Top tips to organise your home business

Running a business from home requires motivation, dedication and organisation. Once these three things are in place, you will soon be achieving your goals.

Read on to discover some simple suggestions to help organise your home business more efficiently:

Structure your day

It is essential that you make a plan for the day. Schedule in rest periods and lunch to ensure your output is productive. Make a manageable to-do list – an extremely powerful organisation tool – and take pride in ticking off when you have completed a task.

Schedule

Use an online calendar such as Keep&Share. Use it to schedule meetings with clients or appointments with wholesalers. Colour code the calendar and view it easily from your laptop or smartphone. It lets you add and share multiple links, attach pages of notes, add images and customise fonts.

Create a calming workspace

Minimal distraction is key to running a business smoothly. Is the TV too close for comfort? Create a workspace in a light, quiet area of your home.

If the plan is to stay at home and work, you could be sitting down for over eight hours per day – so don’t skimp on your health. Invest in a comfy chair and sit up so your monitor is in your direct line of sight, to ensure good posture at your desk.

Declutter

• Stationary – Don’t buy excess. Who needs tonnes of plastic wallets? Stick with the essentials.

• Paper – Shun stacks of it for an electronic system. Store all your important documents on an iCloud storage system. Another common mistake is storing your papers and your important documents wherever there’s room, rather than where it gets used.

• Excess gadgets – Take advantage of a multifunction printer – doubling up as a scanner will help save space.

Tidy your inbox

There’s nothing worse than opening your email and finding thousands are unread and just loitering in your inbox. Use categorized folders to sort out ‘actioned’ and ‘to be read’ emails.

Make specific times in the day to read and delete emails before it takes over your action plan.

If you constantly receive junk emails, unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom. Deleting an unwanted email takes a few seconds but this easily builds up to an hour a month. Time is precious.

Delegate tasks

Delegate tasks to staff to ensure you have time to take advantage of evolving business opportunities.

You should also find the time to eliminate those remedial tasks that are just plain annoying. Can you outsource them or drop them altogether?

Outsourcing

You may have a broad range of skills within your business but changes in the company could create a need that cannot be met by yourself or existing staff. Employing consultants or specialist staff to help in these areas will provide skills necessary to deal with situations when they arrive.

• An accountant is not an unnecessary expense and could save you hours of agonizing when time is pressed – not to mention money. Working from home allows you to claw back some business costs, for example heating and lighting your ‘office’.

• A PR & Marketing executive will come up with amazing ways to pitch, promote and boost your business while you sit back and get on with the tough stuff.

• An IT consultant could solve all your technology woes and get you on the right track for making money and saving time.

Finances

A pet peeve for outsourced staff is when they have to chase their payments. They’ve done the work so should be paid on time. Ensure you are up-to-date with all invoicing by tracking expenditure as you go along. You don’t want to end up with a forgotten bill at the end of the month.

So as you well know, when it comes to business, time is money. Good organization will help keep your business under control. Make lists, offers and relationships and you can’t go far wrong.