I woke up this morning to over 2,000 emails in my inbox. This is a few day’s worth, actually. I only answered the most pressing stuff from the past few days. I think it would take the better part of the day to go through all the mail coming in and handle other tasks. That’s why I’ve decided to implement a weekly administrative day.
I hear what you’re saying, I’m busy too. So busy, a monthly administrative day is no longer adequate. This week I’ve been working with a schedule that’s going so well, I can take Sunday and make it an administrative day. At this stage in my career it’s a necessity.
Let me explain…
- Email: My email is totally out of control. I know there are people waiting for me to respond to their emails just as I know there’s mail I haven’t gotten to yet. I need a few hours at a time to sort through it all and respond.
- Product Reviews: I receive products to review on a daily basis. These are all piling up in my office. On administrative day, I can at least go through some of the stuff and schedule the reviews on my editorial calendar. Which brings me to…
- Editorial Calendar – I already take one day each week to plan my blogging. I have a large wall calendar and once a week I write in daily topics for all my blogs. With over a dozen blogs, an editorial calendar helps to keep things flowing.
- Comments – I like to respond to the comments on my blogs. Administrative day is a good day to catch up.
- Accounting – We should all go through the books on a weekly basis to make sure we’re being paid in a timely manner, and send a gentle reminder to clients who strayed from the schedule.
- Feeds - I subscribe to over 300 RSS feeds. It would be nice to be able to take a day to catch up on them all.
- Bookmarks - I don’t even want to tell you about my bookmarks. It’s embarrassing really.
- Stats – I check my stats each day. Several times a day, in fact. What I’d really like to do is set aside some time each week to truly analyze my traffic.
- Revenue - The problem with being so busy is that I don’t have the time I need to really explore revenue possibilities for the blogs i own.
- Office Clean Up – My family would thank me if I worked a simple office organization into administrative day. By the end of the week press releases, product sheets and personal notes litter the area.
As you can see, I need at least one day each week to go through everything from email to bookmarks. To let it go is only asking for a bigger headache further down the line. Plus I want to look into other things. I want to learn more about the technical aspects of blogging and using video in my blogs, for instance. When else would I have time for this? Maybe I need a whole weekend…
Do you have an administrative day? What takes do you complete these days?
What about time to train yourself on something new so that you can keep up? I always find that there’s something I need to learn, but maybe no one wants to pay me to learn it.
In theory I’d like to have an admin day. In reality, I don’t have time, although, at this point it is a necessity for me as well. I think this is part of the whole know when to say no issue you recently posted on. I just quit a job, well most of a job (which you knew), but it will free me up some massive time. You have to let go when the admin tasks start slipping.
@dh many of the better networks do implement training, just not paid training. I think the nice thing about blogging, is that the training never feels like work, I love to learn new ideas about blogging. But, it would be cool to get paid. I suppose the perk here is that if you do spend some time each month learning new blog tactics, your skills and eventually pay increases.
@dh – The thing about freelancing is that you have to learn everything on your own time – which isn’t a problem when you have the time.
Monday mornings are my “admin time.” I try to plan for the work week and kind of re-calibrate myself. I agree, once a month is not enough for many people.