In addition to the issue of making an income, there’s the constant pressure to maintain some semblance of a work-life balance. The longer it takes you to get your work done, the less time you’ll have to enjoy a life outside of work.

With these considerations in mind, how can you keep yourself accountable when there’s no clock to punch and no boss looking over your shoulder?

Here are four tips to keep you on track when you work as a freelancer. By following these guidelines, you can start building the business — and the life — that you want.

1. Have a vision for what your freelance business will become

Beyond your day-to-day tasks and projects, there are likely some things you want to accomplish in the long term. And whatever your goals are, you need a plan as to how you’re going to achieve them.

Begin with an overall vision of what you want your business and lifestyle to look like in future years. Then, keep that vision in mind with every decision you make. Whenever you hit a fork in the road — for instance, choosing whether to take on a new project or cut back on existing projects — that vision will be the compass that guides your direction.

In addition, some consultants use a deliberate process to turn their longer-term vision into smaller steps to take each month, each week and even each day. Over time, those smaller steps add up to the freelance business and lifestyle that you want. They’re all part of realizing your greater vision and defining a path forward.

What path? Your path. That’s the point of working for yourself — you get to choose the work you do. By pursuing work that truly interests you and aligns with your longer-term goals, you’ll be far less likely to drag your feet while doing it.

2. Help yourself get in the productivity zone

You’ll finish work a lot faster (and enjoy your downtime a lot more) if you can carve out time to focus fully on your core business activities — the stuff that you do best.

The first obvious step: turn off your cell phone or put it in another room. Or, if you need to keep your phone with you, you can put all of your apps (even your text messaging) into “Do Not Disturb” mode. If family members must be able to reach you in case of an emergency, there are ways to make exceptions in your cell phone settings.

Next, turn off email notifications on all your devices. If your clients need you to respond in five minutes, you have the wrong clients. Let them go as soon as you can and find people who appreciate your ability to dig deep and focus.

Finally, create a mental or physical spot in your life that is dedicated to working. For some people, this means keeping one computer for work only. Others prefer working in a certain coffee shop or taking over a particular area in their home during work hours. Whatever you choose, make sure you create a workspace that you enjoy – and that allows you to get stuff done.

3. Know when to take breaks

Repeat after us: humans are not robots. We all need to eat, sleep, socialize and move our bodies regularly in order to get work done. Being on the job 18 hours a day is not a sustainable solution.

Remember, you’re not working for a company anymore. You are your own business. You set the efficiency expectations and the schedule. A Harvard Business Review study found that working long hours — a notorious corporate life trick to show how hard you’re working — is actually bad for productivity.

Some people take a rigid approach to scheduling and follow the Pomodoro Technique — they work for 25 minutes and then take a break for five. Others work for hours until they are tired, then take a long walk or do some chores before getting back down to business.

Of course, we can’t tell you when or how often to take breaks. It’s your body and it’s your business. Just make sure that you respect yourself and your health when deciding how much work to take on.

4. Use technology to enhance your productivity

To paraphrase the “Hunger Games”, may the odds be tilted in your favor. While a lot of people may use technology as a distraction from work, you can actually use it to save time.

First, think of all the mundane, routine tasks you must do as a freelancer — bookkeeping, phone call scheduling, and the like — and use a program like Zapier to automate these tasks. If your budget permits, you could also hire a virtual assistant to take care of these tasks for you.

Next, consider moving all of your clients and projects out of Excel spreadsheets and into a proper client management tool like Method CRM. By keeping all of your essential data in one location, you’ll spend less time hunting around for phone numbers, meeting notes, and invoices. You can also respond to client emails faster and see exactly what you need to do each day at a glance.

Finally, look for opportunities to integrate your existing apps whenever possible. Double data entry is a huge time-waster for any business — but when the business is just you, repetitive tasks literally bring productive work to a halt. Choosing a client management system that integrates with QuickBooks makes quoting, invoicing, and receiving payments as simple as possible, so you have more time to focus on your real work.

Conclusion

When you start your career as a freelancer, it can be overwhelming to develop a productivity system. Just as settling into a new job takes time, so does identifying the goals, routines, schedules, and tools that enable you to work effectively for yourself. But once you figure it out, you’ll be amazed by what you can accomplish in a day — both on and off the clock.

The post 4 Ways to Stay Productive as a Freelancer appeared first on Method.

“I’m hoping you’ll feel a little more empowered when we’re done with today’s session,” Woodard told the audience. As the CEO of Woodard Events, LLC, as well as a renowned author, consultant, business coach, and speaker, it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about professional development in the accounting industry.

However, the audience wasn’t yet sure whether Woodard had all the answers they were looking for. When he promised to share his methods for getting to (and staying at) zero inbox, the room erupted in laughter — was such a thing even possible?

Overcoming productivity myths

Before getting to the secrets of an empty inbox, Woodard needed to debunk some common misconceptions about productivity.

The first myth is that you can manage time. In reality, no one has any control over time. Instead, productive people focus on managing projects and smaller tasks within those projects.

Woodard gave the example of someone trying to find the time to write a book. Such a large project can seem daunting, so just think of each individual page as a task to complete.

“If you want to write a book, you write a page and you write another page and you write another page — and all of life is that way.”

The second myth is that efficiency is the hallmark of productivity. Sure, someone who completes 80 tasks in a day will appear extremely productive. But what if those 80 tasks were unimportant or unnecessary?

Woodard explained that the true measurements of productivity are outputs, effectiveness, and mental clarity. Mental clarity is a big one for him: getting tasks out of his head by accomplishing them or depositing them elsewhere for future reference. He referenced David Allen’s Getting Things Done: “You should never think a thought twice unless you enjoy having that thought.”

The third productivity myth is that you can multitask. “You can only think about one thing at a time — that’s the truth,” said Woodard. Attempting to focus on two tasks at once inevitably leads to distraction and poor performance on one of them.

To drive the point home, Woodard asked the audience if they had ever attempted to interact with a teenager who’s on their phone: “You would think they just lost all of their mental capacity.”

Overcoming productivity roadblocks

Even when you know the truth about what productivity is (and isn’t), that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve it.

“In my experience, the psychological roadblocks are the biggest impediments to productivity — even more than process,” said Woodard. In other words, your mind is literally making it harder for you to get stuff done.

Negative thinking is one of the biggest barriers to working productively. Indeed, Woodard offered a laundry list of negative emotions that can hinder progress: fear, uncertainty, and doubt; worry, dread, and fretting about the future; anxiety, strife, and self-consciousness about the present; guilt, regret, and remorse about the past.

It’s enough to make you wonder how anyone gets out of bed in the morning. Luckily, Woodard reassured the audience that there are antidotes to all of these woes: things like planning, acceptance, forgiveness, and confidence.

And then there’s the procrastination beast. Procrastination causes you to prioritize the tasks that are easiest, most fun, or most predictable — meaning that by the time the post-lunch slump rolls around, you’ve run out simple tasks and can’t fathom tackling your most challenging tasks.

One of the best ways to overcome procrastination is to perform micro-tasks that can jumpstart the desire to do the larger task. It’s important to recognize that the desire to do something rarely proceeds doing it — “but if you continually act in a way and desire never follows, change occupations,” quipped Woodard.

Putting productivity in motion

Productivity begins with prioritizing your tasks appropriately. But first, make sure the tasks on your list deserve to be there.

Woodard told a story about being asked to come up with a mission statement and being reluctant to do so. But then he realized he was missing the intention of the exercise: “The point wasn’t to have a mission statement. The point was to have a mission.” If everything on your task list ties into your overall vision, mission, and purpose, it’s far easier to find focus.

Woodard is a proponent for using the Eisenhower Matrix to set daily task-based goals. The idea is that each of your tasks falls into one of four quadrants in the matrix, and you need to incorporate each quadrant into each day.

1. Tasks to manage: those that are both important and urgent.
2. Tasks to focus on: those that are important, but not urgent. “The world of effectiveness lives in this quadrant,” explained Woodard.
3. Tasks to avoid: those that are urgent, but not important.
4. Tasks to limit: those that are neither urgent nor important.

You should also aim to complete your most challenging or dreaded tasks during the time when you are most focused and alert.

The elusive zero inbox

Finally, Woodard was ready to share his four-step plan for conquering your inbox, once and for all.

The first step is to adopt some kind of note solution — whether that’s Evernote, OneNote, or simple Word document. This note solution will become an extension of your brain; the place where you deposit important details so they aren’t cluttering up your mental space.

The second step is to go into your inbox and clear out all emails older than 60 days. Seriously, just delete them or move them into a folder. Realistically, said Woodard, if you have an email that’s older than 60 days, “there is nothing actionable in it that’s still actionable — or, if there is something actionable, someone else has pinged you about it since then.”

The third step is to go through your remaining messages and apply David Allen’s “four D’s”: delete it, delegate it, do it, or defer it (by adding it to your note solution). The point is to get every single email out of your inbox — and by extension, out of your brain. “This is fantastic airplane stuff,” Woodard suggested.

The fourth and final step turned out to be a bonus: experience clarity of mind. “I sleep well because I don’t have anything in my inbox,” said Woodard.

To close, Woodard reminded the audience that while zero inbox is not a myth, zero task list is. The point of life isn’t to have nothing to do — because how dull would that be? Instead, focus on organizing, prioritizing and executing your tasks wisely.

After all, nothing induces a good night’s sleep quite like a highly productive day.

Want more #QBConnect content? Check out our full coverage of QuickBooks Connect San Jose 2018!

The post The Art of Extreme Productivity: Joe Woodard at QuickBooks Connect appeared first on Method.

No matter what your business structure — if you’re like many small business owners, you probably work far more hours a week than you would if you worked for someone else. And no matter how much you love your job, you (or your friends and family) likely wish you could reclaim some of that time. But if you don’t have the budget or desire to hire more staff, this dream may seem unattainable.

However, it doesn’t have to be! Instead of bringing in more people, the solution lies in making sure every aspect of your business is as organized as possible. The more organized you are, the more efficient and productive you can be. And when you’re able to accomplish more in fewer hours, the remaining time is yours — do with it what you will.

Here are some tips for getting organized and staying organized as a small business owner.

1. Get Your Office Space Organized

When you first set up your office space, everything probably looked pretty neat and tidy. But over time, it’s inevitable that you’ll accumulate paperwork and all those other accessories that go along with running a business. By now, your office might look like a tornado ran through it.

If you find yourself spending any amount of time just looking for stuff, then you definitely need to get your office space organized. Gather up all of the papers and objects that are sitting on surfaces and sort through them carefully. If you don’t need it, toss it. And if you do need it, make sure it has a permanent home. If this means buying some old-school filing cabinets or desk organizers, so be it. When your physical workspace is clean, it’s mentally easier to develop an organized process for getting work done.

2. Use Software to Manage Customer Relationships

As a small business owner, your customer relationships are the heart and soul of your business. Naturally, you want every customer to feel important. But it’s hard enough to do this as a small team — and it’s even harder if you don’t have an organized system for tracking customer data.

The best way to keep your data organized is to use customer relationship management software. These systems consolidate contact information and conversation notes in one convenient location, streamlining the process of looking up customer details. And if the CRM integrates with your accounting software, you can even view transaction information in the same place. This makes it easier to keep your finger on the pulse of each customer’s account and provide highly personalized service. And when your customers are satisfied, you’ll spend less time dealing with complaints and more time getting other work done.

3. Streamline Your Marketing Efforts

Unless prospective customers know about your company, they’re not going to buy from it. So when you’re getting a new business off the ground, it’s natural to want to promote it at any opportunity. But this kind of “shout it from the rooftops” marketing is only sustainable for so long. After a certain point, you need to develop a more organized marketing strategy so you have time to focus on other aspects of your business.

When developing marketing campaigns, you want to be sure they’ll resonate with your audience. But don’t just guess at who your audience is and what they want to know. Instead, use the data in your CRM to map out the demographics and buying behavior of your current customers. This information will help you develop buyer personas, which in turn will help you organize your marketing efforts. Your CRM is also a valuable resource for streamlining email marketing. Rather than exporting and uploading your QuickBooks customer list (or worse, sending hundreds of emails manually), send your CRM contacts directly to your email marketing software with the click of a button.

4. Stay on Top of Your Expense Receipts

You know the feeling. Tax time is coming up, and you haven’t been diligently logging your expenses throughout the year. As a busy small business owner, there was just never enough time to deal with those receipts; you figured you’d have more time in the new year after things “settled down.” As it turns out, you’re busier than ever — this is great news for your business, but not for the looming tax deadline.

Make this the last year you end up in this position. Starting now, spend the last few minutes of each day tracking the day’s expenses. File or scan receipts into labeled folders and come up with a naming system that tells you what each document is without having to open it. If you prefer a more digital solution, there are also a number of apps available for tracking business expenses. Whichever method you choose, taking 15 minutes each day to stay organized will save you (or your accountant) a massive headache at tax time.

5. Save Time with Integrated Tools

Even with solid software at your fingertips, it’s time-consuming to constantly flip between programs. In addition, entering data into multiple systems can lead to errors that have negative repercussions down the line. To maximize productivity and minimize errors, you want to automate and integrate as much of your work as possible.

As mentioned earlier, using a CRM that syncs with your accounting software is a great organization solution. When you do so, you can enter data in one system and it will automatically sync to the other. This frees up valuable time that would otherwise be spent on double data entry. It also gives your employees immediate access to important updates. Meanwhile, using a CRM that integrates with your email provider (like Gmail or Outlook) is another huge time-saver for small business owners. Not only can you save email correspondence to your CRM directly from your inbox, but the visibility into each customer’s history will empower you to respond to emails faster.

Conclusion

There are plenty of benefits to getting more organized at work. Your workday will feel more pleasant and less chaotic. You’ll be able to provide your customers with better service, which will ultimately help your bottom line. And you just might be able to work more efficiently and leave the office a little earlier. Ultimately, the goal of these organization strategies is to create a work environment that works well for you — and isn’t that why you went into business for yourself in the first place?

The post How to Stay Organized at Work as a Small Business Owner appeared first on Method.

I first introduced you to Overwhelmed Olivia, your Operations Manager. This week, let’s chat about Grumpy Gus, your Sales Rep.
 

“It’s difficult to manage leads and close deals when I’m having to scour through emails and sticky notes.  ”

Gus works for Backyard Masters – a small business building beautiful backyard decks. Gus takes pride in the work his company produces, but scattered internal workflows make for a slow sales process. This ultimately results in less sales commission, making for one grumpy Gus.

This is where a CRM for QuickBooks comes into play. A QuickBooks-integrated CRM provides staff with safeguarded access to customer accounting info, giving certain roles (like sales) the autonomy to get more done in a day by operating more efficiently.

Valuable time is no longer spent sifting through paperwork or email inboxes for customer information – a centralized database eliminates redundant and manual steps.

How Gus becomes quicker with a CRM for QuickBooks

With a QuickBooks CRM, Gus’s leads are managed in a centralized database, accessible to the whole team. Now, with all contact details and account history at their fingertips, the customer service reps can handle inquiries from customers and leave Gus to close more accounts.

And, it’s not that Gus dislikes working with Olivia, but with a streamlined CRM workflow he no longer relies on and waits for his Operations Manager to create sales orders in QuickBooks. Instead, he quickly creates and sends off sales order to leads directly from within the CRM, with everything syncing in real-time to QuickBooks.

Does this make Olivia nervous? Nope. She’s happy to give the sales team the autonomy to create sales orders and estimates ever since she set up discounting parameters on the team’s customized CRM order screen.

Gus is much happier with the team operating within a streamlined workflow: as the first vendor to get a quote to his leads, he’s closing more deals every week. In his CRM, a contact managed as a Lead doesn’t sync over to QuickBooks until Gus converts them into a customer – a task Gus is happy to perform.

The post Simplify your small business workflows for a faster (and happier) team [Part 2] appeared first on Method.

In our small business workflow series, I’ll shine a spotlight on the inefficient practices and frustrations of many small business staff, and illustrate how a streamlined workflow improves individual performance and provides overall business organization.

In the coming weeks you’ll meet Frank, Debbie, Gus, and Arnold. But to start things off, allow me to introduce you to someone who plays a key role in the overall operations of your business: Olivia.

“It takes me forever to put together our billing, because everyone is managing customer and order information in spreadsheets and email accounts. It stresses me out to think how easily order details could get lost.”

 
I bet you never considered how QuickBooks could help streamline your team’s workflow and increase productivity!  But the real process improvements occur when a small business adopts a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application made specifically for QuickBooks users. (tweet this)

Now, let me clarify: creating a quicker team with QuickBooks does not require everyone to have an accounting background, or even access to your QuickBooks file for that matter.

But by equipping your team with a CRM for QuickBooks, which provides safeguarded access to customer accounting info, your team can operate more efficiently. Redundant and manual steps are eliminated within your business’ customer-centric workflows, more can be accomplished by each team member in a day, and the frustrations felt by your staff are put to rest.

QuickBooks ProAdvisor Fran Reed points out in this blog post “the lack of  internal ‘flow’ also creates disharmony amongst team members with everyone getting in the way of the other.” A CRM solution goes a long way to harmonizing that disharmony!

How Olivia becomes quicker with a CRM for QuickBooks:

Olivia no longer has a stack of quotes to send out for the sales team. As the CRM administrator, she set the permissions in Method to allow the sales team to create and send out quotes themselves. And then, when the lead accepts the quote, the team converts the quote into a sales order, which again syncs with the company’s QuickBooks file.

Everyone is working from a centralized database they’re able to access from anywhere, so Olivia’s time is no longer spent hounding team members for info when it’s time to do the billing. It also means vital customer data is no longer being saved in email accounts or on laptops, which does wonders for Olivia’s sanity.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this small business workflow series where I’ll review the roadblocks faced by Frustrated Frank (your sales rep) and how to supercharge this revenue-generating team member.

Ready to start streamlining your operations?

Sign up for a free trial of Method CRM, the #1 rated CRM by QuickBooks users on apps.com. 

Or, read the Education CRM story of sword fighting school, Guard Up! 

The post Simplify Your Small Business Workflows for a Faster (and Happier) Team [Part I] appeared first on Method.

In this blog, you get a deep dive into 10 productivity tips and habits for small business owners. Try out a few of these small business productivity hacks over the next few weeks on a daily basis. You’ll see the difference that a few changes can make.

1. Get out of the way of your sales team

To start off our list of top 10 productivity tips for small business owners, you want to give your sales team the resources and tools to close sales and maximize profits for your company. But as a business owner, sometimes you are the bottleneck of sales approvals.

Using a discounting spectrum or equation, you can create automated safeguards in your CRM for your sales team to work within. With your custom safeguards in place, your sales team can send out offers and begin processing orders within the parameters you set and significantly quicker.

2. Write on the walls

Productivity apps are a fantastic way to stay organized and get through your daily tasks. But productivity can sometimes feel limited in digital form. 

You can actually boost productivity by getting a marker out and writing on physical surfaces, such as:

• Your office walls.
• Sticky notes.
• A big piece of paper. 

Managing team priorities this way gives your team a clear visual image of what tasks look like. 

After getting everything out on paper, move that information into your CRM system to digitally delegate activities to your team. There are a lot of benefits of simply getting out of your seats, huddling around a whiteboard, and quickly updating each other while re-prioritizing tasks.

3. Keep your mornings (or an entire day!) meeting-free

Next on our list of productivity tips for small business owners is to minimize your meetings.

Meetings can break up your day and make it difficult to do deep work that benefits your business. 

Having a dedicated period of time where you are uninterrupted by meetings is a great way to stay on track and get more done in one sitting. Block time off in your calendar to ensure you have enough time to get the most important work done.

Figure out the time of day you can naturally get in the zone and block off time to complete tasks that need extended focus. If possible, choose one day a week as “No Meetings Day” for your small business and see if there is a lift in everyone’s productivity.

4. Get annoyingly specific about time

Try scheduling meetings ten minutes earlier than you normally do. For example, if you normally do half-hour meetings, shorten them to 20 minutes. 

By shortening the length of meetings, whoever organizes one is forced to stick to and keep everyone on a tight agenda. If you have 3 half-hour meetings tomorrow and everyone is able to get through their stuff in 20 minutes, you’ll gain back 30 minutes of productive time.

5. Maximize energy by working in 90-minute cycles

90-minute stretches of work produce the best productivity. Despite how hard we try, we’re human and our energy levels change throughout the day. After around 90 minutes, our brains need meaningful rest. You might think that this wastes your time, but it actually lets you get more done as it prevents your brain from getting foggy.

It’s the opposite of being productive to jam your break time with more emails or any other work you want to catch up on. You might feel like taking a coffee break is a waste of time, but breaks give you an essential period to regain energy and do even better work. Focus on renewing your energy during breaks and avoiding working non-stop.

6. Understand the value of your time

As a small business owner, you have to assess which tasks are best suited for your skillset and which tasks you can delegate to others. This is important because you have to value your time and know that your responsibility as the owner are in order to find time to focus on growth. 

One of the best productivity tips for small business owners is to value your time. Some ways you can value your time include:

• Hire a full-time or part-time employee.
• Outsource work to a freelancer.
• Onboard a contractor for temporary work.
• Use automation software to complete admin tasks for you.

It might seem risky to spend money on the above, but think about how much your small business productivity would grow if you focused on only what you do best. 

7. Focus on deep work, not shallow distractions.

There are a million and one distractions in the workplace that seem like they need your full attention. This is a huge struggle for small business owners who feel like they are constantly putting out fires in their workweek. It causes burnout and even restricts you from focusing your efforts on growth opportunities. 

Instead of hyper-focusing on everything, dedicate a few long hours to deep work. These few hours of uninterrupted work allow you to fall into a deep concentration and give back to your business. You’ll feel accomplished at the end of your workday and see that the list of tasks you thought originally deemed important isn’t what’s driving your business forward.

8. Free up your time with technology.

When you first started your business, doing manual work for tedious tasks might not have seemed like a big deal. After all, you worked hard to get your business to where it is today. But as larger tasks come your way, you need to focus your efforts on new business ideas to make the biggest impact and grow your company.

If you find yourself spending hours on repetitive tasks, it’s time to find a technology solution to do it for you. Free up time in your day for more important things by automating your sales process with software solutions like Method.

9. Decide what’s vital versus what’s nice to do.

Prioritizing your daily list of tasks is hard because sometimes it can seem like every single task is important. It’s a valuable skill to decipher which tasks are most pressing and need your attention now. 

Start by creating a list of tasks that you do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. Be as detailed as possible and include the smallest tasks to the larger tasks. It might surprise you to see how many tasks there are in a day!

Now to the hard part – prioritizing the tasks. To do this, think about the tasks that your business couldn’t survive without. Then move on to what would be nice for the business to have but not essential. 

The last step is to rank how well you can complete each task. Make sure to identify which tasks are:

• Easy and quick to do.
• Hard and time-consuming.
• Required to be completed by you.
• Able to be given to someone else to do.
• Able to be combined with other similar tasks.

Now you have lists of tasks that you can comfortably fit into your schedule and delegate to other team members. 

10. Find out what your team is good at and delegate.

As a small business, your team is probably also a small one. With the team you have, you want to start delegating tasks from your to-do list to your team. A few things to consider when delegating tasks include:

• Your employee’s interests and skillset. 
• Their workload and time availability. 
• Whether or not they have the resources to complete the task.
• Splitting tasks or combining tasks to boost productivity.

By giving tasks to your team, you free up hours in your workweek and reduce your stress levels. 

In the long run, these productivity tips for small business owners help your mental health, the quality of work you produce, and the growth of your business.

Take small business productivity to the next level with a free trial of Method CRM!

Image credit: BullRun via Adobe Stock

The post 10 productivity tips for small business owners appeared first on Method.