5 Areas to Get More Organized In

Do you feel overwhelmed in your business pretty much every day? Do you know you have too much on your plate but you’re not sure how to manage it all and or which things to keep on your plate and which things to remove? 

Whether you have any assistance in your business or you are all alone to try to figure it out and do it all yourself, there are ways that you can get and stay more organized so that you can manage your day-to-day activities, the projects you have on your plate, and all the lead generation, marketing, and sales activity is that still need to happen regardless. 

In the business coaching that I do with clients we don’t just talk about getting clients and making money, we also talk about overall how to get more organized. Because being more organized is the key to being more productive and profitable in the long run. It also allows you to be more consistent with your lead generation, marketing, and sales activities which means you’ll get more clients and you’ll make a lot more money! 

Here are the five main areas that I typically work on with clients to help them get and stay organized as an entrepreneur.

1. Organize your computer. Whether you work from a desktop, a laptop, or your phone most of the time you have to stay organized with your clients, your own marketing materials, your own documents, projects, and everything and anything that runs your business and your life. I work primarily from a desktop, and I have folders within folders within folders that organize everything I need to get access to from my own legal documents, to my speaking presentations, to my client recording and notes, and everything that I do is sorted in a way that makes sense to me. What makes sense to me may not make sense to you, therefore you have to come up with the systems and processes that will work for you to be able to find more things more often and more quickly. You can’t spend time searching for things any longer, you have to name documents and folders accordingly so that you can consistently find things within seconds. This is critical. 

2. Organize your desk or office space. Most of the people reading this probably work out of your home and whether you have a dedicated office / room or not, or you work from the kitchen table or maybe your laptop in the living room… This can apply for all of you. You do want to keep some type of organization with where you do what in your home office. For example, you might have a guest room closet where you keep file folders, marketing materials, printer paper, client information, books and notebooks perhaps. If you do have an actual desk that you can use for your business then I highly recommend you don’t keep too much on top of it except for maybe one stack of things that you’re working on and/or some fun things to keep you motivated. The challenges when you have to work from a laptop and you take it all over the place and try to be productive yet you can’t find the pieces of paper or the notes that you’ve saved from previous calls or events. That’s when saving everything to your computer becomes critical. 

3. Organize your to do’s. Your to-do list, for most of us, is our bible. This is what we look at every day to make sure we get things done in a timely manner. We prioritize our to do by urgent and non-urgent perhaps or green yellow and red. Writing things down in one big long list of everything you have to do is a good thing to do. And then typically I recommend you pull off three or four of those things each week or each day depending on how big they are and put them on a small piece of paper or sticky note and those are the things you focus on for that week or that day. Going back to the big list once a week perhaps to update that and make sure everything still on there that needs to be on there and still in order of importance. 

4. Organize your ideas. This is really hard for entrepreneurs mostly because when we get an idea, we want to act on it today, right now. But that isn’t always the most practical thing to do, because you already have lots of projects already on your plate and adding one more new idea at the fun, creative aspect to your day or week but it also will disrupt the flow of the completion of the other projects on your plate. Especially if you’re a starter, and not a finisher, then you will continually start new projects and come up with new ideas and get started on all these new things that will never see completion. This is why I hire personal assistants who are good at completion because this is one of my main issues. 

5. Organize your calendar. I know there’s some die-hard paper calendar people out there and I get that you have all the reasons and excuses why paper is better than anything else on the planet for you but it’s hard for me to agree with that because in this world we are running all over the place and take our electronics with us and we need to have our calendar at our fingertips. I also know that a lot of people flake on appointments because they don’t look at their calendar every day, therefore it’s another good reason to keep it all electronic so you can find it on your phone, on your laptop, on your desktop, and even in a hotel computer that you might log into if you’re on a business trip. Organizing your calendar also has to do with making sure you plot out the things that you want to get done for yourself first. Then putting in your own marketing time, events, and networking calls that you need to be on to find clients and leads. After that is when you open up your calendar to everybody else to book calls, client consults, and more. Color coordinating your calendar is also a key to being more organized with it and if you’re not sure how to do any of this or segmenting, and blocking your time better, then reach out and ask me or somebody else who can tell you how to be more efficient with your calendar. 

I hope some of these suggestions are helpful, and you’re not ignoring them. These will help you get out of overwhelm and get more productive, and organized so that you can be more profitable in your business.