Are you constantly struggling to keep up with your work schedule? Is the clutter at your office space getting you worked up? Does it seem like your business is so disorganized that you’ll never have enough time to seek it out and make it work the right way?
Unless you’re an exceptionally meticulous person (or you haven’t seen that much business come through your company doors), you will have found yourself in the situations we’ve just described. Maybe you are even dealing with such a problem now. Perhaps the disorder you hate so much has become the default setting for your business as a whole.
Without proper organization, establishments will fail to function optimally. In fact, many enterprises have failed because they lacked structures and systems efficient enough to allow them to run smoothly. They neglected bookkeeping, didn’t evaluate employee productivity regularly enough, or lacked any real way to measure the company’s overall performance.
If a business’s processes are perennially disordered, you can be sure that it’s working without a real focus. And just like a ship that sails without direction, it’ll sink after a while.
The first thing you will have to fix on the road to getting more organized is defining your focus. What are you in business for? What’s your aim? What are your mission and vision, and what would it look like for these things to be actualized?
When you have a clear picture of what you’re pursuing with your venture, you will find it easier to set up systems and structures in place to reach your goals.
Let’s assume you’ve defined your target. You know what you want to achieve with your business. How do you make your journey towards that goal as straightforward as possible? What little (or big) things should you put right to tar your growth path?
Tips to Help You Get More Organized
1. Work with a Schedule
Don’t let the days, weeks, and months take you on a ride to nowhere. Take charge of your time. Create a work schedule for yourself. It’ll help you become more productive, and allow you to see how much you can and do get done on a daily basis.
There are many ways to do this. One would be using good old pen and paper. Write down your tasks for the day and week and stick it up somewhere visible to you. If you think that’s too outdated, you can use any of the numerous calendar and scheduling tools around these days, like Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.
2. Set Up Formal Communication Structures
If you’re not working with a set and stable formal communication structure at your company, your messages to members of staff may get lost in transit. This could, in turn, create disagreements between departments and members of staff that should never have arisen in the first place.
Instead of passing information between colleagues across departments and units in a company, you may work through the established organizational structure. With business-related messages passing through established ranks, it will be easier to track messages and projects that have been dispatched or delegated to the various departments.
3. Use Cloud-Based Applications to Track Projects
Cloud-based systems like Google Sheets allows multiple people to keep tabs of projects from wherever they are, as long as they have access to the platform on which the project files are located.
And if you’re working on something with other members of your team, you should make communication as effective as possible. Depending on the nature of the project, your means of communication could be Google Hangouts or team collaboration software like Slack.
4. Preschedule Social Media Posts
We’ll dwell on the scheduling theme a while yet.
Anyone who has tried juggling social media management and core enterprise building duties will know that it’s a hard thing to keep up with. You can’t create a large following unless you are putting content up on a regular basis. But work can’t wait either.
The go-to solution is social media scheduling apps, which let you schedule your social media posts when you’re less busy and gets them published at the time of the day that you like. Some of the more common social media scheduling apps include Buffer and Hootsuite.
5. Rearrange Your Office Space
You may never know how much a disorganized office space takes out of your time, or how much it disorients your mind and distracts you from work that really matters. But it does.
Besides keeping your workstation clean, you can also declutter your desk by arranging files in racks or shelves. This frees up space and gives you a clear visual field and the freedom to concentrate on more crucial stuff.
Make sure your furniture is also arranged in a way that makes it easy to move around the office. The rule here is to take up as little space as possible and keep your environment aesthetically suitable for productive work.
6. Be Systematic About Managing Customer Requests
Record customer requests as soon as they come in- or as soon as you can – and document your progress on meeting their requests. This gives you less to grapple with in your head and allows you to tackle issues as they arise. And you’ll forget less and please your customers with your prompt delivery.
7. Monitor Your Inventory
Also, examine your stock of goods at regular intervals. You will be effective at doing this if you are noting the volume of these goods coming in and going out of your business (that is, what you produce or purchase, and what you sell).
8. Keep Tabs of Receipts and Expenses
You don’t have to sweat it out with your pen and paper on this one. Thanks to accounting software, you can automate a lot of your bookkeeping, and manage your accounting records with far less effort than you’ll need if you were just using paper or spreadsheet systems. This article takes you through some of the accounting software options you can choose from.