It’s now officially summer, but you might be forgiven for not realising given how much it’s been remaining for the past few days! Before that though, the sky was bright and sunny, which means it’s time for a good old-fashioned spring clean. We’re super excited to see that some of our clients are blowing the cobwebs away and giving their offices a vigorous clean and reset, ready to take on whatever the rest of the year can throw at them.
But what if spring cleaning could mean more than just making your office smell of lemons and look really sparkly? What if you could give your business an equally thorough scrubbing, and have it ready to kick some ass when you come back to it after the weekend? It’s not as difficult as it sounds – all you need to do is follow our advice, and maybe ask for some help at the end.
Delegate And Automate
Let’s start with something really basic, that most of our business owning friends tend to forget. Just because you own the business does not mean you have to do everything. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of what you should do. A good business owner knows where their efforts are best spent, and where it would be better to get someone else to manage things for them. When it comes to organising your business, there are plenty of elements you can outsource to free up your own time – mainly the ones that take a lot of time even though they are small. Things like managing your inbox, going through your paperwork and filing it properly, or doing follow-up calls from business shows – someone like a VA could do them in half the time you could. That being said, there is also no reason you should be paying an arm and a leg for anything. I promise this isn’t a plug for my services! But I do believe in delegation, and if you can pass on the simplest and yet most time-wasting task to someone external, then you could save an awful lot of time and stress.
Everything In Its Right Place
Spring cleaning is all about getting rid of the old things you don’t need any more, reorganising the things you do to be more efficient, and maybe a little bit of cleaning at the end. So if you aren’t sure how to get started – take a look at your workspace. How clean is it? More importantly, how efficient is it? Be honest, how much time do you spend every day searching for a hole punch, a highlighter or a stapler, only to never be able to find one? And when you do eventually find it, does it go back where it belongs? Take some time to go through your workspace and organise what you actually use and what you don’t, and arrange it all in a pattern that suits the way you work. This will be different for everyone, so it doesn’t really matter what that looks like, just as long as it works for you.
The Power Of Paperless
I’ll be the first to tell you that my paper diary was my best friend. I say was, because recently I was converted to the paperless way of working, and now you couldn’t pay me enough to go back. Think about it for a moment – most of us have our phones in our hands all the time, so it makes sense to keep our diaries at our fingertips. With a little effort to set it all up, your business could go completely paperless – eliminating a lot of hassle for you and improving the environment in one fell swoop. Solutions like Google calendars are incredibly user-friendly, so you can keep all of your diaries in one place. There’s even an app that you can colour code, so you can tell the difference between home and work events right away! It’s not just your calendar you could digitise either – there are millions of apps out there that can help you reduce the paper you have to deal with, from paperless bank cards to scanning receipts and filing them directly with your accounting software, so you don’t need to keep paper receipts again.
Get The Bin Ready
I work by one golden rule when it comes to spring cleaning of any kind – if you’re surprised by it, chuck it! Human beings tend to like to hold onto things, but more often than not they aren’t actually any use. This means you will end up keeping a lot of things you just don’t need, or fear that if you throw it away, you’ll suddenly need it again. We all have this fear, and the good news is you don’t need to face it – use the power of scanning to keep records of everything you think you might need, and then get rid of the actual paper. If you are digging through piles of paper and mountains of stock, you need to have a ‘you might go’ box ready. Fill this with all the things you aren’t sure about, and keep an eye on something. If it hasn’t come out of the box in 12 months, then it’s time to release it back into the wild (i.e. the bin!).
If all of that sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t worry! That’s where the magical flamingo comes in (AKA, me!). At Your Admin Hub, we love a good spring clean. From going through your piles of paperwork, digitising it and filing it away for you, right through to actually cleaning your office and making it shine again. We would love to help you find some peace and calm in your business, and enjoy that lovely lemon-scented feeling of a clean, organised business. If that sounds good to you, all you need to do is pick up the phone, open the emails or grab your nearest carrier pigeon, and send us a message today.
