Toolkit: Planning & Time Management

Welcome to the Planning and Time Management Toolkit. It’s here to help you plan effectively and manage your time effectively whilst running your small business. Helen from The Creative Business network and I have teamed up to offer a business advice service which started with these PDF downloads that you can complete in a matter of hours from your own home, enabling you to build your business with a little help from us.

This Toolkit is all about using your time effectively and planning your content. We know that it’s always hard to manage your time when running your own business – there are never enough hours in the day to achieve everything! We hope that by using the templates in this toolkit along with our suggestions (and top tips!) you can structure your working week better to accommodate all your tasks.

Whether you prefer an online planning tool, or like to use printable planners, we introduce lots of ways to plan your year, month and week. We have included enough blank templates to allow you to plan for the whole of 2019, including ideas sheets. We’ve also created a blank template on Trello – which is an online planner that we use for our own business planning. There are full instructions on how to use Trello within the template.

Creating a planning toolkit for everyone was always going to be tricky as we all have different goals, commitments, priorities and capacities. We’ve personally found methods that work for us and a structure to apply that helps us both (when we follow it!) What we hope this kit offers is a variety of solutions, inspiration and practical advice so that you can find the method best suited to you to enable you to use your time well.

We’re also thrilled that Josephine Brooks, planning expert has included some of her top tips for side hustlers – those of you who are running your creative business as a part time venture, and therefore needing to plan your time even more effectively!

IS IT FOR YOU?

If you’re not sure if this toolkit is for you have a look at the below points to see if it sounds helpful…

The Planning & Time Management Toolkit:

• Introduces structures to help you plan your time effectively
• Helps you look at the big ‘planning’ picture
• Has a link to a public Trello board which you can save to your own private account and amend to your needs
• Gives ideas to working through ‘the funnel’ – our planning structure
• Works digitally or using pen & paper
• Is useful for figuring out all aspects of your business, from blogging & social media to product development
• Gives tips to get ready for events and exhibitions
• Looks at a variety of different planning techniques
• Has plenty of top tips to motivate you
• Helps you devise ways that work around your capacities
• Create tools to help you carry all of this forward

THE KNITTY GRITTY:

• Designed for both Existing Businesses and Start-Ups
• Ongoing planning techniques
• You’ll need a notebook & printer (to print off the worksheets)
• Includes templates, techniques, prompts, and exercises

**When you purchase your toolkit and download the PDF please be sure to save it straight away so you don’t lose it. Thank you!