Learning how to make work both productive and enjoyable can be tricky, especially if you’re working alone from home running your own business. Unlike larger companies, you don’t have anyone to delegate tasks to. Instead, you are responsible for everything that happens in your business. As good as you feel when things go well, you know you only have yourself to blame if things go wrong. This is enough to make anyone work too hard, but this is not sustainable, so how can you reduce your workload and maintain the success you’ve achieved so far?
Track Your Time
Time tracking is an effective time management tool. It provides essential help and information when billing clients but is also useful for discovering how long it takes to start and complete certain tasks. While you may believe you are efficient, you’ll be surprised at how much time you waste doing the small but essential tasks for your business.
It only takes a few minutes to respond to an email, but entrepreneurs can easily get distracted because they know it won’t take long. Therefore, while the email may only take a minute, you might spend five minutes scrolling through your phone or browsing the internet. This means a one-minute email becomes a six-minute one, and if you do this ten times a day, you’ve wasted an hour. By tracking your time, either through software or on your phone or watch, you’ll find out how much time you waste, which encourages you to adjust your habits.
Make The Most Of Tools And Resources
You shouldn’t expect yourself to do everything, even if you learn how to manage your time properly. There are some elements of your business that you can leave to others, whether it’s tech tools or services.
Common approaches include outsourcing or using a white label marketing agency that still allows your business to be a part of the process. You can also look at automation for social media posts or appointment booking, which can dramatically reduce the amount of work you need to do throughout the day.
Know How Much You Need to Do
It also helps if you know how much you need to do each day. This should be the first thing you establish, as it immediately gives you an idea of how long everything will take and allows you to check whether you are ahead, on, or behind schedule.
However, many entrepreneurs still approach their work with the hustle mindset. This isn’t to say it’s wrong, but ignoring your time off in the hopes of making a few extra dollars is rarely worth it. This can lead to a toxic self-made culture of overworking, which leads to health issues that will negatively impact your business.
Reducing your workload may not seem possible right now. But, it is something that you must do if you want to maintain your performance, creativity, and ability to meet deadlines and demands from clients. As a one-woman enterprise, you must identify the best ways to reduce your workload and make everything more manageable so you have time for everything else.
