Podcast 85: 3 Easy Ways to Streamline Your Holistic Business
Oct 07, 2021
Streamlining your business will ultimately save you time and money. It’s about looking at what you do in your business and finding ways to simplify and automate as much as possible.
As a practitioner you wear lots of different hats in your business - some you love doing, some you’re great at but others are difficult and time-consuming. In an ideal world, you’d get rid of the ones that you’re either not good at or hate doing but often, you have to find a way to make it as easy as possible for yourself.
One of my superpowers is being organised. Taking some time to streamline areas of my business help me to stay on top of things - here are 3 easy ways you can streamline your holistic business:
Create checklists
Checklists are the simplest system you can add to your business. They can be as low or high tech as you want them to be from simple lists on a notepad or in a Word document to utilising project management software such as Trello or Asana.
There is a huge benefit to having checklists in all areas of your business:
- You don’t have to try and remember exactly what to do
- You’ll complete jobs faster and more efficiently
- You won’t miss out on any steps
- You’ll reduce the number of mistakes
- And you will have a readymade brief when you want to ask someone to do a job on your behalf
Consider any tasks that are repeated and create a checklist for them. These could be anything from the process of onboarding a client, to doing your accounts or updating your website. If you do one each time you adopt a job that needs repeating in your business, you will build a reference file that will support you as your business grows.
Start batching
Batching is a way of being super productive and is simply doing similar tasks together. It will save you a serious amount of time and stress.
When you stop and start different tasks there is a time delay between them. Whether it’s getting your brain in gear or logging into different websites, there is a time cost. If you reduce the number of times you move between one thing to another, it will add up during the day.
It is easier to get into the flow of jobs when you are focusing on them. You won’t have to work out where you got to or try to remember what to do next because you are in the right zone for the task at hand.
Batching will help you to clear the tasks that can often take days or weeks to get around to. It’s a great way to give you space to work on your projects or take downtime with family and friends without having the unfinished to-do list hanging over you.
Don’t limit batching to just work, by batching some of your home activities and chores, you can save even more time. It’s a way of working efficiently in every area to free you up for the things you’d love to do.
Some examples of things you can batch are:
- Emails – only check your emails once (or twice) a day, don’t dip in and out of them as soon as you see the little notification. If you don’t trust yourself to not look, turn off your notifications or close the programme down.
- Clients – book your client appointments or calls together so you can get into the ‘client zone’ fully.
- Content creation – whether you produce blogs, podcasts, videos – the more you can do these together, the better. Especially if you have the equipment to set up or want to do your hair and makeup before appearing on video, batching will be a huge time saver.
- Social media – create your posts for the week (or month) in one go and use a scheduling tool to automate their delivery. You will still need to check them and respond to any comments etc. but you can do this a couple of times a day.
- Administration – do all your accounts and other similar administrative tasks together. This way they won’t interfere with your day-to-day work.
- Dinners – if you’re cooking a meal, make extra portions and freeze them so you have your own healthy ready meals.
- Friends and family – making a couple of visits in one afternoon or making a few phone calls in an evening is a great way to catch up with people and be efficient with your time.
Create templates
Templates are a great way to speed up tasks and create consistency in your marketing. They provide you with a framework that you can personalise and adapt, rather than having to start from scratch each time you start a new job.
Emails you send regularly are a great place to start, whether that’s answering enquiries about what you do, or providing useful information to clients. Notice the emails you’re writing regularly and create a template in your draft folder that can be simply copied and pasted before personalising it.
Using templates in your visual marketing is a great way to get a consistent look and feel for your social media graphics, website graphics, leaflets, documents etc. to keep everything on-brand. They will save you a huge amount of time trying to get everything looking right because you already have the design set up, you just need to amend the information and images to suit the topic.
You can also create templates for your written marketing such as newsletters and blog posts, which provide you with a framework to work within. This will help you to organise your thoughts and write in a structured way so that you can complete the content quickly and easily.
These 3 simple ideas will help you to streamline your holistic business, so you have more time to do the work you love. You can adopt them at any stage of your business and make them as low or high tech as you want.
If getting organised in your business is something you struggle with, book a discovery call with me and find out how I can help you.
Podcast 85 show notes:
- (01:54) Create checklists
- (04:20) Start batching
- (09:12) Create templates
