When you start your own business, it is very rare that you will start with a comfortable nest egg in the bank. We don’t have a full IT department behind us or a HR department providing us with holiday and sick leave as needed. You start your business, YOU, and that is your greatest asset.
As your business grows it’s a smart idea to make sure that you protect yourself, so that you are able to run your business successfully without burn out!
A big part of protecting yourself is to assess your time management.
I am a planner! So much so that I designed my own range of planners as I couldn’t find anything on the market that suited how I work.
Plan each day, know where your hours are going, what client or project you are working on and what you are doing in your own business. Prioritize your tasks. If your tasks aren’t written down how do you know what you need to do? Unfortunately though, the other members of my team can’t see the planner sitting on my desk, so along with my daily planner I also use Asana for listing client tasks and delegation. This keeps everyone on track.
As a part of planning my day, I also batch tasks wherever possible. By grouping similar tasks together I am able to be more productive as my brain is focusing on one task at a time.
An example of task batching, Emails: I check my emails in the morning and in the afternoon. This means I am only replying to emails twice a day and I don’t get lost in the rabbit hole that writing emails can be! As a side bonus to this, it also encourages my clients (and team) to keep their messages within Asana or our instant messaging app, Slack.
You might find that checking emails and checking your social media are tasks that you can do at the same time (it’s all customer service, just different platforms), I know by scheduling my time on social media, my work day doesn’t include nearly as many cat videos! 😉
If you do weekly blogs, instead of trying to write one each and every week, take a day or a morning once a month and write all 4 of them. Get them done and plan your social media to go with them. Once they are planned and scheduled, you don’t need to worry about them (and it will also make writing your newsletters easier too as you’ll have a blog all ready to refer to).
I’m sure we all wished we had more hours to our day, and whilst I haven’t found a way to actually achieve this, I have discovered the next best thing… Outsourcing.
Yes, I practice what I preach! I know that I can’t do everything for my business and my clients when there is only so many hours in the day, so I have people to help me, just like I encourage my clients do for themselves. Outsourcing doesn’t always have to be in business either… Hello online grocery shopping! Having someone else walk the grocery aisles, pack your bags, bring everything home and dump them on the kitchen bench might just give you that extra hour a week that your business or family really needs you for.
You can never outsource your knowledge, your expertise or your intellectual property. That is, the stuff in your head that your clients come to you for. In order for you to provide your clients with the best of you, you need to make sure you have the time to commit to them!
How do you plan your day or protect yourself from burn out so you can look after your clients to the best of your ability?
