Life as an entrepreneur can be overwhelming. You have a business to maintain, a constant eye on marketing trends, and have a million other tasks on your plate everyday. You simply can’t juggle everything, and you shouldn’t have to. With the right tools and strategies, both new and seasoned entrepreneurs can make their lives just a little bit easier.
In this article we will highlight tips to make your life as an entrepreneur simpler, less stressful, and more productive. With these tips, you make navigating your business life go from being lost at sea to on a weekend cruise. Finding ways to better manage your daily tasks can make your business run smoother without any extra effort or input.
1. Automate the Simple Things
For all entrepreneurs, the tiny things you need to get done daily add up, slowly draining away both your time and energy. Avoid this by turning to automation, eliminating these daily tasks from your mental radar. No matter what your workflow looks like, there are likely countless elements that can be partially or fully automated. Automation tools have become relatively simple to learn, and with so much documentation available, there has never been a better time to learn.
If you are tired of coordinating meeting times over email, consider using a meeting scheduler. This allows for your digital schedule to do the heavy lifting, while you focus on business strategy instead of time zone differences. If you’re exhausted writing yet another copy-paste email, look into communication automation tools. This can easily streamline employee onboarding, customer followup, and basic email backup processes, all important tasks that don’t require your full attention. Simple tasks like these are perfect for automating, as they are required but often more time consuming than beneficial.
Automation might take a bit of work to get comfortably set up, but once it’s in place you permanently have fewer tasks to do daily or monthly. It also eliminates an element of human error, ensuring you never forget to send out payroll or that one followup email. Putting in that initial effort is sure to help you have more time for your entrepreneurial pursuits, both in time and mental capacity.
2. Outsource Complicated or Laborious Tasks
An essential part of any business is being the best at everything you do. From your product or service, to the customer experience, to the quality of your website, putting in effort shows. However, at a certain point it can feel impossible to put in professional level effort into every task. This is where outsourcing really shines.
A common and often overlooked task that is ripe for outsourcing is cleaning. Seeing as a clean space increases focus and productivity, investing into a cleaning service has more than just aesthetic benefits. Other possibilities include managing and designing your website, transcribing calls and meetings, or even basic data entry. You could even outsource automation to an expert, eliminating the obstacle of initial setup.
Outsourcing can also be for one-time tasks, such as getting high quality photos of your product or business. If you are making a demo video, consider temporarily contracting a video and audio editor. These one-time jobs are the perfect place to let someone else employ their expertise instead of learning a new skill from the ground up.
3. Plan for Financial Turbulence
The thing that is known but often not said out loud – the business world can be an unstable place. As an entrepreneur, you can easily find yourself at the total mercy of the market, and if the market suddenly goes south, you will too. Unless, of course, you’ve planned ahead for this possible disaster.
Consider setting up a nest egg, investing into your long term. Having a retirement fund properly set aside is a great long-term investment, and getting started early means you’ll be able to retire comfortably. A big first step for this type of investment is budgeting, meaning taking a look at your current expenses and whittling them down so you can invest elsewhere. This benefits you by not only prepping for your future, but also improving your present financial situation.
Another essential step for building your nest egg is paying off debt. While it might not sound like an investment, not having to deal with debt or loans simplifies your budgeting process. It also ensures that debt never becomes a roadblock between you and funding in your future. Investing into this is not only a financially sound choice, it’s also peace of mind. Overall, investing into this now is a solid plan for any entrepreneur, no matter your stage of life.
Keep Eyes Peeled for Opportunity
Being an entrepreneur means always being on your toes, ready to pounce at the next opportunity. That means with every worry you manage to snuff, you’ll have that much more focus when it comes to spotting the next big thing.
Start by making a list of tasks you get done daily, and then a list of what you get done monthly. Examine time sinks you deal with, and look into solutions. Optimizing begins with identifying the issue, and from there you can begin to implement some of these tips. Through automating basic tasks, outsourcing arduous tasks, and investing in yourself, navigating life as an entrepreneur has never been easier.
