6 Tips On How To Be Organised

Talking to a fellow business owner this week, he had spent all weekend bringing his accounts up to date – ready to hand to his accountant for the year end process. We had a conversation about being organised and it led me to write this week’s ditty.

How to be organised

1. Be ruthless with your time

   1. Value your time – if a task takes all day and prevents you from working on something that might win more work, complete delivery of something billable or ensure that your team is firing on all cylinders you have to decide if the time spent on that task was worth the cost or if you should find some other way – outsourcing, simplification or simply stopping.

   2. Consider outsourcing book-keeping to a book-keeper if you do not have the time to keep your books up to date.

   3. Consider outsourcing other routine tasks where your time investment is not justified.

   4. Set limits on work so that it does not interfere with precious family or leisure time.

   5. Set limits on play and trivia so that they do not interfere with more valuable leisure or work time.

2. Backlogs are vile – any of your routine tasks can easily be ignored for a few weeks. Then they build into a large backlog of “stuff to do” that gets harder to tackle and which, instead of taking 15 minutes a week, takes a whole day to catch up on.

3. Split tasks into time groups and schedule time for working on those tasks that you really have to do yourself.

   1. Daily

   2. Weekly

   3. Monthly

   4. Quarterly

4. Deal with very large tasks by splitting them down into smaller work packages so that you can measure progress (Try “Elephant Tasks” in Google).

5. Be objective

   1. Stand back – it is very easy to become so engrossed in time consuming tasks that you forget to check that they are worthwhile or at least that they will give you a reasonable return on your time.

   2. Record – keep records so that you can account for the most time consuming items in your diary. I keep a record of the source of all my work so that I can track which networking groups give a financial return. Those that do not pay and do not offer any other form of value are ditched.

   3. Review – if you start to question how you are using your time, have a conversation with someone you trust and test the arguments for continuing unchanged against the arguments for making changes. You may disagree with the comments you receive, but at least you will explore the decisions involved more objectively.

6. Use lists – check lists that are reviewed at set intervals are a great way of organising time and making sure that nothing is forgotten.

This was a guest post by Paul Fileman of Results-Zone. Results-Zone bring extensive knowledge and experience gained in Blue Chip organisations to businesses like yours. They ensure that your business is fully exploiting a well thought through operating plan. They work alongside you and your team – as business results managers. They ensure that your team and your business are elevated to the results-zone. They bring you “hands-on” experience – similar to employing high quality management skills without the risk or costs in recruiting full time employees.

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