Do you feel like you're juggling everything and always falling behind?
Then you'll want to listen to this episode where I'm going to be
talking you through time management tips for independent retailers.
Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan.
I'm Catherine Eardley, and this podcast is here to share retail industry
trends, insights, and best practices for you, the retailer who's serious
about building something that lasts.
How do you juggle everything in your retail business?
This was a question that I got asked.
I was out and about on my road trip through Devon, Cornwall, and Dorset,
and I'd stopped into the beautiful town of Shaftesbury in Dorset and visited
the absolutely stunning Fold store and met Karen, who is a podcast listener.
So hi, Karen.
And I asked Karen if she had any suggestions for what she'd like to hear
on the podcast, and she said, "What about how do you actually juggle everything?"
And to be fair to Karen, this is not the first time I've been asked that
question, and for a very good reason.
Independent retailers have their plates absolutely full, and they're all spinning.
The reality is if you run an independent retailer, then you
have to buy stock, plan your range.
You have to reorder stock, chase your suppliers.
You're merchandising your store, doing your windows.
You're working on your online store, maybe dispatching and posting orders.
You've got all of your marketing to think about, from email marketing to social
media, your launches, creating content, customer service, managing your staff
and rotas, bookkeeping, figuring out VAT, looking at your cash flow, as well
as events, pop-ups, or collaborations.
And that's before anything's even gone wrong.
Late deliveries, tech issues, team problems, or a slow week
that just throws everything off.
So the point is that you're not bad at managing your time.
It's just that there is genuinely a lot to do.
So the real question is not really how do I do everything, it's how do
I decide what actually gets my time?
And I'd also like to reassure you, if you're listening to this and
thinking, "This sounds like me," that this is probably the number one issue
that I work with clients one-to-one in my Retail by Design program.
And I have worked with people who have had really, really
tight restrictions on their time.
I've worked with people who've got a couple of hours a day to work on their
business after their kids go to bed, or they have got one day a week when they
can actually not be on the shop floor.
So it is very common for me to come across people who have a lot to do
and not a lot of time to get it done.
When I have someone who comes to me who has this issue, the first thing
that I encourage them to do to really help us understand what is going
on is to actually track their time.
Because the first question in how do I juggle everything is, well,
how long is it all taking you and what are you actually doing anyway?
So I suggest using either a notebook and a pen just to write
down what you're doing and, and what and how long it's taking you.
Or you can use something like a free app called Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, a little
plugin on your browser that you can click start and stop whenever you're
doing tasks so that you can find out exactly how long things are taking you.
And I suggest that you do it for about one or two weeks.
And once you've done that, you should start to build up a bit of a picture.
What are you actually spending time on?
Not what you think you're spending time on.
Where are the time leaks, and where are you switching tasks constantly?
So you might be doing lots of different things, but you're
doing it really inefficiently.
So what you often find is, well, one thing that I find really funny,
is that when people do this time tracking, often what they find is
just the fact that they're tracking their time makes them more focused.
Because when you sit down and you have to click a button that says, " what
are you working on right now?"
And you have to select something, makes you stop and think, "Well, actually,
what am I doing right now?" And so people often find that there's a lot of
procrastination going on, or a lot of procrastination disguised as busy work.
Lots of, "I'll just do it quickly," but it takes far longer, and
then there's often constant interruptions and context switching.
So context switching is where you're sitting there
writing an email, for example.
You're thinking, "Right, I'm gonna work on my email marketing.
I'm gonna send out this email." You start typing away, and then somebody messages
you on Instagram, and you think, "Oh, I better respond to that." So you go
over on Instagram, and then who knows?
Before you know it, maybe you found yourself scrolling and looking at cat
videos, and, uh, 20 minutes has gone past.
And you suddenly realize, "Oh, hang on a minute, I'm supposed to be doing
my email marketing." And then you go back into it, and you have to almost
re-engage your brain to really think about what it was that you were doing.
And that is context switching, and it can be a real time leak.
But do this exercise, track your time, go through it all, because you can't fix
your time if you don't understand it.
So once you've tracked your time, then you can start asking some questions.
What tasks are you doing regularly?
Which ones have a clear beginning and end?
Uh, these can be easier to delegate, so it could be something that you can highlight.
What could I actually hand off?
And then what are the natural time blocks in your day?
And then you also have to factor in real life.
You've got to perhaps walk the dog, do a school run, maybe you
have other caring responsibilities.
Maybe who knows, you want to exercise, or maybe you have to travel to your place
of work, and you need to factor that in.
And you also have all your life admin.
Who knows?
Emptying the dishwasher, prepping food, all of these things take time, and so it's
really helpful and useful to understand how much actual time have you got.
And often, what people find is it's actually less than they thought
in terms of the number of hours.
So when you're trying to fit all of these different things in, it could
just be that you have got a jigsaw puzzle with too many different pieces.
So it's not that you're failing, it's that you've just been working with an
unrealistic expectation of your time.
And if that sounds gloomy, then one thing I will say though, the trade-off
is, is that you may have less blocks of time than you think, but often
you may also be wasting a lot of time because of all this context
switching, which we'll come onto later.
So the third step that I suggest that you do to help you really get to
grips with your time is to then start defining what needs to happen each week.
This is your BAU, or business as usual tasks.
So they could fit into themes as well.
It may be marketing, which could be that you need to create certain
amount of social media content, you need to draft an email newsletter.
You might have to do things like come up with some ideas for
future promotions, for example.
You may also have a money and finance bucket, so things like
checking your cashflow, doing your bookkeeping, or sending information
that your bookkeeper needs.
You may have to look at your taxes or any number of tasks that fit
under that money and finance.
You may have team tasks as well.
That could be team meetings.
It could be rotas.
It could be training people or working on, for example, recruitment.
You may have stock related tasks such as reordering, planning out
your range for an upcoming occasion, or whatever else it might be.
And then you may have operational tasks as well, which could be
anything from cleaning the shop to organizing or whatever else it might
be that falls under that bucket.
So then what you want to do is work out all of these things have to happen.
This is roughly how long they take.
You should have s- a good idea because you've been tracking
your time, and then you can start building a rough weekly structure.
So for example, in my own business, I like a bit of alliteration, I have a
marketing Monday because I've identified the amount of time I need to create social
media content or podcast planning, and then I've worked out the time, the block
of time in the week that works for that.
Batching tasks together, as I mentioned, it can really significantly help reduce
overwhelm, and some people are not a fan of this technique, so it may not work
for you, but it does work for a lot of people because you start then grouping
things together and putting them all together in one particular time zone.
So make sure you give yourself those focused blocks of time.
For example, let's use the marketing example.
You've identified that roughly speaking, you're spending about three
hours a week between lots of different things working on your marketing.
So could you identify then 9:00 till 12:00 on a Monday morning is going to
be when you do your marketing tasks?
This can really help you reduce context switching, which as we touched on, can
really, really slow you down massively because your brain has to do that
reset every time you switch tasks.
So if you've kind of gathered your similar tasks together, it... and put
them into one place, it should really reduce the amount of context switching.
It should also calm down your brain because your brain can see that
there's a time in your week for you to do all of these things that you
have to do Now here's the key thing.
A lot of people will try this, but they end up getting distracted, and that is
because we have developed this theory that we are completely 100% always available
to everyone, whether that's our staff, whether that is our customers, whoever
it might be, we've decided they have to be able to reach us at all times.
And that fact can really significantly damage your ability
to have focused and quiet time.
So alongside the idea of having these time blocks, I would highly suggest
that you do things like pause your inbox, if you've got the opportunity
to do that, where you no longer get new emails in for a certain amount of time.
Put your phone in another room.
remove distractions as much as possible so you can actually get on and do the work.
Some people I've talked to about this, they are absolutely 100% adamant
that they cannot be unreachable.
They have real fear that something's gonna happen, that
No one's gonna be able to contact them, and they feel
really uncomfortable about it.
If that is you, then I would suggest that you get yourself a dumb phone.
You get yourself a specific phone number which is only for emergencies,
and you give that with your, to your team, or you add it to an autoresponder
on your emails saying, "If it's an emergency, call this number."
And that phone exists only for one purpose, to allow you to switch off
all other distractions, but know that there's a way for people to reach you.
Or maybe, who knows, maybe you have a landline and
people can actually call that.
But make sure that there is some way, if you feel really nervous about this and you
just think, "There's no way I can possibly block out all people being able to reach
me for two to three hours," then make...
Set yourself something up that people can get ahold of you, but make sure
they know it's for emergencies only.
And while we're talking about autoresponders as well, I do highly
recommend that, number one, you have a separate email address for your customer
services from your own personal inbox, because that is one thing that really
messes people up, is when they're trying to go through their inbox and
they get customer service as well.
Make sure they're two separate ones, also means it's easier to outsource as
you grow, someone else can handle that.
And secondly, make sure you have an autoresponder on your customer
service that, number one, answers commonly asked questions such as,
"Where is my package?" And as well as making it clear when they will...
can expect a response.
Many people find that they feel much more comfortable letting go of being
always on and always available when they know that their customers have
got information telling them when they can expect a response, and that
it may be 24 hours, for example.
So that can really help you reduce your anxiety about being
able to switch things off.
Because one thing I can tell you is that that is almost impossible to get
focused work done when you have got this fear or this constant need to check your
messages, because you just get distracted and all of that time gets frittered away.
So you don't necessarily need more hours.
This is where the, the good news, bad news comes in to...
when you maybe identify that you've got less time than you think.
You just need more focused ones, 'cause you will be absolutely amazed how much
you can achieve in 20 minutes of focused time without any distractions So once
you have done all of this piece of work, you've worked out what your business as
usual tasks are, how long they're going to take, when you're going to get them
done, then you can start identifying where you might have extra capacity.
Now, for some people, that might not be very often.
For some people, it may be that you have one or two days of extra capacity
a month, and that's absolutely fine.
But just being aware of how much time you've actually got to play
with can be really, really powerful.
You may also want to have blocks of time in the day which
is for more distracted work.
For example, if you know that you can really only concentrate for a couple
of hours first thing in the morning, then do your deep work then, but then
give yourself a couple of hours in the afternoon to answer messages or go
through the kind of work that requires less of a deep focus and can be done
when you're maybe not exactly distracted, but you don't have to be as focused.
So you can break your day up like that, too.
And then on top of that, think about when you might have extra
capacity to work on your projects.
So for example, I can take no credit for this method.
This is something that I have learned working with Andrew
and Pete, who run Atomic.
But basically, I will sit down and I will look at my entire
quarter, upcoming day by day.
I work out what days I've got particular things happening, where I'm traveling,
where I'm away, what my business as usual tasks are, what my weekly
tasks are, what the days that they are that they're going to take up.
And then I work out how many additional days I've got, and therefore, that
can help me really understand how much time I've got to work on additional
projects to move the business forward.
So for example, let's say you've got some bigger projects that have been
kicking around for a really long time.
Maybe it's redoing your website, maybe it's launching a newsletter, maybe
it's developing your own product.
Who knows what it might be?
But you've got something that you've been wanting to tackle that you know
is going to be really beneficial to the business, but you've just got no idea
how you're ever going to get it done.
Do the exercise.
Work out how much time you've got after you've done all
your business as usual tasks.
Don't be disheartened if some week you only have time to do
your business as usual tasks.
That's quite common.
But hopefully, somewhere in the month you might have a couple of days where
you can actually work on those tasks.
So then what you want to do is make sure you've got a task list.
So rather than just saying, "Start my newsletter," actually write down
all of the various different steps.
Because if you sit down with a day and you think, "Right, today I'm gonna start
my newsletter," that's still a lot for your brain to overcome in terms of working
out how to actually get it started.
So instead, break it down into lots of different steps.
Break it down into research different email software.
Then you're going to take a look at how many people you've currently
got subscribed, and then you're going to work out how to get those
imported into the new software.
Whatever it might be, go through all of that so that when you do actually have
time to sit down and work on it, you're not spending that first block of time just
trying to work out what you want to do.
You know exactly, right, task number one.
A task is basically something you can sit down and, and achieve in a certain
amount of time with clear guidelines.
So task number one, I'm gonna look at three different s- email
marketing software, for example.
Or maybe you're thinking about, right, I'd really like to have some
leaflets that I can hand out to people in their bag as they leave the shop.
Okay, so how long is it gonna take you?
Right, I need to do the following four things.
I need to design the leaflet in Canva.
I need to research printers.
I need to send it to print, actually s- place the order, and then I need to get
the proof back from them and approve it.
And then you work out how long each one of those tasks will take, so maybe
it's gonna take you an hour and a half to design the leaflet, an hour to
research printers, half an hour to place the order, half an hour to proof it.
So you've worked out now it's gonna be roughly three and a half, four hours.
It also really helps you be very realistic to do this kind of thing
because that's often the answer why you don't get things done, is 'cause often
these things, it sounds like a quick job, I'll just create some leaflets,
but actually that, we're talking about three and a half to four hours.
And if you're constantly being distracted, then that, also that
three and a half to four hours could stretch out longer and longer.
So work out how much time you've got, work out what you want to get done, and
then work out when you can slot that in.
It's also really useful, one thing that I find when I look forward and look at
a quarter that's coming up, it really helps me protect my time because I realize
how few days I actually have to work on projects, and you may well find the same.
So that if you actually go through all of this and realize, right, I want to
get this done, but I've only actually got this one day to get it done.
It also really helps you focus your mind, or for me personally,
it helps me focus my mind.
When it is that day, I'm like, "Okay, if I don't get this done now, there
isn't another slot for a while, so I've really got to get on with it."
And if I've broken down my tasks so I'm just sitting there doing a
list of things that I know how to do, each one individually, then
that makes it a lot easier and makes it a lot smoother as well.
So you can see what's actually possible.
You can avoid over-committing.
You can protect your time better.
And you can also feel better about how much you're getting
done because it's really clear to you where your time is going.
Another point that I'd like to make is about decision fatigue.
Because just like if yous going to sit down and do a big project,
it can be a lot to try and work out how to get it all done.
Even on your weekly tasks, that can feel like a lot as well.
So don't forget to create checklists for everything that you can think of.
If you've got a weekly task to do for your marketing, then you can
use a checklist that literally goes through all of the different tasks
that you need to do each week.
So each week you're not starting from scratch thinking, "Right, what is it I
need to do this week?" Create repeatable ways of doing things, so a set process
for planning your content, a regular day on your regular day for marketing,
getting that consistent weekly rhythm.
Because the more that you can plan this out, the less that you have to think
about the basics and the more energy you have for the important stuff.
So there is no one perfect way of working.
there are different approaches that work for different people.
Some people like to get up early in the morning and do
things before anyone else is up.
Some people like to have one focused hour at the start of the
day, and that is the extent to, to which they could concentrate.
Some people like to work in short bursts throughout the day in 20 to
25-minute blocks, and some people like to have longer work blocks.
Some people like things like the Pomodoro method where you set a timer
for 20, 25 minutes, and then you take a five-minute break and then repeat.
Some people find that too bitty.
The point is, is that there is no one-size-fits-all.
All there is is tracking, reflecting, adjusting, and repeating so that you
can get a sense of how you work, how you like to work, and also how much
contingency you have to build in.
Because that's the thing.
You can have the most perfectly planned out plan in the world, but
if somebody calls you and tells you that your basement's flooded, then
all of a sudden everything shifts.
So do think about how you can build in some contingency because
there will always be emergencies.
There will always be things that come up that are unexpected.
And if it's all still too much, if you've done all of this and there's still more to
do than there's time available, then the answer is you have to either delegate, if
that's a possibility, you have to simplify or simply stop doing certain things.
So one of the other really big benefits of doing a big time investigation like
this is it helps you identify like, "Well, what can I actually drop and
what is just happening for the sake of it, and what can I just simply no
longer fit in?" You cannot optimize your way out of doing too much forever.
There is a point at which you just have to say, "Well, you
know, time is a finite resource."
So if you've got too much to do and not enough time, you have to figure
out either to stop doing it or have someone else do it for you instead.
So this work, it can feel a bit heavy up front.
And as I said, when we work in retail by design, this is something that we
do together over a number of weeks because we have to learn about how
people are spending their time.
We have to help them shape their time more effectively, and there is a lot
of backwards and forwards that goes on.
So don't feel overwhelmed if you listen to this and think this just feels like a lot.
It can be something that you can do over a period of time.
And it is a time investment up front, but it's also incredibly clarifying
because instead of feeling constantly behind, you can start making really
intentional decisions about your time, and that's where things start
to feel calmer, more structured, and ultimately more profitable.
Thank you so much for listening.
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