How to: Manage your Day to Day

The everyday influx of emails

Between researching, visits to factories, writing content and putting together funding proposals, in our experience there are a lot of emails every day. We’ve found that rather than spending all day getting distracted by a buzzing inbox, picking a specific hour in the day to process them saves a lot of time; however this will depend on your working style.

The ‘can I pick your brain’ question

We get countless requests every week that essentially ask if we can take an afternoon to hang out, get a coffee, Skype / Zoom, chat (etc). It might be about a new product, a startup idea, a PhD student, or simply a question about manufacturing. Of course, we want to be helpful to everyone but these types of enquiries have the potential to take hours out of your working week.

We suggest:

1. If possible, send appropriate links to existing resources, Stories and articles. For manufacturing specific requests we send links to the appropriate Make Works listings.

2. Asking the enquirer for three specific questions they would like to know the answer too.

3. Running a monthly ‘office hours’ session where people can contact you to ask questions. Typically this filters all the brain pickers into one morning rather than eating into lots of hours throughout the month.

4. If you provide it, explain you offer of 1-1 consultancy at paid rates if they are interested in working on something in depth.

Talks

Giving talks and attending conferences are a fantastic way to get the word out there and meet interesting people. However, similar to the ‘can I pick your brain’ questions, these can take up a lot of your time. So be diligent about the ones you say yes to! Make sure that they work well with your schedule.