Do you feel like you’re hustling and grinding all the time, but in the end, your business isn’t actually growing? Are you exhausted and craving a more simplified business?

Do you feel like you are spending too much time on things that aren’t actually moving your business forward?

Do you feel like your business is just so chaotic, unorganized and without direction?

If you answered ‘YES’ on one of the above, then you’re totally in the right place, my friend.

In this blog post, I talk about 8 mistakes you are probably making in your business that are holding you back from a streamlined and simplified business.

Other Reads:

• Overcoming Perfectionism: 7 Steps to Silence Your Inner Perfectionist
• 12 mistakes you are probably making that are killing your productivity
• Why Working Long hours isn’t the Answer to Productivity
• Losing Motivation? 7 Bullet-Proof Ways To Regain Your Passion And Stay Motivated In Your Business
• 3 Key Mindset Shifts To Stop Letting Fear And Anxiety Sabotage Your Success
• How I Avoid Feeling Overwhelmed As A Solopreneur: 3 Simple Steps

Mistake #1: You don’t have an information management system in place or maybe you have, but it is too complicated

As a business owner, you have lots of information to manage on a daily basis.

Think about all your blog posts, social media content, newsletters, projects you’re working on, financial numbers and metrics, notes of courses you’re following, your invoices, and the list goes on and on.

What I see a lot with small business owners is one of the following two things.

ONE. they aren’t consistent in the way they’re capturing information (sometimes they write it on a piece of paper, something they write the same things on a note-taking app on their phone, and another day they write it in Evernote. And afterward… they can’t find where they have written it down anymore. All the information is just shattered everywhere.

TWO. They have an information management structure in place, but they use too many different applications and software that it is inefficient and overwhelming (Trello for project management, Todoist for to-do’s, Evernote for random note-taking, Google Drive for invoices, Google Docs for blog posts and so on.

Less is definitely more here.

The key to an organized business is a simplified one.

You don’t need 5 different productivity systems, 3 project management software, and 4 different note-taking apps.

You just need 1 simplified business system that works for you and then stick to it.

In that 1 system, you will be managing, tracking, and producing all of your information in your business. Whether you want to use Trello, Asana, Evernote, Notion, or something else for this, it doesn’t matter, as long as it works for you.

Action point: Find 1 information management system that fits the best with your note-taking needs. Make sure it is:

• Easy to use
• Versatile
• Easy to structure (with colors, hierarchy,…)
• Enjoyable to use

Mistake #2. You don’t keep track of your numbers and metrics consistently

If you don’t keep track of your metrics and numbers, it is impossible to know how your business is growing and evolving. You might be busy, but what specifically are you working towards?

Analyzing your numbers will give you a lot of information about what is going well in your business and where extra work and attention is needed.

Action point: Make sure you’re keeping track of the following numbers on a weekly basis:

• Pinterest Impressions, Repins, Engagement, and Followers
• New email list subscribers, email open rate, and email link clicks
• Website sessions, Page Views, and total users in Google Analytics
• Monthly turnover, expenses, and profit

Which actions did you take and how did these make your numbers grow? Experiment with different strategies and take note of what works and what doesn’t.

Mistake #3: Your inbox is a hot mess

Your inbox shouldn’t be a horrifying place and shouldn’t be the thing where you spend the most time of your day.

Action point: In order to obtain a simplified business, here are a few things you can do radically change your mailbox experience:

• Unsubscribe from all the subscriptions you don’t want anymore, you don’t need or never read
• Organize all your emails that you do want to save with categories and labels and then archive them
• Set up email filters and rules so this categorization is automatically done for you
• Create canned email responses so you can answer frequent emails in just 1 click

Organizing and customizing your inbox experience so it works well for you and your biz, will make it way less stressful, while simultaneously reducing tremendously the time spend on your mailbox.

Mistake #4: You don’t schedule and plan enough

If you don’t schedule and plan your working days in advance, it is difficult to know where you should be working on and it’s very likely that you end up forgetting stuff.

Action point: Use Google Calendar or whatever calendar you’re using to literarily schedule EVERYTHING in your business. Every meeting, every task, and every business-related activity should be scheduled, so you have that peace of mind that you aren’t forgetting anything important and you know exactly what you should be working on every single day.

Also for planning new meetings or unexpected to-do’s, it’s much easier to see when you’re available, and where you have some open timeslots during the week when everything is scheduled.

If you have different businesses or big projects that are completely separate, it can be useful to create different calendars into one, so that you can view them either separately or together.

I also strongly recommend color code different activities in your business, for example, everything social media is in yellow, meetings are blue, admin is grey,… and so on. This will make it much easier to have an overview on where you are spending your time to.

Mistake #5: You don’t have a running Master List of ‘ideas for the future’ in place

The shiny object syndrome is a real thing, right?

Did it already happen to you that you have this amazing idea, that you’re just too excited about to be able to concentrate on the things you’re currently working on? So you end up stopping completely with whatever you’re doing and start working on this new project? But in the end, you realize that the idea isn’t that great after all, and then you just end up with two half-finished projects.

Or maybe you have this amazing idea, but then life happens and you don’t remember your idea anymore?

Action point: For both situations your ‘Ideas for the future’ Master List comes in really handy since you can keep a running list of all your ideas. It should be easily accessible so you can just note down whatever comes up in your mind. In this way, you have the peace of mind that it’s written down and that eventually, when you have some space and time in your business, you might decide to focus on this new project.

But right now, the time isn’t right. So you can forget about it for now and don’t let it distract you from the projects you are currently working on.

In order to obtain a simplified business, make time every week to brain dump new ideas you have and put them on your Master List.

Mistake #6: You don’t have an editorial calendar

Do you feel sometimes that you’re on this hamster wheel all the time trying to keep up with producing all this content? You can’t even allow yourself to be uninspired or demotivated for a few days, because this would mean a delay and thus inconsistency in your posting. That can be stressful and huge pressure on you.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Action point: Setting up an editorial calendar where you plan out all of your content (blog posts, social media posts, newsletters) in advance for the whole quarter, can really help to get ahead in your schedule.

With an editorial calendar, you know perfectly the topics where you will be writing about, so it’s much easier to batch content creation and work on future content weeks in advance so you can schedule it and forget it.

The feeling to be already months in advance with content creation is so nice because it really allows you to take a break or deal with unexpected events and things that come up, without worrying about being behind on schedule.

Mistake #7: You don’t re-purpose your content.

Nobody will read ALL of your content, your blog posts, as well as your social media posts, and your newsletters all at the same time. And even if they do, that’s great, because people need to read a certain message a few times in order for it to really get to them.

So creating separate pieces of content for every platform is completely unnecessary and just a waste of time.

Action point: It’s much more efficient to create one piece of content that is high quality, extremely valuable and really stands out.

And then, you re-purpose this quality blog post into different snippets of content that you will use across all the different channels, for your newsletters, social media captions, extract quotes from it to share on Twitter, and turn it into a checklist or workbook than can be used as a freebie, your sales page, … etc.

In this way, you can really get this message out and use this content on a variety of different channels so that people actually receive the information.

Because what is the point of writing this perfect blog post if only such a small part of your audience actually get to read it…

Mistake #8: You don’t automate and outsource mundane tasks.

As a solopreneur, there are so many tasks in your business that you have to take care of. From admin to discovery calls, to content creation, graphic design, social media, customer support, engaging with your audience, … And just like everyone else you just have 24 hours in a day.

Action point: In order to keep your sanity and avoid becoming totally burned-out, it’s so necessary to start automating and outsourcing tasks that take up too much time and don’t actually make your business grow.

Even in the very beginning phases of your business, you can already outsource or automate the most mundane tasks for only a few dollars. And when you do, you can finally spend your precious time on the tasks that actually keep the needle moving in your business.

Other Reads:

• Overcoming Perfectionism: 7 Steps to Silence Your Inner Perfectionist
• 12 mistakes you are probably making that are killing your productivity
• Why Working Long hours isn’t the Answer to Productivity
• Losing Motivation? 7 Bullet-Proof Ways To Regain Your Passion And Stay Motivated In Your Business
• 3 Key Mindset Shifts To Stop Letting Fear And Anxiety Sabotage Your Success
• How I Avoid Feeling Overwhelmed As A Solopreneur: 3 Simple Steps

And this rounds up 8 mistakes you might be making that are holding you back from a streamlined and simplified business 🙂

Let’s Chat!

Which one of these are you guilty of? Let me know in the comments down below.