Productively Managing Your Day as a Small Business Owner

Small Business Owner Solopreneur Productivity
 
Today's Guest Post is from Rae Steinbach from FueledCollective. Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing, of course, and can be found on twitter at: @araesininthesun.

Productively Managing Your Day as a Small Business Owner

Owning a small business or being a “Solopreneur” is attractive to many people for a number of reasons:

  • Being based out of your home or able to work in a nearby coworking space instead of going to an “office”.

  • The flexibility that comes from being your own boss and not reporting to anyone.

  • Ability to “create your own destiny”.

  • You can choose the amount you want to work each day, and what you work on.

  • You get to keep all the profits of your own efforts.

But managing your own company comes with a number of unique challenges that employees at a larger business will not experience to the same degree.

Being short on time and not knowing where to focus are two of the most common difficulties faced by small business owners.

It is easy to feel “spread-thin” when you’re the one that is responsible for so many different tasks. Learning effective time management skills is a great way to feel more in control of your business and lead it to success.

Here are three areas to focus on to improve your time management abilities:


Work at Your “Best Times”

Flexible scheduling is among the most attractive features of small business ownership, but also brings with it a set of challenges. While the traditional “nine-to-five“ works for many people, the truth is that everyone works best at different times of the day.

Forcing yourself into a schedule that doesn’t help you be at your best will negatively impact your productivity and likely result in working longer hours.

Once you’ve determined your most productive times of the day, try to schedule your workdays in advance so as to spend those hours doing the most important tasks.

This will give you flexibility throughout the rest of the day to spend time working on less pressing assignments or those that don’t require the same level of intense focus.

Keep Track of Your Time

Like with any skill, one of the best ways to get better at time management is by examining your existing habits and looking for ways to improve them. This can be easily accomplished with one of many time tracking tools, which are also commonly used for tracking billable hours.

Periodically checking back on your time management tendencies will help you notice weak spots in your routine and find ways of addressing them.

Simply knowing that your work hours are being precisely tracked is also a great way of improving productivity and being conscious of the time you’re using.


Schedule Around Your Goals

Scheduling your workdays in advance based on your goals and work habits will help you accomplish the most important tasks on your plate each day. There are many different philosophies and ways of thinking about prioritizing, but all that really matters is finding one that works for you and your goals.

To-do lists and schedules help to make it easy to keep your most important tasks in mind throughout the day and avoid spending too much time on the wrong assignments.

Another recommendation is to have a set of morning routines in place that will help you be more productive from the moment that you wake-up.

Being able to visualize what needs to be done by the end of the day is a great productivity tool for both entrepreneurs and traditional employees.

Starting your own business is often overwhelming, but there are effective methods of dealing with the stress and workload required from solopreneurs. These three areas of time management will help you make the most of each day and start taking small steps towards building the company of your dreams.

Are you a small business owner or “solopreneur”?

What are your key “time-management” and “productivity” tips?

Today's Guest Post is from Rae Steinbach from FueledCollective. Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing, of course, and can be found on twitter at: @araesininthesun.