 Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for a talk about It's About Time with Kami McNamara. It's about time to leave, right? It's getting close. Do you all remember how slow time went by when you were a kid? I really remember that well. I remember my mom and her best friend having a cup of coffee at Denny's, and it was supposed to be their last cup, and it would take forever. And then I remember when I was about to turn 16, it felt like it took forever to be able to drive. And nothing, though, will remind me more about how time was really slow when I was a kid, more than my grandmother's lamp. And my grandmother's lamp wasn't just any lamp. It was a parking meter on the bottom and a light on the top. And you had to feed the meter to get the light to turn on. And my grandmother totally tricked me and made me think that I could only put in one coin at a time, because if I loaded up the parking meter, the light would be on all night. Like she couldn't just unplug it, right? So I love that the parking meter so much that my aunt, who worked for the parking meter company, gave me that parking meter for my eighth birthday. And I still have it today, and I keep it in my office to remind me to pay attention to time. My name is Kami McNamara, otherwise known as Web Kami. I have been running my own web design business from Seattle, Washington, for 21 years. I initially built websites using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. And then along came this thing called WordPress that I thought was going to put me out of business because anybody could build a website. Well, I was really wrong about that, right? And that kind of conversation is now happening around chat, GPT. And the one thing I can say is to have longevity is important. And I will tell you that nothing is more important than time. So it's about time and controlling your schedule so your clients don't control it for you. So I'm going to give you six tips today to help you accomplish that as a WordPress freelancer. Tip number one is to time block. So if you're not familiar with time blocking, it's setting assignments on your calendar for specific tasks at specific times. When I first started using time blocks, I really did a poor job of it. I did not pay attention. I was just trying to fit in everything into my schedule. And on Monday morning, I'd be rare to go with my time blocks. And by that afternoon, I would have blown my plan completely. It made me feel terrible. And I didn't work in times for lunch. I didn't work in times to take breaks. And I really was letting my clients run my schedule. So what happened to help me get control of it was I stopped thinking about it as the things I needed to do and started thinking more about the increments of time that I was working in. And I decided to make them set patterns. So I had habits every day of working in the same time increment. But the reason I was working in that time increment could change based on what was happening in my work week. The one exception day is always Friday because by the end of the day on Friday, I don't have the bandwidth to keep going until five o'clock. So if you fast forward to what my time blocks look like today, I'm going to explain the color coding here so it helps make more sense. But you can see everything is very evenly across every day. It's same time increments. So red is for my own time. I start my day early. I get up. I do exercise, whatever I need to do, but it's not work time. Every other thing you see there in red are breaks. So a lunch break, a morning break, and an afternoon break. Next, I'm going to talk about green. And green is for green. It's for making money. So those are my billable hours. And that could be working on a project that's a flat rate or it could be maintenance that's billable. Whatever it is, it's going to generate an invoice and it's going to make money. Light green is supporting making money. So that's communicating with my clients. It could be sending out an estimate. It's time working on things that have to be done for me to make money. Purple time is interesting. I call it big picture time. But I picked purple because it's for prints. So I want you to picture prints in the studio. Do you think he ever picked up the phone to answer a call when he was working and in his creative time? It's really important to have time for your creative time and time to work on your own business. So in the morning, I plan my day. At the end of the day, I plan the next day. And I don't have enough time in here, but that one little block is for me to work on my own company's stuff. I worked on this talk during that time. I work on my social media planning and stuff like that. Orange is meeting time. And that is the only time that my clients see in my calendar is open to book an appointment with me. Every meeting could be an email. So I do take meetings on Zoom and take phone calls. But in reality, you can really shrink that time down and have effective meetings without being open for meetings all the time. So more tips for time blocking. Start every day with the most important thing. We've all heard of eat the frog. You want to do the thing that you need to get off the list first. You may not be able to finish it, but you need to chip away at it. Create flexible blocks to respond to your weekly needs. So you can have a time block that's an either or. It could be working on one project, or it could be working on estimates. But you need to give yourself some flexibility because every week is going to be different. Dedicate one day to focus on one thing the entire day. This will help you stay in flow. So if you have a big project that you're working on for a client and you want your behind on sending them an update or something, just plug away at that all day long. Limit meeting time. I can't stress this enough. Take regular breaks and use the Pomodoro technique. If you're not familiar with that, it's working in 25-minute increments with a five-minute break. And when you do four rounds of that, you take a longer break. It's really a game changer. It's really healthy to use it. If you're using a standing desk, you can stand and sit according to your Pomodoro's. And then always plan for tomorrow. Even if it's just you writing down one thing you know you need to do tomorrow. Tip number two, create a task and appointment calendar. So I use Calendly to control my calendar settings. And I've been a web designer long enough to know when it was just a back and forth with the client and trying to pick the right time. And I still have old school clients that really don't like to schedule online. It's crazy to me because it's so easy. But in Calendly, what I do is set my time that's open to most of my day, even though my calendar isn't showing that. I do that because my availability is controlled in my Google Calendar. And setting this up this way allows me to open something up that's closed and have that client be able to book using Calendly. So this is a random web designer's Calendly that I found online when I was preparing this talk. And this person is available Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM. And I think that sends entirely the wrong message to the client. It says that you're not busy. So to the potential client, you're not busy. To the existing client, they're the most important thing in your life. And you want to solve their problems and be there for them. But you need to have time to work on your work. So I recommend that you're not available all the time and you're available at different days. So I generally try to keep my meetings very limited on Mondays and Fridays. I do open one up every now and then. And this particular one was created when I was going on a brief vacation on the 22nd of March. So you see I'm marked out there. But it's a really good message. I'm a busy web designer. So I think when a new person is coming to this, they think that I'm slot after. So also, within the days, alternate when I'm available. So sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. So it's good to give them variety, but you don't have to be available all the time. And then for those clients that may not want to just resist using online appointment scheduling, I find that presenting it to them like this makes it work 99% of the time. So please send dates and times that work for you. Or if it's easier, here's my Calendly link. And something about just telling them it's easier makes them think it's easier. So now we have the problem of tasks. And I am a solopreneur. So a lot of task management tools are geared towards a team. So this might be a little bit different if you have an agency. But if you are a true solopreneur, there's no need for you to assign your task to anybody. It's always going to be you. So I found that using Google Tasks was great, because I could just click one click. And my email from the person asking me to do something is now a task. But the interface of Google Tasks is really lacking. And there is an add-on. I think I pay $36 a year for this. It's called Tasks Board. And it turns your Google Tasks into more of a Trello board. And then I tend to group everything, not totally based on my time blocks, but kind of in the same categories. So I'll know I can tell a client who sends me maintenance when I have that on my time blocking schedule and give them an estimate of when something can be done quickly. So those tasks, then, in Google Calendar, go up at the very top. I don't put the task in the exact time block, because I want this clean presentation where I have all my tasks at the top of the day, and I have my plan for my time down below. So now let's put it all together. We've got our time blocks, our appointments, and our tasks in one place. And you can see that I have my appointments in blue are entered into the right spot. If I have something personal that I can do early in this instance, I was getting some physical therapy and I was doing it during my own time to make sure that I was giving myself enough time to work. But this becomes my control panel that I can look at every day and not feel lost in my tasks. Tip number three, borrow time. What I just showed you was like, that's great, but nothing ever happens the way it's supposed to. There is always a person that comes to you that needs you now or has an emergency. And as a service provider, you're going to help them. So what do you do? You're going to borrow time in your time blocks to take care of them. So if they are asking you to do something in your work time that's making money, you're going to reach out into the future and grab a meeting time and turn that into a work time. So it might be the next day. It might be the next week. But you want to always take back the time you expected to work and give it back to yourself. So in Google Calendar, you can mark things busy or free. So that's why the calendar was wide open to be open, because that gives me the ability to make changes when I have to. A few more tips to help you with this. So I was a member of a business networking group called B&I for 12 years. And when you're in a networking group, there's a lot of people asking for meetings. If you're in a networking group or a chamber or something, you still want to do those, but don't overdo them. You want to keep them in balance so you're not taking away from your work time. If you say yes to everyone, you're going to end up with less time to make money. Make one week a month a focus week and don't allow anyone to book an appointment with you through Calendly. They can call you if they have an emergency or reach out to you for emergencies, but this allows you to have an uninterrupted week of working and moving through projects. Schedule all your personal appointments, your doctor, your dentist, getting a haircut, all of those things. Put them in a meeting block or put them in your personal time blocks on your calendar. Try to keep them out of the time you expect to make money. And then my final tip for those of you who are the solopreneurs that may be using the Google tasks to manage your tasks, pause your inbox. And there is an easy add-on to get through the Google add-ons called pause inbox. And it will just stop the incoming from coming in so you don't feel like you're playing whack-a-mole all day long. Tip number four, track and evaluate. I think this is one of the most important tips I can give. So knowing where your time is spent as a freelancer is really important for almost everything you do, but most important for sending out estimates and knowing how much time it takes you to do something. Now, my rule is knowing how much time I take is not the time I'm going to build them for, because there's always unexpected things that happen. I think it should be two or three times what you expect the actual building time to be, because you have to account for every email, every issue, the back and forth, the revisions, everything that happens. This plugin, or plug-in, it's an app that you add on to your browser. Rescue Time is like Big Brother, and it tracks everything you do. So it can be a little uncomfortable if you're worried about that. But this, it gave me, look, I worked a 40-hour week, which is kind of a light week for me, but I'm able to categorize what I'm working on and see what my design work is, working on business, working on scheduling and communication, and then, of course, it tracks all the things you shouldn't be doing, too, like social media. But it's a terrific way, and you can, with a little bit of categorizing, it can be a fabulous way to keep track of things. On top of that, I use my invoicing software to track the billable time that I'm working for clients doing maintenance, and I also track, just by project the hours I'm spending on a project, no, if I was hit or miss with a particular estimate. I use FreshBooks, but this would work for any other harvest or QuickBooks, whatever you use. But I'm making it easier to invoice somebody and not having to go back in research. Now, if I forget to do this, I have rescue time as a backup. Does anybody here remember a store called J Jacobs? Like, it's been a lot of years, but it was a retailer, I'm from Seattle, and it's a retailer that was in Seattle, and I worked for them in their corporate offices, and the owner's name was J Jacobs, and he made everybody that worked there have a steno pad, and every meeting you went to, you had to take notes. You had to take notes about your day, and he would bring you into his office and check and see, and so it was a real stickler thing, and it stuck with me when I started my own business. So I keep a daily work journal of my day to help me know exactly what I'm doing and what I need to do. So that daily work journal happens to follow my time blocks. So I created a template, which I'm gonna share with you in a minute, but I'm reinforcing in front of me, I don't print this, I keep it in Google Drive, but you could print it. Some people like to print and write notes, so I keep it in Google Drive and I keep it organized by month, and I am making notes all day on what I'm doing during time blocks. On top of that, I give myself a score for a particular time block because if I'm failing at a certain time block over and over, I have a problem with my plan, and I might need to move things around. So it's a great way to know, if you're always getting an F and not doing what you're supposed to do, maybe you need to move that time block. So on this same document, I also keep track of those most important tasks. So I start by listing my inbox and my staying later box. Those are my two main email boxes. I wanna know how many emails I start the day with. I write the five most important things to do, and if I only make the first, if I only get to the first item, then I consider it a win, but this keeps me focused every single day on what is the most important thing and helps me not get distracted. And finally, at the end of the day, I take a look at all of, I assess how things went. So did I complete my tasks? Did I, how far did I get down that task list? How many billable hours did I work? What was my ending inbox? Did I use Pomodoro's? Pomodoro's are generally counted so you kinda know how you're doing. And then let me get this side thing off here. Oh, it's gonna fast forward. So bottom line, evaluate your day. Let me go back really quick in case you didn't get to scan that. There is a free download of this template for you. All right, tip number five is to use the right tools and bonus to anyone who knows what that device is. Does anybody have any idea? You're close. It's Uncle Rico's time machine from Napoleon Dynamite. And I don't know if you remember the movie, but it failed at what did not work, but Rico and Napoleon both tried it. And the important thing was they were trying a new tool, right? And so they eliminated that as working, but you always have to try new tools. So here are the tools that I have mentioned today. This, if you scan that code, I have all of this information available to you. But again, I'm coming to you as a solopreneur. So your tools might be a little bit different, but you could still implement the same time blocking in the same system. And I think you could also do it as a team. So one item I wanna mention is I'm currently training with Notion. And I absolutely love it. I think it could kind of wrap all this up in a bundle, but it's a little time consuming to set up, but always try new tools, try free trials. Just you kind of have to work through a process of elimination to find the exact tool that will work for you. That went a little too fast. Oh, I'm so sorry, this is going the wrong way. Hang on one sec, let me go back. And now it's got a timer on it. Let's see if I can get this to go back. All right. So I think you guys know where I'm going. Let me see if I can get this timer off. There it is. Okay, tip number six, prioritize what's most important. So you're gonna save a lot of time getting control of your day. You can't just go into your day and let the client come in and have that be what dictates how things go. So you could use that time for many things. So you can build your business more. You can do more training. You can do more networking. You can do a lot of things, but I'm gonna encourage you to do something different. So one of my favorite books I brought a couple of copies to give away today is 15 Secret Successful People Know About Time Management and the author has this quote, you can never lose time and get it back again. Time expires. So I'm gonna encourage you to use the time you save to spend with the people you love the most. So about this time last year, my dad went into hospice and he died over the Thanksgiving weekend in the US and prior to that, my mom died in January of 2022 and their health started to fail around 2017. And I started making three to four trips from Seattle to Sacramento a year to help my parents. They did not have internet at their house. So, and they lived in the country. So I would have to drive at like, early in the morning to a Starbucks and do a little bit of work. And then I would cook for my dad because my mom forgot how to cook. If I didn't have this system, I would have been in big trouble in terms of being a service provider to my clients. And I really worked hard to hone this during, I didn't have this all together, but by the end I had it together. And I was able to spend time with my parents that I am always going to appreciate and know that I did the right thing. And during that time, I managed to grow my business, which is just like incredible to me. And it was really about taking control of my day and not letting my clients control it for me. So, thank you so much for coming to my talk today. I may not be from Canada, but I am from the Pacific Northwest, so I knew how to dress to be here. And I live in Seattle, and my dog and I walk at a beach called Alki Beach, although some think it's Alki Beach, and it used to be called that. So, so I would love to connect with you. And, you know, I just, I love WordPress. I love the WordPress community. And it's just an honor to be here to all the volunteers at the WordCamp. You guys really put on a great WordCamp today, so thank you. Does anybody have any questions? The question was, what's the difference between the two? Well, so they're kind of two different, they're two different tools. So your Google calendar is going to just organize your day. And Calendly allows you to schedule appointments. I know that there's probably some Google add-on tools that you could use in place of Calendly, but Calendly is like $9 a year, and it, or $9, $9 a month. And it will handle sending reminders and, you know, let the client cancel and let the client reschedule. So it's a really great tool, that or acuity. I really recommend getting some sort, investing in a scheduling app. Oh, thank you. I'm wondering about when you have something back up in your schedule that's more than a block can fix. Yes. So you talk about moving things around because you need to borrow time from the future to solve something today. I find, especially before I go on holidays, the last time I had like four websites to launch a week over holidays. It was just like, this is not going to happen. Yeah, this is like panic. I launched six before this, right? It isn't perfect, but I guess that what I would remind you is it's temporary. The thing is, is that you can have that happen every now and then. You can't have it happen all the time, right? So I launched six websites. I've only invoiced for three of them. And I'll do the rest when I get back. So this isn't a magic bullet, but it is remembering that if you can just make it work 80% of the time, you are doing so much better than you would be if you were only having it work 40% of the time. And I have found that it's just kind of made everything better in my business to be stricter with myself about my time. Yes? Just curious, and maybe slightly off topic, but is there a particular framework you use when you do builds? Yes. So I'm sorry I didn't do that. The question is, is there a specific framework? So when I first started using WordPress, I got into Genesis early. And I paid for StudioPress and did the lifetime. And I did that up until 2016. And I started using Beaver Builder. So Beaver Builder is my builder of choice. I also recently purchased Cadence just to have a backup plan. But that, for me, as a solopreneur using a PageBuilder, is faster for me. And my clients tend to be smaller businesses. And they understand the PageBuilder more than they understand the Block Editor. They can use the Block Editor for blogging. And I have been transitioning a lot of them from classic to the Block Editor. And they are starting to get it. But in terms of having them handle any design in the Block Editor, for the non-tech user, I'm finding that to be hard. Which I like them to come to me for maintenance. But I also like to empower them to do things on their own. And I like to do big things for them. Yes? For someone who, let's say, doesn't have any time out of an at all to say the calendar is just like the empty or a little bit full. I've been there. To the ideal of what example you showed us. So what would you recommend to put that person just, let's say, sort of? I would just start with one day. Start with trying to get Monday under control. And when you get Monday under control, and that might take six weeks, then add Tuesday or Friday or something. But just do one day at a time and ease yourself into it. Yes? I know that technology makes sometimes things easier on that. But did you rescue anything to use paper instead? Piper? Paper, paper. Paper, paper. Did I use paper? I used paper for years, right? I had. And I just recently purged all my paper. I'm in a temporary office location right now without my filing cabinet. And I kind of figured out I don't need paper at all. Like, I don't really need. I have my contracts are signed online. So I store a lot of things in Google Drive and Dropbox. I still like to scribble notes on paper. But I tried Rocketbook for a while where you can write notes, and then you take a picture of it, and it ends up in your Google Drive. I've tried everything. But yeah, paper, I think there's some studies that say if you write it down, it stays in your mind better. So that's great. Write it down so it stays in your mind. Then put it in a note on your computer so you can go back and find it. And Notion is a tool that has a search feature that's going to be great for that when I get it figured out. Any? Yes? Yes. So when you have your no meeting weeks, is that the only change? Or do you do different things in a meeting-free week that you wouldn't do normally? What do I do in my meeting-free week that I wouldn't do normally? That is my catch-up. So that is my gut check. That is like, oh my god, I completely forgot about x, y, and z. And then I make those become my most important things. And sometimes I'll make a list that is just the gut check. I swear there is something in us that makes us know, like we've let something go too long, and there's a client out there that's not happy. And you have that feeling that you just need to listen to it before you hear from them. Yes? I have the idea sometimes that you've seen for some projects, Microsoft Project. Yes. So sometimes it's kind of easy to move to the schedule. Let's say you have your schedule done for, I don't know, three weeks, and then something happened like a couple days, and you have to move the whole thing, shift it, like two or three days. So is this just to drag and drop? And by this situation, how do you do that? I will go back to my task board. That task board that I showed you has a drag and drop feature, and you can move things around, and you could create an actual column for things that you need to reschedule. So what I would do is take everything at the end of the week that you didn't get to, put it in a column that says, next week, and then that next morning, put it where you want it, what day you want to work on it. But it's going to be phase? Yeah. Yeah, well, I haven't worked in the tool you're working in. So one thing I will say, you do not want to get so involved in your task management that that's a job. And that can happen really easy. So make sure that, I mean, you could write down a simple list of everything I missed, and then deal with it later. Leave it on your desk for the next day. But it's really easy to get sucked into project management, and that's not your job. You're either a designer, developer, or I don't know, maybe you are a project manager for a web company. Yes? How do you manage tasks? Well, I used a tool called Insightly that had everything. It allowed me to put a task into Google, and it would put all the subtasks. It stopped working. So I basically have a cheater list in Google Docs that has my list there. So I'll just put the top level here. And if I've forgotten what all my steps are, I'll pull up that cheater list in Google Docs. So I also I don't want to have all those sub lists on here. Because then if my calendar is way down here, and I'm deflated when I sit at my desk and just look at it and think, I'll never get this done. So I think top level. Are we good? OK, anybody else? Oh, yes? That view you had with the tasks on top, was that in Google Calendar? Yes, it was. Yeah, so I'm just using Google Tasks. Here, I'm not real good at dividing through this, but this is just a Google Calendar. That's all it is. And at the top are just Google Tasks. That's just one tool. And the meetings come in from Calendly because Calendly is connected to my Google Calendar. So that is in this tool here, is the one I'm talking about that is the add-on to Google Tasks. Because Google Tasks is so rudimentary, it's just not enough. I can drag something around in here. So it's just like Trello. But if I click on one of those, it opens the email that the task came from. And that's the key to me to knowing what I'm doing. I don't use Trello. I use this. This is like Trello. But it's tied to your Google Tasks. Did you have a question? Yes? Well, so how do I not use paper? Like I said, or declutter. I try to take whatever is on paper and get it on Google Drive. And so I use Google Docs. And I use the voice command in Google Docs. And if I have something on paper, I just read it into Google Docs. And that way, I don't have to type it. So that's a good tip. And it's never pretty and perfect. But then you can take it and put it in chat GPT and make it even better than what you said. Yes? Yeah, well, I mean in creative, I mean it's time for me to work on my own business and my own business goals. And not time to work on client work. And not time to do invoicing. And not time for anything like that. But if I have social media posts, I run a Facebook group for web designers. I need to plan for that. I need to plan for talking at WordCamps. I want to do courses someday. I need time to think about those. I want to be creative. I want to be prince. I want to have big goals. And that's the time I use for that. Now, I make my planning time as important because I feel like if you don't start your day with a plan or end your day knowing what you did, you're going to feel lost when you get behind the desk the next day. Yeah, so what do I use for training? So in the states, well, do you guys remember something called linda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning? So in the states, if you have a library card, a lot of libraries have free LinkedIn Learning. And so I use that a lot. I sign up for trainings. I'm currently in a web designer training. And I've been doing it for 21 years. But I invest in myself because it's important that would go in my purple time. And I signed up for Notion Mastery. I'm learning that. So I invested a good amount of money in that, too. And then I also teach a beginner WordPress meetup in Seattle. So that's a good opportunity for me to keep up on my skills. Yeah, thank you. Are we good? So whoever would like a copy of this book, I only have three. So if you're really struggling with your time management, I'd like to give you this book. I didn't write it. I don't know this person. But it really made a difference in me thinking about taking control of my time. So please come and see me. And it's been really great to see all of you here. And I'll see you at the after party.