“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” – Alexander Graham Bell
Whether you’re doing voice-over part-time or full-time, your journey will be more productive and efficient by setting goals, making a plan, and structuring your days. Managing and organizing your daily tasks will help you make sure you’re maintaining your momentum and reaching the goals you wish to achieve. If you start your days without a plan, you’ll spend too much time circling around and trying to figure out what to do next. Having a clear structure and plan will help you accomplish the goals you set out for yourself.
Below is a list of things that I do to help structure my time each day to reach my goals and be efficient with my time and energy.
1. Figure out what your allotted time is for the week.
First, you want to figure out how much time you can allot to voice-over during that given week. This will vary if you’re doing voice-over part-time vs. full-time or depending on what else you have going on. You may be able to set aside time every day, or have certain days and times during the week that you’ll devote to voice-over. If your time varies each week, make sure to portion out this time at the beginning of your week. Get clear on the time you have and set it aside.
2. Structure and break up your bigger projects and goals for the week.
After you’ve figured out your time for the week, sort out your daily tasks. Start by breaking up any longer projects you have for the week. If you have a project that requires longer recording times and want to break it up by day, start with that. For example, if you have an audiobook or longer e-learning project that is going to take you many hours and you want to break it up a little, split those into days first. Let’s say I have a project that will take me about 10 hours to complete and it’s due at the end of the week; I may split that up into two hours per day Monday-Friday or put it on a few days where I have more time.
3. Set some time aside at the beginning of your day to see if there is anything urgent.
I usually start my day with emails. I check my emails and see if there is anything I need to respond to immediately. Then I see if there are any auditions that I need to complete for that day and what time they are due by. I do this first to make sure that I don’t miss anything that is time-sensitive while I’m busy completing my other tasks for the day.
If I receive a new project from a client, I’ll send them a quick reply so they know I received their email. I’ll also let them know when I can get their project to them. A quick “thanks for this project, I’ll get that to you by tomorrow morning” puts the client at ease knowing you received their email and when they should expect the voice-over back.
4. Next, work on projects in the order that they are due.
After I’ve taken care of urgent tasks, I go to my projects or parts of projects I want to complete for that day. I usually do the things that take the longest, first. It’s a personal preference, but I like to get the more tedious things out of the way.
If I have a bunch of projects I’m working on at once, I’ll create a spreadsheet with the projects and put them in order of when they are due to keep myself on track.
For me, I complete each project one by one and send it off to the client. In other words, I record it, edit it, and send it off to the client before moving on to the next project. Some people prefer to do all of their project recordings at once, then edit them all, and then send them to the client. You can try each way and see what you like best.
5. Finish with tying up any loose ends from the day and spend any additional time growing your voice-over business.
Lastly, I make sure I’ve wrapped everything up for the day. I’ll check my emails one last time, see if there are any invoices I need to send, complete any other administrative tasks, and check if any last-minute auditions came through while I was doing other things.
If there is any extra time available for the day, I use it to build my business. That can mean marketing to a new client, doing research, or making plans on how I want to obtain the growth I want in my business. At the beginning of my voice-over career, I made time just for this on a weekly or daily basis. If you aren’t where you want to be in terms of the amount of voice-over work that you’re receiving, keep scheduling time to build and market yourself.
I watched an interview with Joan Rivers once where she talked about how she would do at least one thing every single day to build her career before she went to bed, even if it was just writing one joke or an idea for a joke. That’s something that has always stuck with me: doing at least one thing every day to build my voice-over career has helped me keep an ongoing momentum without things seeming overwhelming or feeling like everything has to be done at once.
As a person who gets distracted easily and hasn’t always been the best with staying on task, having a structure and a daily plan for efficiency and growth has really helped me keep my momentum in the voice-over industry. If you have a plan and a set time to work on it, you set yourself up for success.
Check out our free PDF with pro-tips from real working voice-over actors here!
Want to learn more about voiceover? Signup for our introductory VO webinar.
