Juggling Act: How to Effectively Manage Your Time as a Solopreneur
Being a solopreneur is a two-sided coin.
On one side, you have the freedom and flexibility to be your own boss and pursue your passions.
On the other side, you have the overwhelming responsibility of managing your time effectively. With no one to delegate tasks to or set schedules for you, it's easy to feel like you're constantly juggling and struggling to keep up.
Effectively manage your time as a Solopreneur by having clear focus. Prioritize tasks by impact, not just importance. Set daily achievable goals, and divide your day into dedicated work periods. Take short breaks to stay sharp, and organize tasks with a digital calendar. Continuously evaluate and adjust your schedule for optimal productivity.
In this article, you will explore effective time management strategies specifically tailored for solopreneurs. Whether you're running an online business, a real estate professional, local businesses or a coach/advisor these tips will empower you to take control of your time and increase productivity.
From creating a prioritized to-do list and setting realistic goals to utilizing time-tracking tools and mastering the art of delegation, I will dive into practical techniques that will help you maximize efficiency and minimize stress.
Being employed is a different game than being self-employed. For example, when you have a job, bosses want you to have a full calendar/schedule…
But when you’re self-employed you should want a full pipeline, not a full schedule.
These are the shifts you have to make.
Don't let the juggling act of solopreneurship wear you down. By implementing these time management strategies, you can achieve a sense of balance and restore harmony to your work and personal life. It's time to take charge of your time as a solopreneur and set yourself up for success.
Understanding the challenges of being a solopreneur
Being a solopreneur comes with its own unique set of challenges. Unlike traditional employees who have clear job descriptions and set schedules, solopreneurs have to wear multiple hats and manage every aspect of their business. This can lead to a lack of focus and feeling overwhelmed.
Also, solopreneurs often face the temptation to work long hours and neglect their personal lives. Without a designated time to "clock out," it's easy to let work bleed into personal time. This can lead to burnout and a decrease in overall productivity.
Going solo in business is like being a one-person band. You're the guitarist, drummer, and singer all at once. It's cool because you call the shots, but it can also be a lonely gig. You miss out on those watercooler chats and those "two heads are better than one" moments. And if you're a parent working from home, it's a whole different ball game. Your office is also a playground, and sometimes it feels like your to-do list is a mile long.
Decision fatigue? It's real. Imagine making all the calls, from the big deals to what snack to pack for your kid's lunch. It's like your brain's running a marathon with no finish line in sight.
And for the parent solopreneurs, it's not just about keeping the business afloat; it's about making sure you don't miss the school play or that you're there for bedtime stories. Sure you’re there, but are you present?
The game-changer here is finding your tribe. Networking isn't just schmoozing; it's about finding other solo flyers who get the hustle. It's about swapping stories, tips, and sometimes just knowing you're not the only one who's had a conference call with a toddler on their lap.
And for the parent in the mix, building a support network is key. It's about linking up with other parents who know the struggle of balancing spreadsheets and playdates. Maybe it's a co-working space that doesn't mind the occasional baby giggle or a community group where you can trade babysitting with other parent-preneurs.
The importance of time management for solopreneurs
Time management is crucial for solopreneurs because it allows them to make the most of their limited resources. When you're the only person responsible for running your business, every minute counts. Effective time management helps solopreneurs stay on track, meet deadlines, and achieve their goals.
Furthermore, good time management enables solopreneurs to maintain a healthy work-life balance. By setting boundaries and allocating time for personal activities, solopreneurs can avoid burnout and maintain their passion for their work.
Common time management traps and how to avoid them
As a solopreneur, it's easy to fall into common time management traps. One of the biggest challenges is the lack of structure and accountability. Without a boss or colleagues to hold you accountable, it's tempting to procrastinate or get sidetracked by non-essential tasks.
Some other common time management traps and how to sidestep them:
1. The Perfectionism Trap
Trap: You're polishing that graphic for the tenth time, but will your clients notice the difference? Probably not. Perfectionism can eat up hours, leaving less time for tasks that actually move the needle.
Tip: Set a timer. Give yourself a realistic deadline to complete a task. Once it buzzes, it's pencils down. This forces you to focus on the essentials and move on.
2. The Overcommitment Trap
Trap: Saying 'yes' to every request or opportunity can leave you stretched thinner than a dollar store balloon. Overcommitment means you're busy, but not necessarily productive.
Tip: Learn to say 'no,' or at least, 'let me get back to you.' This gives you time to evaluate if you can truly commit to a new task without derailing your schedule.
3. The Multitasking Myth
Trap: Juggling multiple tasks at once can feel efficient, but it's a mirage. Multitasking usually leads to more mistakes and half-baked outcomes.
Tip: Single-task with purpose. Pick one task, set a goal for what success looks like, and go at it until it's done or you hit a predetermined checkpoint.
4. The Distraction Rabbit Hole
Trap: A quick social media check can turn into an hour-long scroll fest. Distractions are the arch-nemesis of time management.
Tip: Go on a distraction diet. Set specific times for checking emails and social media. Use apps that limit your time on these digital candy stores.
Tip: Create a focused environment. Find a quiet spot, use noise-canceling headphones, or listen to focus-enhancing tunes to create a bubble where distractions can't pop in.
These traps are sneaky, but with these tips, you can outsmart them and keep your day on a productive track.
How Solopreneurs should prioritize tasks and set goals
Prioritizing Goals
To effectively manage your time as a solopreneur, it's essential to prioritize your tasks and set realistic goals. Start by creating a to-do list and categorizing tasks based on their impact, urgency and importance. This will help you identify which tasks require immediate attention and which can be postponed.
Impact tasks and projects move things forward.
Important tasks and projects are maintaining things.
Urgent tasks require immediate attention.
Here's how Steven Covey defines Urgent tasks:
Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention NOW. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.
The key to Urgent tasks is to get processes and people in place in order to prevent the fires from starting in the first place. And this can be some of your Impact tasks that get put on your calendar.
Setting Goals
When setting goals, make sure you know your B.I.G. Goals. B.I.G. Goals are great for Problem Solvers.
Or if you’re ready to set E.P.I.C. Goals.
The philosophy I’m going to share here aligns with the idea of having a clear direction but not being shackled by rigid, long-term goals. There It's about agility and clarity, ensuring that you're moving towards a vision that can adapt to change.
“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.” —Andrew Carnegie
SMART GOALS don’t do that.
Smart goals suck the energy and inspiration out of you.
3 Other Problems with Goal Setting For The Self-Employed
1. Focused on Obstacles: When setting goals, people often concentrate on the obstacles and challenges they want to avoid rather than the outcomes they wish to achieve. They focus on the past and what held them back. Or why they didn’t start sooner. They focus on what could get in the way or stop them now. It’s like they won’t even allow themselves to dream or wish or think about something better.
2. Too Big or Too Far Out: Goals that are too ambitious or set too far in the future can be overwhelming and seem unattainable. This can lead to procrastination or a sense of defeat before even starting. It's important to set realistic and achievable goals, breaking them down into smaller, manageable tasks that can be accomplished step by step.
3. Using Someone Else's Goal: Adopting goals set by others, whether it's society, family, or peers, can lead to a lack of personal investment and motivation. It's essential for goals to be self-chosen and aligned with one's own values and interests to ensure a genuine commitment and drive to achieve them.
Cascade Goals
Charting the Course: Setting Your Yearly Aim
Think of your yearly plan not as a fixed goal but as setting your aim. This is about direction, not destination. It's the theme of your professional narrative for the coming year, whether that's adding more leverage in your business, deepening customer relationships, or enhancing your product line. Your compass gives you the general direction to go and the flexibility to navigate through the unpredictable seas of business. The path becomes more clear the more progress you make. You don’t need to know every twist and turn. You just need to know the general direction you want to aim and start.
Quarterly Quests: The 12-Week Trek
Transform your broad direction into tangible 12-week quests. These are your milestones that act as checkpoints on your journey. They're close enough to keep you on your toes but spaced enough to let you gather wins along the way. Each quest is a mini-adventure, a focused push toward a specific aspect of your yearly aim.
Monthly Missions: Tactical Targets
Narrow down your quests into monthly missions. These are the tactical objectives that support your quarterly quest. If your quest is to conquer new markets, your mission might be to identify potential clients or to enhance your product's appeal. Monthly missions are your strategy, the map that guides you through the terrain of your quarterly quest.
Weekly Wins: Immediate Action Items
And then, break down your monthly missions into weekly wins. These are the immediate, achievable tasks that give you a sense of progress and accomplishment. They're the actionable steps you take to climb the mountain of your monthly mission.
If your mission is to enhance your product, a weekly win could be to complete a feature upgrade or to gather customer feedback. If your mission is to grow your audience or database by 100, a weekly win could be to get 25 new leads or sign-ups.
Weekly wins are your tactics, the day-to-day maneuvers that ensure you're always moving forward.
By reframing your goals in this way, you create a dynamic, responsive approach to achieving your vision. It's a layered strategy that keeps you agile and focused, ensuring that every task, every week, every month contributes to the grand narrative of your year.
By cascading your goals from a broad direction down to specific weekly tasks, you create a goal-setting style that is both flexible and focused. It allows you to pivot as opportunities or challenges arise, while always keeping your eyes on the prize. This approach ensures that you're not just busy, but investing your time doing what matters most for you.
Effective time management tools and techniques for Solopreneur
There are plenty of time management tools and techniques available to solopreneurs. Here are a few:
The Pomodoro Technique:
This technique involves working in focused sprints of 25 minutes, known as "Pomodoros," followed by a 5-minute break. After four Pomodoros, you take a longer break of 15-30 minutes. This method helps maintain high levels of focus and prevents burnout.
Why It's Effective for Self-Employed: As a self-employed individual, you're often juggling multiple tasks without the external structure provided by a traditional office environment. The Pomodoro Technique instills discipline and creates a rhythm of work and rest that can enhance productivity and maintain mental clarity. It also utilizes the idea of Parkinson's Law. The time allotted is the time it will take. Instead of screwing around for 20 minutes to get ready, you’re now on the clock.
Time Blocking:
Time blocking involves dividing your day into blocks of time and assigning specific tasks or types of work to each block. This could include client work, administrative tasks, and personal time. It's a way to dedicate focused attention to one category of tasks at a time.
Why It's Effective for Self-Employed: For the self-employed, work can easily bleed into personal time and vice versa. Time blocking helps to create boundaries, ensuring that there's a balance between work and personal life. It also helps to manage the day-to-day operations of your business more efficiently by allocating specific times for different responsibilities.
The 1-3-5 Rule:
The 1-3-5 Rule is a simple yet effective way to manage daily tasks by acknowledging that not everything on your to-do list can be a top priority. Each day, you set one big task, three medium tasks, and five small tasks. This helps you to realistically plan your day around the most significant task, while also balancing other important duties.
Why It's Effective for Self-Employed:
Simplicity: The 1-3-5 Rule simplifies your to-do list to a manageable nine tasks per day, which can help in reducing overwhelm and increasing focus.
Balance: It ensures a balanced approach to your workload, allowing you to tackle different types of tasks and responsibilities.
Flexibility: This method provides the flexibility to adjust the size and scope of your tasks based on your current workload and priorities.
Each of these techniques can be adapted to fit the unique workflow and demands of being self-employed, helping to manage time effectively, reduce stress, and increase productivity.
There are also various digital tools that can assist with time management.
Time-tracking apps like Toggl and RescueTime can help you monitor how you spend your time and identify areas where you can improve efficiency.
Project management tools like Asana and Trello can help you stay organized and manage tasks effectively.
The thing to keep in mind is to make productivity personal and keep it simple.
Solopreneurs need to personalize productivity. As I’ve outlined above, solopreneurs are doing something different than the employed. The same method that a 9-5er would use is not going to work for the self-employed.
Read More About Time Management and Productivity:
Creating a weekly schedule as Soloprener
“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” - Stephen Covey
Now that you have your goals, you have your priorities, how do you make sure it gets done?
As a solopreneur, your calendar is the command center of your operation. It's not just about cramming in tasks; it's about crafting a week that aligns with your big-picture goals.
You could be super busy and work long hours, but if it’s not connected a big results and things that move the needle, it was pointless.
Here's a down-to-earth approach to building a schedule that's as ambitious as it is doable. In my opinion, its the best weekly planning and schedule for a self-employed person who needs structure and to go with the flow.
Heads Up - The Monthly Beacon
Start with the end in mind. On average, people spend 20–30 hours on pre-travel planning. That’s 5 days away from work, spending 20-30 hours planning that. How much time are you spending on planning your next month of work?
You don’t need to spend 20-30 hours. But don’t you agree sometime should be invested in it.
“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra
What's your beacon in the fog this month? Maybe it's a revenue target, a product launch, or a new client you want to land. Your weekly plans should be stepping stones to this goal. This way, every week, you're not just busy; you're building towards something big.
People, Personal, Projects - The Top-Down Model
People First: Start with the people in your life. Don’t neglect them. Get them on your schedule. Family, friends of course. But clients, your network, people matter. If you believe that, put it in your schedule first, not as an after thought.
Personal Next: You're the engine of this whole operation. Block out time for your well-being – mind, body, and soul. That's a new book, training or coaching. Your gym time, your quiet coffee before the world wakes up, or your meditation. Keep that engine fine-tuned.
Projects Last: Now, bring in the big guns – the projects that will push you towards your monthly goal. Break them down into bite-sized tasks and spread them out. No cramming allowed.
The Space & Pace Model
Resist the urge to front-load your week with a marathon of tasks and meetings. Spread them out. Give yourself breathing room each day for those unexpected opportunities or problems that pop up. This pacing prevents burnout and keeps you nimble for when fortune knocks.
Remember, your schedule isn't just a list of tasks; it's a reflection of your priorities. By giving space to people, personal time, and projects, you're building a rhythm that keeps you moving forward without running yourself ragged. And always keep some open slots – life as a solopreneur is full of surprises, and you want to be ready for them.
Delegating and outsourcing tasks as a solopreneur: Navigating the Focus Funnel:
In the chaotic life of a solopreneur, the Focus Funnel is your compass to navigate the sea of tasks that threaten to capsize your day.
Eliminate: The Art of Saying 'No'
At the top of the funnel, we have 'Eliminate.' Ask yourself, "Is this task essential?" If it's not moving you closer to your goals, it's just noise. Be ruthless. Cutting out the fluff isn't just about saving time; it's about clearing mental space for the big plays. Remember, every 'yes' is a 'no' to something else.
Automate: The Power of Technology
Next up, 'Automate.' If a task must be done and it's repetitive, make technology your workhorse. Whether it's scheduling social media posts or automating invoice reminders, find the tools that do the job without you. Automation is like cloning yourself without the sci-fi drama.
Delegate: The Strength in Numbers
Then there's 'Delegate.' You might be solo, but you don't have to go it alone. If a task is necessary but not within your wheelhouse, pass the baton. Hire a freelancer, a virtual assistant, or trade skills with a peer. Delegation isn't a sign of weakness; it's a strategy for growth.
By the way, don’t get caught up in automation. If you can’t quickly figure it out then you delegate the automation creation.
Regulate: The System's Symphony
Finally, at the narrow end, we have 'Regulate.' For the tasks that remain, create systems. Systems are the rhythms to your business dance. They ensure consistency and quality, and they're your playbook for when things get hectic.
And as you navigate this funnel, keep these mantras in mind:
Don't Procrastinate. Concentrate. Focus is a solopreneur's superpower. Hone in on what matters, and give it all you've got.
Need Help? Collaborate. Two heads are better than one, even if the other head is on a Zoom call a thousand miles away.
Keep It Simple. Don’t Complicate. Complexity is the enemy of execution. The simpler your processes, the smoother your day runs.
This Focus Funnel isn't just about doing less; it's about doing what's right. It's about making sure that every piece of your day serves your journey to the top. Because as a solopreneur, your time isn't just valuable— besides your skills, it’s the only thing.
Balancing work and personal life as a solopreneur
Achieving a healthy work-life balance is crucial for solopreneurs to avoid burnout or boredom and maintain their well-being.
It's important to set boundaries and establish clear separation between work and personal life. This can be done by designating specific work hours and creating a dedicated workspace.
Make time for activities that fulfill your mind and body outside of work. Engage in hobbies, exercise, and spend time with loved ones. Remember that taking care of yourself is just as important as taking care of your business. Because you are the business.
Time management tips specific to different solopreneur industries (e.g. freelancers, consultants, online business owners)
While the principles of time management apply to all solopreneurs, there are industry-specific tips that can help maximize productivity.
For freelancers, it's important to set clear expectations with clients and manage project timelines effectively.
Coaches/Advisors can benefit from creating a standardized process for client engagements and optimizing their communication channels.
Online business owners should prioritize tasks that directly impact revenue generation, such as marketing and product development. It's also important to leverage automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and free up time for strategic activities.
Real estate pros should have buffers on their time blocking. Have extra time allotted around showings, meetings, contract work, etc, so you don’t stress with lack of time. And if you have extra time, plug in more follow-up or content creation.
Mastering time management as a solopreneur
Being a solopreneur may come with its challenges, but with effective time management strategies, you can overcome them and thrive. By understanding the unique demands of solopreneurship, prioritizing tasks, utilizing time management tools, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance, you can take control of your time and set yourself up for success.
Don't let the juggling act of solopreneurship wear you down. By implementing these time management strategies, you can achieve a sense of balance and restore harmony to your work and personal life. It's time to take charge of your time as a solopreneur and set yourself up for success.
Of course, your skills matter as a solopreneur. But your ability to manage your time and focus will be the thing that separates you from your competitors.
Here’s 4 things you can do right now:
1. LEADS (GET TO 6 FIGURES): PROGRAMS & COURSES
2. LEVEL UP (GET 6 FIGURES+ ): COACHING
3. LEVEL UP ACCELERATOR: ONE DAY DEEP DIVE
4. LEVERAGE (TIME BACK FOR 6+, 7 FIGURES): LET DARIN DO IT