This is the second in a series of blog postings on the American Society for Indexing’s (ASI) Virtual Conference, held on Saturday, May 2nd. The Annual Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina was postponed until 2021 because of COVID-19.
Held on Zoom, the second session, New Time Management Techniques for the Savvy Indexer, was presented by Diana Witt.
She started with a review of basic time management techniques. She recommended using time tracking tools to see how fast you are indexing. Dedicated indexing software often keeps track of how long you have been indexing in a session.
Although she said embedded indexing is slower than back-of-the-book indexing, software such as Index Manager can reduce the amount of typing by highlighting terms and, thus, increase speed.
She said it is important to manage the amount of time spent on clients’ e-mails. Be sure to give a prompt response and have indexing samples ready in case they are requested.
She also focused on how publishing industry changes have impacted our ability to manage our time and workflow. She described portal systems now used by publishers, which are third party billing systems that require more documentation. These changes have greatly increased the amount of time indexers must spend on non-indexing tasks in order to run their businesses efficiently.
I will discuss the third session of the Virtual Conference in the next blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com