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time management

Scheduling Tips to Book Like a Pro

October 15, 2024 by Laura Schreiber

Having a Schedule Matters

As full time, professional voice actors, it can often seem like there is not enough time in the day. I can’t tell you how often my to do list carries over from one day to the next, with priority given to booked work, live sessions, and coaching students. There is always a difference between what has to be done and what can wait, and essential items like booked work typically can never wait. Some might say to higher a VA, but as someone who has never had great luck with a VA, I am always striving to improve my time management skills. Over the years the have improved. My children have also gotten older. The combination has enabled me to improve my scheduling so that I can book more work. Here are some scheduling tips to help you book more work:

Google Calendar

Example ot time-blocked Google Calendar (this is NOT mine)

I switched to google calendar a few years back and this was life changing. This enabled my calendar to sink on all my devices all the time, everyone. It has several features that I love:

  • I love that I can block out chunks of time in different color
  • I love that when I am going somewhere (like a VO conference) I can add locations and ticket attachments as a PDF. For those of us juggling way to many balls this is amazing
  • I love that I can send calendar invites to guests also sharing an event.
  • I love that it integrates seamlessly with other apps like Apollo, Evernote, and Calendly!
  • I love that if an event or task changes it is easy to edit.

Calendly

Calnedly client Dashboard
This is what clients see when they log into Calendly,

Years ago I decided I needed to make my scheduling life easier, and Calendly was the answer to all of my prayers. Are you ever tired of the constant back and forth about when to schedule a zoom and how to accommodate your clients or industry friends? I sure was? Calendly put an instant end to all of that. Different types of calls and zooms are available. I have it as a drop down tab on my website. If someone needs to change a time, no problem, they go back in and reschedule. The best part of all is that this syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar which of course syncs with all my various devices.

Calendly User dashboard
This is what I see as the user when I log in. Notice all the functionality options at the left to set my settings.

Without Calendly, I would almost certainly need a VA to schedule my appointments at this point in my career. I simply do not have time for the back and forth conversations and to coordinate between coaching students and voice over clients. Often peoples’ schedules change. I also do not have time to have repeated conversations about the same session. Calendly makes all of this seamless.

Let’s say you never want to work Thursday afternoons because you have a prior commitment. No problem, so set that up in your availability settings. Perhaps your accountability group meets every Wednesday night. That’s fine too, just block the time. Calendly let’s you make yourself available when you are and carve out the time when you are not and you no longer have to explain it!

Planoly

I confess I have a love/hate relationship with Planoly. Her my many years in business, sometimes I am super focussed on it, sometimes I can’t bear to use it, and I think it simply depends on how much I have to say, how much is happening in my personal life, and how much is happening in the studio. With that caveat aside, Planoly allows you to pre-plan and line up your social media posts on sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.  You can line them up a month (or more, I think) in advance and they will automatically post for you. You can even pre-plan stories, which I find to be mind-blowing.

Planoly Dashboard
This is the planoly dashboard for a user of a free account. You can see content I have uploaded in the past and that nothing is scheduled at the moment.

There are several pros to this. Planoly allows you to sit down in one fell swoop and make sure, in just a few hours, that posts will happen and you will indeed have a social media presence. Whether you do it or a VA does it, it will get done and those posts will go up! You will have a chance to build great branded content and can cleverly weave themes throughout which is quite nice.

There are cons as well with Planoly. Let’s say there is a natural disaster or terrible, tragic event, whether it be in your personal life or on a national scale. But now, you have used Planoly, and regardless of what is going on in the world, you have a post going up at 3:10 PM on all fronts that is all glitter and hearts. This may not be idea. It may go with your brand but yikes, it may be all kinds of wrong. You need to make sure that wherever you are in the world you can stop or block such.a post in the event of an unforeseen emergency.

Paper Lists

Weekly Planner
I am obsessed with this weekly planner!

Yes, I confess, I am still a woman of a certain age and even though I could do it all with Google tasks and phone apps, there is something about having a paper list and seeing it in front of me. I confess I use several different paper items because I love them so much. I use a paper weekly planner for on-going brain storming so my ideas don’t get lost, I use 3 x 5 cards because I love the size and feel, and I use paper “to do” lists because a girl who has a love of lists can never have too many lists. I’m not kidding, I actually love the paper products and I make no apologies for it.

Hiccups

Nothing is perfect. In VO, a lot of my work books very last minute. Many of my commercials which require Source Connect sessions come in same day and then require that something be moved. It just happens. The other problem is that I am, at the end of the day a human and a working mom and I mess up. Sometimes I schedule everything I’m doing on google for the 1st of the month and then nothing gets blocked an I am double booked. That really stinks. Try not to do that! It is apparently google’s default. I also apparently often put actual religious holidays on the wrong day. I am Jewish and observe a lot of holidays, especially in the fall. We actually go to synagogue, so I cannot take bookings those days, and this year I accidentally left the second day of Rosh Hashanah open. Oops! Basically, you can make mistakes with all of this and the only way to catch it is to inconvenience people and it is very, very annoying. Some people will be kind and others will make snide remarks.

Lessons

A GoalOver the years I have learned that trying things and learning from other industry friends is generally a help! Be adventurous, test things out, and see what works for you! You will have opinions and will like some things and really dislike other things, but you won’t know until you try.

Filed Under: Business Management, Client Relationships, Coaching, Marketing/Branding, Voiceover Tagged With: calendly, challenges, google calendar, plainly, Schedule, time, time management, voice actor, voice over, voiceover, voiceover actor

Managing a Weeks Work of Voice Over Bookings in One Day

November 24, 2019 by Laura Schreiber

The Ups and Downs of VO Bookings

When I started out in voice over years ago, I was told that the ups and downs of the industry are can be described as “feast or famine.” I was cautioned to always set money aside for the slow times, and I always thought about the ebb and flow in terms of the finances. The flaw in this thinking, sound though it may seem, is that when the feast comes, and the voiceover g-ds shine down, it’s not the money that we have to worry about, it’s having enough hours in a single day as a working solopreneur to get the work to our clients in a timely manor. In fact, it’s more that that. Here are some issues that come up when the work suddenly pours in at once as it often does:

  • What needs to be done first?
  • Will you actually be able to meet all of your deadlines?
  • Will your voice hold up? If your voice fatigues, is there a natural order that makes sense so that your more youthful sounding work is recorded first. This is likely not the order in which the work was sent to you as life is never that simple!
  • Do you have family responsibilities that you can delegate? Did you have to help a child with a project? Were you supposed to pick someone up from a soccer game that is now impossible?
  • Did you have any client calls scheduled that can be reshuffled?
  • This should get you thinking about how the unexpected is, well, unexpected and you never really know what the day will bring. Planning only gets you so far.

I Never Really Know What’s Coming

Sometimes I have clients tell me with excitement about a great project that never comes. Sometimes without any warning I get a huge eLearning job that may have 20 minutes of finished audio and of course needs to be done as soon as possible. No heads up, no phone call, it’s just there. Yay, except I then have to reshuffle. Sometimes I get the email asking my availability because a script is coming my way “that day.” And of course when they get it to me they need it right away. Even when they tell me it’s coming, often the final script doesn’t come right away. This happened this week. I heard a script was coming Tuesday. I waited much of the day, glued to my desk. It came around 4 pm. It’s not their fault mind you, if the person sending it knew when it was coming, they would tell you. They have as much control as you do: none. So, we don’t know and life is hard to plan. It’s a great job for a type A person!

Not Just by Financial Goals, But actually A Crazy Amount of Time in the Booth

So, again, there is a difference between meeting your financial goal and a ton of working flooding in on a given day. I am talking about the latter, which makes the former possible, and is an entirely different ball of wax. Sometimes days go by with little work, and then all of the sudden, you might face the scenario that I faced on Wednesday, when as much work as I typically do in an entire week came in one day. I have a system when work comes in which involves entering the job into my CRM, carefully reviewing the script, preparing the invoice, recording the work, and then preparing a thoughtful delivery email, and that system is great when I have unlimited time.

But most of us in voiceover also have families. On Wednesday it happened to be my husband’s 46th birthday. My daughter Emma, 16, also happened to have an orthodontist appointment at 6 pm in a town about 20 minutes away. I had planned that we would go out for dinner that evening at the mall after the appointment. My kids also had Scarlet Letter essays due in English the next day and a History test, so I told them that when we got home I would help with both. I had not planned to be in my booth after dinner, working on of all things a Halloween spot (I can’t even… It’s November…)

So the work came pouring in. I was delighted. I was working as thoroughly as I could to do a beautiful job and get it done promptly so that I was not editing audio from an orthodontist’s waiting room. I finished with moments to spare, but I was far from calm and the horror from my Halloween script seemed to be bleeding out into real life. I felt working mom/wife guilt for my poor husband as his gift was not wrapped and did not even make it into the car when we were meeting for dinner. Again, I did not see this influx coming.

What I would Have Done in Hind Sight If I Saw it Coming..

So, on Friday it occurred to me that I should have had an outside editor who I have worked with in the past edit the eLearning work. Neither of those two jobs had an NDA and I could have outsourced. I honestly did not think of it in the moment because I did not know that the other work was coming. Outsourcing is really important for professional voice over actors. There is only one person who can be in the booth recording. What can be outsourced to lighted our load:

  • editing
  • marketing
  • social media
  • cold calling
  • follow ups/responses
  • lead/prospect development
  • website maintenance
  • SEO

Essentially anything that does not involve your voice can be outsourced. No one ever had an empire of one, and as you get busier it is really important. Another thing I should have done differently is given myself permission to hold some of the work until Friday. The fist job of the day, a PBS spot, actually was not on a time crunch. It may have come in first, but the client was not in a rush to get the audio back. I should have sent an upbeat email for the two commercials and let them know they would be delivered the next day.

Next, I often prepare dinner on my lunch break. Even though it was Harlan’s birthday, we should not have gone out to eat that night. It was frankly too much. We had already gone out twice the weekend before for his birthday, so this was unnecessary. In December I am doing a crockpot challenge! I cannot tell you how excited I am for this. I follow the Budget Mom on Social media and I think she is brilliant. My hope is that in having dinner ready to go in my crockpot several nights a week, I will both stay on budget and alleviate stress on these busy nights.

Final Thought

Everyone should prepare financially for our famine periods, but we need to plan mentally and emotionally for both the famines and the feasts. If we do not have supports in place in our personal lives we will not succeed as working creatives. I am blessed, I have a husband who gets it. We started discussing dinner for Monday night yesterday, Saturday, because I have to be on location much of the day Monday in Philly and the family still needs to eat. We, my husband and I, planned ahead. But a lot of people have to do it alone either because they are single or because their partner doesn’t get it. If your partner doesn’t get it, find friends who do get it and let them help you strategize, because the one thing I will tell you is that on your best days and on your worst you need people to get you through! And in case you are wondering, Monday night we will be eating chicken drumsticks and sweet potatoes. This momtrepreneur keeps it simple.

Filed Under: Voiceover Tagged With: bookings, flow, goals, making clients happy, momtrepreneur, outsourcing, planning, solopreneur, the new norm, time management, VO, voice over, voiceover

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