Managing Your Workload as a Small Business Owner

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As a small business owner you will be constantly challenged to complete what seems like an endless list of tasks. This list can often become overwhelming, destroying motivation and more importantly innovation. When you become overloaded you start to almost panic in a way, throwing away parts of a project that were once regarded as critical, just to save time. Sometimes it all becomes too much and the overall quality of your work starts to degrade. This is not good for anyone — not your team, you, or your clients. So what can you do about overload?

Most of the time work comes to your desk in a variety of non-standard forms whether it be a collection of emails, a physical package, or rough notes from a call with a client. Typically people will try and jump right into these and try and bang out a couple of the quick and easy tasks before digesting the longer more difficult ones. However, they’ve already set themselves up for a potential disaster. What happens if you start working on some tasks that were sent to you via email, and then suddenly a bunch of new emails come in from the client asking for revisions on what you’ve done? Now you’re left scrambling to rip up everything you’ve completed and essentially restart from scratch. Needless to say this will add to your stress level and can start setting in that panic affect as you start to think you’ve accomplished nothing — back to square one. This is where organizing yourself before jumping in can really come in handy.

The majority of the work that I handle on a daily basis come from either emails, or notes taken during a phone call, and I handle them almost identically with very few exceptions (which we’ll get to). My procedure involves modularization and record keeping and it goes a little something like this:

1. Organize everything that you have on-hand for the project

• Gather all emails and notes and start to make sense of them
• Cross out anything redundant so that you don’t accidentally do it twice or think it’s not complete later on (ie if a client asks for a colour change in an email and it was mentioned on the call)

Use a folder structure to organize emails appropriately. Your folder structure will vary depending on how you like to organize things, a really basic example might be: Client Name (parent folder)| Updates Pending (subfolder) |Updates Completed (subfolder)

2. Modularize your gathered materials from step 1 and enter those modularized pieces into a task software of your choosing

• I personally suggest using one that allows: assigning tasks to yourself and team members, has due dates with push notifications, allows for full long form descriptions
• The one I use is Asana — there is a free tier available if you’re interested

3. Compare deadlines with other work that is already in progress

• Check all your deadlines to see which project needs to be completed first, and how much work is left. This allows you to decide whether or not to dive right into your new project, or to continue plugging away at what you were working on before.
• If a project’s deadline is far away, you might consider working on what you already have in progress instead of diving right in. Often times clients will come up with new ideas or revisions that they will send you, these most commonly occur during the early stages of a project, so it might be worthwhile waiting to see if any changes come in before you even need to begin work.

4. Keep a log book

• When you’re faced with what seems like insurmountable work, or if you get the feeling that you haven’t accomplished anything in a day, a log book can really help you reflect on all the things you have completed. This log book can be done in any note taking application, I use OneNote which has a free version available. It’s important that this log book be kept only for yourself, it doesn’t need to be formally written, it can be messy, but it needs to include everything you’ve done in a given day. Each day should be a different page, or log, so that you can see just how much you have accomplished during your workday.
• Seeing near empty pages on your log book can be a great motivator for subsequent days, filling up a page with all the things you completed can almost feel like a reward.
• You can stay organized knowing exactly where you left off the previous day, so you can get right to work after reviewing yesterday’s log.
• Logs can help you gauge how long a project took you to complete, so you can get better at quoting similar projects in the future — maybe you can save your client some money? Maybe you need more money next time?

Exceptions

As with everything in life there are exceptions to every rule and these guidelines are not exempt. There are a few situations where I don’t follow these guidelines, they include:

1. When I get used to the client and/or project.

• Sometimes you are put on a project long term, whether that be for content maintenance, or a very large scale project that takes months, or even years to complete.
• When this happens I find myself knowing what to do in various situations, haven gotten used to the client and their expectations, I’ll just do whatever they want at the pace that they expect.
• Some clients are all about speed and want things adjusted when you’re on the call with them, others will leave it open-ended and have you email them when you’re complete. Others will have a hybrid of these expectations, wanting content updates done fast whilst having structure updates done slowly, for example.
• As you gain experience working with a given client/project you’ll learn exactly what you should be doing and when, and what’s the easiest way to accomplish a given task. Doing all the guidelines that I laid out might be a waste of time, maybe you’ll just need to do a few of them — the choice is at your discretion.

2. When tasks become a chore.

• I find no use modularizing or comparing deadlines of my “chores.” Things like accounting tasks, bookkeeping, paying bills, etc. all need to be done, and therefore I just do them when it’s required. It’s not like I want to do them anyway, and the pending invoices are reminder enough that I don’t need to write down “pay bills” in my task management software.
• Your mileage will vary, of course, with what you consider chores, or if you need to write them down. Some people are very orderly and want to ensure everything is documented accordingly, which is fine, we’re all different, but I choose not to dedicate any more time than is necessary to tasks that I really dislike doing — just do it to get it done and move on.

Conclusion

In conclusion, every business owner comes to a point in their career where the amount of work seems insurmountable, leaving them scrambling to get things done, barely making critical deadlines. It’s pandemonium to say the least. Luckily with some free software and a little bit of self discipline you can organize your workload into manageable chunks, plan for revisions, and ensure you don’t feel like you’ve done nothing all day.

I hope these guidelines help you out, and I’d love to hear how you manage your workload in the comments below.

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