When things become very hectic, most small and medium business owners wish they could manage to squeeze in more than 24-hours into their day. It’s not uncommon for your “to-do” list to become so lengthy that you never get to focusing on each task as much as you would like.
Eventually, this also results in you spending extensive hours at the office or dealing with work-related things late into the night as well; this eats into your leisure hours and affects your work-life balance. Here are simple time management tools to help improve your productivity and profitability and some tips that will help you make the most of your day and get all the critical work done.
#1 Keep track of your time
The fact is that you can’t manage things you don’t measure and that holds true in the case of time management as well. If you try to improve this aspect without keeping track of your time, the effort will be in vain. If you don’t track exactly where & how you spend your time, you won’t have any way to measure whether your time management is in place. You won’t have the means to identify what the time-wasters are and which tasks you could easily delegate.
Begin by creating an excel sheet that will be able to add up all the hours and minutes for you. Alternatively, you can use any of the free or paid online time management tools or apps that can help simplify this task and give measurable results.
#2 Eliminate all the time-wasters
Once you have all the information you need on how to spend your time, it will help you eliminate the time wasters such:
- Fielding telephone calls
- Accessing social media
- Responding to emails
- Drop-in sales people and visitors
- Meetings that extend more than they should
- Alternating between tasks – reading & replying to emails as they come in over the course of the day
All of these things can impact your productivity and it’s a good idea to try and reduce or allocate a specific time for them rather than letting them distract you from tasks at hand. You can delegate the task of answering to messages and fielding calls to a responsible team member; train a few staff members on how to handle sales people. Allocate some specific time to check your social media accounts and other messages and run meetings on a fixed schedule.
#3 Learn to delegate
Take a closer look at your existing workload and check which tasks can be delegated to others. Aspects such as managing reconciliations and petty cash, general correspondence, product development, sales and marketing and quality control etc. can easily be delegated to team members, provided you have skilled and capable people on your payroll. If you choose to run a more compact business with fewer people on board, you can consider outsourcing some of these tasks; not only will it help you in time management, but may prove to be a more cost-effective option as well.
#4 Become organised
Investing some time now in developing efficient systems can help save you a significant amount of time in the long-term. Whether it is adopting automation, using time management apps and tools or hiring more people to handle certain tasks, becoming more organised will help you focus on more important things and manage your time in a better way.
For effective and sustainable cost reduction strategies & efficiencies that will increase your bottom line, contact the experts at Benchmark Cost Solutions at this number – 02 9525 0777. If you prefer, write to us at this email address, and we will revert quickly.
Thanks for reading,
Benchmark Cost Solutions Team
02 9525 0777
