Business, Entrepreneur, Freelance

Time Traps: The Self Employed Experience

When people decide to become self-employed, the most common thing most consider first is the amount of freedom you will have to do what you like with your own business, and workload. However, it is essential to make sure that your first task as a self-employed person, is to manage your time effectively. There are many traps just waiting for you, and if you’re not careful, you may fall foul to many of these, even in your first week. But Time traps are optional. If you show some self-control, then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. But here are some of the more common ones that you need to watch out for.

Social media

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Social media is excellent, it really does bring people together from all around the world, and is also a fantastic tool for businesses to use. You can use social media to find new clients, and also work with and collaborate with other businesses and publications. All of these things can improve your business and chances of success. You can also use social media to keep track of your primary marketing campaigns, and many people use social media as their primary marketing tool. However, you do need to be careful when using social media, Since it is designed to hold attention and keep people scrawling for as long as possible. If you’re not careful, you may log onto social media just so you can create an ad, but also end up reading about your school friends latest meal. Some tools can help you with this, but ultimately you need to be sensible and only log into social media to complete business-related tasks. Nothing is stopping you from watching a motivational speaker of an evening when your work for the day is done, or speaking to your friends over messenger while relaxing. But knowing when to use social media for business and pleasure, it’s going to be an excellent tool for you. Investing in a social media management tool, or even a social media manager for your business is a great idea. You might not always realize just how much time you’re wasting on social media, but once you do think about it, you might be surprised.

Meetings

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Unnecessary meetings are something that most people really dislike, whether you’re self-employed and working with another business or meeting a client to discuss their account, or whether you work for a large company and are called into busy meetings for the smallest update or change. But some ways to combat this is first to ask the person who is arranging the meeting if it is, in fact, necessary, or if you can touch base by a video call, or email. A lot of people don’t realise when they schedule meetings that they could be unnecessary, and that you could reach the same conclusions via a quick telephone call. Of course, it’s nice to take a minute out of the main hustle and bustle of the business, but not to the detriment of your essential and valuable time.

Time wasters

There’s always going to be people that like to waste time, sometimes it is not their own fault, and something comes up to change their plans; however, many people just won’t value your time as much as you do. From the offset it’s best to have procedures and contracts in place, so that they take deposits were services, or payment upfront Brighton. This stops people from trying to gain products and services without making an investment first. Quite often, things happen when people are en route And that can’t be helped, but also, there are times where customers just haven’t planned their time correctly, and unfortunately, as a professional business, you will stand out when you stick to your guns about business procedures. Some people that do not have a business of their own, really don’t understand the pressures that you face and can be excused from judgment, But there are and unthoughtful people who know the stress you’re under, and still distract you.

Sales calls

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Sales calls are essential to your business if you need to raise your income in revenue. You will need to make sure you have time to do these to a high level or have a member of staff can do this for you. Either way, when it comes to sales calls, there are many different options and reasons why you should keep them to a minimum. A lot of people buy or choose to buy from the Internet these days, so selecting some solid SEO work and being able to prioritize these (or delegate) sales calls, will actually save you plenty of time. Of course, you need to make sure that you touch base with your regular clients and customers, but once you streamline the process, everything will fall into place, and you should need to spend less time on the phone, and more time working hard progress in your business. There are actually plenty of courses on this aspect and it’s important to note that Rome wasn’t built in a day, there are people who actually specialize in this area of business, and are able to help you so don’t overlook this, and find the right person to point you in the right direction sooner rather than later. Project management systems are going to be critical in this development as well. If your sales team and yourself have a Joint board with everything you need on it to keep track of your sales efforts, this is going to avoid duplicates and time-wasting. It’s always good to have a sit down to plan everything out before going ahead with sales calls. The other consideration when it comes to sales calls is B2B sales calls that you are likely to receive yourself. Try to avoid this unless you have arranged them for a reason. You should always make Purchases intentionally, not just because somebody has asked you to. This may seem like a contradiction, but if you value your time, I want to get ahead in business, you really need to think ahead, and plan.

Decision-making

The Decision-making process, when your business is 100% yours, can become a lot more complicated. When the responsibility is yours, the profit and loss boils down to you and how hard you work, and when you are the one that will miss out the most if anything goes wrong when decisions become a lot harder. This is natural. We want to get things right and do our best, but to speed things up and to make sure you are losing lots of time, for a little game, then most of your smaller decisions need to be made quickly and concisely. With a lot of choices, you should still make them fast, with maybe a bit more thought and input from your team. It can take weeks to make a decision, especially if it’s an important one. While everyone is waiting for you actually to take the step and decide, they are looking. Do you to lead and motivate the team as well. Don’t forget that any time away from managing the business, takes away from your future expansion and success.

Paperwork

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Not many people actually enjoy the paperwork side of being self-employed. That’s why many of us choose to hire an accountant at the very least, I will keep an eye on the tax side of things. Mostly everything else can be done with little effort nowadays. But delegating the long-winded and frustrating tasks, while you concentrate on the work at hand, makes perfect business sense. The best thing to do to stay on top of all the paperwork is to keep it organised and tidy as soon as a crops up. This also saves you time if you ever in the future. A random order when you’re on organize camping this frustrating at worst cost you are fine. 

Really it all comes down to what your priorities are in business; some people think you need to work 24 7 to reach success. But. That really isn’t the case, if you work harder and smarter, then you won’t have any problems. Ideally you will have support at the very beginning of becoming self-employed, such as a business advisor, bank advisor, or even just friends and family that have been through this before. Always take the help and advice on board as much as you can, although you may like to do things differently, there is no reason you can’t draw from their experiences. Just remember that nobody has done what you’re doing before because nobody else’s you. There doesn’t seem to be many “new ideas“ but if you put your own spin And things and hope that many people are interested, then you will have a thriving business. Keeping things professional from the beginning. It is essential to research everything you can be prepared for these to happen to you.Your child will ask questions, just not this one. 

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