Your Day-to-Day Work
As business owners there’s always so many pressures on our time and getting the balance right between working on versus working in our business can be pretty challenging.
We all have the odd occasion when we’re in meetings all day and at the end of the day we feel completely ‘Zoomed out’. After days like these it’s easy to end up wondering when you’re actually going to get ‘the work’ done! For the odd day wall-to-wall Zoom calls may benefit you, but if it’s every day, that’s a recipe for creating stress and overwhelm, causing you to eventually break.
It’s important to feel like you’re in control of your day and not the other way around! So, let’s have a look at a few things you can have in place to make sure that’s the case.
How are you using your time?
Do you actually know how you use your time every day? So often it seems, we just start a project in the morning and by the time you know it, we’re closing up for the day and we don’t seem to have gotten anywhere. That can often have repercussions on our home life too, as we take things home to finish.
It’s so easy to lose hours of your day on tasks that are neither income generating nor actually necessary to move your business on. Knowledge really is power when it comes to your precious time. Using a time tracker can be an absolute game changer for understanding exactly where you spend your time. There are a number of online time tracking tools available now, like Clockify and Xero.
Once you’ve tracked your time for, let’s say, a week, see how it breaks down. How productive are you with your time? What things are you doing that someone else could do instead? The ideal is to get to a place in your business where you’re only working on things that fall into your specific zone of genius that no one else can do. And then everything else gets delegated or outsourced.
Your ideal working week
The beauty of having clarity about your ideal working week is that it gives you a solid framework for planning your time.
An ideal working week should include:
· Thinking time – this is an essential part of being successful in your business so please don’t cut it out! Thinking time gives you space for creativity and allows you to pause and make informed decisions about the performance and growth of your business.
· Preparation and planning time – this covers time for preparing presentations and research for meetings, planning your day, week and month ahead and setting your short, medium and long-term goals.
· Admin time – even if you have an assistant or VA, you’ll still have your own admin that needs to be taken care of. Factor in time in your working day to keep on top of your admin tasks and make sure these don’t leak into your personal time away from work.
· Work time – these are the hours when you’re directly working on your client and customer projects. For example, this could be writing a client report, serving in your café or working on your client’s marketing.
· Breaks – yes, you even get to make time for breaks! In fact, it’s absolutely essential you make time for them. Working with ultradian rhythms has been shown to be extremely effective, where you work for periods of 90 minutes and then stop for a break. Working these into your day can often mean you are more productive than just powering through your day without taking time out to rest.
· Business development time – this includes meetings, writing proposals, taking care of social media interactions or loading new products to an online shop.
Think about how you would portion out your time for each of these elements to a working week. Are there any other things you’d want to include that would make it your ideal week?
In our next blog we’ll be exploring the working week further and combining your ideal week with a standard week and how best to use your time.
If outsourcing your weekly accounting work or financial planning for your business are things you need support with, get in touch – we’d love to work with you.
