Business owners often experience difficulty completing the millions of tasks and jobs that fall on their shoulders. No matter how you look at it, you always end up with more things to do. The good news is, there are effective ways of managing time. With that in mind, we’ve put together this quick list of time management tips for business owners.
1. Track a “typical” day for you.
When we mean track, we mean every minute of every day. Track from the moment you open your eyes in the morning to the second you close them to go to sleep at night. You have to be able to log everything during your day in order for it to really work. Don’t worry — you only need to do it once, so long as it’s a “normal” day for you. (We know, nothing is ever really “normal” in the business world, but you get what we’re trying to say.)
2. Identify workday time wasters.
That’s where time logging comes into play. You’ll quickly see what areas of your workday are wasted on non-productive tasks. Some of those tasks include looking through e-mails, listening to phone messages, and returning calls. In addition, breaks, downtime, etc., are time wasters. Finding out unnecessarily soaks up your time is one of the easiest ways to manage your day. An online appointment scheduling software like EZnet Scheduler®, can help you with this tip. There’s nothing like seeing tasks plotted on a calendar to point out just how much time you spend on them.
3. Make sure you delegate tasks properly.
By that, we mean to make sure that your employees are properly trained for the task you assign to them. As an illustration, don’t just say “This is what I need done — go.” That might work in some cases, but in most situations, your employees will need proper training. Otherwise, you’ll be left in an angry fluster to do the work yourself. On the other hand, don’t overstep, either. You have employees for a reason. Not everything has to be your responsibility. This, of course, becomes harder to manage in a virtual company. But we’ve got tips for virtual companies, too.
4. Try the Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is perfect for any task, even if it’s not business-related. In this way, you set a timer for anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes to work on a task. When the timer goes off, you take a break of 5 or so minutes. Then, you can either go back to that same task or move on to another one. You can base this off of the time log for the day, to break up the tasks that take the longest.
Keep these tips in mind as you go through your daily business life, and remember to breathe! Feeling overwhelmed is normal business owners, but you needn’t subject yourself to constant stress.