As someone who specializes in mentoring people to achieve greater work-life balance and become more productive, I want to get out my pointy shoes and declare loudly – stop the insanity; booking appointments by multiple modalities is a surefire way to stress you out.

 

Consider this for a moment:

* The average American spends 23 hours per week texting. (USA Today)

* The average user spends 40 minutes per day on Facebook. (Mark Zuckerberg)

* You probably are not getting all of your Facebook messages thanks to the feature that automatically sorts things to a spam filter of sort.

* Your texts may be getting lost in the shuffle.

If you want to run around wasting time, missing appointments, and being disorganized, stop reading right now.

If you want to clean up your communication, start acting more professional, and creating a legitimate log of your business activities, read on.

A few years ago, I politely informed people that the only way to book time with me was via email.

My calendar is Outlook and although it is synched to my phone, I have no desire to go from a text message to checking my calendar when instead, if the request comes via email, I can send a link to my schedule via Schedule Once.

By not taking requests for time via social media, or text, my schedule was centralized. This was a huge leap in productivity.

Tim Ferris, guru of the 4-Hour Work Week, recently commanded that people should schedule via email.

I am a fan of Mr. Ferriss, and as someone who teaches productivity and yet has five, yup – five kids in tow, I have a unique perspective.

With two businesses, and a host of things going on, I do not have the time to be checking Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, and my texts, to see who wants to schedule time.

I do have time to centralize booking and keep my schedule to one modality – email!

How much time are you wasting by sorting through texts, social media messages, and emails?

I estimate that the mere task of looking at a FB message or text, going back and forth, and then having to check a calendar is wasting easily up to ten minutes per transaction.

If you book six appointments per week then you have wasted an hour that you could have used to have a massage, workout, play with your kids, or even nap!

I was mentoring a young entrepreneur who was working seven days per week even though I told him that he would never maintain that pace.

He was exhausted, rundown, and stressed.

By simply letting people know that all of his calendaring was going to be done via email, he ended up saving time.

At first, he had to ‘train’ people that this was going to be his primary mode of appointment booking however in a short time, he began gaining a few extra hours per week.

If you have an assistant, you can do what I do, which is go into Schedule Once, choose the availability I want, and have your assistant reply to the email requests for time.

They send a link, the client chooses what is best for them, and it populates your Outlook, ICal, or Google Cal.

It is that simple.

My goal for you is that you become more productive so that you can truly live into a higher degree of work-life balance.

Get off the crazy train of allowing people to run your schedule, take back control, and reclaim your sanity.