Here’s one thing I’m seeing with many of my coaching clients — they are having trouble keeping up with all of the aspects of their business,. They’re failing at time management. Specifically, they aren’t managing to get these tasks done:
- Building their audience, including building their own list and connecting with partners
- Maintaining their relationship with their existing audience
- Creating and selling products and services
What’s often happens is that they start building their audience with a free offer. Then they want to work on a product, so they ignore their subscribers for months.
They start out OK but when they have to do several things at once — as you have to do with a business — they can’t manage it all. Without proper time management, they get overwhelmed.
Sometimes, part of the issue is that they don’t like or aren’t good at some pieces of the puzzle.
If they are budding entrepreneurs, wearing all these hats at once is new for them.
3 things you need to be doing in your online business
To make your online business a success, you need 3 things, all at once. I call it the Business Triad. You need:
- An audience that wants what you have to offer
- A relationship with that audience so they’ll trust you
- An offer relevant to that audience
Here’s what can happen if you omit one or more of the Business Triad elements:
- If you don’t have an audience, you promote a product or course and not enough people buy
- If you have an audience but neglected them (perhaps while you were creating your product/course), they won’t buy when you make your offer
- You create your course, but don’t promote it enough to your audience so you don’t get enough sales
- You don’t expand your audience to followers of partners, so your audience isn’t large enough to get enough sales
The point is that you have to work on your audience, your relationship with your audience, AND your offer. You can’t neglect any of these components.
Why it’s so hard to keep up with the Business Triad
When new entrepreneurs start out, they figure out their marketing message (who they serve, the problem they solve and the solution they provide).
Then, they might work on their website and social media account and the back-end technology.
With that out of the way, they work on a free offer so they can grow their list.
So far, they’ve only had to do one thing at a time and haven’t built up a business yet.
But then, they have to start doing more than one thing at a time and that’s where the difficulty comes in.
All of a sudden they have to:
- Promote their free offer every day
- Contact potential partners and set up partnerships to promote each other
- Continue to email their growing list of subscribers regularly with new content
- Create a paid offer
- Promote the free offer
That’s 5 tasks to work on every day — or at least every week.
That can get confusing and overwhelming!
What’s the solution to all that confusion and overwhelm?
The best solution I’ve found is to use a time management technique that works — creating a schedule — daily or weekly — that locks in all of the necessary tasks.
Here’s an example.
Now, this is just an example. You may not do each component every day. But can you see how it leaves you time for everything? Note that you don’t check your email and social media notifications until 11 am so that you don’t go down the “rabbit hole” with those tasks. You can check them at the end of the day, too.
Maybe you can set aside Tuesdays and Thursdays for connecting with partners. Maybe you have to fit in client meetings. But having a schedule helps you get everything done.
Another technique is to make sure that you put your tasks on your calendar. Often, we only put appointments on our calendar and omit important tasks we have to get done. So put them on your calendar and change their color when you complete them. That feels good!
And finally, if you can manage it, I recommend outsourcing some of the tasks you don’t like or aren’t good at. Some tasks you can automate, too. An example is pre-scheduling social media posts.
Here are a few other posts I’ve written on similar topics…
Systematizing your emails and blog posts
How to get help when you’re overloaded
What to do when you don’t have time for marketing
A next step for better time management
I have a video lesson called “Get Everything Done!” that will give you some specific techniques for getting more work done. You can purchase it here..
What are your struggles with getting everything done? Leave a comment below and please share this using the social media share buttons below because I’m sure you know other people who are having the same problem!
2 replies to "Schedule your day so you get all your business tasks done"
This is very helpful! Thanks! I will try this kind of schedule this week.
I think this is good for those who are doing their businesses full time. But for people like me who work and have side hustles, a bit more discipline is required. It helps too when you have a little extra budget to allocate for systems and services to help you automate things.