Deciding to start a business can make you feel empowered, excited, and motivated to build a better future for yourself. But once you start filling out the paperwork and getting swamped with to-do items, it’s easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed. The key to reducing your stress and staying focused on making measurable goal progress is staying organized—but organization requires more than just self-discipline.
The Importance of Organization
Staying organized matters because it helps you keep track of:
- Contact information. No business is started and managed alone. You’ll be relying on dozens of partners, employees, mentors, and external professionals, so you’ll need to keep track of all of them (and the communications you have with each of them).
- Documentation. You’ll also need to keep track of your business’s vital paperwork and protect those documents with insurance (in case they’re lost or stolen). Items like your partnership agreement, articles of incorporation, and office lease are imperative to the structure of your business.
- Ideas, tasks, and checklists. Of course, you’ll also need to keep track of your new ideas, your to-do items, and checklists of things to accomplish for each goal—otherwise, you’ll leave important items unattended and good ideas on the cutting room floor.
- Partnership and delegation. You’ll also need to keep your most important information handy, in case you need to discuss it with partners or delegate it to your employees.
It also helps you stay less stressed; even if the work is piling up, you’ll feel in control of the situation if you’re organized.
How to Stay Organized
So what are the best ways for new entrepreneurs to stay organized?
- Use as few organization tools as possible. We live in an era with many options for organization, communication, and task management, but it’s counterproductive to enlist the help of many of them simultaneously. You’ll experience this firsthand the moment you look for an important piece of information but can’t remember if it’s in your calendar, your email inbox, your project management software, or on a sticky note by your computer. Try to rely on only one or two management tools, and stay consistent with it.
- Keep tabs on your goals and sub-goals. Everything you do should relate back to one of your main goals or a sub-goal of those main goals. Create a hierarchy of importance, with your main goal being “starting the business,” and your sub-goals being things like “securing funding” or “creating a business plan.” This will help you categorize your tasks, and sort them appropriately.
- Think of priority as both importance and urgency. Learn the difference between importance and urgency, and utilize both when categorizing your tasks and information. Important tasks are ones vital to your business’s operation, while urgent tasks are ones that must be done in short order. A task can be urgent but not important, and important but not urgent, so it pays to know how to categorize them accordingly.
- Appeal to a standard that works for you. Not everyone will respond equally well to the same organizational conditions. For example, some people work better with pen and paper than they do with digital systems, and some prefer an intuitive visual layout rather than written notes. Use whichever standard works best for you, and develop your own unique system.
- Set standards, and be brutally consistent. When you do develop your system, formalize the rules of that system with documentation. Then, be as consistent as possible; in other words, don’t break your own rules. It’s much easier to stay organized proactively than to clean up a mess after it’s already made.
- Have cleanup days (or times). During the week, no matter how consistent you try to be with your task management and overall organization, there will be things that slip past your radar or spiral out of control. To compensate for this, establish a consistent cleanup day (or time) that you can use to reorganize anything you may have missed, such as Friday mornings or Thursday afternoons.
- Shut out distractions (at least temporarily). The more distracted you are, the harder it will be for you to stay consistently organized—or focused on your most important tasks. Take at least some time each day to shut out all distractions, such as cutting off your internet connection or turning off the notifications on your phone, so you can work heads-down on what’s most important for your business.
You don’t need to completely revolutionize your work style to master the art of organization, nor do you need to invest hundreds of dollars in productivity tools (though some can seriously help). Instead, committing to a plan of attack that makes sense for your personality and experience, and staying consistent with it can dramatically improve your results.