Here we are, almost at the end of the first month of 2011. How is it going so far for you?

I’ve been working harder than ever, really pumping out the content and communicating with prospects. At the same time, we also freed up a lot of time. Hmm… how do you work harder than ever and still free up your time?

Outsourcing? Yes, we do that… but not in this case.

The secret, scheduling!

If you’ve been around the block, you know that you can schedule email broadcasts, email autoresponders, blog posts and even personal emails using Boomerang for Gmail (great tool that one. It really helps me with my volunteer work).

I know. Scheduling is not cutting edge technology and it’s not news to you.

But think for a minute, how have you used it to date? I mean… really use it? We used to do just the bare minimum e.g. scheduling a post for tomorrow or next week. Overall, we were still working on a week to week basis. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like working like that. Being a fan of batching, I decided why not batch everything monthly?

We wrote blog posts and emails a month ahead of time and plan to keep doing it. Yes it is a lot to come up with at once but then again, not really.

For example, we used to dread writing emails weekly. We’d drag our feet and spend 1-3 hours getting that email out every single week. At best, that’s 4 hours a week. At worst, we’ll be spending 12 hours a week on emails. Wow, that’s a lot of hours. In contrast, batching and scheduling 4 emails a month took us 2-3 hours. (I realize some of you could write emails a lot faster than that, we’re still working on the speed thing).

Let’s look at that again. 12 hours a month versus 3 hours a month. Same output. Of course we want to produce the same amount of work in less time.

There are other benefits too. Because we are looking and scheduling a month at a time, we are also seeing things in a new light – the bigger picture and are able to better synchronize promotions with our communications and content.

Thus far, I am loving this new way of operating. The point is, don’t underestimate the basic, not-so-sexy technologies.