Why You Need Scheduling in Business Operations and Pro Tips.

So many business owners and young professionals are losing sleep due to the number of tasks they need to do, upcoming meetings, deadlines, and demo sessions. If you are one of those who find it difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance or you keep missing out on important events at work and in your personal life, you need to pay more attention to the act of scheduling. 

Why is Scheduling in Business Operations so Essential?

Productivity experts are of the opinion that scheduling in business operations go a long way to impact one’s productivity. It’s very important to be able to look ahead at your schedule and get a vivid picture of what your day will look like. Scheduling helps busy professionals prioritize key tasks, perform efficiently, and prove to clients that they are important to your business. 

Another important thing is knowing which task to outsource rather than piling it up in your to-do list. Now you’ll be able to focus on the things that bring real results for your business rather than getting distracted by several other things. Using digital scheduling tools automates the entire scheduling process depending on how you’ve set it up. You’ll only need to do a few things manually. This means you don’t have to store up your daily activities in your head or beat yourself up for missing out on any of them.

Pro Tips for Getting Started with Scheduling

Scheduling isn’t something you do once and for all in your business. It is a continuous act, one you need to do properly and intentionally. If you’ve read this article to this point, I believe you are ready to take this aspect of your business more seriously. Here are some pro tips for you.

Understand the Nature of Your Business

For starters, the nature of your business will determine how you plan and schedule things. For example, the way we schedule at Big Field Digital will be different from the way people selling products will do theirs (especially when it involves customers placing orders and organising deliveries). Also, your schedule will depend on your role in the organisation and the tasks assigned to you. For service-oriented businesses where prospects send in briefs and request for discovery meetings or consultation, you’ll need to determine what hours of the day you’ve dedicated for such interactions. 

Select Scheduling Software

Times are changing, gone are the days when business processes were done manually. With the popularization of digital technologies, so many SaaS companies have done well by creating scheduling software for use by individuals, teams, and the likes. Interestingly, many of those platforms are available for free or can be purchased for a small fee. Sometime back, I came across a brand’s website and on their booking page, there’s was a calendar that showed the already booked date/time slots and the available ones. There was also a note below which informed people that they only have 5 meeting slots per day. The entire thing looked very organised and made them in control of their schedule. This is what many fast-paced organisations do, or else, they’ll burn out if they have to manually schedule those appointments. 

With scheduling software, you can input the activity, its time, when you should be notified about the upcoming activity and other information. Some of the common digital scheduling tools you can maximise for free as a small business owner include Google Calendar, Setmore, HubSpot, Rallly, Bookafy, Woven, Doodle, Calendly, AppointmentThing, Appointlet, and more. If you have a budget and want to explore paid scheduling tools for better and more flexible features, you can explore Chili Piper, MeetFox, Cogsworth, Pick, etc.

Review Schedule

From time to time, you need to take a moment to review your schedule. Adjust things based on your priority or how urgent they are.

As a tailor, you just got an order to make two dresses for a soon-to-be bride. One is for her bridal shower while the other is her wedding gown, and both of them must be ready for delivery in the next two weeks. Mind you, you have other customers who gave you their dresses before the bride did and those who will bring theirs while you are in the middle of making those dresses. How do you plan accordingly to ensure you don’t disappoint any of your customers and still deliver beautiful dresses within the timeframe? In this scenario, scheduling in business operations places a huge role. You’ll need to keep reviewing your schedule often to ensure you do things based on priority, urgency, or the complexity involved in production/execution.

Evaluate Effectiveness 

It’s not enough to just set and review plans. You must by all means evaluate how effective it is. After using a scheduling software for, let’s say, a month or two, you should be able to determine if it has helped you boost your productivity and what other areas in your life you need to prioritise time management. If you aren’t so satisfied with the tool you are using, performing an evaluation will help you discover the lapses, then you can find an alternative tool. Note that free scheduling software have their limitations. So if you have more scheduling needs, you should create a budget that accommodates a premium tool.

Encourage Your Team Members to Schedule

Scheduling gets even better when you do it with all members of your team. If everyone learns to perform their duties at the right time and meet set deadlines, it’s a plus for your company. Remember, if you’ll win as a team, it means everybody involved is working constantly to achieve set goals.

A while back we gave out some survival tips for small business owners, we believe that in addition to all we mentioned in that article, cultivating the habit of scheduling and prioritizing activities will help you deliver high-quality projects. Apart from that, you’ll have more time to do personal activities without feeling super exhausted. We hope this article gave you an opportunity to reconsider the act of rescheduling. If it did, be kind enough to share it with your community.