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
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
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.
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.
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
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
Over 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.
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:
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.
