From a young age, an idea of how a happy life looks like is painted in your head. And that idea is not the same for everybody, all these ideas are pieces to one big puzzle i.e., Success. Don’t you agree? Who doesn’t want to be successful? People constantly striving to become better. They think continuous achievements will add to their success and bring them closer to happiness and genuine satisfaction. But, now the tide is turning and people have started thinking that having an excess of everything will not bring any happiness. So that is where minimalism came into the picture.
What is Minimalism? Some say it is a lifestyle while others say it is a mindset. But the answer to this question depends on what you want it to be. Not everyone is a minimalist but most of the successful business owners and other affluent personalities are becoming devotees of this lifestyle.
Understanding minimalism
Many think the meaning of minimalism is living on the backpack without a home, car etc. But you make rules for this game. If you desire to live with fewer possessions, with minimalism you can get there but that’s not it. The true meaning of minimalism is the pursuit of freedom. Real freedom. It can be anything, freedom from fear, guilt, depression, financial worry, keeping someone or something above you etc. Minimalism is not the destination but it is a tool that will lead you towards your destination. It is not about living without any facilities in a tiny house if you think all those possessions are important for you, great. This approach simply improves your decision-making skills, it allows you to make your decisions more deliberately and consciously.
How minimalism can be related to the business?
Building a Business can also come under minimalism. Confused? Let’s look into it deeper. Minimalism is all about the pursuit of freedom when you decided to start your business you have already taken freedom from a system i.e., 9-5 job. You have the freedom to build your business on your terms, values and pursue things that matter to you. Over the years, the business has also broken its traditional regime and ventured into many things. Businesses have grown through digitalization. Online business has now gained its popularity.
Minimalism can be adopted for your business too. It will introduce you to the new side of the business that you’re yet to explore. And for that to happen you must aim at changing your mindset. The minimalistic approach doesn’t come with a manual on how to make things easier. It is you who have to make important decisions to bring the change your business.
First things first, the most common goal for all business owners is getting successful. But not everyone has the same thoughts about success, it doesn’t carry the same meaning to everybody. So take time to understand and acknowledge your inner self. What does success mean to you? Whether it is making more money or gaining a loyal customer base or serving quality products to your customers or well-being of clients, employees etc. This will bring a major impact on how you perceive success and helps you in understanding your business better.
Here are a few tips on how minimalism can help your business and make it better.
Essentialism
Do you know what is Essentialism? It is not about how to get more things done, it is all about how to get the right things done. It helps you in making the wisest probable investment of your time doing essential things only. Entrepreneurs these days are dealing with many things. The business has become their top priority and they’re packed with schedules and racing against time to accomplish all their tasks with perfection. Not only big businesses but small businesses are also spending a lot of their energy and time on trivial tasks. This is mitigating their focus from the other important issues that can help them in growing their business.
So a business needs to calculate their moves, as every move is critical. It is important to choose which tasks to spend your time and effort on, but that is the tricky part. How do you differentiate between them? See, not every task is important so it is your responsibility to set out the goals and prioritize your tasks. What is the point of overwhelming you and your employees to achieve too much? It may, however, affect your quality anyway. And the perfect way to tackle your never-ending to-do list is by finding an efficient way to organise your tasks.
More≠Better
The main focus of the minimalistic approach is “Less is more”. Entrepreneurs need to bring down their business to only essentials by removing all other non-essential tasks and elements. The complication will take you nowhere. And this is what most business owners overlook, they often complicate their business plan.
By adopting the minimalistic approach, they can achieve their goals faster as they’re directing their focus on fewer tasks. Why minimalism works is because it doesn’t impose too many tasks in your schedule. It helps the organisations in realising why less is more. Working on core principals of your business and focusing on other essential tasks that needed to grow. It allows you to accomplish so much more with less stress, no restrictions and distractions.
Clarity
You need to have the clarity of the path you’re taking your business to. What is the point of decluttering your tasks when you don’t know the direction in which you want your business to go? You must get the clarity about success too. If your acronym for success is money then you would never be free because no amount of money will ever satisfy a person. So it is important to understand your take on the business. The simplicity and necessity is the crux of running a minimalistic business. Even if your income reduces, so are your worries and responsibilities. All of this will provide you with enough time to concentrate on things that will matter to the business.
Simplify and streamline the process
As you have decided to use minimalism in your business. Why don’t you go all out? You can start by streamlining your management, start trusting your employees more and give them more responsibilities then you’ll have fewer tasks to manage and it gives you the time to concentrate on other important issues in hand. Place a few systems and processes in your office. When you introduce technology into your work then your workload will drastically get reduced. You can even allow your employees to work remotely. If you want to enhance the productivity this is the most effective way. Giving them freedom can help your business too.
Streamlining your business will bring good changes at all levels of an organisation. You can even use cloud-based tools that can make your business omnipresent. When you manage most of your business on the cloud. You don’t necessarily have to carry all the information around and worry about it getting into the wrong hands. All you need is an internet connection to access your data from anywhere at any time. To summarize, allocating work or responsibilities to skilled members in your team can reduce your responsibilities and bring the best work to the table.
Work with what you have
The benefit of minimalism is it cultivates a habit of working with available resources. So it helps you in making the best use of what you have. This way you’re forced to come up with creative ways to solve a problem. It improves your problem-solving and your decision-making skills.
Wondering how?
You must take the right decision to solve the problem. Get it?
Minimalistic businesses are great and will sustain for a long time as they use what they have to make things work and even if they face a problem in the future they know what to do and when to do. They’re not great because their businesses use the tools, it is because the owners know how to work with what they have got. When you use the resources optimally then your business operations become more efficient and smoother. This creates freedom for the employees and organisation to pursue things that value for them. Not to mention your team will get closer and it would improve your relationship with them too.
Conclusion
Minimalism is a tool that will help you in reaching your destination. If you think it is a one-time event then you’re wrong, it is a continuous process. It helps organisations in developing deep expertise, improved customer experience and unique offering. In this competitive market, an organisation needs to have unique offerings to gain a competitive advantage. It provides you with the freedom to pursue things that matter to your company only with available resources. Minimalism improves decision-making skills and allows organisations to work only on important tasks that will take the business forward. It helps a business owner in learning how to value their time and resources. What are you waiting for? Try the minimalistic approach to grow your business.
