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Saturday, February 05, 2011

The Business Chat - Calendars

Continuing on with my current mania for organization this week I ripped the first month off my 2011 calendar. This isn’t just any old calendar, this is my spiffy new Business Calendar (it deserves capital letters).

I keep to-do lists, but until now I didn’t have a business calendar. I’m talking about a different kind of calendar– I mean a seasonal schedule, something to remind me in July to get busy on designing my Christmas line. A reminder in October to order mailing supplies for the holiday rush would be helpful. I also included my schedule for sending email newsletters. If I were better organized I’d also put in an editorial schedule for my blog (next year).

At the beginning of the year I updated my business plan and goals. As always those files are sitting on my computer and every couple of months I look at them. This year I’m trying something new, they’re going on my new Business Calendar. I have a lovely large paper calendar on my desk (18” x 24”, can’t miss it) and I wrote all my major goals on the calendar. Now they have actual dates associated with them. For each of my goals I also broke down the steps to reaching them and then gave those steps dates as well. Those dates also went onto the calendar. Boy that calendar filled up fast!

The format of your business calendar could be a spreadsheet or to-do lists for each month or season. Reminders in your electronic calendar would be handy. I do like the look of my lovely hard copy calendar, in fact next year I think I’ll print out my own calendar with images of my jewelry on it. Hm, a new product? I’ll add that on to the calendar for production dates.

Do it. Make a calendar for your business. What tasks are you adding to your business calendar?

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