“Always freakishly organised…”

Is how my sister chose to describe me when I asked her to write the copy for my wedding planning website back in 2011.
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These days I support small business owners, coaches and not-for-profit organisations who are struggling with overwhelm and want someone to ease the workload. And I have to admit, I am rather organised. Which is a big key to why I do what I do.

Normally at this time of year I’d have written about how to manage the school holidays along with running a small business, but so many of us had to negotiate 4 months of home-schooling that the summer holidays didn’t seem to present the same challenge this year. In fact this looks like being the easiest 6-7 weeks of the parenting/work juggle that I’ve done in quite a while.
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Our experiences since March of this year have all been different. Some business owners embraced lockdown, using it as an opportunity to take a look at marketing strategies and revamp existing processes and practices. Others have reacted to the new situation by realigning their offering – moving from face-to-face services to online. Some have been even busier than usual. A lot of us will have been concentrating purely on what absolutely needed to be done, keeping our business afloat and letting a lot of the little day-to-day things slide. 

For small business owners the art of juggling is one we have to learn early on. We start off being CEO, Finance Director, Administrator, Customer Service, Marketing department – every time something new gets thrown at us we add it to the act, find the time, and keep on going. Since lockdown started many of us have had to deal with extra challenges, whether that has been in the shape of homeschooling, moving a face-to-face business online, or both.
 
But there comes a point for all of us when it gets too much and we can’t keep everything going. For me, it all fell apart last week – I was trying to keep too many balls in the air and ended up dropping all of them.
 
At first I felt awful – I’m a professional multi-tasker, how had I let this happen? Well, it’s simple really, I’d forgotten the golden rule - planning. I had become so tangled up in what I had to do that I hadn’t stopped to think about how to go about doing it.
 
So I dusted off my trusty VA rulebook and created a helpful infographic for all of us who are struggling with the juggling act right now.

In the last 10 weeks the world of work has changed beyond recognition for most of us. Remote working, up until now something that only a handful of us did regularly, has become the norm, with tools such as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet replacing face-to-face contact. It’s a reasonable assumption that we won’t ever return to the old normal and that in the future flexible working patterns will increase, with more people working from home on a regular basis and teams continuing to communicate via video conference.
This is all well and good and while I’m obviously a champion of remote working (what VA isn’t?) there is one area where it really can’t compete with face-to-face contact and that’s when it comes to team-building. Zoom, Teams and all those other online tools work to maintain the connections that have already been built in the office at people’s desks, bumping into each other while getting a cup of tea, those ‘water-cooler’ moments where chance snatches of conversation enable colleagues to get to know each other and build relationships. And if we’re going to see increased flexible working then the humble team-building day will be ever more important.

The events industry is in limbo. With current government restrictions having forced the closure of venues, both large and small, mass gatherings banned, and no guidance given as to when these constraints will be lifted, the events world as we know it has all but disappeared. Conferences, exhibitions, workshops, even the humble team-building day: the physical versions of these have all been cancelled or postponed for the foreseeable future.

The Business Visits and Events Partnership (BVEP) has briefed DCMS that business events should be classed differently from mass-gatherings (https://bit.ly/2Wpi1eh) to aid recovery of the industry when lockdown restrictions are eased; in the meantime many business events continue to be transferred to a virtual setting or have been postponed for the time being.

Against this backdrop it may seem counter-intuitive to be considering hiring an events manager to plan your next event – surely we should be waiting to see how things pan out? However now may be the perfect time to get all your ducks in a row and be ready to proceed when we come out of the other side.

April is stress awareness month, very apt given the stressful situation we all find ourselves in at the moment. Our generation has never had to deal with anything like this and every day I see posts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram from people trying to make sense of it.
With this in mind I’ve put together a cheeky infographic aimed at helping those people who are finding working from home and the increased juggling of tasks is raising the blood pressure more than they would like. I’m not an expert but I am someone accustomed to working remotely and who spins lots of different plates for a living and all these things have helped me at one time or another.

Are you overwhelmed by work? Desperate to outsource but no idea where to start?  It can be dispiriting looking at a mountain of work, knowing it would be so much easier if you had someone to help but feeling that you have to get everything in order before you can ask someone to take it on.

Do you want to know a secret? You don’t have to get everything sorted before you outsource your tasks. In fact, isn’t the whole reason you need to outsource that you can’t physically get through it all?
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Here are 5 things you can outsource now:

We are ten days into a brand new year and decade, and resolutions are being made and broken left, right and centre. I’ve heard many friends and colleagues over the years resolve to be more organised in the new year, having come out of the Christmas madness more than a little dishevelled. But if you’re not a naturally organised person this is one resolution it can be difficult to stick to. Did you to know that it takes around two months to break old habits and form new ones? No wonder it’s tricky!
To give you a hand I’m sharing my 5 top tips for getting yourself organised.
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