One thing I often hear from business owners is that there is never enough time to do everything they want to get done (AND they aren't making enough money!). So, I want to share a few tips to help with that (some of these might apply more to service-based businesses).
1) STop being a time optimist.
ADHD brains are particularly bad at this. As you may know, I have ADHD. I think everything is going to take me less time than it does - especially getting places.
If this sounds familiar, my advice to you is to stop trying to do so many things in a day. Give yourself three tasks to do in a day instead of asking yourself to do 25 and then being mad at yourself when you don't get them all done. Things take longer than you think!
2) Stop underquoting and over-delivering.
This goes along with being a time optimist. You tell someone something is going to cost a certain amount of money based on how long you think it will take but discover it’s going to take twice as long but don't charge twice as much. On top of that, you also think of a few other things you can do that would make the project/service even better and want to WOW the client. So, now you've spent three times the amount of time on a project and are still getting paid the original fee.
Ways to overcome this are to double your time estimate from the start so that you're being more realistic about the time it will take and charging more fairly. You can also offer different packages with higher and lower amounts of time/deliverables so that people can choose to take the option with fewer of the bells and whistles and pay accordingly if they want them.
3) Stop beating yourself up for not always being productive.
We all need downtime. Let yourself have some instead of taking some and feeling guilty about it. Let yourself be okay with not producing more more more all the time. The energy we waste on shame means we have less energy to give when we're feeling excited and into things. Some of the time we're losing is more about energy and not actual minutes.
Did you find these tips helpful? Would you add anything? Leave a comment and let me know.