How Self-Employed Business Owners Can Plan with Purpose for a Focused Year Ahead

Running a small business or micro business comes with a wonderful sense of freedom. It also comes with plenty of responsibility. As a self-employed business owner, you are responsible for delivering products or services that satisfy your customers and keep revenue flowing.

As you move into a new year, it’s important to take a look at where you are now and where you’d like to go. While it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities that keep your business running, it’s also important to step back occasionally and look at the bigger picture. Spending some time thinking about the future and what it will take for your business to reach the next level is a wise investment that will pay off many times over.

Why Planning is Critical for the Self-Employed

To be clear, planning is important at all levels of business. From massive multi-national corporations down to one-person operations, all businesses need to have detailed plans in place.

Of course, for a huge corporation, there are dedicated planning teams that do nothing but think about the future. You don’t have that same luxury. It all falls on you, from top to bottom, and that means that planning is often pushed onto the back burner or ignored entirely.

A lack of planning in a small business relegates you to reactive work. You simply encounter each day as it comes, putting out fires and responding to the most urgent requests first. That might get you through, but it doesn’t allow for meaningful, sustainable progress. What’s worse, this approach to work can lead to burnout and frustration, and it can even threaten the very existence of your operation.

The Role of Focus in Running a Small Business

What’s missing in this somewhat grim picture is time to focus. As an entrepreneur, you need blocks of time where you can sit down, focus on a task at hand, and execute. But if you aren’t careful with your planning and how your business operates, that focused time will never come around.

It’s common for a micro business owner to fall into this trap. As you get caught up in daily operations, you forget to spend time on the thing that made your business valuable in the first place. Whatever it is that you have to offer the market, you need to protect enough time to actually deliver that value. If all of your time is swallowed up by busy tasks, you’ll never get around to doing great, meaningful work for your clients.

Setting Realistic Business Goals for the Coming Year

Let’s zoom out from the daily operations of your business for a second. In order to know what to spend your time on each day, you need to have some overarching goals that provide your business with direction. Those goals should be ambitious, but realistic. Shooting for the moon might be tempting, but if you are destined to fall short, the goals you set will be more frustrating than motivating.

Here are a few quick tips to guide your goal-setting process:

• Avoid setting too many goals. A total of three annual goals is a good target, as you’ll be able to track progress without being overwhelmed.
• Be modest with revenue targets. Everyone wants to make more money, but aiming to increase revenue by 10-20% is far more realistic than trying to double your income.
• Look at your lifestyle. Consider setting a goal that involves working fewer hours each week while still growing your business effectively.
• Add one new thing. It could be an additional product or another service, but commit yourself to finding a fresh way to serve your customers.
• Setting goals is a critical part of growing a business of any size. Without a destination in mind, you can’t possibly know which way to go. And, when you set logical, practical goals, you’ll enjoy a boost of motivation as you work toward making them come true.

Build Time-Saving Systems with Batching

Goals are great. At the same time, they aren’t going to go anywhere without systems. It’s systems that move you from one point to the next while not burning out along the way. When you have systems in place for your business, much of what you do during each day will feel like it’s on autopilot.

This starts with batching. The concept behind batching is that you should do similar tasks all at the same time to avoid switching back and forth between duties throughout the day. There is a cognitive cost that comes with that switching, and it can wear you out long before the workday is over.

Answering questions from clients or customers is a great place to apply the concept of batching. Instead of randomly answering inquiries throughout the day, set aside certain times when that work will be done. For example, you might have 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at lunch, and 30 minutes at the end of the day for this important job. All you do during those windows is answer questions and get back to people, and since you have three blocks set aside, no one will ever have to wait very long for an answer.

You can apply this same concept to nearly everything you do as a small business owner. From sending invoices and payment reminders to scheduling meetings and more, nearly everything can benefit from batching. You’ll be amazed at how much you can get done in a single day when you work through your to-do list in batches.

Get More Done by Doing Less

Even with optimal systems in place, there is still a limit to how much you can do in one day, or one week, or one year. Only 24 hours are available in each day, and some of them need to be allocated for things other than trying to grow your business.

Toward that end, there are probably things you are doing in your current routine that could simply be dropped. It’s likely that at least a few of your ongoing habits aren’t really making any meaningful difference in the success of the business, and nothing would change if you just stopped doing them completely.

To track down these time wasters, make a log of what you do each day while working in the business. For now, write every single thing down, no matter how obvious it may be. If you are like most small business owners, this is going to turn into a rather long list pretty quickly. Once the list is done, leave it alone and come back to it with fresh eyes a day later.

When the next day arrives, review your list and think about each line item. Some will be things that you obviously need to keep doing, like having sales calls or working on your products or services. But other activities will probably jump out as not being so mission-critical. Highlight anything that you think you might be able to drop and stop doing it for one week. If you skip it for a whole week and nothing about the business changes, you can probably leave that activity behind permanently.

Build Powerful New Daily Habits

If you go through the process of setting some clear goals, putting operational systems in place, and cutting out time-wasting activities, you’ll be primed for a great year. But there is still one other step you can take toward building an even better business. These are daily habits that make much of what we have already discussed possible.

Habits aren’t quite the same as systems, as these are things that you do over and over, no matter what type of task you are working on. Taking some time for reflection can help you uncover what habits you might want to build or change, but the list below highlights three possibilities to consider.

• Start the Day Intentionally. It’s all too easy to start the day in reactionary mode, grabbing your phone to answer messages before you even get out of bed. This habit can scramble your brain and put you directly into reactionary mode. Instead, make it a habit to work on one intentional task each morning before you dive into other stuff. That pattern will put you in a better frame of mind to be productive the rest of the day.
• Create Boundaries Around Focus Time. When you plan on using part of your day to focus on a project, put boundaries on the time so you won’t be interrupted. Tell people in your life that you’ll be unavailable, and put your phone on silent (or turn it off completely!). There is tremendous power to be found in dedicated focus time, but that power only appears when distractions are gone.
• Be Physically Active Each Day. Many small business owners in the 21st century find themselves stuck at a desk staring at a screen all day long. Spending some of your day in that position is inevitable, but it’s important to keep your body moving. Physical activity is as important for your mind as it is for your body, so time spent being active is anything but wasted. Even a couple of short 10-minute walks can make you feel better and more energized for your work.

Set the Tone Right from the Start

It’s a great feeling to hit the ground running in a new year. If you can perform well in the first month or two, there will be no limit to what you can accomplish the rest of the way. And, if some of your time early in the year is spent on planning and setting goals, you’ll know exactly what steps you need to take to drive your business forward. Whether you are starting a business from scratch or trying to reach new heights with an existing venture, the advice on this page should serve you well.