Juggling Like a Pro

Feb 4

Anyone who has been in business a while knows there are many important skills needed: collaboration, communication, a strong work ethic. But what about now? When, for so many of us, our work life has mixed with our home life, how do we juggle and -- this is key -- balance, our work and home lives. How do we manage multiple clients? Competing priorities? Limited time? Here are our tips for juggling like a pro.

Get Organized

Whether you believe it or not, that clutter on your desk is causing clutter in your mind too. And that mental clutter is impacting your ability to focus and get things done. Got papers to file? Emails to respond to? Do them now and get organized, so you can free up headspace for bigger, more strategic work.

Block your Time

For juggling multiple projects or clients, this is KEY. Block (and log) your time spent on them. Think something will take you x hours? Block off the time you need on your calendar to prevent meetings taking up your work time. And track the hours you spend on projects (or clients each week or month) so you know about how long things take you to get done. We use an app called HoursTracker, which works great when you’re just starting out.

Manage your Inbox

We’ve all heard it: Inbox Zero. That magical place we can never really seem to get. Throw in a couple of spam or promotional emails and forget it. But you don’t have to get to true zero to improve your productivity. It just takes some sorting and organizing and suddenly it will feel like spring cleaning. Our tips? Create a system that works for you. Utilize priority symbols (colors, stars, whatever your server offers), folders (“In progress,” “Needs follow up,” “Complete” are good places to start) and the delete button for things you’re done with or that don’t pertain to you. You’re going to feel amazing, we promise!

Use a Project Management System

Whether it’s Asana or Monday or whatever, Project Management is key to making juggling look easy. Create steps, milestones and deadlines for your projects in a project management system (or use your own - it can even be a to do list on a sheet of paper) and you’ll feel so accomplished when you can mark things complete - which will only motivate you to keep going.

Set Boundaries

This may be the toughest ask, but for successful juggling, you need to set boundaries; with your time, your meeting schedule, your availability to pick up new projects. Heck, with yourself. Creating boundaries will allow you to free up time, minimize meetings, and allow you to juggle without feeling like you’ve got fifty balls in the air.

While there’s no rulebook for successful juggling, these are the tips and behaviors we find work best for us. Try them out and let us know how it goes!