Organization Tips For Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners
As an entrepreneur, there are countless tasks, projects, and priorities vying for your attention at any given time. If you want to stay productive and on track to accomplish all of your business goals, you need to be organized.
Today we’re going to share some of our top tips for getting your business organized… and keeping it that way. Each of these solutions should be long-term and ongoing, because every entrepreneur knows there’s no such thing as a quick fix.
1. Understand how you spend your time
Organization is about more than having a streamlined filing system and organized desk — you also need to understand how you spend your time so that you can organize your schedule accordingly. You may be used to tracking your billable time or time spent on client projects, but you should also get a handle on how much time you spend on administrative tasks, email, projects, and even aimlessly browsing online.
You can use one of these tools to track your time, though any time tracking tool that you use for clients and customers can also be used to track time for other tasks. Alternatively, try keeping a simple Excel spreadsheet.
2. Keep your workspace clutter free
Having a clean and clutterless desk makes it easier to focus on the task at hand. When you’re surrounded by loose papers, pens, post-its, and other things it’s all-too-easy to feel as scatterbrained as your workspace look.
Here are 6 ideas for cleaning up your desk and office that you can implement today. But there’s one additional tip that’s not mentioned here: going paperless. Getting rid of paper clutter will help you stay organized, and you’ll never have to worry about losing important documents.
3. Spend meeting time wisely
It’s hard to stay organized when you have a schedule packed with meetings. It’s even harder to stay organized if those meetings don’t have a clear agenda, purpose, and set of post-meeting action items.
Meetings should be useful and productive, and here’s how you can make that happen. Pay special attention to tip #5 about having an organized person running the meeting!
4. Consider hiring some outside help
Staying organized on your own is no small task — you have so many other things to worry about, after all. Entrepreneurs and small business owners from every conceivable industry have realized that delegating certain tasks can help save their sanity.
You can delegate organization-related tasks in a number of ways, including by hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants work for you and your business, but they’re employed directly by another business (like our Intelligent Assistants at Intelligent Office). You don’t have to hire or train someone, either. The interview process has already been completed and the assistant has already been trained, so you know you’ll be working with a competent professional who will act as a trusted extension of your team.
Staying organized is a long-term process
If you want to get (and stay) organized, treat the process as a long-term priority and implement systems accordingly. Once you understand how you spend your time, get your workspace in order, make better use of meeting time, and maybe even hire a virtual assistant, you’ll be amazed by how effortless staying organized can be.
