1. Tie Everything Together With an ePOS System
An ePOS system is the number one way you can help yourself be more organised as a business owner. The right ePOS system will automate your inventory management, accounting, and marketing campaigns, in addition to allowing you to pull valuable information out at the touch of a button.
Integrated software can help you keep track of your employees, and you can work with a payment processor that takes every kind of payment imaginable.
Whether you have one brick-and-mortar location, two locations, or you are spread across multiple channels with several branches, using an ePOS can help you organize your inventory wherever that may be. Tie all the most powerful business management tools together into one, to keep organised and on track to scale your business to new heights this year.
2. Tidy Up Your Desk and Desktop
Channel your inner Marie Kondo by taking a serious look at what brings you joy, and what just distracts you. A tidy workspace helps you feel more focused, less stressed, and happier overall.
A tidier desk may even inspire you to make healthier food choices—who knew a decluttered desk could help you lose weight? If unearthing your work surface sounds like an insurmountable task, take it one item at a time and break it down into segments. Keep at it and you will see the wood your desk is made of someday!
While you are at it, take a few minutes to clean up your computer’s desktop too. You don’t still need that empty file folder from three years ago labeled “extra stuff”. Stick it into your recycling bin. Then empty that, too.
When you’re finished, you should only have the most important files accessible from your desktop. Think about the things you use every day, and keep those. Put everything else in another menu.
3. Tidy Your Office Space or Backroom
Though it felt like you could have unearthed a small wooly mammoth from underneath the clutter on your desk, your tidying job is not finished. You want to know where to find things in the whole of your office space. Not just on your desk.
Get all those stray papers filed away. Put cluttered files and knick-knacks on shelves. Give that blazer from 1993 to someone who still wears a neon bum bag.
For a green touch that elevates and stabilises your mood, helps you concentrate, and improves your surrounding air quality, add a few indoor office plants. Aloe, lavender, spider plants, and philodendrons are low-maintenance and don’t need a whole lot of sunlight to stay healthy and happy all year long.
4. Purge Your Inbox
This is one job everyone hates because it is so tedious. That’s why this time, once your inbox is clean, you’re going to keep it clean, right? Delete all the old emails you will never look at again, and the sent emails too.
Only keep emails if they have something you will use again in them—no that biscuit recipe from fifteen years ago that your cousin you don’t even like sent you is not an email worth keeping. Delete it now.
Once you have cleaned out your inbox, use your email’s software features to automatically label your messages as they come in. This way everything stays organised and you won’t have to weed through a dozen irrelevant messages to find the ones pertaining to your business.
5. Keep Notes Organised
If you are a busy entrepreneur and you are full of ideas, you hopefully take notes so you don’t forget your brilliance before you have a chance to implement it.
While notes are an important part of remembering good ideas, cluttering up your space with them, finding yourself picking up lone notes wondering what “octopus” refers to, or struggling to remember things until you find that note you can’t ever seem to find, means it is time to find a better way.
Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps on the market today. You can sync your notes across all your apps, use talk-to-text to create notes, and even make your notes PDF files.
Evernote also has powerful search tools that allow you to not only search titles, but also the body of your notes so you can find anything you’re looking for in an instant.
6. Organise Your Passwords
Hopefully, every password for every secure site you deal with for your business is different. If you are doing security right, no two passwords are the same, and they are written down, locked away in a secret secure location where no one except you will find them.
If your brain is melting at the idea of creating a new password for every site you ever visit, there is a solution. Everykey is a special dongle you can attach to your keyring that replaces all your keys and passwords.
It can serve as your car key and your house key, and it will generate secure passwords for all your websites where you hold accounts. When you go to the website, it will automatically log you in. And if you lose your Everykey, you can deactivate it so no one can steal your car or anything else.
