Entrepreneurs and small business owners are often overloaded with tasks as they begin their business journey. 

It can be difficult to notice this when you become used to juggling multiple task lists simultaneously. However, this can eventually be detrimental to your enterprise’s long-term growth. 

There are different reasons you might be struggling to find time to develop your business. Maybe your time management skills still need to be further developed, or tasks aren’t being delegated effectively as you try to catch up to your workload. 

This can be further exacerbated if you’re consistently overloaded with administrative tasks. This is a business area where many owners often spend an excessive amount of time, especially when they’re just starting their enterprises. 

While it’s normal for entrepreneurs and start-up business owners to handle most, if not all, administrative tasks, dedicating too much time to this aspect of your business can hinder your growth and impact your overall productivity. 

Suppose your time and resources are primarily focused on administrative processes and tasks instead of growth-focused activities. In that case, you might struggle to scale your operations, expand your customer base or even adapt to the changing market landscape.  

In this blog, we will help you with two key things: First, to confirm if you are overloaded with administrative tasks, based on certain signs and factors. Second, to identify and implement solutions that can help you increase administrative efficiency and reduce your workload.

How do you know if you’re overloaded with administrative tasks?

While it’s true that every day is busy for a business owner, you need to assess your ongoing work and your backlogs.

Your ongoing work includes tasks and responsibilities that you need to accomplish every day, week or month. This can include following up with lead calls, conducting weekly meetings and creating monthly reports. Your ongoing work needs to be manageable, so if you find yourself struggling to accomplish your ongoing work because of administrative tasks, then that’s a clear sign you’re overloaded.

Meanwhile, your backlogs include tasks and responsibilities that you had set aside at a later date but need to be accomplished. This can include emails, accounts, and administrative tasks such as keeping and filing data and documents in storage and conducting research for business development.

Backlogs can clog your systems and processes, especially if they primarily consist of administrative tasks. Ideally, backlogs should not exist, so it’s important to address the cause of these backlogs immediately. 

5 ways business owners can reduce administrative tasks

We’ve shortlisted five strategies you can use to reduce your administrative workload and enable you to dedicate more time and energy to developing your business. 

1. Automate routine tasks

By automating routine, straightforward administrative tasks, you can immediately reduce your workload and ensure they are consistently accomplished. 

Here are six administrative tasks that you can automate:

• Organising and responding to emails – Setting up smart labels for your inbox ensures that your emails are automatically sorted, allowing you to identify which emails need an urgent response or action plan, and which ones can be set aside for later. Creating email templates and canned responses can also speed up the emailing process.
• Scheduling appointments – Manually setting appointments or emails through email in a back-and-forth conversation can be exhausting and time-consuming. Using software that syncs everyone’s calendars and automatically sets appointments, such as Calendly or Google Calendar, can make the process smoother.
• Paying bills – Take advantage of the auto-payment services offered by banks. This allows you to set up your payments for bills in advance so you don’t have to manually cut checks or enter payments in your accounting system.
• Creating proposals – Creating proposals from scratch can be laborious, eating up precious time. Investing in proposal management software can help you consolidate your proposal tasks in one platform. It also allows you to seamlessly coordinate with sales, marketing, legal and others about relevant details in the proposal.
• Responding to customer inquiries – If you’re getting overwhelmed with customer inquiries, consider getting an AI-powered help desk system to help you field the inquiries and respond to different customer concerns and issues depending on their technicality.
• Collecting customer data – As a business owner, you might not have time to research your customer data, even if you recognise its importance to your business development. Using forms and automation systems like Hubspot can easily take care of this, allowing you to collate data and quickly generate customer insights.

It’s important to identify which administrative tasks are the most overwhelming and if they can be automated. If these tasks are complex or require a human touch, then one of the other strategies in this list might be more appropriate.

2. Streamline internal processes

Streamlining internal processes and workflows enables you to remove complex or unnecessary steps so that the final tasklist or workload is simplified.

It’s important to assess your existing processes and workflows as this will give you an overall idea of how each step works and how streamlining can improve each area. Ranking each process from least important to most important can help you identify which ones are interrelated (and can be combined) and which ones are time-consuming, unnecessary and/or costly.

Suppose you regularly hold a team meeting three times a week. You must assess the relevance of having frequent sessions every week and if it positively contributes to team morale and productivity. If it doesn’t have a significant positive impact on you and your team, it might be best to streamline your meetings by reducing them to once or twice a week. 

3. Implement management systems

According to Monday.com, a well-known cloud-based team management and project management software, a management system is a set of procedures, processes, and policies that an organisation uses to ensure its people can complete the tasks required to meet the company’s objectives.

Establishing a management system for resources, administration, sales and marketing and projects can enable you and your team to work more efficiently and collaboratively while ensuring that your organisation is continuously working towards your goals.

4. Delegate tasks to trustworthy third-party administrators

There will be administrative tasks you can’t automate or assign to team members because the work is highly specialised or complex. In this case, professional administrators can be significantly beneficial in helping you operate your business. 

You can successfully delegate administrative tasks to third-party administrators by doing the following:

• Outline expectations and objectives – This will help you align with your chosen third-party provider so that you are both on the same page when it comes to your expectations and deliverables.
• Define success metrics – Defining goals and monitoring how those goals are achieved can help you assess the improvement or decline of performance on the third-party provider’s end.
• Conduct quality checks – Regularly checking in with your administrator and the work they do ensures that their output is consistent with your standards.

5. Regularly ask for feedback and self-audit

It’s important to regularly assess your internal processes and systems to see if they are still relevant, useful and efficient. 

When it comes to how your administrative tasks are handled, having a business coach assess these elements can give you much-needed insight. Your coach can help you identify the best course of action to address an overload of administrative work.

Administrative work will always be an important aspect of business, but it’s important to handle them effectively so that they don’t take up the majority of your time and resources. Contact us and we will help you continue growing in your business journey.