When you are a small business owner, productivity and time management should be your number one priorities. Why? Because…

Time is money.

I used to hate when people said that, but now that I own a business, I get it! It’s no secret that Hannah and I both have full time jobs as well as this photography business, and it can be challenging to juggle all of the responsibilities. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, especially since we’ve become busier and busier. Toward the beginning of our business, it took us a long time to do everything because we were still knew to everything. It would take us days to weeks to edit a wedding gallery and hours to just write a blog post!

About 6 months ago, we made a pact to meet every Saturday morning to work on our business together. We’d then divide up work at the end of our meeting that we were to work on the rest of the week. Although those meetings were great, we’d oftentimes get distracted by our best friend talk and realize that we’d been there for 2 hours without really getting anything business related done.

We soon realized how important it was to get straight to business because as it took us longer to do things, our hourly rate was getting smaller. Although we started this business so we could do what we love, serve people well, and spend time together, the more serious we became about Chelsea and Hannah Photography, we knew we needed to make some changes.

We stack our phones during our Saturday business meetings.

It’s so tempting to jump on social media to show my friend Hannah a funny meme or a cute dress I saw on Instagram while we’re waiting on our coffee or a gallery of photos is loading. What could be the harm of answering a few text messages here or there while we’re planning the timeline for the next wedding? We’ve found that these seemingly small things slow our meetings and productivity way down. We only get to meet once a week, so we can’t afford to waste much time!

We come to the meeting with a planned agenda. 

There are SO many different aspects of running a business. Our todo list on Trello seems never ending. When we first started, we would just stare at all of items we needed to get done, but we felt like we could never catch up! To change that, we started planning the 3 or 4 most urgent tasks we needed to get done together before we get to the meeting. It helps us feel so much more accomplished and inspired when we can cross them off the list!

We still make time for best friend days. 

Most people would probably roll their eyes if they saw our matching calendars. Because we’ve been so busy we actually have to pencil in when we are going to have a non-photography best friend day! We’d rather do that than miss getting to do fun things together! Some of our favorite things are movie nights, shopping days, and trips to new places around Nashville.

Working with a friend is not always easy, but we wouldn’t change it for the world.

 

A couple key things to remember:

1. Planning is everything.
2. Encourage each other to keep going even when it gets hard!

-Chelsea & Hannah