Introduction
Running a business can be incredibly overwhelming for entrepreneurs. Their work days are packed with meetings, phone calls, responding to emails, creating and maintaining a marketing plan, and solving technical issues that arise. Mastering time management skills is an essential function if they want their business to succeed. Being productive and effective at time management isn't about working harder, but instead finding a way to work smarter. When you can find a way to manage your time better, you'll find that your business runs much smoother and you'll notice a dramatic uptick in your daily productivity.
Time is a perishable commodity, for everyone, not just entrepreneurs, and once it's been lost, you can't get it back. Whether you are meeting with a client to close a business deal or preparing to launch a new product, time is the critical factor in determining whether or not your business succeeds or fails. Unfortunately, the reality is that you can’t add more hours to your day. Instead, you have to master the art of effective time management to ensure you get as much done during the time that you’re allotted.
As the owner of a small business, you have to master time management and increase your productivity if you want to achieve your business goals and be successful. With a better system for managing your time, you can get a handle on everything that you need to accomplish in a day without the stress, leaving you more time to spend on the tasks that will help you grow your business and increase your profits.
We all have the same 24 hours in the day. However, it isn't uncommon for some people to accomplish more during their days than others. This is because productive people are better at managing their time. Even with looming deadlines and client pressures, those who are high achievers rarely fall short of their schedules. With sufficient time management, you can get more work done in less time. Here are five productivity secrets that you can use to get more done during the day, take control of your time, and achieve greater success.
1. Outsource Non-Core Work
As a business owner, it is crucial for you to understand which of your tasks you can outsource to someone else. These are the tasks in your daily schedule that are urgent by not important. Outsourcing non-core work tasks to other professionals is an extremely effective way for entrepreneurs to master time management in their day-today operations
For example, if you have a lot of administrative duties, it can be extremely time-consuming of you to handle these tasks. While these duties don't lead to more profits or growth for your company, they are tasks that still need to get done, so your business runs more efficiently. As a business owner, your time is better to spend working on tasks and activities that will lead to an increase in profits. Outsourcing these kinds of menial but necessary tasks can help you do this.
Thanks to the Internet, it is much easier and more affordable for companies to delegate more tasks to skilled professionals. With just a click of the mouse, you can assign these tasks to experienced freelancers that are located around the world. There are several sites where you can connect with freelancers to help you tackle business tasks. Once you've outsourced the routine tasks in your business, you will have more time to focus on managing your time so you can be more productive.
2. Employ the 80/20 Rule for Time Management
If you've ever taken a business class, then you know about the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. If you don't know what it is, the Pareto Principle is a theory developed in 1906 by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto that states that 80 percent of the output from a given situation or system is delivered by 20 percent of the input. So, how can this rule be implemented to help you better manage your time and increase your productivity? When it comes to time management, it involves completing 80 percent of your tasks using just 20 percent of the time you have.
The principle advocates delegating those incredibly timeconsuming tasks, but that create less revenue for your business than other jobs. Doing this will allow you to focus your time and energy working on those tasks that will bring in more money for your business. When prioritizing your todo list, you have to remember that your energy levels and productivity tend to fluctuate throughout the day. For you to successfully master the 80/20 rule, you need to make sure that you focus on completing the essential business tasks during the times that you are most productive.
You can use the 80/20 rules in several different ways to help you increase your productivity. If you look closely at your todo list, the chances are there are only a few tasks that are tied to important issues. While you may find it satisfying to cross off a large number of the smaller issues, the 80/20 rule suggests that instead, you focus on the few items that are more important, and that will generate the most significant results for your business. While your to-do list might not be much shorter at the end of the day, you will be practicing effective prioritization.
3. Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
One way you can manage your time and increase your productivity during the day is by managing your energy rather than your time. If you know that you are more productive in the mornings, you can plan to accomplish the work on your to-do list that requires the full extent of your competencies in the morning, rather than trying to achieve them in the afternoon when your energy might be lagging. This frees up your afternoons to schedule the work that doesn’t need as much of your brain power to accomplish when you know your energy levels are lower.
If you typically manage your time by creating and prioritizing to-do lists and scheduling dedicated time to each of those tasks, you know how easy it is to get derailed during the day. A single conversation or email can quickly break your focus or completely rearrange your day. By managing your energy, you can bring your best performance to any activity that comes up. You can achieve far superior results over the incremental gains that you might get from other time management techniques.
Using this method of time management relies on your understanding of what points in the day you are optimally ready to work. According to Alex Pang, the author or Rest, people are most productive when they work in four-hour intervals. This means that you need to make sure that you schedule your essential work within the four hours that you are at peak performance.
4. Find Ways to Automate
A recent survey showed that entrepreneurs and business managers spend 68 percent of their days working on administrative tasks. That’s a lot of time to work on something that doesn’t directly contribute to the growth of the company. The best way to bring that amount of time down is with artificial intelligence. AI can now automate many processes that are necessary to run a business, including administrative tasks. For instance, chatbots can handle thousands of queries a day without involving humans. Then there’s Bookmark’s, Artificial Intelligence Design Assistant, AiDA which can help you design a website within minutes, eliminating the most painful process of creating a company website.
When you can remove these menial, but necessary tasks from your daily schedule you can free up your time to focus on more critical tasks that will help you grow your business and increase profits. Also, AI is expected to be used to find solutions to the more complex business processes that you may be faced with completing. This will significantly reduce the amount of time that you spend making important business decisions, which in turn will significantly improve your business efficiency.
According to a recent survey, 78 percent of entrepreneurs said that in the future, they would trust the advice that they receive form artificial intelligence systems in making decisions. In addition, there are a ton of time tracking applications that are powered by artificial intelligence that can help you complete essential tasks on your daily and weekly to-do list. These time tracking tools are highly useful in helping you increase your productivity and achieve your goals.
5. Stop Multitasking
Many people believe that multitasking is an essential skill that you have to master if you want to be successful. While it might seem like a great way to get a ton of things done at once, research shows that our brains aren't nearly as good at multitasking as we might think. Some researchers suggest that our productivity is reduced by 40 percent when we try to multitask. Unfortunately, when we try to multitask, we are quickly shifting our attention and focus from one task to the next, which makes it more challenging to tune out distractions and can create mental blocks that ultimately slow you down.
When you try to work on several tasks at once, you can lose the focus that is required to complete the tasks adequately. Switching between multiple tasks breaks your concentration, which ends up requiring more time to come back and work on a job where you left off. When you bounce from one task to the next, you waste more time because your brain has to refocus on the essential activity that must be completed. Multitasking can also lead to your brain function becoming overstimulated, which can lead to memory impairment. When you have too much information inundate your brain at once, your mind can't differentiate between what is essential and what isn't which can negatively affect your memory.
Multitasking significantly affects your human executive control process. This process has two distinct phases that must be active before you can switch tasks. The first stage of the process is known as ‘goal shifting,' which allows you to drop one activity in favor of a different activity. The second stage, which is the complementary ‘rule activation' phase turns off the rules of the previous task and activates a new set of rules. Both of these processes take time to deploy the task switch.
While the actual cost of switching between a single task is small, the cost of switching between multiple tasks ends up adding to large amounts of time. Even though the thought of multitasking can seem like an efficient use of your time, in actuality it isn’t always true. If you multitask too frequently, you may find that it will take a lot longer to complete the tasks on your to-do list. Many studies have shown that engaging in multitasking throughout your day can end up costing you 40 percent of your productive time. If you want to increase your productivity, then you have to stop multitasking.
Conclusion
Whether you are at the start of your journey as an entrepreneur or are a seasoned professional, you can always work on your time management skills and increase your productivity. There are plenty of ways that you can start to master your time management skills. These secrets of productivity are just a few of the ones that can help you get a better manage over your daily time and increase your productivity.
No matter what your passion, you need to make sure you revisit the principles of time management because effective time management skills are often the best competitive edge that you have over your competition. You will never have more than 24 hours in a day, so you need to learn how to work harder, not smarter if you want to improve your productivity and work less while achieving more.