As the senior vice president of external affairs for local nonprofit Lighthouse Louisiana, Stephanie Benedetti is in charge of many tasks. Depending on the day, she could be working on social media campaigns or social enterprise sales, maintaining the organization’s IT infrastructure or managing the retail stores. Currently, she’s working on the organization’s upcoming virtual Halloween fundraiser, a reverse job fair, and several grants. “I do find that when I have many desk projects, I also have a lot of meetings. And with the pandemic, I’m having even more meetings all online.”
Here, Benedetti shares with The Network how she’s managing her some 20 hours of meetings each week while completing all her tasks and managing a team of seven.
Mornings: A self-proclaimed night owl, Benedetti wakes up after 7 a.m., grabs a banana and starts work between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. She completes a morning ritual through her Full Focus Planner and takes a quick glance at emails to make sure she didn’t miss any urgent requests from the night prior. Then, she sets up her workday. “I look at my current to-do list and identify the top three things I need to do by the end of the day to move that project forward. Then I list all my appointments and other important tasks. I make sure to take my time in the morning to get organized so that I can face the next seven and eight hours.”
Lunch: At the beginning of the pandemic, Benedetti outfitted her home office with a mini-fridge. She snacks through the day, working through lunch, before taking off a few hours in the evening for dinner and a break. “My home office is a one-stop shop for drinks, snacks, yogurt, almonds, cheese and pepperoni.”
Evenings: To make up for lunch, Benedetti prepares a big dinner. After spending the evening with family, she gets back to work and normally stays up until midnight.
Benedetti’s tech tricks
Email: Benedetti uses Mailchimp for general communications and internal newsletters and Raiser’s Edge, a donor platform, to communicate directly with Lighthouse Louisiana’s constituents.
Calendar: She connected her Gmail and Outlook calendars with Calendry. She sends a link to someone who wants to meet with her and they can schedule the appointment themselves. It updates in real time so there’s no double booking and she can block off time needed for herself.
Communicating with staff: She uses Slack, but they also try to look for programs that are accessible for the organization’s employees who are blind, and so they also use ToDoist. It’s a cloud-based task list, available for web or app, and using it allows her to understand priorities for her staff.
Lighthouse Louisiana also uses another cloud-based software, Performa for annual reviews as well as giving continuous feedback. The organization’s goals are loaded into the system and employees set individual goals to track throughout the year. Everyone in the organization can see the larger goals as well as how their individual goals tie in. “Everyone knows where we’re going and how their work contributes to where we’re going.”
Benedetti’s productivity hacks
Multitasking. If there’s a meeting she’s attending where she’s not an active participant, like a webinar, she’ll workout during the meeting.
Have an outside person to run ideas by. Benedetti likes to think out loud, and while before the pandemic she could bounce ideas off coworkers at the watercooler, working remotely has cut her off from that kind of casual socializing. Now, her in-person coworker is her husband, who as an engineer brings a totally different perspective to issues, she says.
Upgrade your office. Knowing she would be spending most of her days in her home office, at the beginning of the pandemic, Benedetti purposely invested into the room and transformed it from just a table and a chair into her own productive haven. She added a couch, a minifridge, a light fixture and some art to customize the room into a warm, comforting space to work. “I made this space my favorite room in the house.”
Read more about Benedetti in a recent Baton Rouge Area Chamber profile of Lighthouse Louisiana.
