The life of a contractor is a life of multitasking, especially if you’re self-employed and at the early stages of your business. You have to juggle finances, marketing, and logistics, all the while heading out and doing the heavy lifting yourself. And although it’s always good when you’re landing a lot of jobs every week, it does make it difficult to manage multiple projects at once.
Hopefully with the following tips you can find some balance in your routine. There’s no “one way” to do it since everyone operates differently, but there are a few universal tips that can help you make your life much easier.
Setting priorities
There are many quickfire ways to recenter your priorities when things start getting messy. This is important to make sure you’re taking care of what’s most urgent first and moving down the list of tasks in the most efficient way.
Time-sensitive tasks go first. If you’re looking down a list of tasks, focus your efforts on the most urgent ones first. Might seem obvious, but quite often we’re tempted to focus on easier tasks instead, which unavoidably drains our energy and time. Knock the time-sensitive tasks off the list early and everything else becomes much easier.
Prioritize difficult tasks. This one depends on the context, but the idea behind it still stands as logical one. By starting with the most difficult task, you will naturally have an easier time as the day or the week progresses.
Productivity apps can help
After a certain point it becomes difficult to manage multiple projects in your head by just winging it. Luckily, there’s no shortage of productivity apps (most of which are free) to help you with this.
Here are some of my personal favorites productivity apps to get you started:
Todoist. When it comes to list-making, this free app is king. Good for groceries lists and managing teams, this simple app is as powerful as you need it to be, helped along by the fact you can have it on almost anywhere, be it your phone, desktop, tablet, browser, etc.
Trello. Trello is better for those that prefer visual organization, allowing you to create cards with all sorts of data and visualize how your week will be. Excellent for managing complex workloads and setting priorities.
Asana. One of the top options for those that need to manage large teams remotely. Not necessary if you mostly work alone, but definitely worth a look if you plan on hiring remote help like a marketing and finances team.
Check out other 10 apps that will help your contractor business!
Stop checking your email all the time
Obviously checking your email is important, especially if it’s a tool you use to communicate, send estimates, and report to clients, but it should be done at specific times. Check your email at the start and end of the day and reply to whatever you can in those times, but leave it alone entirely otherwise.
This prevents the anxiety-inducing addiction of constantly refreshing your email every 15 minutes, which kills your productivity and leads nowhere.
Track your time
This productivity tip actually works wonders for managing multiple projects because you can learn more about yourself and apply it in different ways. It’s quite valuable to know how long you usually take on average to complete certain tasks, as it allows you to plan your days much more effectively and accurately.
You can track your time by just paying attention to the clock, but apps like Toggl are built for that purpose and allow you to specify what you were working on for easy tracking.
Automate tasks
One thing I bring up a lot here is the importance of online presence. Contrary to popular belief, managing social media on its own is a lot harder than it looks, as it requires a good deal of planning and can be very time consuming. The trick is to plan ahead and automate most of it, freeing you up to move on with your day.
But this doesn’t apply to social media alone, there are plenty of small tasks you can automate to save time. If you’re looking for a good option on social media though, I recommend Buffer, as it’s easy to pick up and learn and offers a great deal of free options to get you started.
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