Are you desperate to reclaim your time?

Are you feeling excited to be back to work today? Or does Monday come with a sense of heaviness and stress?

Do you often feel like you're stretched too thin, at the beck and call of others with a thousand tabs open in your brain and not enough hours in the day? Are you desperate to reclaim your time?

How to free up your time is one of the first things I look at when I start working with a bookkeeper, along with systems, and pricing. There are also a whole lot of mindset shifts going on as you move from thinking like a bookkeeper to thinking like a business owner.

The reality is that there are only 3 ways for you to free up your time:

1. Reduce your workload 

   - you can do this by firing painful or unprofitable clients who take up too much of your time for not enough reward, or by hiking your rates up to see if these people deselect themselves as your clients. They're often the most price sensitive anyway, but if you're stretched too thin it doesn't make sense for you to hold on to these clients when your time would be better spent servicing the clients who value what you do and are happy to pay you well and on time to do it.

2. Be more efficient 

    - where can your systems and your processes be improved? In my talk at the ICNZB conference a couple of years ago I spoke about Lean Thinking including the 8 Wastes of Lean - a topic for another blog - but to name a few, you are looking for any part of your work process that is not needed, not wanted, taking too long, or includes wasted time or resources. It can help to map out your systems to see where time can be better spent, where wasted time can be eliminated, and where tech can replace or minimise repetitive or time-consuming tasks. 

3. Delegate to others 

   -  bringing on a team, whether that be staff or contractors, can feel daunting and overwhelming and often the fear of what could go wrong can stop you in your tracks. But, obviously, there is simply no other way to build a bookkeeping business that is not just you without bringing others in to take on some of the work. There is a lot to consider and learn in this area, especially if you've never done it before, and it's one of the core things I focus on in my coaching. Most bookkeepers I know wait too long to do this but you need to take this next step if you want to grow your bookkeeping business.  

I'd love to hear from you. Where are you at in your business? Do you need to free up your time? Hit here and let's talk.