Small business task management skills can streamline your life
When you own a business, you’re constantly juggling the demands of your personal and professional life. Staying on top of everything that requires doing can get frustrating fast! Fortunately, you’ve likely learned quite a few things about task management during your career as a business owner—skills that you can apply to other areas of your life. Here’s how to leverage your task management skills to get a better handle on your professional and personal workload!
Delegate and Outsource
Knowing when to delegate work is an essential business skill. Even if you have the time to do everything yourself, hiring out specific projects to professionals is better than wasting hours learning how to write email newsletters, build a website, or navigate the complex world of digital marketing. For tasks like these, consider outsourcing to a digital marketing company like Cooperata! You may even be able to offload your business tasks to online services. For example, if you want to form an LLC, take advantage of online formation services like Zen Business to save time and avoid costly mistakes.
The same concept works for household projects. For example, try delegating household chores to other members of your family or outsourcing them to contractors. Hire a dog walker, cleaner, and landscaper to save yourself some time. You can even outsource meal planning and grocery shopping!
Use Project Management Tools
Categorizing and breaking down your tasks into manageable parts is critical. And where project management tools can help! Keeping all of your work and personal jobs in one place will make it much easier to manage your time and determine which tasks you can tackle yourself and which ones you need to delegate. At work, you can use these tools to break up long-term projects and assign tasks to your team members. At home, use project management apps to give your kids chores, keep track of appointments and events, plan meals, create grocery lists, and more!
Schedule Your Priorities
As a business owner, you have so much to do and so little time. It’s essential to prioritize the tasks that will have the most significant impact on your business, whether this means sending out invoices to clients or pursuing new leads. Use this same mindset to organize tasks in your personal life. For example, it’s best to start your morning by tackling the most challenging task on your plate—also known as “eating the frog.” This task is the one you dread the most because it’s super-important, complex, or time-consuming. Getting this out of the way will help you stop procrastinating and establish momentum for the rest of your day!
Stop Multitasking
According to Wanderlust, studies have shown that our brains are terrible at multitasking. Trying to do more than one thing at once can hurt your productivity! Instead, try to give all of your attention to one project at a time. At home, this means deciding on a project—whether cleaning, cooking, meal planning, financial organization, or helping your kids with homework—and seeing it through to completion before moving on to another task. If you’re facing a long-term project, set a timer and get down to work until the timer goes off.
Stick to a Routine
Creating a daily routine and building your schedule around this is a great way to avoid multitasking and procrastinating. As SkilledAtLife explains, routines make us more efficient! When you stick to a cd, you have fewer decisions to make throughout the day. Regular practices free up mental energy for more important things, like working on your business! Rituals—like going for a walk or making a cup of coffee—are great for breaking up parts of your routine so you can move from one task to the next without letting your attention drift back to your previous project.
Embrace Flexibility
Establishing routines, to-do lists, and plans is essential for organizing your personal and professional life, but it’s also important to be flexible. Business owners should be ready to adapt to changing economic environments and revisit decisions whenever needed. In the same way, being adaptable at home will help you overcome unexpected situations that could throw off your whole schedule. For example, if your kid gets sick and needs to stay home from school, good mental flexibility will help you make adjustments quickly without feeling like your entire day has been derailed.
The task management skills you employ at your business can have invaluable benefits in your personal life. Whether you’re looking to split up household chores, save time, prevent procrastination, or improve your ability to adapt to change, good task management skills will get you there!
Outsourcing is a critical component of good task management. If you’re looking for someone to help you with digital marketing or website development, schedule a free consultation with Cooperata today!
