The benefits of using an online calendar for time blocking business/life - Michelle Kuzmick

Website: https://www.michellekuzmick.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michellekuzmick/

00:00 Hey there and welcome today we are going to dive into how to use an online booking calendar to streamline your scheduling, make your life a little bit easier and it's not going to be just for your business so if you're not using 1 yet, I'm going to show you how it can save you time and eliminate the hassle of back and forth scheduling and to stay organized with ease. And if you're already using one, keep watching because I'm going to be sharing some of my secrets to maximize its efficiency. Even better results. So before we dive into everything, just a little about me. 

00:39 I've been an entrepreneur for the past 25 years. I've worn every label from photographer to CEO with Michelle Kismet, Photography Business Academy and editor in chief of the She's Making Her Way magazine ended i am an online business strategist and Kajabi expert, brand and website designer. What I really like to say is I'm a support system for entrepreneurial women. All of that might sound really impressive because when I read it out loud and I turned in my bio, I'm like, wow, that's, that's good she's done a lot. 

01:14 Here's the truth. I am just like you. I'm just another person, entrepreneur, solopreneur, trying to make my way in this beautiful thing called life. My business and life have shifted based on what my kids needed from me. So there was never any big plan and I first started my business. I simply wanted enough money to buy diapers and formula for my first child, which then expanded into a couple more. So before we dive into the actual presentation, here is a myth that I want you to get out of your head because so many times when I teach this and time management in general, general, people say I don't want to be combined. 

02:05 I don't want to, I don't want to have to be in a box i became an entrepreneur because I want the freedom to do whatever I want to do. And, and I agree, that's one of the reasons why I started my very first business. But I want you to kind of flip the switch and understand that when you schedule your time, it is not confining you. It frees you because real freedom comes when you take control of your time instead of letting your time control you. 

02:36 So today's goal again is I'm going to share with you the power of an online calendar because we all have the same 24 hours in a day when yet there are people that can seem to accomplish so much more while staying calm and in control. And the difference in them and the people that are always constantly scattered is they don't just manage their time, they protect it. So an online calendar is more, it's more than just a tool and something else to, to learn. It's a clarity tool and what it's going to allow you is to simplify your scheduling so there's not any more endless back and forth emails and texts, which I will tell you literally will drive me up a wall. 

03:21 It's kind of like when somebody says, what do you want for dinner and I say, I don't care. And then they have to message me 10 more times go, what about this what about this same thing with the simplifying your scheduling? You don't want those back and forth because that's a time sucker. It's going to improve your productivity, so it's going to help you structure your day so that your most important work gets done first. 

03:48 And last but not least, it's going to reduce your mental load because you when you free up your brain space by getting everything thing out of your head into a system you trust, magic starts to happen and you can learn to be more present in every moment. So confession, I am a recovering yes addict. I used to say yes to meetings without thinking about how they fit into my schedule, so I was always left stretch way too thin. 

04:22 I was always running behind and struggling to focus on what truly mattered. So in the early years, I told you I started my business so that I could stay at home with my babies and not have to put them in daycare. But I found myself that during mom time I was thinking about work, and during work time I was feeling guilty that I wasn't being a mom. I was totally afraid as a service provider, and I used to feel this constant pressure to be available at all hours and to show up for everyone i said yes to every request and I was always on. 

05:04 I was worried that if I was not instantly available, I'd be letting someone down and worse, 20 years later, I became a single mom and I needed that money i didn't have, you know, my husband that had a steady paycheck every week. So if I felt like if I said no, I wouldn't be able to cover my basic necessities. But what really happened? I started setting clear time blocks and automated my scheduling and I created a structure that worked for me so I could stop feeling guilty for setting boundaries and I started owning my time. 

05:41 Now I know exactly when I have meetings, I know when I need to focus and when I can unplug, which has led to a more productive and less stressful better work life balance fun thing last. Gosh no, it's been 2 years now. My sister at the spur of the moment just said let's go to Fort Lauderdale i want to go swimming with the dolphins because my schedule was so well planned out. Things were in in blocks of time i could free up those blocks of time because my calendar showed me exactly what I had going on. So here is my personal strategy. 

06:20 I have fixed meeting time slots every day at ten eleven thirty one two thirty and four monday through thursday. So instead of letting people book whenever I control when I'm available and this this allows me to batch my meetings and stay focused so again, the goal is to protect your energy while still making yourself accessible. So now we're going to jump into Calendly and I'm going to show you how I set this up in real time action. So the first thing I want to do is I'm going to set up my availability now you'll see that I already have things scheduled here and I'll talk to you about those more in just a few minutes. 

07:05 But for 1st, I'm going to decide what I want my schedule to look like. And I've already told you that I want to have appointments at ten eleven thirty one two thirty and four every day. So what I would do is I would plug in this and it's going to, this is going to go in for all my Mondays and I'm going to punch in my eleven thirty A and it's going to be 2. Oops, twelve thirty PM. Now my train of thought is yes, I hold appointments at 10:00 and 4:00 every day or I do something during that time. 

07:47 I don't put them on my calendar because those are the times that what I call my catch all times. So say I had a project that needed to be done that wasn't done, then I know that I can plug that in at 4:00 and I will have that open. Say I have a client that needs an emergency help with their Kajabi website. I know that I can put them at 10:00 so I leave myself a little bit of cushion of what people can schedule for themselves. Ok, so after I did that and then you just go on right on down the list. 

08:21 So you would set up for the whole month and then we are going to schedule your event type. So we're going to create an event and y'all bear with me because I don't do this often because my stuff is already set up so so I'm going to be the person test number two I'm going to say it's going to be for an hour and it's given me my options. Just do I want it to be a zoom meeting? Yes, can be it could be an in person meeting because I do have clients that are local to me. I always put to be determined if you're doing local meetings so that way you know, if they're an hour from me, we can meet in the middle or what have you. 

09:09 And then my other location is going to be a phone call so they'll be able to pick that when they register for an appointment. 

09:20 And we've already did the event details, the hosts and scheduling settings we're going to go right into here and we are going to say that we wanted to use our test setup that we just scheduled. I don't put a buffer time on my events only because I've already built that in with the 1 and a half hour time blocks, minimum notice. I want 24 hours notice. I don't want someone, if I think I get to be off on Thursday or that I can do a particular project, I don't want someone jumping in on Wednesday and just messing up my plan for the week so that is what I put there. Your time zone over. 

10:12 There, your time zone is and this is important so my time zone, I am Eastern Standard and that's how I schedule my time. But when you go to my calendar, say you're central time, I want my calendar to show you your time so we're not doing math and trying to figure things out so I schedule, but with you go on my calendar, it's going to show you whatever time zone you're in. All right. And lastly, you can put on there any questions you want to ask. 

10:48 If you're using decide to use Calendly, you can collect payments after booking i can either send them to a thank you page, it's built out on my website, or I can just display Calendly's standard confirmation invitation, the standard confirmation page. Ok and then on the confirmation page, do I want to let them schedule another event and I don't so and then this is where the power of Calendly comes in. 

11:22 And no matter what you're using to schedule, because most of this can be built on different calendars, Tidy cow, Google different ones. Mine is set up. They get their email confirmation after they book and when they get this information, the confirmation, I'm going to show you how I set it up. If they're going to be on Zoom, I'm already integrated to Zoom so it sends them the link, they get a cancellation, they'll get an email email reminders i like for them to get email reminders twenty four hours in advance and one hour before. 

12:06 If you have a cancellation policy, you can put that in text reminders whoops, I didn't turn that on let's turn that back on. I am famous for forgetting to turn things on and just savings so email, reminders those are turned on text reminders. I do the same thing with text reminders so that they know and it is coming and turn that on. 

12:35 And then email follow up. I typically send personalized emails after each one of my meetings because a lot of times I'm giving people different resources so I have it turned off. You could very easily set this up that says hey, you know, thank you for attending, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and whenever so that is how you do that. I want to show you the two things that I love let's go back over here. And it is down in integrations and apps so again, my Zoom is connected so that way I don't ever have to worry about sending somebody a Zoom link if they are connected to my account to Calendly, they're automatically going to get it. 

13:17 There's a couple other ones that you can use if you want to take payments through your scheduling you can connect to PayPal or Stripe. It's a payment that I need like I have calls that are started 147 to do clarity calls and things and that Stripe will automatically bill them for that. So that is Facebook you can track your engagement and do your Pixel and just all kinds of stuff that you might need for your business. Before we jump back over and I give you your takeaways, I wanted to show you two things that I do that makes my life so much easier. Go into event type so the first is I have a calendar block off page. 

14:08 What that does for me, it's scheduled at eight in the morning it's a 12 hour time block so that way say I don't want to anybody to schedule appointments on the eleventh because I'm going out of town. I can just click the button and I'm done i don't have to go in and block it off individually on the calendar. I just schedule a day off and I'm done i do this for holidays too. 

14:31 The other thing that I do is I have a booking page with my personal appointments and this has more hours than everything so it takes me through the whole day it's just not my regular time blocks. I use this to schedule my personal appointments because say I have a doctor's appointment at ten AM on the seventeenth, I can plug that in and it's going to block it off on my other calendar. Those are just a few tips that I have for here are your action steps, your takeaways first, choose your calendar tool. 

15:07 Google Calendar, Outlook or Calendly there's Acuity. Just a simple side note, Calendly to have the different features. It is a paid app, they have the free version but because I managed several businesses, I needed more than just one basic calendar. But keep it simple. 1 central calendar keep it synced across all your devices. Step 2, just block your time decide what time you want to work, add those blocks in and Step 3 is going to be set up your scheduling links. I have this on my website. I have a link to it on my phone so someone texts me and says, hey, can we meet next week and I'm laying on a beach i can simply just hit, you know, copy and paste it into the text message and say sure, here's what I have open. 

16:00 A little side note, I learned this a long time time ago when I first started business. I want to be in control of my schedule. So when someone says me, sends me a message and they say, hey, can we meet Friday right i typically don't work with clients on Fridays that's kind of a catch all day for me. In the event that my client is on in the middle of a launch or something like that, it's a different story. 

16:26 But as a rule, I don't. So when someone tries to give me their schedule, I I send them my calendar and I go, hey, to make it easy, here's a link i pretend like they didn't even didn't even say Friday. Now, if they come back and say, Hey, I don't have any, you don't have anything on Friday, but that's the only day I have available, then I can decide, well, do I actually want to work and, and help them on Friday or am I going to push them back to my calendar again? So just a little, a little side note there, start with your structure and adjust it as needed. 

17:04 I typically the calendar that I'm using now, the ten to four monday through thursday. I finally landed on this at the beginning of last year and it's pretty solid. But I will tell you that my first year I was kind of tweaking and going through things so the goal is just to put yourself in control of your time instead of reacting to everyone else's demands. And lastly, I want to thank you for showing up and also wanted to share with you my action planner it's michellekismate dot com forward slash action because the online booking calendar is just one of my secrets to managing my business. 

17:46 If you want to learn more, this is my gift to you. It's a step by step workbook. It's designed to capture your thoughts, your dreams and your ideas. And it's going to guide you into prioritizing your goals and breaking them down into actionable plans for the quarter, the month and the day so you'll see real time how I I work on my calendar and get everything planned out again you can grab it at michelle kismet dot com forward slash action. I can't wait for you to dive in and I will be cheering for you every step of the way.