Today I'm continuing my series for photographers in which I share tips for organizing and systematizing your workflow. And when I say "workflow," I don't mean it in the narrow sense of post-processing. I mean the entire customer experience and set-up of our businesses. If you're just joining us, click here to find a complete list of the posts in The Workflow Series and get caught up!
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of systematizing. And in Part 5 last month, we talked about the workflow checklist. Today I'm going to share about how we use a common tool that most every office uses, to successfully systematize the tasks on our workflow checklists.
As I shared last month, it's important to have a workflow checklist to make sure you give your clients a consistent customer experience, to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and to make your business scalable. But our workflow checklists are typically filed away in client folders in a drawer in our desk, so how do we make sure we're keeping up with all the tasks listed on them? Some of the tasks surround the wedding day and the days immediately following, so those are easy to manage. But other tasks need to happen 2 months before the wedding, a week before the wedding and a month after the wedding. These tasks aren't prompted by a shoot, a blog post deadline, or another physical event, but they need to be remembered and completed nonetheless. The tool we use to facilitate reminders associated with tasks on our workflow checklist is iCal.
iCal is the calendar program that comes with Apple computers. But any calendar program will suffice. At the top of this post, you can see a screen shot of what our iCal looks like for this month. Sara and I absolutely couldn't live without it. As you can see, we take full advantage of the ability to create categories and color-code them. Blue is weddings, green is personal, red is other business stuff, yellow is my blog plan, orange is birthdays, gray is client anniversaries, black is holidays, and purple is the category we use to denote reminders for tasks that need to be completed -- many related to client workflow.
On our workflow checklist there is a task listed near the top that says "Put reminders on iCal." So when we book a client, Sara has a list of reminders that she puts on iCal in purple that are specific to each client. So "Send Date Night Kit for _______" is put on the calendar 2 months before the wedding; "Email Final Details for _________" is put on iCal a month before the wedding; and so forth. All of these reminders are put on iCal when the client books so we know we will be prompted to take care of these tasks at the necessary time without having to reference the workflow checklists for each client every day. Once Sara completes a task in purple, she types "done" on it, so that way I know the task is complete without having to ask her.
The great thing about iCal is you can set up events on a recurring basis. So we also use our purple reminders to designate other tasks that need to be done on a specific day of the month or week -- like sending in sales tax and following up on client leads. It's pure brilliance! You can also write notes in the event, so we keep track of who is 2nd shooting and assisting for each wedding in the notes section of each wedding event, for instance, so we can access that information quickly without having to take out the client folder.
There are a lot of other programs out there with automated task reminders, but I like iCal because everything is available at a glance in one place. It's easy to use and it syncs across all of my apple devices.
I hope you found this post helpful! To find out about more resources I offer photographers, click here!
Click here to read Part 7 of the series -- Using Signatures for Email Templates.
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of systematizing. And in Part 5 last month, we talked about the workflow checklist. Today I'm going to share about how we use a common tool that most every office uses, to successfully systematize the tasks on our workflow checklists.
As I shared last month, it's important to have a workflow checklist to make sure you give your clients a consistent customer experience, to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and to make your business scalable. But our workflow checklists are typically filed away in client folders in a drawer in our desk, so how do we make sure we're keeping up with all the tasks listed on them? Some of the tasks surround the wedding day and the days immediately following, so those are easy to manage. But other tasks need to happen 2 months before the wedding, a week before the wedding and a month after the wedding. These tasks aren't prompted by a shoot, a blog post deadline, or another physical event, but they need to be remembered and completed nonetheless. The tool we use to facilitate reminders associated with tasks on our workflow checklist is iCal.
iCal is the calendar program that comes with Apple computers. But any calendar program will suffice. At the top of this post, you can see a screen shot of what our iCal looks like for this month. Sara and I absolutely couldn't live without it. As you can see, we take full advantage of the ability to create categories and color-code them. Blue is weddings, green is personal, red is other business stuff, yellow is my blog plan, orange is birthdays, gray is client anniversaries, black is holidays, and purple is the category we use to denote reminders for tasks that need to be completed -- many related to client workflow.
On our workflow checklist there is a task listed near the top that says "Put reminders on iCal." So when we book a client, Sara has a list of reminders that she puts on iCal in purple that are specific to each client. So "Send Date Night Kit for _______" is put on the calendar 2 months before the wedding; "Email Final Details for _________" is put on iCal a month before the wedding; and so forth. All of these reminders are put on iCal when the client books so we know we will be prompted to take care of these tasks at the necessary time without having to reference the workflow checklists for each client every day. Once Sara completes a task in purple, she types "done" on it, so that way I know the task is complete without having to ask her.
The great thing about iCal is you can set up events on a recurring basis. So we also use our purple reminders to designate other tasks that need to be done on a specific day of the month or week -- like sending in sales tax and following up on client leads. It's pure brilliance! You can also write notes in the event, so we keep track of who is 2nd shooting and assisting for each wedding in the notes section of each wedding event, for instance, so we can access that information quickly without having to take out the client folder.
There are a lot of other programs out there with automated task reminders, but I like iCal because everything is available at a glance in one place. It's easy to use and it syncs across all of my apple devices.
I hope you found this post helpful! To find out about more resources I offer photographers, click here!
Click here to read Part 7 of the series -- Using Signatures for Email Templates.
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