Running a travel business is not easy..
You wear all the hats – from marketing to itinerary planning, to client calls, and #ugh bookkeeping! You got into this business for the freedom and flexibility, but you feel like you are spending ALL of your time spinning your wheels.
Each minute of every day seems filled, yet there is always more to do.
Assess Your Priorities
Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule? According to my good friend google “The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is an aphorism which asserts that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes for any given event.” In business this is typically used to say that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your effort. If you can identify the 20% of tasks that are actually money generating and spend 80% of your time working on those tasks then you can grow your business exponentially.
A great exercise that Penny loves is tracking your time.
Have you ever gone to social media to check on “just one little thing” and then ½ hour later you look around and think to yourself, “What am I supposed to be doing?” You log out of Facebook, which takes you back to one of the 25 open tabs on your workspace and immediately see what triggered you to go to FB to begin with… so you log back in…
No? Just me?
Social media wasn’t the only thing that was sucking my productive time away. Too many open tabs, a messy desk, the ding-ding of incoming emails, all of these distractions had the potential of turning a 15 minute project into a 45 minute one in the blink of an eye.
I was determined to find a better way to manage my time.
Set Boundaries
You may not like to hear this, but you do NOT need to respond to every email with a quote request or client question within minutes of receiving it. You are in control of your time. You get to decide what you do or don’t do with it.
Christina only checks and responds to emails three times a day at 9:00am, 12:30pm and 4:00pm so her dedicated marketing or content development time is not interrupted by notifications and pop ups. When I sign a new client I set the expectation up front that I will respond within 24 hours. They know I do not “work” on Tuesdays or Sundays.
When someone submits a quote request they receive an auto-response with what the current turnaround time is, if that does not work for them then they were not meant to be a client.
Block Your Time
Time blocking is a time management strategy where you schedule out every part—and we mean every part—of your day. With time blocking, you’re effectively breaking the work week into bite-sized time slots where you check your email, work on projects, take a break, or even exercise.
As you get started with time blocking, think of each block as an uninterrupted chunk of work where you can tackle critical projects and get into deep work.
Batch Your Work
The average time spent on a task before losing focus is only 1 minute 15 seconds. And here’s the thing… we’re not REALLY multitasking. We are just switching our mind back and forth rapidly from one task to another, not giving either task our full attention.
Batch-working is dividing your workflow into different days/hours of ONE TOPIC instead of jumping around from task to task. Group your tasks by function and/or objective, and then assign each to a set window of time. Enter your batched tasks into a calendar or scheduling tool so you have a visual representation of how you’ll spend your time during the week, day by day and turn off notifications.
Automate Your Process
By automating certain tasks you can:
- Anticipate traveler questions before they come up and keep you from answering the same things over and over again
- Solidify your value with travelers so they will pay your service fee without a second thought
- Spend less time working on each trip, so you can focus on other areas of your business
- Free up capacity, so you can book more travelers and make more money
- Generate glowing reviews and referrals from travelers who will never book direct again
- Allow you to stop working 24/7 and actually get freedom from your business which is why you decided to do this in the first place.
Wondering where to start? CLICK HERE for 6 Workflow Automations that you should automate.
