Time Management Tips for Fundraisers (Others Can Use Them Too)

Nov 01, 2000

The second thing I learned while new to this work is implied in a lot of the Journal's writing, but I will state it explicitly here: being a fundraiser means you have too much to do, more than any human being could ever accomplish. And besides, your work never ends.

With this in mind, a few simple time-management techniques can make the difference between being panicked about the work being out of control, and feeling okay about the work being out of control.

Before you dismiss that distinction as New Age double-speak, consider this: facing the fact that you have way to much to do means you can stop wasting time fretting about it. You can settle down and do the most and best work you can do, and let the other work wait.

In a fundraiser's day, twice as many tasks need to be done as are humanly possible to complete. Things are always falling through the cracks. The trick is to let things fall that aren't that important or that can be postponed. A lot of us have gotten into the bad habit of only doing things that are urgent and have a deadline attached. Unfortunately, in fundraising, those things are often not what yields the most money. For example, there is no deadline for calling Sally Jane Bigbucks. She is not calling you, either. So you sit with the name of this qualified prospect and the months pass.

SEVEN WAYS TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY

Here are seven things I do that make a world of difference in my productivity. A word of caution in the beginning: while you will recognize these as tried-and-true time-management principles, you need to adapt them (and any other time-management tips) to your personality. Some of these simply won't work for some people; trying to make them work will just make you more inefficient.

1. Your desk

Keep on your desk only the project you are working on at the time. Move everything else onto the window sill, a credenza, another table, even the floor if that's all you have. (If your group is really short of money, spend two hours at a flea market or garage sale and buy a table or another desk to put things on.)

If you have piles of folders, pieces of paper, your stapler, your extra disks, or even your phone on your desk along with the project you are working on, you have too many distractions. You get stuck on a sentence you are writing and you think, "I'll just fill up my stapler," or "I'll just call my friend briefly." It can take up to twenty minutes to regain interrupted concentration, even if you are interrupting yourself.

2. Your phone

The telephone is one of the greatest time drains in all our offices. Move your phone off your desk. Put it where at least you have to stretch to reach it, and preferably where you have to stand up to answer it. This inaccessibility will prevent you from making unnecessary phone calls. Furthermore, you will be prepared before you get on the phone. If you have to ask someone something or make an appointment, you will be sure to have the paper you need to refer to in front of you, or your calendar open.

Remain standing while on the phone. This shortens your phone conversations tremendously and gives you a greater sense of control over your phone time.

Obviously if you are the main or only person answering the phone, moving it off the desk may not be practical. In that case, let the answering machine take calls for a few hours a day. Start answering the phone at 10:00 instead of 9:00 and put the machine on again during lunch time, even if you don't go out for lunch. Unless you are an emergency line, it is totally acceptable to keep your phone machine on for up to half a day. You can screen the calls and pick up any that are urgent.

3. Your planning

Each month, take 30 to 60 minutes (yes, seriously) to plan your work for that month. (The monthly plan is, of course, based on your overall work plan for the year.) Set goals, list deadlines and make an outline of projects to be done.

Then, set aside a minimum of 15 minutes every day to plan that day based on your monthly plan. Make a detailed plan of what you need to accomplish that day. Many people do this at the end of the day for the next day, so that they can get right to work in the morning. If it works better for you to do it in the morning, do so.

While there are any number of expensive and more or less useful calendars and planning documents you can fill in, I use an 81/2 by 11 piece of scratch paper and a pencil. I write both my work and personal to-do lists on the same piece of paper. (I add personal things on my official to-do list because otherwise, as I get more frenetic, my personal life gets dropped or squeezed.) When my lists are made, I put times beside each activity. If the times are completely out of order, I transfer the list chronologically to another sheet.

Some people prefer to use a rating system, going from A (most critical) to C (least critical). This rating system expands fairly indefinitely when you use codes such as A1 as the most important, A2 as the next most important, B1 for the most important B item, and so on. I know many people who use these codes very effectively, and they obviously work. My problem is that everything seems like an A or a B, and although a coding system is inexhaustible, my time is quickly used up. By assigning specific times, I find I make a more realistic to-do list.

It is also useful in terms of accurate time planning to double the amount of time you set for most tasks. This allows both for the tasks themselves to take longer and for you to be interrupted to focus on something you hadn't planned on. A method many people use is simply to plan four hours of work in an eight-hour day. This also acknowledges the very necessary need to take breaks which, when you're enthusiastically imagining all you will accomplish, can easily be left out of your plan.

4. Your papers

You need three receptacles for paper. These can be drawers or baskets or simply piles on an empty surface.

One is for things that you will be doing that week, but not that day. That group of papers sits near or in your desk, but not on it. The second pile or receptacle is for papers that you have to deal with soon, but there is no pressing need to deal with them this week. The final receptacle is for things to read. Of course, the really final receptacle is the recycle bin or trash can.

You will notice that I don't keep a "to be filed" file. To tell the truth, I do have a pile of stuff to be filed, but I think the best way to deal with things to be filed is to file them immediately. (I'm working on getting better at that myself.) We lose a lot of time looking for things in our "to be filed" pile that we could easily find it they were in the right file. It should only take you 5-8 seconds to retrieve any piece of paper.

If you make it a rule to handle each piece of paper only once before deciding what to do with it, you will move your paper flow a lot faster.

5. Your meetings

Have fewer of them. While we have to do work in meetings, and admittedly a certain amount of the work we do at meetings is socializing and building camaraderie, many meetings are not essential, and almost every meeting lasts too long. Question every meeting: Is it necessary? If it is, do I need to be there, for part or all of the meeting? Make sure there is an agenda with times beside each item. People tend to talk for the amount of time that is listed. You can negotiate the need for extra time as it comes up. 6. People who drop by or call just to talk

You are not obligated to talk for the length of time that other people have available, no matter how important they are to your organization. Depending on your relationship with the person, you can use more or less subtle ways to help them wind up their conversation and leave. If you are a peer or a friend, try being straightforward: "I am so jammed right now, I just can't talk." Then, if you want, "Let's set another time."

If it is your boss, or a board member or donor who is not a peer or friend, there are a few things you can do. First, either get rid of chairs in your office so there is nowhere for them to sit, or keep papers on the chair(s), so you will have to move something for them to sit down. Don't move anything unless you feel it is necessary.

Second, have an arrangement with a co-worker to interrupt you after ten minutes to hand you a piece of paper that looks like a message. You can then say, "Oh, I need to take care of this." Or you can say at the outset, "Thanks for stopping by. I have an appointment in ten minutes, but let's chat for a minute." If you act unhurried, but establish your boundaries quickly, your visitor will not feel rushed, but will not stay.

If the halls aren't carpeted, you can sometimes head off visitors when you hear one coming down the hall by standing up before they get there. When they come in your office, remain standing. Again, chat as if you have all the time in the world, but don't sit down. Your visitor will not stay.

Finally, you can move people along with body language. While you are talking, look at your watch or glance at your calendar. It will make the visitor conscious of time without making them feel you are not listening.

7. Your priorities

Set priorities in this order: Start with the source of funding that is a combination of the biggest, the most likely to repeat, and the likeliest to come through. In balancing those three variables, place more emphasis on the repeatability and likelihood than the size. For example, for the overall health of the organization, you would do better to seek a gift for $1,000 from an interested individual prospect than a foundation grant for $10,000. The $1,000 gift will probably be repeated and upgraded over many years, whereas the foundation grant will be spent and finished inside a year.

FORGIVE YOURSELF

When you have done all this, forgive yourself for not getting some things done. The nice thing about being a fund- raiser instead of a neurosurgeon is that our decisions are not life-threatening. Let that help you keep some perspective.

This article first appeared, in slightly different form, in the Journal's Vol. 9, No. 5, October 1990.

by Kim Klein

Reprinted from the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Volume 17, Number 3, copyright Chardon Press, 1998.