Scheduling for Creatives

  1. The Everyday Schedule

    • Understanding the daily reality: There are different personality traits like: assertive and direct, enthusiastic and upbeat, compasionate and helpful, and accurate and logical. Can help you shift gears, understand the most efficient way to schedule.
    • How to start the day: The best way to approach your day is with purpose, focus, and openness. Purpose: The point of a schedule is to maximize your effectiveness. Focus: your schedule is there to remind you that you need to get things done. Openness: be ready for changes.
    • Creating a balanced workflow: Take into account all of the things that could come up unnexpectedly: Home life things like family, friends, or days you just want to be yourself; Work related things like talking with a client, meetings or days that you need to come in.
    • Increasing productivity around tight timelines: To increase your productivity before deadlines: 1. Prepare for pitfalls: can prevent an impossible deadline scenario; 2. Be sensitive, 3. Plan ahead. To squeeze more time into your workflow, check if the established day is the due date. If it is then ask the question, "Can the date be pushed back?".
    • Deliver bad news early: Delivering bad news early helps you get the things that are the hardest to do out of the way, and takes care of a few problems too. Here are some common probems: "We are going to miss the deadline", "We made a mistake or a mistake has happened", "We can't get whatever you asked for to work the way you want it to", "We are going to be over-budget", "We can't keep working until you pay your bill". Always have a solution or recommended next steps ready to deliver.
    • How to end the day: Check off the items you have done, and see if you can get any of the easier items checked off before you leave, if not scoot them to tomorrow. If time allows, help any of your other teammates with anything they are struggling with. When done, evaluate your day so you can leave work at work and not take it home with you. Set yourself up for tomorrow by: ordering your list of contacts, list the priority contacts, list the next day projects, check files, and tidy desk.

  2. How to Schedule You

    • Understand when you are most creative: Organize your day depending on what times you are most creative. To see what times you are the most creative, pick a week, prepare to document your day, write down what you have discovered about when ideas flow best and when they don't, start implementing your schedule, and make adjustments if needed
    • Daily habits that help you win: Figuring out your routine will help you understand the workflow of the day, Bost energy, attitude, or creativity. Prioritize your schedule, give yurself a little pep talk, constantly triage your to-do list, allot time to email, meetings, research, and creativity, manage your list, schedule breaks.
    • Signs you need to adjust your process: Signs that you may need to adjust your processes, is by asking this simple question: "Am I able to get my work done?", Use this checklist to help you make sure that you are good to go:
      ✔️ "Do you have a calender with all jobs listed and planned out?"
✔️ "Do you have reguar check-ins on the various jobs and the schedules for each one?"
✔️ "Do you track your time?"
✔️ "Do you hit your deadlines 99 percent of the time? Or are you or your team always working late?"
✔️ "At the end of the job, are you profitable?"
✔️ "Do you dissect projects to see what the commonalities are? If so, do you make adjustments?"

  3. Understanding the Team Schedule

    • Setting the ground rules: Here are the ground rules: 
      1. Remember that you are serving others, not yourself, serve the client, no blinders, get timing expectations
early
2. Make sure team members can access the schedule easily, know teams habits and abilities, pre-project talks,
life stages of team members
3. You need to have frequent scheduled check-ins, twice a week, once a day, or more, regular check-ins are
necessary
4. Plan for the worst

    • Working with easily distracted employees and team members: To find out if some of your team members are distracted easily, ask them what the are distracted by, this will start a discussion about any distractions they have and how to reduce them. A good way to reduce team members from being distracted is by giving them less things to worry about/reducing multitasking.
    • Juggling scheduling, hiring, and profitability: Know how many hours you can handle per week, look at each employee's ability, time you spend on projects, increase budgets if need be, schedule smarter,

  4. How to Manage Client's Timing

    • Understanding your role in the project schedule: When you are the person in charge of a team, you are also the one who has to contact the client about necessary changes or unexpected errors, asking for more time, or anything else that you would need. You would have to outline the parameters from the beginning, ask for details,
    • Bring clients into the schedule: Identify client-side manager and decision makers, understand their process, focus on that relationship, schedule regular check-ins. Make your client feel like part of the team.
    • What to do with the schedule killers: Ask the client these following questions if you encounter someone who is kind of a "schedule killer":
      * What frustrations did they have in the past?
* How were those handled?
* What made projects successful to them from a scheduling standpoint?
* What is the client's ideal form of communication?
* How many times have they been a part of a project like this?

    • It's time to have "the talk" with your client: Before you have "the talk" with your client, think about this: What role have you played in things woking poorly? What really happened to turn things sideways? It is possible to save or repair the relationship with your client.
    • Be calm and give options: When it is time to have "the talk", stay calm and get some other options ready, and have some facts about why certain things aren't working. Never use an email for "the talk". Include next steps, or referral. End with the desire for smooth transition. Try to keep the client relationship.

  5. Some Tools That Can Help

    • The ancient art of having a team conversation:
      Defining meeting rules:
1. Make it a standard that everyone is up to speed
2. Make sure everyone has questions, goals, or outcomes prepared
3. Start with a timeline
4. End with next steps and on a positive note

      There are two types of meetings: Standing Meeting: is a All-Hands-On-Deck meeting, looks at the week ahead, highlights big deadlines, bottlenecks, and time off. Check-in meetings: morning check-ins, kickoff, progressive check-in. Morning Check-ins: You check on everyone's workload, and to-do list, and they identify any questions early. The kickoff meeting: has the team leader, Introduce project, present schedule, and then any questions/missing information. Progressive check-ins: Occurs at various milestones, is kind of a redundancy mechanism, but is helpful to see where everyone is at.
    • How to keep your list organized: There are mainly two types of to-do lists: paper and digital. It also is best to split your list into categories so that it is easier to find the things you need to do.
    • Team tools that will help you dominate the scheduling maze: Here are a few online apps to help you schedule things accordingly: Basecamp, FunctionFox, WorkFront, Trello, Asana, Harvest, Google Drive, Google Calender, Slack,