We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called “Opportunity” and its first chapter is New Year’s Day. – Edith Lovejoy Pierce
Many people make New Year’s resolutions, goals or plans to change things in or about their personal lives that they don’t like or just feel aren’t working. We all need to stop and make this sort of assessment.
One area that we often forget about in this assessment is our professional lives – and really we shouldn’t, as our professional life does take up a great deal of our time.
As a business owner or an employee about to embark upon a New Year, now is a good time to pause and reflect upon last year and ask yourself some questions:
- What happened last year that took you off guard or left you feeling overwhelmed and totally unprepared?
- What tasks were the most time consuming?
- What tasks left you feeling crabby and frustrated? Why?
- Do you feel that you felt like you spent more time than usual putting out “fires” either at home or at the office?
From a business owner’s perspective, now might be a good time to take a look at your overall business operations and look for ways and opportunities to improve them in the upcoming year. As a business owner, you’ll need to involve EVERY employee in order to put together a plan that will work.
If you are an employee when you make this list, be honest and prioritize your issues. Maybe you need some training or a system to better organize your work.
I’ve spent much of the last several weeks making this same assessment and I’ve come up with quite a list, both personally and professionally. One of my big projects is to reorganize, revamp, and give a facelift to all 3 (soon to be 4) of our websites – I actually started that in September 2012 and it’s been a huge task. I had hoped to have it all done by today, but that didn’t happen – simply because it’s a HUGE project and I could only work on it when I wasn’t taking care of the things that are part of my normal day-to-day activities. I did manage to get all of our QuickBooks related training materials, that had been part of our main website, moved over to the “Learn to use QuickBooks in your construction business” website – if you haven’t visited that site, please do so. There is a lot of interesting things over there that you should find helpful. With any luck, I should have everything else squared away by the first of February – with the facelift or rebranding to appear at that time.
Remember, this is a New Year, full of opportunities – make the most of it!
What are your goals for the New Year?
Thanks, Nancy! Making sure this is in order on a daily basis is definitely ideal!
Hi John
Thanks for stopping by! I checked out your website and it’s really nice.
What you are experiencing is very common – leaving all your tax prep stuff till the end of the year. Most business owners get so involved with the day to day “running” of their business and helping other people that they often neglect making sure their own books are in order. Next thing you know, poof – it’s the end of the year and tax time….
My advice, set aside a a half hour (more or less) every day to keep your books organized; things will be fresh in your mind and once you get into the routine you’ll be happy you did!
Good luck!
My goal is to be MORE ORGANIZED! I do all of my bookkeeping for my Contractor Websites business and as I prepared my taxes last weekend, I realized, I set that all aside until the end of the year. 2013 for me will be changing that behavior!