When running an expanding business, efficiency has to be one of your top priorities. Whether it is client correspondence, scheduling, shooting, editing, blogging, packaging, or designing, you have to find the right systems to keep your business running smoothly. In our last Priorities post, we talked about setting realistic expectations when it comes to scheduling and knowing how much is involved with an actual session. Today we are talking about that actual time that is to be devoted to those sessions.

Prioritizing what you spend your time on each and every day will revolutionize how your business and life runs, and allow you more time to do the things you desire.

This is where social media sites come in. It’s can be easy to confuse work with being distracted. By no means are we suggesting removing yourself from social media sites. On the contrary, social media is essential for business growth. We’ve seen much more growth using social media than investing our time and money in advertisements. But, we are choosing to make conscious decisions on how social media impacts us.

Decide which social media sites are worth your time investment and which one’s aren’t. Are you subscribed to blogs that aren’t benefiting your business or your creative juices? Are you spending hours on forums and discussions that are tearing people down, and in turn, making you cynical? Are you following people on Twitter that only cause you annoyance when you read their tweets? Are you scrolling up and down Facebook and getting envious of why everyone else seems to be having a great time instead of you? Is your Pinterest account a mile long but you’ve never taken the time to recreate anything?

Want a few action steps?
1. Continually evaluate your blog subscriptions, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest accounts and remove those that initiate negative energy. Decide who speaks into your life and who warrants your time and energy. Much like trying to lose weight, if you keep desserts readily available in your house and watch the Food Network all day, you are only setting yourself up for failure.
2. Take back control of your time and set guidelines for how you use it. Consider using an actual timer to monitor your social media usage. Ask someone to be an accountability partner. Consider taking an entire day off from social media and see what happens.
3. Select a task and take it to completion without switchtasking (i.e. juggling two tasks by refocusing your attention back and forth between them, and losing time and progress in the switch). Trust me, it’s harder than it seems on the outset.
4. Breakdown the actual hours you worked in a day vs. the amount of hours you are on the computer and phone. If you’re not happy with the results, take initiative and make changes. As we’ve stated before, the 1% changes will make the greatest change over time.

Social media is going to be around a lot longer than all of us. Taking back control of how we use it and how it affects us will push you further along the road to creating the lifestyle you’ve dreamed of.

Because EVERY post is better with a picture, here are a few Instagr.am’s from our lives {off of Candice’s iPhone} of us from the past few days.

1,825 is a significant number today in our house. It equates to 5 years. Today Candice and I celebrate our 5 year wedding anniversary. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long and that short all at the same time. It feels like we’ve known each other forever and at the same time we are learning new things about each other every day.

Five years of life can cause some pretty dramatic changes. I remember in our first year of marriage the biggest question after work was what kind of fun we were going to have that night….dinner? a concert? a sporting event? a movie? shopping? a quick weekend trip somewhere?

Fast forward five years and our daily questions are a bit different as you can imagine. Questions of raising a family, our house sale and purchase, running a business, and who gets to sleep in while the other gets up with Stevie in the morning!

I’m not going to get all sappy on the blog, but for those of you who know and have met Candice, you know I married better than I deserved. One of the qualities I love most about Candice is her sense of social justice. If someone is being mistreated she’ll take care of the person mistreating them. If someone is lying, she will call them out. If someone is texting and driving, she’ll slap her phone up to the car window and tell them to put it away. If there is an earthworm on the pavement about to die, she’ll pick it up and put it in the grass. That’s just how she rolls. See, she cares. And not only does she care, but she wants things to be better which is why she takes action. She believes in people and speaks life into them.

Candice, I love you. And even though our 5 years have had all kinds of ups and downs and inside-outs, I wouldn’t trade a day of it. I look forward to many more 5 year marks. When we make 60 years of marriage, I hope you’ll look back fondly on our lives and have had a life full of love and joy.

And since you may have never seen our wedding photos, here’s to seeing us looking much younger.

photos courtesy of Me Wha Photography in 2007.