It’s inevitable. As a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats, especially if you’re just starting out and getting your “sea legs,” so to speak. 

You’ll play multiple roles and sometimes be stretched thin for many months or years until you learn how to outsource.

Some of the roles solopreneurs take on right out the gate when starting a business:

Marketing manager.

Bookkeeper.

Content developer.

Coach.

Technical support staff. 

While this type of task juggling is to be expected when you start out, you have to be aware that not all the hats you juggle  are not created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there won’t be any cash to manage. 

In addition, to figure out what’s the most important to grow your business, you’ll have to consider how much time you’re spending in each area as well. It’s common to get stuck in the trap of working on small things that won’t move your business forward. If you spend all day tweaking your website’s design and put off sending an email to your list, what have you gained? 

Sure, you might have a prettier website, but you lost an opportunity to drive traffic to your offer that may have converted without the additional tweaks to your website. 

In an ideal world, you’d simply put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but we don’t always have that option here in the real world. Instead, we have to work smarter, not harder, and take care of how we’re spending our time. 

Let’s take a look at how to stop juggling so much in your business.

Prioritize Your Daily Tasks

We all have different skills and sweet spots when it comes to the tasks we need to do for our business.  As the CEO of your business, money-making tasks should be at the very top of your to-do list. You might love customer support, but is it taking so much of your time that you can’t focus on money-making activities? 

What I mean by money-making activities are tasks like product creation, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different. Identify the specific money-making tasks in your business and make sure to prioritize them Every. Single. Day. 

Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent

In the classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a time-management grid. Every task is assigned to a quadrant of the grid, based on whether it is urgent, important, both, or neither. 

Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately know what you should be working on. For example, marketing and planning are important but not urgent. A ringing phone is urgent, but not important. The sales page for your new program, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important. 

So before you prioritize your daily to-do list, think about where each of your tasks falls in the quadrant and schedule them accordingly. 

Will you always be working on the best task for right now? Probably not. Nor will you always use your time as wisely as you could. But by making a conscious effort to organize and prioritize your days, you’ll find it’s a lot less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business. 

Overwhelmed with Juggling so Many Hats?

I’ve created a Business Productivity and Time-Management planner to help you become more productive in business. This planner will help you set business goals and how to break those goals down into actionable steps. While everyone’s business goals are all different, we all have to create a plan and learn how to take real action without distraction. There’s no excuse not to grow your business this year! Learn more here.