Plan Ahead and Avoid Year-End Panic: 5 Helpful Business Owner Organisation Tips

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

As brokers to many businesses across South Africa, we know how things go when our clients get closer to year-end. Work seems to speed up at an insane pace, you’re always worried that you’re forgetting something, and you feel like you’re swimming in admin and paperwork. As insurance brokers, we’re all about planning ahead and having all our ducks in a row. So, we thought we’d help you avoid all the stress and panic of the upcoming silly season by preparing a list of helpful business owner organisation tips to help you keep on top of things.

Start Your Day the Right Way

The first 30min of your workday matter! Spend this time planning out the most pressing and important tasks to complete in your day. This will help you stay focused and be more productive. A little bit of planning can save you many wasted hours in your day.

Use Smart Project Management Software

As a business owner, it’s likely that you have a million different things to keep track of and remember, and the reality is that you’re only human and have limited memory capacity. While keeping notes can help, it’s easy to lose them or not be able to decipher your own handwriting or shorthand! Many business owners are moving to project management software (such as Asana, Clickup or Planner) for good reason – it helps you get things done by holding you accountable, visually tracking everything, and keeping all the information you need for a project in a single (and easily-searchable) place that everyone can refer to when necessary.

Use a Time Tracking Program

If you’re not familiar with the idea of tracking the time you spend on each task, it may seem a little over the top. However, timing yourself, on software such as harvest, clickup, or clockify, can be extremely helpful. By timing yourself every day, you can start to get a good idea of how long certain tasks usually take, and therefore, plan better in future. You can also start to notice what’s eating away at all your time, and types of activities you may need to cut down on.

Tackle Your Biggest Task First

It’s easy to make yourself feel good by ticking off a million of little tasks, giving you a sense that you’ve been productive. But this is not true productivity, as many little and unimportant tasks can be used to procrastinate in view of the harder, bigger, or more complex tasks. By starting straight off the bat, with the biggest task, you’ll be way more productive and feel a sense of relief, knowing you don’t have anything looming over your head – it goes a long way to improving work satisfaction (which is much needed during silly season).

Meeting Timers

Meeting timers will be your best friend during year-end rush. We all know that unorganised meetings can be major time wasters! Which is why it’s a good idea to allocate a set amount of time for each meeting topic, and back this up with a phone timer that gives you audible alerts, informing you that you need to start wrapping it up.

Another consideration is keeping meetings to a minimum and only reserving them for things that can’t easily be communicated in a mail. Less meetings equate to happier staff and a more productive you.

We hope you’ve found these simple but practical business owner organisation tips helpful – we promise you that they’ll keep your sanity intact as you inch towards the end of the year. Happy planning!

P.S. If you need one less thing to worry about this silly season, be sure to set up a call with your broker to review your policies and make sure you’re covered on all fronts. We’ll help you properly plan your commercial cover. Call us today.