5 ways to find more time to work ON your business, not IN it

Let me guess – you’re too busy to spend time marketing your business, right? Well, here’s a fact for you: If you don’t spend the time working ON your business, nobody else will. If you’re only marketing your business when things are a little bit quiet and you need a few more clients or customers, then your audience is going to see right through that. Inside this post, I’m sharing my 5 top tips to find more time to work ON your business, instead of IN it.

 

 

 

5 ways to find more time to work on your business

Hands up who here considers themselves busy? I'm willing to bet that most of you just put your hands up (or at least mentally put your hands up). I'm also willing to bet that you consider yourself too busy to spend time working ON your business when there's just so much that needs to be done IN your business every single day. Right? The thing is, if you don't work on your business, nobody else will. If you're only marketing your business when things are a little bit quiet and you need a few more clients or customers, your audience is going to see right through that.

You need to be consistently and regularly working on your business. So, here's how you can find some time to work on your business when you're just so freakin' busy.

Tip #1: Schedule your growth activities into your calendar each week

If it takes you two hours to write and edit a blog post, schedule this. Maybe you know you're more creative in the morning or more energetic in the afternoon – try to schedule your tasks according to how you work best and, once they're scheduled, don't procrastinate them. Don't let them budge. Working on your business is as important as a meeting or deadline, so treat it like one.

Tip #2: Have set themes for each day

I stole this idea off the girls at the Strategy Hour podcast because it's a genius idea and I'm trying to implement this into my own business at the moment. Essentially, each day has a theme. So, for example, Monday, Wednesday and Friday might be client work days. Tuesday might be my social media day and Thursday might be my podcasting day.

On these days, I can only do things related to this theme. On Tuesdays, I might source create and schedule social media content, maybe set up some new Facebook Ads, and review and measure everything from last week. On Thursday, I might prep and record my podcast for the week, write some blog posts, promote the previous week's podcasts.

Obviously, you'll need to set your themes according to what you need to do in your business, but try to set aside at least one day for growth activities.

Tip #3: Get out of your inbox

At the start of this year, I did this really crazy thing where I actually stopped replying to emails that weren't important. It gave me serious anxiety for about a week but, guess what – nothing happened! The wheels didn't fall off.

Of course, I still reply to important e-mails, like ones from clients or potential partners, but I've stopped replying to tyre kickers and time wasters, and I feel so much better for it. I reckon I've saved myself a few days worth of time in the last six months and probably kept myself a bit more sane as well.

Tip #4: Batch what you can

I've talked about batching your content a few times before and that's because I love it. You can seriously save a lot of time by batching. Got emails you need to reply to? Reply to them all in a batch, once or twice a day. Spend the whole day writing blog posts and suddenly you've got a month's worth of blog content.

Batching works by saving you a lot of time because you don't have to switch between tasks. So, just try it once and see if it's for you. It's not for everyone, but it might be what works best for you.

Tip #5: Outsource the things someone else can do

Yes, it's nice to be in control. Yes, delegating tasks to someone else can take longer initially than if you were to do them yourself, but, in the long run, you'll save yourself so much time.

What can you delegate? Things like customer service, bookkeeping, invoicing, emails, website maintenance, etc. It might be really tough the first few times but, trust me, delegating becomes addictive.

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