How to Manage Yourself (as a business)

Posted on August 21st, 2011 | Management, Productivity | 5 Comments »

When you’re self employed, you don’t just manage a business. You don’t just manage your time. That’s for employees who have another person breathing down their neck. When nobody’s in charge, except for you, in order to keep a business alive, growing, and the money coming in, the thing you need to manage best is yourself.

The self employed have the most difficult management jobs out there. It’s very different from managing a store (because those managers have bosses who manage them), and its very different than being an employee and being responsible for managing a department, project, or your own time. There’s always someone to report to; there’s always someone to push you, and there’s always someone else to help manage you while you’re managing everything else.

How can one effectively manage themselves, though? When we don’t feel like it, there’s really no additional motivation. That’s one major part of self management though — doing what you need to do when you don’t feel like doing it, and doing what you need to do with the right priority. Managing a freelance business also means bettering yourself in order to constantly be more productive, organized, and push your business to the next level. After all, nobody else is going to do it for you.

Do You Always Feel Overwhelmed?

I know I’m guilty myself of getting myself worked up over uncompleted tasks, even if I’m not behind and even if the tasks aren’t that important! I know that when I have to much to do — laundry, clean my place, Project A, Project B, write a blog post, my social life, and everything else — I tend to over think it all. Then, like most people do, the more I have to get caught up on, the less productive I become. Then, I actually do less to take care of any of it!

I’m learning to become more relaxed, and to just do things instead of thinking about them. I’m also learning to become more prioritized so I always know what step to take next if I feel overwhelmed and just freeze.

To better manage a freelance business, you have to better manage yourself with everything from your personal life to your business tasks and goals. This means recognizing that overwhelming feeling, conquering it, and moving forward. By better managing yourself, you’ll soon find you won’t feel as overwhelmed as much at all anymore.

We All Have a Million-and-One Things We Want Done

It’s important to remember that we all have endless things we want done. All of these things are a mixture of our current tasks that we need to survive, tasks that relate to our non-working life from social to upkeeping our home, to our personal goals, and of course we’re always wanting to get done all those big goals for our business. Yet, so many of us who are feeling overwhelmed have this “What’s wrong with me?” mentality.

If anything, constantly wanting more and constantly creating goals isn’t a bad thing. It’s a main trait of some of the most successful people. The only bad thing that comes out of it is our personal attitude towards ourselves when we don’t get it all done, when we over-extend ourselves, and when we don’t get things done to perfection.

We don’t need to stop creating goals, we need to better prioritize our goals. If you have a cool new idea that you’d like to implement into your business, but are still working on several other things, put it on your “some day” list; don’t start working on it today with high motivation, only to abandon your other goals. Your older goals will then only come back to haunt you, still not completed.

Next Step Methodology

The most important thing one can do in order to change their habit to better manage themselves is to always focus on the next step. Never stop getting things done because you don’t know what you should be doing next. If you don’t know, then become better at prioritizing. If you feel unmotivated because you can’t find anything or simple tasks take too long, get organized.

Below is my general order for prioritizing:

1. “Survival” tasks – what I need to do to pay my bills
2. Personal goals and tasks – not having my personal life in order adds far too much stress
3. Bigger goals – Business related or not
4. Leisure – taking breaks is important to my sanity and my business!

Furthermore, I try to keep caught up every day in each of these, progress a bit more, so I don’t feel like I’m neglecting any portion of my to-do list. However, if I have deadlines looming I may spend a week getting caught up (and possibly ahead) with my client projects, and if I’m having a slow week with my client work and am caught up with personal tasks, I’ll focus a lot on my bigger goals.

Adjust as necessary. Don’t get so over focused on one area that you feel behind in another though! When you complete a task for the day, week, or a bigger task for the month, don’t just sit back and wonder what to do next. Always know!

3 Habits to Make You a Better Self-Manager

Bettering yourself is all about creating positive habits (so it doesn’t feel like work) and getting rid of bad habits. The work involved comes from crafting and destroying habits, but once it’s done, you’re new positive daily choices will reap the benefits with no extra effort. Below are the top three habits you should constantly be working on to become a better manager to yourself, and to grow your business.

1. Get and Stay Organized – Keep your place clean, keep your office clean, and keep everything organized. If you’re not a naturally organized person, so what? Make yourself one. Make a process for your type of work, your next project, how you manage clients, your finances, and more. Stick to it. Keep organized with how you run your business too. Create and write your processes down on paper; that’s the easy part. Then, always work on getting better at sticking to it.
2. Make Yourself Work When You Don’t Want to But Need To – If you need to work, then do it. Self-discipline is a muscle, and the more you work when you don’t feel like it, the less painful it will be when you do. Always better yourself in the ways of procrastination. Just do it!
3. Always Finish What You Start – If you lose motivation, if it doesn’t turn out to perfection, or if something comes up to interrupt you half way through the process, it doesn’t matter: finish everything you start! It will make you stronger, smarter, and grow faster. You may be surprised at some of the benefits that come out of some products you weren’t expecting much from too. Doing this will also help you finish with more ease the things you need to get done but don’t feel like doing. It will help you get done the things you want to get done, but have nobody counting on you to get done.

What do you think it takes to become a better self-manager?