When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re ultimately responsible for a lot – particularly when your business is young and you haven’t yet built a strong team. You’re likely be too busy working in your business, leaving too little time to work on your business. Tasks like strategizing and marketing might seem like luxuries you can’t afford. On the contrary, you can’t afford to not allot time to marketing and growth-related activities. But where are those hours coming from? By utilizing these tips, you can uncover hours of hidden time that you can use for working on your business, planning growth strategies, executing marketing initiative, learning and personal enrichment, or working with a coach or mentor. However, you’ll have to push past several obstacles in your thinking and behavior. How you prioritize and delegate is probably the most difficult area of change, so let’s tackle that first.
Delegate to Elevate
Do you find it hard to delegate work to others? You’re not alone. It’s a common problem for many entrepreneurs. For some reason, we get it into our heads that it’s faster to do the job ourselves than to take time to explain it to a team member. Maybe you need to go back and look at your hiring practices and figure out why you’re hiring people you don’t trust to do the work the right way. But, if we assume for a moment that’s not the problem, there’s still no reason you should be performing tasks that almost anyone else can do. Great advice if you have a team, right? OK, what about the one- or two-person shop? In that case, you can get a better grip on managing your time by learning how to prioritize what’s on your plate.
Learn to Prioritize
If it feels like everything you do is both urgent and important, you need to take a look to see if that’s actually true. You might be jumping on tasks that can actually be done later as if they were urgent. That will consume your time quickly. Obviously, do what needs to be done and get it done the right way. But work on reducing the number of fires you have to put out by being proactive. Then you can spend the majority of your time doing what’s important, but not urgent. Some tasks appear urgent, because they’re time sensitive, or maybe because someone’s complaining. But if they’re not particularly important, delegate as much as you can. Whatever you identify as neither urgent nor important, push that to another time, or better yet, delegate it.
Efficiency for All
If you’re the owner of a business with employees, you must help your entire team become more time efficient. Do you have salespeople working for you who are mired in administrative work? The more tasks that can be delegated to an administrative assistant the more you can depend on your sales staff to get out there and sell.
Master Your Relationship with Your Phone and Email
If not managed properly, phone calls and emails can be parasites siphoning your attention and ability to concentrate. When you’re in the zone, working on an idea for a promotional event or comparing advertising opportunities, you simply cannot pick up the phone or check your email every five minutes and expect to be productive. Ignore the anxious voice in your head that’s telling you that if you don’t attend to that call or email right now, your customers will bolt and your prospects will disappear. Of course there may be times when customers need to talk to you personally. You can handle that by blocking specific times each day for making and returning phone calls. If you have an administrative staff, you can train them to respond to customers’ needs and route calls and emails appropriately. If you’re on your own, you may have to check your voicemail more frequently, always letting your clients know ahead of time that they are guaranteed to reach you during certain dedicated times. The same principle holds true with your email. Resolve yourself to checking it a maximum of three times per day: once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once at the end of the day. By handling them in batches, you may find multiple emails on a similar subject can be answered more efficiently, as opposed to handling everything piecemeal as it comes in.
Create Shorter and More Focused To-Do Lists
Making a to-do list might seem old-fashioned or too obvious, but don’t overlook it. It can be especially powerful when you split it into three separate lists. The first list reflects your long-term goals for the year. This will help keep you focused on the big picture. The second list is a weekly list you prepare on Sunday night. Then, each day before you leave the work, use this list as a guidepost for what you’ll accomplish the following day, and create a third daily list. By breaking down the larger goals for your business into manageable tasks, you always have your grander vision in the background, which keeps you from using your daily agenda as a laundry list for items that should be delegated or eliminated entirely.
Schedule Your Appointments in Clusters
Similar to how you’ll block off time for phone calls and email, you should also block off batches of time for scheduling appointments. Whether it’s a staff meeting or an appointment with a client or prospect, clustering the time that you’re accessible to others will save you time and give you the freedom you need to focus for uninterrupted stretches of time.
Use Your Drive Time Wisely
If you drive yourself to work, use that time to invest in yourself and your business. There is a wide array of podcasts on topics that will expand your mind.
Limit Your Internet
Become more mindful of the time you spend on the Internet. Browsing websites or social media to get a handle on what’s happening in the world may make you a better conversationalist, but unless your knowledge of what’s trending on Twitter is bringing money in the door, it’s a colossal waste of your time. If you find this is a problem for you, there are website blocking apps that can help curb even the strongest browsing addictions. By utilizing these tips, you can uncover hours of hidden time that you can use for working on your business, planning a growth strategy, for executing marketing initiatives, for learning and personal enrichment, even working with a coach or mentor. If you think you don’t have time, look again. You might be surprised by what you find.
