As a self-employed business owner, you’re a professional wearer of many hats, spinner of many plates and chef of many dishes. And whilst you’re no doubt able to handle it all, there’s no point overcomplicating things. Staying organised is an essential component of handling your work duties, ensuring you spend your hours productive and on-track.
In this article, we’re going to offer some tips on how to stay organised in your work. From tracking your goals and workload in a calendar to automating tedious and repetitive tasks, explore how you can boost your productivity with these organisational tips below.
1. Use A Personalised Calendar To Track Your Schedule
The budget-friendly alternative to a real-life personal assistant is a well-maintained calendar. You can design your own calendar using easy online templates that provide you with the flexibility to make it completely your own so that it’s tailored to your work style and routine (or lack of it, if that’s how your job operates)!
Many of us prefer to keep things digital these days, but if you’re a pen-and-paper person, printing out a personalised template will leave you space to jot down your thoughts, dates and anecdotal information in a way that works for you. Whether digital or physical, a calendar that expresses your personality, contains your favourite colours and fonts, or even has your company branding, is going to be a lot easier to keep updated than a scruffy notebook or blank document.
It’s a good idea to split your planning into monthly and weekly schedules. The former will provide key dates, deadlines and events at a glance, which are available as a reference point. A weekly planner will help you segment and schedule your work days and remind yourself of meetings. Of course, each industry is different. The key benefit of a personalised calendar is that the blank canvas is shaped entirely by what works best for your organisational style and line of work.
2. Adopt Project Management Tools To Streamline Tasks
Planning ahead is an excellent way to stay organised, but keeping your projects under control as you’re working on them is equally important to make sure you don’t fall behind or lose sight of something important. Project management tools like Asana and Trello are helpful for self-employed business owners, whether you work in a group or independently.
You can store your work in a centralised place and provide easy access to clients, collaborators and colleagues as necessary. This will save you the hassle of emailing files and losing documents in the digital sphere, which can become a major time sink, and quite stressful!
Using project management software or SaaS (Software as a Service) systems means you can access your work from any device, as well as provide status updates and connect with people on the go. For most of us, breaking down large projects into smaller tasks makes work more manageable, and makes it easier to track progress, both for yourself and your clients.
3. Integrate Automation & AI Where Possible
Whether or not you’ve employed others to work with you, two pairs of hands and one brain can rarely take on all that needs to be done when running a business. Luckily, plenty of software has been developed to streamline menial administrative processes and repetitive tasks that can easily be automated, or taken care of by AI.
Think how much time you’ll save if you can hand over invoice generation, routine marketing and customer service enquiries to automated tools. You can automate social media posting and cold outreach emails to post or send at a pre-set time, and even schedule automatic follow-ups after a given time frame, which frees you up to focus on your areas of expertise.
Many businesses and even the Odisha police have introduced AI-powered chatbots to answer simple customer queries and share real-time information. AI is also being used more frequently for content generation, which can be a great way to spark ideas or edit what you’ve written for your website or portfolio, to make your tone more engaging, professional, confident or modern.
4. Clearly Define Your Personal & Work Life
As a self-employed business owner, it’s easy for work hours to spill over into your personal life. This is especially true if you work from home, or if you work with clients in different time zones, whose working day may fall over your nighttime. So, set clear boundaries, both in your head and explicitly communicated, to keep work compartmentalised.
If you do work from home, dedicate a room or at least a desk to become your office. Minimise distractions, and make it clear to those in your household that this is your ‘do not disturb’ zone. Try not to work from your bedroom as this can disrupt sleep, or in noisy, high-traffic areas of the home.
Make sure your clients and colleagues are also well aware of your working hours. It can be all too easy to answer a quick call ‘after-hours’ to help someone out, and whilst this isn’t always a bad thing, it is a good habit to politely mention that you’re doing it as a favour. Being self-employed means you’re your own manager, so don’t end up becoming a ‘nightmare boss’ for yourself!
Self-employment and owning your own business is a popular model of work for many, with some arguing it’s more lucrative than government jobs. Here we’ve shared our tips for staying organised as a self-employed business owner. We’ve talked about:
- Creating a personalised calendar to stay on track with projects and deadlines
- Using project management software to make work easily accessible and centralised
- Automating simple, repetitive tasks to save time
- Working with AI generative tools to increase productivity and output quality
- Setting boundaries between work and personal life to remain well-balanced
With these organisational tools under your entrepreneurial belt, you won’t spend a second more than necessary staying on top of things, leaving you with the time and energy to focus on developing your business.
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