Owning a business can be a very exciting venture and can be one of the achievements that you are most proud of, but it does take a lot of hard work and determination to make your business a success. While you can’t control external factors that impact your business, you can take control of the way you manage your time and stay organized to keep on top of all the essential tasks it takes to ensure daily operations run smoothly, and if you are a small business owner who is feeling slightly overwhelmed, here are some tips to help you improve your time management.
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Set Yourself Work Hours
The first step to good organization is creating a schedule for yourself. When you are a business owner, it can be hard to switch off sometimes, particularly if you’re in the middle of an important project. However, it is important to make sure that you are maintaining a good work/life balance for your well-being, as it shouldn’t be all work and no play. Setting yourself work hours is a good way to do this, whether that is the traditional 9-to-5 pattern or starting earlier in the morning and finishing mid-afternoon, or mid-morning to early evening. How you set your work hours will depend largely on the times of day that you feel the most productive, but also on when your customers are more likely to come into your store or contact you to use your services.
You should also think of creating a staff schedule if having various shift patterns will work better for your specific business. Although you might need to come in early or work late on occasion, sticking to set working hours will help you get into a good routine and manage your time more effectively.
Avoid Micro-Managing
This might be difficult to do at first, particularly when you are first starting as a new company and you are feeling protective as a business owner, and you want everything to go perfectly. However, micro-managing is not only irritating and stifling for your employees, but it can also mean that you’re wasting time trying to do tasks that could and should be delegated to someone else. You can be there to support your employees should they need assistance or guidance, but you do need to trust them to do the job that you hired them to do. Remember, you picked them to join your team for a reason, so let them take on their responsibilities and show how much of an asset they are to the team.
Consider Outsourcing
As a small business, you might not have the funding to hire a lot of employees to help run every part of your daily operations. While there are a lot of things that can be taken care of in-house, if you want to save some of your time and relieve some pressure off of your teams, outsourcing to business services could be a cost-effective idea and help to boost morale by ensuring your teams are not overworked. There are various aspects of business management that you can outsource to other services, such as IT support, sales and marketing, and even HR. For the latter, see the HR dept in Oxford, as this could be the ideal service you are looking for and can provide the right support to help your business and its employees stay protected and valued.
Set Yourself Daily and Weekly Objectives
Another good way to manage your time more effectively and maintain your organization is by setting yourself daily and weekly objectives. You can prioritize the most important tasks that need to be completed, particularly ones with specific deadlines, as this way, you won’t get caught up in other jobs that can wait and avoid feeling stressed later in the week. You might even find that allocating certain days to specific jobs, such as doing the weekly accounts on a Friday or Monday, arranging staff meetings at the beginning of the week, etc., can help you to feel more balanced and in control of your workload. This also helped you to get into a good routine and make sure that all of your jobs are done by the time you leave the office.
If you have been feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner and would like to take back some control, use these tips to help you start managing your time more effectively and see how it can help to reduce those feelings of stress.
