s the kind of task that you can do for 5 minutes and come away then do another 5 minutes on. Some things like development I find that I have to have long periods of time and I can’t chunk it in that way but other tasks I find I can chunk quite successfully.
Clare: And you also have to be aware that you will have different times of the day when you work more efficiently. Something else I was reading, in fact I was on the radio the other day about, your brain switches between left brain and right brain throughout the day, so if you suddenly find that you’re in a moment when you don’t really feel like concentrating on anything then that 5-10 minute technique is probably really good, whereas sometimes when you really get into something and you’re really passionate about it or really interested in it you can potentially work for a couple of hours on quite happily…
Andy: And time just slips by and you don’t realise that suddenly it’s 7 o’clock in the evening – where did that time go?
Well Clare thank you very much, that will do it for part 1, just very quickly where can people find your book and find out about you?
Clare: They can find out more about me and a lot of the things I’ve spoken about that are in the book, my website is www.clareevans.co.uk, thats Clare without an ‘I’, C-l-a-r-e E-v-a-n-s. You’ll also find there’s a free time audit on there so you can check how good or not your current time habits are.
Andy: Brilliant! Clare Evans, thanks you very much indeed.
(Music)
Andy: Some fantastic insights from Clare there. I’m with Darren Fell, co-founder and managing director of , hello Darren.
Darren: Hello, Andy.
Andy: What you think, Darren? I know that you’re a big fan the Getting Things Done philosophy, what do you think of Clare’s time managements techniques then?
Darren: Clare has come out with such concise and brilliant points, I was listening and scribbling lots of notes of all things I wanted to put in place with my massively hectic schedule. They’re fantastic so I would thoroughly recommend anybody goes out immediately and gets Clare’s book, Time Management for Dummies, really very useful. Another good book to read on top of Clare’s book is David Allen’s, Getting Things Done book, the GTD approach, so if you see GTD out there it’s connected with David Allen’s theories. I read that quite a few years ago and that’s made a massive difference to my business life and handling all the many ideas that are flowing through my head to market the business, selling, partnerships, everything. So that, I think, would be a useful addition in terms of your readership to rally embrace getting things done and time management effectively.
Andy: I know one of the concepts that you like, Darren, that we mentioned just before we started recording was this concept of chunking, and I know that you – this sounds quite rude actually doesn’t it (laughs) – but you’ve an interesting view because it is a little bit like this idea of contexts in the getting things done philosophy isn’t it.
Darren: Exactly. I know we’re going to speak about software in part two, but chunking for me is a contextually lead approach, and that may sound like I’m overcomplicating things. The software I use is Omnifocus which I believe you use as well, so the idea of getting things done is to get everything, I mean literally every idea and thought of a task, out of your head, and I put it into a piece of software, because for me, it has to be a trusted source, a trusted list. So many of us do it on pieces of paper and in reality the brain doesn’t trust that list is ever going to be around – you might loose it. So my Omnifocus goes into my Mac, it then copies through the cloud onto the iPhone, and the onto my old Mac at home, so I know it’s completely trusted. I could be walking down the street and, “Ah, got this brilliant idea”, and I get it out of my head. So the getting things done approach is an addition on top of Clare’s excellent time management techniques. It’s getting all those theories, ideas and great things out of your head, into a list and simply adding a context to it. What’s the first thing I need to do to achieve that task? Is it an email to somebody to ask their thoughts on it? Is it a phone call to a supplier just to see if they can do what your talking about – could be anything. Pay the gas bill – that’s a phone call. So you simply select the context as phone, could be on the Mac, the PC, could be an email, or it could be at home…
Andy: Or out and about – errands.
Darren: Exactly. You got it! So you can then as Clare suggests, she calls it chunking, you simply in your software, Omnifocus for me, you select email, and you’ve got this list of emails, you just go one after another, bang bang bang bang bang, job done. Next thing, I fancy getting on the phone and talking to a few partners or doing a bit of selling, click on the phone context, there’s a list of people I’ve thought about calling up for partnerships, call call call call call – you really get fired up. Absolutely fantastic way of getting things done to fit your mood and energy levels.
Andy: We talked in the interview about business plans. Just finally have you got some views on business plans and time management?
Darren: Yes I think business plans can set a fear of God into most people, they think back to school or business school and it’s a massive 30-40 page document – it doesn’t have to be that for your business. We’ve spoken about before in other podcasts. It’s setting a mission for you as a freelancer or a contractor or a small business. What is the mission you want to achieve? You want to deliver the finest and tightest code in your enterprise Java programming. You want to deliver cheaper and simple Ruby on Rails applications. You want to be a really effective project manager at an effective cost for customers. What’s the overall missions, your values that guide you? And then the goals underneath that are what you want to achieve, it could be monetary, I want to get to a £68k-70k salary or turnover by the end of the year. I want to have one day off a week so I can play golf or go to the gym and see friends so I’m going to compact my time into four days by March 2011. So the goal’s to find the time and when you’re going to achieve the core things to fit in with your overall values and mission to what you do as a freelancer, contractor or small business. So it could be one page.
Andy: Yes. I like the idea of a one page business plan. A 50,000 foot view, or is it the 100,000 foot view of your business.
Well Darren Fell, co-founder and MD of Crunch, thank you very much indeed.
Darren: Brilliant. Thanks, Andy.
Andy: And we’ll have part two of that interview in the next episode.
Podcast 27: Ten top tips for great time management (part 1) [ 24:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
August 31st, 2010
Andy continues his talk with credit control experts Rob Warlow and Adam Home and Darren Fell of Crunch about credit control and debt collection. In today’s show we ask: What should we do if it all starts to go wrong?
Podcast 26: Credit Control and Debt Collection (part 2) [ 26:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
August 19th, 2010
Andy talks to credit control experts Rob Warlow and Adam Home and Darren Fell of Crunch about credit control and debt collection.
Podcast 25: Credit Control and Debt Collection (part 1) [ 27:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
May 27th, 2010
Andy talks to Web and Social Media Developer John O’Nolan and Darren Fell of Crunch about the power of personal branding.
Podcast 24: Personal Branding for Freelancers & Contractors [ 29:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
April 15th, 2010
Andy talks to Darren Fell of Crunch and Sarah Thelwall of MyCake about the value of comparing your own business data with your colleagues and competitors.
Podcast 23: Turning boring business data into brilliant business plans [ 17:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
March 9th, 2010
Crunch MD and Freelance Advisor supporter Darren Fell talks about the steps freelancers should take to ensure a sustained supply of business.
Podcast links: |
February 9th, 2010
Andy speaks to Judy Heminsley, author of Work from Home.
A lively discussion on…
Podcast links: |
December 23rd, 2009
Part 2 of an interview with Barbara J Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job.
Buy the book: Making a Living Without a Job
Freelance Podcast 20: Making a living without a job - part 2 [ 23:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
December 19th, 2009
Part 1 of an interview with Barbara Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job.
Buy the book: Making a Living Without a Job
Making a living without a job - Freelance Advisor Podcast #19 [ 23:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
November 5th, 2009
What would freelance sustainability look like? How can you take your personal business and brand beyond the bottom line into an ethical and sustainable business? We talk to Carl Jeffrey, creative midwife and joiner of dots at FellowCreative and Paul Anderson, Environmental Strategy Consultant at Sustaina. (more…)
Freelance Advisor Podcast 18: The sustainable freelancer [ 23:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
September 25th, 2009
Andy talks to Hannah Keep, author of Fight Back!
Topics include
#17: Fight Back! How to bounce back after rejection or failure [ 16:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
July 1st, 2009
Darren Fell covers the correct steps to setting up your accounting system.
Step 1: Find the good accountant
Step 2: Make sure you like their software
May 4th, 2009
Andy White talks to freelance Art Director and Conceptual Designer, and winner of The Xchange Team Freelancer of the Year award, Anna Cowie. In this interview, Annie gives us some tips and reveals her modus operandi.
Topics covered:
April 6th, 2009
Andy White talks to Drew Griffiths of Mosaic about why companies hire freelancers and what they look for.
Podcast #14: Why we get Employed - the Company Perspective [ 12:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
April 6th, 2009
Andy White talks to Emma Brierley, Director of Xchange Team, about her book, Talent on Tap: Getting the best from Freelancers, Interims and Consultants, and gain some interesting insights into why freelancers get employed from the agency perspective. (more…)
Podcast #13: Why we get Employed - the Recruitment Consultancy Perspective [ 28:32 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
January 28th, 2009
I talk to Steve Crouch about the latest IR35 case, Dragonfly Consultancy. This case highlights some very interesting points that contractors and freelancers need to consider when embarking on client projects. If you want to remain IR35 compliant, this is a must listen.
November 10th, 2008
In the wake of the results of the Kingston University survey on freelancers, we get reactions and opinions from John Kell of the Professional Contractors Group and Nathan Pope of Latitude Hosting and the Brighton Farm.
Topics Covered:
#11: The growth in the Freelancer Marketplace - Fact or Fiction (Part 2) [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
October 10th, 2008
Andy talks to John Brazier of the Professional Contractors Group, Nathan Pope of the Brighton Farm and Darren Fell of Freelance Advisor, about their views of how the freelancing and contracting market is evolving over the next few years.
Whether you are a consultant or contractor, contracting or freelancing, the future could look bright for the independent and self-employed.
#10: The growth in the Freelancer Marketplace - Fact or Fiction [ 26:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
August 13th, 2008
Andy talks to Darren Fell of Freelance Advisor, about some techniques for working out what you should be charging.
July 4th, 2008
Andy talks to Stuart Scott, an successful freelance graphic designer based in Brighton, about what it takes to succeed in the industry.
#8: How to thrive as a Graphic Designer in todays market [ 19:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
June 19th, 2008
Andy talks to Dave Mellors & Malcolm Cook of First Light Associates about the things that need to be done when taking on a new project.
Topics Covered:
May 9th, 2008
Part 2 of an interview with Steve Crouch of SRC Chartered Accountants. Here Steve tells us about the types of expenses freelancers can claim such as those associated with working from home and some more general things to look out for.
Topics Covered:
#6: Five Things you always wanted to ask your accountant - part 2 [ 17:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
April 2nd, 2008
Part one of an interview with Steve Crouch of SRC Chartered Accountants. Steve answers questions on such things as salaries, dividends, section 660, IR35 and VAT.
Topics covered:
#5: Five things you always wanted to ask your accountant - part 1 [ 19:08 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
March 4th, 2008
Andy talks to Paul Silver of The Farm who talks about 5 areas to concentrate on. Get these right, and your freelancing business will get off to a flying start.
#4: Marketing Secrets part 2: Here are 5 things you must do [ 26:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
February 8th, 2008
RA: , an experienced IT support contractor speaks to Andy about some of his self-promotion techniques as a contractor. This is part 1 of a 2 part special series on marketing yourself.
February 8th, 2008
Andy talks to Raju Ajiz, an IT support contractor, about some of the first things you should consider before embarking on freelancing or contracting.
February 5th, 2008
Andy White and Darren Fell set out the aims and upcoming topics in Freelance Advisor podcast series.
