I’ve just finished reading “13 Time Management Techniques of Insanely Busy People,” and reading it had me thinking about how fundraisers are now being asked to raise several more million dollars while cutting staff. Here are my five favorite takeaways:
1. Automate decisions, remove distractions, and plan your day tomorrow before going to bed.
This first step is a combination of two of the 13 techniques in the article. Automating decisions makes it easier for you to use that added headspace to solve bigger problems. Here are some suggestions:
- Automate those reports that you use to make fundraising decisions. When you spend time asking for a report or producing it on your own, you lose time you need to cultivate one more prospect. Automated reports that get pushed to your desktop gives you those signals you need right now –just like a dashboard — so you can focus on driving.
- Automate any task that you do once a month or more. Even if this suggestion refers to asking your gift processor for something, automate that by setting a routine reminder for him or her and letting go of the responsibility of asking for it.
- Set up announcements, reminders, and social media to automatically publish at the right time. You do not need to remember to post that social media if you have it set up already.
Next, write down your schedule for tomorrow before you leave the office (your work, home, or travel office) every day. When you know how tomorrow will go, your evening will be restful. Also, knowing a day ahead that you have only one hour to write a proposal allows you to say no to distractions that would eat at that time.
And then keep that schedule: Make it public when you are on a focused task and when people can drop in with questions. Especially if you manage staff, remember to have a set time for drop-ins. It is not a good idea to shut everyone out all day, every day, but it is a very good idea for people around you to know when to let you concentrate. As a side note, you may also find out who among your staff have difficulty honoring a boundary, which becomes a coaching/management opportunity.
Once you have your schedule set, including focus time, remove distractions. I have a habit of clearing my desk entirely in December so I come back from winter break with an entirely clean slate. If I did that every Friday, my productivity would rise.
Don’t be afraid to delegate work, either. You hired talent around you to help you – let them. Removing both visible and internal distractions allows you to finish projects.
2. Track your time, set time constraints, and batch your work.
I once had a colleague tell me that I should set aside Friday afternoons for writing. It was a great idea, except that I wanted always to be available for anyone who needed me. So, very little writing happened. If you are responsible for:
- Making cultivation and solicitation calls
- Writing proposals
- Preparing board meeting content
- Drafting social media and other engagement materials
- Devising speeches
- Setting schedules
Then you absolutely need to set focus time for that. A Writer’s Digest article once noted that a writer gets writing done by doing it in the same place at the same time every day. The concept was cemented in my mind when I visited Ernest Hemingway’s Florida home, where he had a clean upstairs room in his garage with only a typewriter on his table, and he wrote from 6:00 am to 1:00 pm every day.
In addition, Pareto’s 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results – what if you could start and finish a creative project in that 20% time? What is 20% of your workweek? Is that enough time for your most impactful work?
We have to make calls on prospects when they are ready to hear from us, but for creative work, we can set our schedule. I had a professor who did his writing from 6:00 am to 8:00 am so he could get the quiet he needed; I sometimes write or code data science gigs from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm for the same reason.
Along with setting a specific, habitual time for your deepest work, also set a time limit. Parkinson’s Law holds true: Our work expands to meet the time given to it. If you limit your time to what you know you need and do not expect yourself to do other tasks like eat lunch, you will meet your deadlines and feel the full weight of accomplishing the project.
Finally, batching not only works for your gift processor and demographic maintenance staff, but also for you. Batch your solicitation/cultivation meeting calls. Batch your meetings if you can. While your brain is already turned on to finding the right words, batch your writing, including emails. You don’t have to send them right away but you can draft them along with other correspondence while you have a writing frame of mind. In other words, focus on one task at a time.
3. Work around your energy levels and delegate to others work where you are less efficient.
If you are lucky enough to plan most of your days, find out what part of the day is best for you to talk to people, to read, to write, and to travel. If you feel most creative at 10:00 am, then that is your creativity time. If your energy lags in the afternoon, then that is your shallow work time, such as cleaning out your email box, signing documents and letters, or updating your contact reports – any work where you need less creativity to do it. I update my company books between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm to both feel satisfied and to do a less taxing task.
Mind, this time does not substitute for automating tasks. You still need the added head space that a dashboard and push technology bring to you.
Delegating work to others can feel daunting, especially to a new manager. If something goes wrong, it will be your responsibility. But remember that you hired (or inherited) staff whose job is to do work that you will not do, and delegating does not have to feel like you are making other people scrub the floors, so to speak. Instead, remember that you do not have all of the talent necessary to run a fundraising office: No way would I trust an extroverted major gift officer to process gifts. Knowing that will allow you to let people do the work they like to do and are good at, and that allows you the freedom to what you do best, even if it is just getting in front of audiences over and over again. Your audiences may need that.
If you have people who can not do the tasks that they hired on for, then you have a coaching/management opportunity. Don’t skate by it! You need to make your entire shop high functioning.
4. Honor your to-don’t list and track your time.
A to-don’t list can include that work with you loathe, such as ordering the lunch for your staff retreat. Please do not include on this to-don’t list tasks that are your responsibility but are uncomfortable, though, like coaching/managing a difficult staff member. Your to-don’t list should include:
- Work that you end up doing because of lack of staff or underperforming staff
- Work that you do because you miss the old days when you did it
- Micromanaging others who do work that you used to do
- Work that rightly belongs elsewhere in your organization. Especially if you are female, remember to NOT do work that is normally the role of the hostess, such as fetching coffee or taking coats, if your role is to be the host who cultivates and solicits.
Time tracking often feels like a waste of time. As a consultant, I have to track my time for nonprofits who hire me by the hour. When I do, I use Toggl. However, for writing assignments like this, I should also be tracking time. In order to effectively give myself the right amount of time to do a task – and therefore meeting deadlines – I must know how long I take to do something.
Tracking your time shows you where you need to expand your deadlines or start earlier to meet them. If you find that you spend half your week in meetings assuring your upper management that you are indeed doing everything you can to raise money, you can show that time tracking back to upper management to try to regain some of your day. Finally, time tracking helps you understand how to better take care of yourself. If you know that your writing time crosses over your lunch period, add the lunch period in and use it to get a breath of fresh air.
5. Work like you meditate.
Dan Silvestre’s article mentions the Pomodoro Technique: Turn off all distractions for 25 minutes and work on a single task. Then break for five minutes. Make sure that the time is completely uninterrupted work. This is the meditative portion of your day. If you can do it only once before you have to go to meetings, answer questions, etc., then do it every day. You will get a lot done.
When you mix the Pomodoro Technique with the Eisenhower Matrix, you will also get the most important work done. The Eisenhower Matrix puts tasks into quadrants with recommendations, which I marked in red:
- Urgent and important: Do
- Not urgent but important: Schedule
- Urgent and not important: Delegate
- Not urgent and not important: Eliminate
Remember that your primary goal right now is to replace government grants that have been taken away, or gifts that corporations and individuals may not be able to give right now. You can accomplish what is really important using these techniques.
If you’d like to talk about the best possible dashboard that would give you a view of how much money your shop is raising and how it is being raised, email me at marianne@staupell.com.