Have you ever set out to accomplish a series of tasks during your day and come to realize that you only finished half the tasks you meant to complete? It happens to everyone at some point and it’s important to break out of that cycle that eats away at your productivity, makes you miss opportunities, and possibly even affects your mental health! We can’t add hours to the day but we can all make sure to manage our time efficiently. Time Management is the process of planning and determining how much time to dedicate to activities. Good time management empowers you with bigger results in a shorter period of time, which leads to more flexibility, allows you to be more productive, lowers your stress and gives you more time to spend with the people that matter most. Time is the only resource that we can never have enough of. Proper time management is a critical skill for anyone with business responsibilities. So, with that in mind, here are five tips that will surely help you in your quest to manage your time better.
Figure out how you’re currently spending your time
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so the most important thing to start out with is getting a good baseline reading of what tasks you concentrate your efforts on. If it’s possible to group them by similarities, that would be the start of a good system. If you notice that certain distractions keep popping up during the day, make note of this, no matter what they are… you could allocate certain hours to these later on to clear your mind. In this “time audit”, being objective and honest with yourself is of utmost importance, so leave nothing out.
Start with the most critical task first
One of the most common mistakes in dealing with planned activities is the thinking that if you’re knocking out many tasks, you’re making good progress. Technically, any progress is a step in the right direction, but updating your productivity subscriptions, for instance, or answering unimportant emails will only take time away from completing a revenue-generating project. In fact, it often happens that by dealing with unimportant activities, sometimes you don’t even get to the most pressing matters. For each task, assign a rating of 1 to 10 for Importance and for Urgency. Multiply both numbers together and start with the task with the highest value.
Assign time limits to tasks
Most people work within the framework of deadlines. Elon Musk famously said, “If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions, and potential.” If you have 4 tasks of equal importance, dedicate an hour to each, for example. If you need occasional breaks from time to time, learn from the Pomodoro Technique and concentrate intently on a single task for 25 minutes and take a break for 5. You will soon see your productivity skyrocket.
Do not multitask
The human brain is simply not capable of concentrating effectively on two things at once. What’s more, the overall quality of every individual task you’re trying to do at the same time will definitely suffer if you try to have a phone conversation and write an email at the same time. If you need to return emails during the time you’ve allotted for calling customers, reevaluate your systems in place.
Learn to delegate
If your time is better spent engaged in activities that you excel at, it only makes sense to rely on others to carry out tasks that you don’t do so well. For instance, if you have a great relationship with a customer and you’re a heck of a salesman and need to update your customers from time to time, don’t manage the project yourself… you may jeopardize its results and the relationship. So, partnering up with a project management firm would make complete sense. The same applies if you want to improve the cycle time of your products. Bring in a new set of eyes and let cycle time experts do that for you.
At Valens Project Consulting, we pride ourselves in being efficiency experts that can easily relate to business owners intent on growing their businesses. With time being such a vital resource and efficiency being the name of the game these days, you can’t afford to not invest in improving your operations and practices. Proper time management ensures that you are on your path to overall improvement. Claim your free assessment with us today!