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Time management is arguably the most important skill for a business owner to possess. You must learn how to manage your time as effectively as possible – but what does this mean?
Effective time management is where you are spending the majority of your working hours focusing on the most important tasks in your business. Or, you focus on the tasks that you are the best at. If the business strategy is your main strong point, you need to devote a lot of time to it. Conversely, bad time management means you are wasting time on loads of other tasks that don’t contribute to the overall progress of your business. As a result, productivity will dip, your output will suffer, and your business will crawl along at a snail’s pace.
Figuring out how to manage your time more effectively is critical for business success. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be as challenging as it might seem. Today, we’ll run through three simple solutions and ideas that will help you stay on top of your time management:
Outsource certain jobs
Outsourcing is always a brilliant place to start when you want to manage your time better. In essence, it’s the idea of shifting the workload to someone else, letting them handle it. As a business owner, there are plenty of things that you can outsource to different people or companies. For starters, almost all of your admin work could and possibly should be outsourced – or delegated to other members of your team. Nowadays, you can find virtual assistant services that let you access remote admin assistants. They can deal with phone calls, managing emails, sending you documents, and so on. This frees up an outrageous amount of time as the admin side of a business is always lengthy and painful.
Admin isn’t the only thing you can outsource – it depends on where your strengths lie. For example, if you know nothing about marketing, it makes sense to outsource this work to an agency. Thus, you don’t spend lots of time trying to develop a marketing strategy without really knowing what you’re doing. Instead, experts take control, freeing up your schedule. Follow this approach with all elements of your business – think about if something should be outsourced, then weigh up if your budget can handle it. If everything adds up, then outsourcing will help you manage your time.
Create a work schedule
You have no hope in hell of being organized if you don’t have a schedule set for each day. Ideally, you should create a weekly schedule every Sunday, mapping out what you will do on each day of the week. You can pinpoint certain days for meetings, dedicate hours to different tasks, and so on. It brings more structure to the working week, and you will approach each Monday with a clear picture of what is going to happen in the next few days.
If you have a team of employees, this schedule also helps the out. You can instruct them on what you expect from them during the week, being sure to set goals as well. Goal setting goes hand-in-hand with scheduling as it provides the extra motivation to ensure everyone sticks to the schedule. Without a schedule, you have a tendency to drift through each day doing bits and pieces of different things here and there. You don’t know what to do, and it leads to very poor time management.
Prioritize your tasks
Alongside your schedule, you need to create a list of priorities. This list will only focus on you and what you deem to be the most influential ways you can personally contribute to the business. For example, perhaps you feel like a new product is necessary to help your business grow. You see the development of this product as the most important thing right now, so it goes to the top of your priority list.
As such, you will devote most of your time to developing the new product. When you create your schedule, you account for this! Obviously, you want to reach a point where your schedule devotes more time to the tasks that are high on your priorities list. As mentioned above, the best way to prioritize is to think about which things have the biggest impact on your business.
Keeping all of this in mind, you can start learning to be a better time manager. As the business owner, if you can become more productive and efficient with your time, the rest of the company is bound to benefit.
