Make Works
  • Make Works Handbook
  • Introduction
    • Exploring a Region's Potential
    • Who can set up a Make Works Region?
    • Talking about Make Works
    • Stay Connected
  • Assessing your Make Works Region
  • On boarding new Make Works Regions
    • How to: Fab City Full Stack Workshop
    • How to: Region's About page
  • Factory Visits
    • How to: First Factory encounter
    • How to: Prepare for a Factory visit
    • How to: Film in Factories
    • How to: Get a brilliant interview
  • Listings
    • Checklist: For creating a listing
    • How to: Use Make Works
    • How to: Enter a listing
    • How to: Taxonomies - Materials, Processes, Industry
  • Launch
    • How to: Decide on a launch format and schedule
  • Communications
    • How to: Content Writing
    • How to: Submit a Story
    • How to: Use Make Works' Stories
  • Up and running
    • How to: Maintain relationships with listed factories
    • How to: Manage your Day to Day
    • FAQ: Tricky Situations
  • Funding & Budgets
  • Acknowledgments
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  1. Up and running

How to: Manage your Day to Day

PreviousHow to: Maintain relationships with listed factoriesNextFAQ: Tricky Situations

Last updated 3 years ago

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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, and articles. For manufacturing specific requests we send links to the appropriate Make Works .

  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.

Stories
listings