How to Create a Project Calendar

Hey there, welcome to Get Booked Out Without Burnout, how to create a sustainable project calendar for the Page Builder Summit. I'm so excited to be here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Shannon Mattern. I'm the founder of the Web Designer Academy, host of the Profitable Web Designer podcast, and we have helped thousands of web designers work less and make more money. And today I'm gonna share it with you, one of the most powerful strategies you can use in your web design business.

to help you go from overworking and undercharging to profitable, sustainable, and healthy. So that tool is your project calendar, and I'm gonna walk you through the process that we use inside the Web Designer Academy to create a sustainable project calendar. And so what I mean by sustainable...

is that you are making your minimum baseline revenue, which in the Web Designer Academy is the amount of money that you need to make to pay yourself however much you wanna make, pay for all of your business investments and expenses, and also have enough money set aside for taxes so that you are paying yourself a sustainable salary, you are spending a sustainable amount of time on your business, you're not overworking, and you are

you have the space and capacity for growth to reach those big goal revenue numbers. So what we see with a lot of people before they work with us and a lot of web designers just in general is that they are massively overworking and spending so much time on things in their business that aren't revenue generating activities or work that they're not getting paid for.

and they are overworking, undercharging, and completely burnt out. They're not consistently making their minimum baseline revenue and their goal revenue is nowhere in sight. And so that's one of the big things that we work on with our students is to create a sustainable project calendar and then put all of the systems and strategies in place to be able to implement that. So.

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I'm gonna walk you through that process today during the time that we have in the Page Builder Summit, and then I'm gonna tell you at the end how you can learn more about what it looks like to work with us to implement this. So the tool that we use inside of the Web Designer Academy to help our students create profitable and sustainable and healthy web design businesses is time blocking. And so time blocking is simply a realistic plan for your time based on

your life, not your life that it doesn't operate the way that it operates today, right? Not that, not your life when, you know, something changes, you know, some day in the future when you've reached all of your goals, a realistic plan for your time based on your life today, right? And so that's how we want you to come at this planning. And so if you look at this time blocking.

You have basically four chunks of your day when you're not sleeping, right? Morning, afternoon, evening, and night. So you can think about these as basically like four hour blocks of your time. Monday through Sunday, and then we have different categories of things that we do in our business, which I'll talk about here in a second. But when we don't have a realistic plan for our time based on our

current life as it is today, this is what our business ends up looking like. And so you can see that we are spending tons of time in our inbox checking emails, putting out fires, doing client work that is likely not even paid client work, right? It's stuff that clients have asked you to do that's outside of the scope or...

It's their emergency that they're making your emergency and you feel like you have to say yes to it You feel like you have to check your email because there might be something in there that Someone needs you and if you don't respond right away Then they'll be upset with you and they won't send you referrals or they'll give you a bad review You take meetings whenever it's convenient for your clients or the people that want to meet with you So you take meetings at all hours?

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of the day whether or not it's convenient for you. You you prioritize you don't create time in your day for the actual client projects that you're being paid for because you're spending so much time in your inbox and putting out client fires and meeting with people that it's the times that you're supposed to be with your friends and your family and your kids that you're working on client projects, right?

And so when you don't have a plan for your time, everything is so scattered. You don't have a lot of big chunks of free time. You don't make time for the things that are gonna actually generate revenue in your business, like marketing. Your client project time is so spread out that you can't really get a good flow going. And so things take you longer because you're...

your client project time is so spread out, you wait on clients for things. You don't have clear deadlines. You're often waiting on clients because you don't have a plan, so you don't have clear deadlines to give to your clients. So they're not in any urgency to get things to you so that you can work on their stuff. You're spending way too much time meeting with people, whether that's coffee chats or

You know, just talking to clients who aren't paying you about work that they want you to do That they're expecting to not pay for right so many things going on that by the time you get to the weekend When all of your clients are taking their own free time now you finally have a quiet moment To dig into client projects. So you spend all morning on a weekend morning working on client projects

Maybe you do take some free time, you know, on Friday and Saturday night, but by Sunday afternoon, you're feeling so anxious and urgent about like getting a jump on the week that you dig into a client project and then check your email in the evening. And so this is what happens when you don't have a plan. This is exactly what my life looked like when I was doing freelance web design on the side before I quit my day job and after I quit my day job. So put.

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day job into any one of these days. So without a plan, everything is scattered. You can't get focused. You're spending your time on the wrong things. And what that results in is you spending way more time working in a week than you need to. You're spending almost as much time in your inbox and on admin tasks as you are on paid client projects.

the majority of this doing work that you're not billing for or not getting paid for, you're spending way too much time in meetings and you're not marketing your business. So when you don't have a plan, a realistic plan for your time, your business looks like this, you're constantly overwhelmed, you're stressed out, and you are undercharging and overworking, right? You're working.

crazy hours and you're not getting paid for all of the work that you're doing and you feel like you just can never get ahead. So that's where a lot of our Web Designer Academy students are before coming to work with us and we help them not only put the systems around their time, but we help them with their thoughts about it and the mindset and all the fears that they have about not being immediately responsive to their clients.

and all those things so that they can create this plan and then follow the plan. Because creating the plan's easy, right? It's the following the plan consistently every single week and working your way into following the plan that brings up all of our fears and insecurities about what are people gonna think when I don't respond right away. So.

I want to walk you through the process that we walk our Web Designer Academy students through of creating a plan that allows them to work almost 50% less than what they were working in their business before coming to work with us and gives them some big chunks of free time, big chunks of client work time where they can really get into flow and really shift how they're operating their business from...

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operating like in a reaction mode like an employee does to operating in proactive mode like an entrepreneur and a CEO does, right? Making decisions ahead of time and following them instead of always operating in reaction to what our clients are doing. So this is what your business can look like with time blocking and you can see that we are actually spending time marketing our business because we've created that and prioritized that.

We have a good 20 hours of client work project work that we can do every single week that's in flow and big chunks of it. So we know we can tell our clients, here's by what, here's when I need this from you to do this project because we have a plan, right? So when you have this in place, your business becomes profitable, sustainable and healthy. So let's walk through how we

do this inside of the Web Designer Academy. So you have six blocks of time in your business and the first block is free time, the second block, and these are in order of importance, right? Free time, marketing, client project, meetings, client work, email and admin. And I'll talk about the difference between client project and client work in just a second, but the most important time that you can plan in your business is your own free time.

This is however you wanna spend your time, that's your choice, but you get to plan your own free time in your business and that gets planned first. So in the Web Designer Academy, what we have people do is we have them go through the next quarter, the next three months, and we have them block off all of the days that they know that they will not be working. Maybe they have things that they're doing with their kids, a holiday, a vacation, all of those things. We have them go through and block.

all of the days that they are going to be unavailable and not working or choosing, whether they're available or not, choosing not to work. For sake of this exercise, as an evergreen exercise, we want you to go through and on a weekly basis for the general schedule of your life, when do you work and when do you not work? I personally work a pretty standard, like,

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corporate style work schedule simply because my husband still has a day job and I work when he works and it's just easier for my lifestyle that way. So that's the example that I'm going to show you but know that you get to design a realistic plan around your life and you may be a night owl and you may choose to work after the kids are in bed. Like you get to design this.

ever you choose to design this calendar. But plotting out your free time is number one. So that's what you're gonna do. You're going to decide when are you working, when are you not working. So for example, for me, Saturdays and Sundays, my free time, I choose not to work on Saturdays and Sundays. I also choose not to work on Mondays, right? Mondays, you know, after quitting my day job, I was like, I don't work on Mondays anymore. So.

Sometimes I choose to plan stuff in the afternoon, but Mondays, I always used to say Mondays and mornings are mine when I was working my day job. So find out what that looks like for you and put all of your free time on there. And you might think, oh my gosh, there's not enough time left for anything, and you have to manage your mind around all of that. And we'll talk about that in just a second. So.

your number one priority is blocking out all of your free time during the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. And then so if you think of these as four hour blocks, that's 16 hours, you have another eight hours in here for sleeping. Okay. Next up is marketing. That is the number one most important thing you can do in your business.

And it doesn't take a long time. I'm not talking about creating content for social media, making YouTube videos, podcasts. I'm not talking about one to many content creation for the masses. I'm talking about connecting with real people, following up, building new relationships, doing outreach, whether it's warm outreach or cold outreach, following up with that person six months ago who said they weren't quite ready and you haven't heard back from them. Marketing only really takes a couple hours a week.

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to really do Duke and when you do it consistently, it's got compounding effect, right? It's like compounding interest. When you do your marketing consistently, it creates massive results for you. What we see most people do without a plan is they're so overwhelmed with everything that they're doing. Not only do they not create time for marketing, they don't wanna market because they're like, I don't have the space for anything else in my business.

And then what happens is they wrap up client projects and then they don't have anything in the pipeline, so now they are in this feast and famine mode. So with time blocking, it is imperative that you prioritize marketing as the first thing you do after free time in your business. And that's why we have marketing as the first thing we do on Mondays, or the first thing we do when we start the week.

So you just do it and you get it out of the way and you move on with your week. But we prioritize revenue generating activities and marketing is a revenue generating activity. And when you do it the way that we teach inside the Web Designer Academy, it's so simple and easy to do. It won't even take you two hours. The first hour will be you getting over all your thoughts around what people are gonna think when you do it. Then...

you'll, and then when you actually do it, it just gets easier and easier and faster and faster. So the next block of time that we prioritize in our realistic plan is client project time. So we have clients that have booked projects with us and paid us, hopefully, a really profitable, sustainable price, which we'll talk about in a second, to work on their projects. And we don't just...

wait around for clients to get us stuff, right? We have a project plan for our time, and this is when we are working on client projects and we're working on certain parts of client projects. We are not working on client projects on these other times, and we communicate these things to our clients, and we say, this is by when I need your content. And we don't let them be late, and we don't let them delay, and you know,

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This is where your project management skills and your confidence and your ability to set and hold those boundaries and lead a client through a project really comes in. And we'll talk about that in a second. But you have your client project days and nothing interrupts those. So notice we don't have email and admin on this schedule yet, right? We don't start our days checking email and looking for all the fires.

and feeling like, oh, we have to jump in and do client work and let the day completely get away from us, right? We start by working on client projects and we put our blinders on to other things. That is a skill that you have to practice. You'll have all kinds of thoughts about people being mad at you or needing you. And it's this transition between being an employee and having the employee mindset that clients are my bosses and I jump.

when they say jump, to being the entrepreneur that runs the business, that makes the rules, and communicates the rules to the client and leads the client through the rules, right? So that is your client project time. So give yourself plenty of chunks of uninterrupted time to really dive into your client work, to be focused, to have that space, to be creative and solve problems.

That's why I love to give myself like all of Tuesday and all of Thursday for projects. I don't do client work anymore But when I did this is what my what my schedule was like and then Wednesday mornings as well And you'll see how this all comes together in like a month time frame here in a second the fourth thing that we want you to Prioritize and schedule our meetings and meetings could be

consultations with potential new clients as a result of your marketing. Meetings can also be design and revision meetings with your clients. So we teach a specific process in the Web Designer Academy of when, how to schedule these projects, when to have the meetings, what to say in the meetings, and all of those things. So we want you to batch those meetings.

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all at once. So maybe you're having a consultation on Wednesday afternoon. Maybe it's a revisions meeting. Maybe it's a kickoff meeting with a client. Maybe it's a coffee chat with someone who, um, who you're getting to know a little bit better building a relationship with. But we're only doing those on one chunk of time every single week instead of having them spread out and interrupting our whole day. And you'll see how strategically putting meeting days in between development days

your workflow. So meetings are our fourth priority. Meetings do not come before marketing. Meetings do not come before client project times. They come forth in the priority of your week. So the next block of time that we want you to plan for is client work. And client work is requests that paying clients

have made of you that don't fall within a client project. So maybe you have retainer clients and you do maintenance for them or you do small updates for them. You know, if they email you on Monday and want something done Tuesday, you get to communicate to them that you do this work on Fridays, unless they would like to, you know, pay extra to schedule.

to have you move that earlier or move things around for them or something like that, right? You can offer them choices, but we set certain days in the Web Designer Academy that we do client work and we communicate those boundaries to our clients to say if you have requests and you make your request by this date, then the work will get done by this date. And then that allows us to put that block of time on our calendar and...

save up all of those things for that day. And depending on how much that client is paying for that retainer package, they may not get priority that day. In that block, their stuff may get moved to another block. So you have to be willing to set up those boundaries and not act like, you know, every client, every client is your boss and that they can just demand that you do things when.

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when they want to do it, you have to set those expectations from the beginning. And so that's when you have your client work block so that you're not. All over the place doing dropping everything for every client, whenever they ask you for something. And honestly, you're probably not charging for a lot of it. If you're like most of our clients, because you feel somehow responsible to do it, or they paid you so much money last year, or you want to, um, make sure that they're happy and that they give you referrals. So you just.

do their stuff and you don't charge for it, we want you to get away from doing that so that you can have a profitable, sustainable business. We help our web designer academy students with all what we call the mind trash around all of this and setting up the schedule. And then the fifth thing, or the sixth part of your business to prioritize is when you're gonna check email. And email is never the most important thing.

that you do every day. It truly is not. We want you to get used to it being the last thing you do that you get used to not making other people's demands and emergencies your emergencies. Get used to being able to get into your inbox to send marketing emails without seeing requests from clients and then having feeling the sense of urgency to do them right away and messing up your whole, messing up your whole time block week, right?

email and all the administrative tasks that come along with doing the things in your inbox. Those are those are when you have a thought error or some mind trash that your client's business is more important than yours and then you dig into email. We don't want you doing that. We want to give you plenty of time to be in your inbox and respond and do all the administrative stuff that comes out of it. We don't want you prioritizing email or

Random client requests every week. We want you prioritizing your marketing, the paid client projects that you've already been paid for, and the meetings that are gonna either keep those projects going or get you new projects. Email and all the administrative stuff is not your priority, and the other mistake that we see people making is that they hire people too soon to make email and admin stuff. They're that person's priority, and it doesn't end up working.

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And so when you can get a handle on your thoughts about your email and, you know, communication and all of that stuff and transition from employee whose boss expects them to respond and always be on to entrepreneur who has a plan for their time and a plan for their business and only responds to things in certain timeframes, that's when everything changes, right? That's when you take back control of your time. That's when you really can.

do client projects much, much faster than you can when they're all spread out all over the week. That's when you can not be resentful of all the requests that your clients are making you because they're taking you away from your goals and taking you away from your free time. You are the one in control of all of it. You get to create a realistic plan for all of it and then you get to go about the work of implementing the plan. Just like...

you know, a New Year's resolution to get fit or whatever, you're not gonna like change years and years and years of behavior overnight. It takes practice, it takes identifying the things you think about the plan and following the plan and honoring the plan that are in your way of actually doing it and working on those thoughts and beliefs about the plan that is going to have you following the plan, not just making the plan. So when you...

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You can see how this comes together into a sustainable project calendar. So Mondays, you're not doing client work. You're doing marketing and you are, you know, getting yourself set up for the week. Tuesdays in this scenario.

you're for your client A maybe you're doing their design that day you've already got all their stuff you've onboarded them you're kicking off the project that's the day that you're going to be working on their client work. Wednesday morning maybe you're working on onboarding client B during that client project block and then you have a couple meetings you're going to do your revisions call for client A's design day you're going to show them the design and take all their feedback and maybe you're also having a consultation with a new client.

Right, and then you wrap up the end of the day with responding to whatever emails came in. Now that you have your feedback for client A, you're gonna do their build on Thursday, right? You're gonna have a whole eight hours to design on Tuesday and another eight hours to build on Thursday uninterrupted, like dream life, right? You can create this. And then Friday.

Maybe you do all your client works. Maybe you have some retainer clients. Maybe you're doing like half day VIP days, exclusive bookings, whatever that looks like for you. And then you're doing email and admin. Maybe you're putting together a contract for client C. You're doing some billing. You're wrapping up your emails for the week. Again, then you start your next week. You don't just start with doing client work. You get yourself set for the day. You do your marketing.

you do your client A's build and integrations because you've finished the design, you've finished the build, you're still working on the build, maybe you're setting up all their integrations, then maybe you're ready to prep client B's project, get ready to start working on it. You have a revisions call with client A where you're showing, walking them through the build and integrations, you're kicking off client B and then you're working on client A build revisions. So you have

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these two full uninterrupted weeks, you know, four days to work on client A. And then you start on client B. Client A in the morning, maybe you're doing some testing and fixing, you're having a couple calls, a revision call for client B's design day, you're doing client A's quality assurance call, because you're preparing to hand over, then you do client B's build day. Client A goes live, client B build and integrations.

client A, Q and A fix, onboarding client C, doing client B's revision calls. So you can see when you have a clear plan for your time, this is what your months can look like. And you get to hold clients to their commitment of getting you the things that you need in order to do this. And in the Web Designer Academy, we have all kinds of scripts and strategies and processes for what if a client doesn't

Um, follow my process and I can't fit them into my time blocking. Will we tell you exactly how to fix that? But when you look at this schedule, you can see you're working 36 hours a week. You're getting some really solid quality time to work on client projects, be creative, tap into your highest level of thinking, and you're not spending, you're not like you're doing your marketing first. You're getting it out of the way. You're wrapping up your week with, um, with client work and VIP days.

And the faster you get this stuff done, the faster you're done on Friday. So this is just an example of a typical traditional, like eight, you know, nine to five, Monday through Friday schedule, but you get to really design this however it works for your life. And when you get that set up and you start to implement it, over time what happens is you create a profitable, sustainable, healthy business. So.

As I alluded to going through this, for this to work, you also need boundaries. You must be able to have boundaries with yourself to start implementing and holding your time blocks and with your clients. So all of the thoughts you think about and all the fears you have about if you're to say no or if you're to tell them you can't do it when they're demanding that you do it, growing into the person who has, who can communicate and hold boundaries is essential.

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Cultivating the CEO mindset where you're stepping out of being the employee and really stepping into being the one who's running the show and who's leading clients through that and who's allowing clients to work with you instead of hoping that clients will hire you right really cultivating that CEO mindset profitable pricing. So I don't care how amazing your time blocking is if you're still under charging for everything that you're doing. You are going to end up.

in the unsustainable business model where you're going to, if you're undercharging, you're gonna take on bad fit projects and let all your boundaries go and you're gonna be back to scattered and making not enough money. You have to learn how to charge sustainably in order for that to work and how to price for profit and how to grow your mind to.

Believe in the value of what you're charging and sell yourself on your pricing and your services So that you can sell your sell that to your clients You need a project management strategy, right in order for your week to really look like this You have to have a project management strategy. That's going to not only help you set this up and plan this but also execute it

And you also need sustainable packages and repeatable processes, right? So as you do things in your business, you'll start to develop those processes. This, you know, planning out these client projects, like the time blocking works, you know, for the week, but planning out that monthly project calendar really comes from you having packages that you sell over and over and repeatable processes that you do over and over when you know.

here's how long this takes me. This is what I'm known for, this is what I do, this is what I sell, I don't just say hire me and I'll do whatever you want me to do whenever you want me to do it. You have sustainable packages and repeatable processes. So without all of those things and without your realistic plan, your business is a hot mess. You're undercharging, you're overworking, you're overwhelmed, you are scattered and you feel like...

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I can never, I can never get ahead, right? But with, and then your revenue follows. This is what your revenue looks like, this is what your time looks like, and you're really having a hard time ever creating consistent revenue. When you implement not only the time blocking plan, but the mindset required to help you implement it, you create a profitable, sustainable, healthy business. So what we want you to walk away from,

and I'm gonna pull this up so you can screenshot this and you can create your own. We want you to, I want you to walk away from this and do your own time block for a week. What is your realistic plan for your time? And then what do you believe about your ability to implement this? What do you believe about what your clients will think? What are all of your thoughts about that? Cause that's where your work is in terms of you following the plan.

We have people inside of our program that are like, this plan doesn't feel like freedom. And you need to explore how what you're doing right now is actually not leading you to the results that you want. So go ahead and screenshot that. And then if you wanna get started working with us, your next step is just go to webdesigneracademy.com and join our wait list.

When you get on our wait list, you'll get all of the details about working with us, plus you'll get a weekly email with insider strategies from the Web Designer Academy that we're teaching exclusively to our students. You'll get an email every week with those, and then you'll be the first to know when applications are open for the program and when you can enroll. So just go to webdesigneracademy.com, click that get on the wait list button for

all of the insider info that we only send to people on our wait list, and then also you can subscribe to the Profitable Web Designer podcast. So if you go to profitablewebdesignerpodcast.com, you can find our podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts and also subscribe to get new episodes in your inbox. And that's where we talk about things like pricing, packages, CEO mindset, marketing.

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all of the things that you need to create a profitable, sustainable web design business and work less and make more money. So thank you so much for hanging out with me in this time blocking episode. I hope that you found something helpful that you can take away and I'll see you on the Web Designer Academy wait list, bye.