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Starbucks to Raise Prices
It hardly makes sense on the surface that a business would resort to raising prices to see itself through a deep recession and weak consumer spending, but that is exactly what Starbucks plans to do. While several basic drinks may now be less expensive, Starbucks has already started raising prices on specialty drinks in several stores.
By the end of the year, the price adjustments should already be affecting Starbucks stores nationwide, placing Starbucks firmly in the difficult position of balancing its brand with its customers’ desires to save money. Competition from the likes of McDonald’s, which recently started selling espresso …
Wanted: Amazing Designer Who Understands E-Commerce
We’re looking for a designer / deep thinker to help us refresh a few key screens of an e-commerce system for increased usability and conversion performance.
We have a client with a semi-successful online hardware business (selling locks and door devices).
They seem to be getting decent traffic numbers, but based on an analysis of their the traffic too many visitors are dropping off before the transaction is consummated.
What’s more, the majority of them are leaving before even adding an item to their cart.
The audience is interested, their prices are competitive, but they just aren’t buying as often as we’d like.
Our theory is that perhaps the product detail pages may be overwhelming them a little.
Our goal is to use great design and thoughtful consideration of the buyers intentions to improve the performance of these pages.
Stop Wasting Your Time!
Implementing a well thought out time plan to your week is the perfect solution when you’re feeling a little lost in your business. They provide structure, focus and motivation and really allow you to get a grasp on your priorities. No longer will you feel like you’re simply working in your business struggling to meet the constant demands of your clients. Start working on your business. Set your tasks, stick to them and you’ll be on time every time before you know it.
Visually Appealing
As freelancers, we’re all very visual people thus it is important that we relay this into our new time plan. The best way to do this is to associate colours to specific tasks from our weekly calendar and then follow through by colouring folders, files and other objects that relate to those tasks in similar colours.
We all know that colour is truly an amazing thing. By applying colour to our designs, we can trigger emotions and set moods instantly. Associating colours to key tasks acts in a similar fashion and can play a vital role in increasing our efficiency and motivation while also setting a positive mood for the work we have to complete that day.
Start by colouring each of your tasks in your weekly calendar. Once you’re done, colour each of the documents, files, folders and other objects that relate to those tasks in the same colour. This way, next time you need to start focusing on a given task, you’ll instantly know what you’ll need to grab to get started!
Defining A Weekly Calendar
Now that we have a clear understanding of our week, we need to map it out. Having something that we can see in front of us reminding us of when we should be working on what is important to gaining structure and focus. This is especially important early on as we’re still trying to reprogram our minds into following such a strict timetable.
Your weekly calendar shouldn’t be focused on just work. It should include personal tasks and other goal related items to give us focus in both our work and personal lives. Here are some examples of what you could include in your calendar:
* Personal Development – Fitness & health, relaxing, reading/writing
* Business Development – Administration, business planning, marketing
* Relationships – Partner, family, friends
* General Work – Client work, emails, accounts
Once you’ve worked out all of the different types of tasks you need to complete each week, map out a chart that contains all of the hours in the day down the vertical axis and all of the days of the week along the horizontal axis. Now proceed to fill in all of the blanks in between with the various tasks you need to complete each week.
Box That Time!
The second step in organising your time is to start boxing your time. Time boxing is all about working on a specific task for a set duration – no more and no less. David Cheong put it best when he said:
By fixing the amount of time we spend on a given set of tasks, we can focus on doing the things that matter, give us motivation to start, prevent overruns and use our “null” times effectively. In contrast, if we worked on things until completion in one sitting, we’re less likely to start on complex tasks, more likely to overrun on open ended tasks and ultimately it leaves us with less time and motivation to work on the next set of tasks.
Outside of our regular weekly tasks, many hours are spent completing work for clients. This is the perfect type of work that could be time boxed. For example, instead of spending an entire day finishing off that single website, split the portion of your day allocated to clients into 1-2 hour blocks. For smaller projects, stick to one hour and two hours for larger projects. Two hours is the perfect amount of time to get started, get focused and get motivated on those complex tasks.
Getting Some Rhythm
Organising your time is all about introducing some rhythm into your life. Our brains love working in patterns, so if we can start implementing some tasks that recur at regular intervals during our week, our brains will quickly snap into the right mode for the right task at the right time. This is the first step in establishing some structure to your week.
Each of us would have a set number of tasks that we have to complete each week to ensure our business runs smoothly. This could be marketing, sales, accounting or business development just to suggest a few. By defining these key tasks and working out when we will do these tasks each week, we instantly gain focus on what needs to be done and when. For example, if you decide that on Tuesday mornings, you will focus on marketing, each Tuesday morning, you’ll wake up and your brain will instantly click into marketing mode!
It’s important that once you define this rhythm, you never stray from it. If you get some ideas to market your business, write them down and keep them for your marketing time. If you think about an account that needs to be balanced, save that for your Accounting time. Doing this will actually motivate you more and will allow you to think about those ideas a little further before rushing into them.
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