Each day every entrepreneur bite off mouthfuls while thinking of what he or she has to do next. It is an exciting but demanding life. Consequently, deciding how much time to allocate to the right tasks is crucial to ensure that your business runs smoothly. Entrepreneurs are responsible for every action of their business. To start and run your own business involves setting up meetings, strategizing, planning, monitoring, networking, etc. Does that sound daunting? We usually overlook the most important resources we often deprive ourselves of as entrepreneurs: time.
Being your own boss may sound exciting. But being your own boss also means you’ll have to manage your resources accordingly. In other words, time management isn’t about quantity. You can’t calculate success by the number of hours you work. Instead, you need to focus on how valuable and impactful those hours are.
Break Down Your Activities Into Simple Problems
Utilizing your consciousness requires more energy, which can be avoided by simplifying your problems. Excellence in time management is based on creating a process. Breaking it down into small, atomic steps that are easy to realize and do not require intensive resources.
Put A Time Limit On Your Time
Entrepreneurs cannot always predict how their days or weeks will unfold. Do not allow rushed meetings, unplanned teleconferences, and time thieves to ruin your day. Instead, embrace the uncertain by putting a premium on time invested in unplanned activities. A call with a regional counterpart should not last over 5 minutes. An unplanned meetings should not last longer than 2 per day. And instant messaging sessions should not go more than 10 minutes. You can always stay on top of your daily work schedule and avoid time-wasters by following these ground rules.
Set Up Non-Negotiable Self-Appointments
It’s a puzzle why people prefer to fill their schedule with others’ demands before their own. How do you plan to fit in self-reflection? By learning new skills, catching up with business school friends, and evaluating your performance over the past week. Those entrepreneurs who are able to find time for these activities despite having dozens of other things to attend do so by making self-appointments. Holding those appointments as sacred as any appointments with high-profile clients. Entrepreneurs who succeed decompose a complex task into pieces, resulting in a more straightforward process consuming less time and energy. Simple tasks that can be completed quickly can also be checked off the list without dozens of follow-up questions.
Anticipate Interruptions
It is essential to anticipate interruptions, personal and business-related, as well as be flexible in order to deal with them. Especially for entrepreneurs with responsibilities that are family-related, it can be very disappointing to have your workday disrupted.
Any time, your colleagues can create unnecessary obstacles that need to be overcome. A star employee is suddenly taking a long leave, a workplace accident, your car breaking down on a remote road, a client who is incredibly unhappy with you, etc.– it could be anything.
Create a Long-Term Roadmap
While it’s fine to have individual projects emerge from your interactions during the business week, planning may drag you away from your day-to-day activities. It will be easier for you to decide whether your new projects are in line with your goals once you have created a long-term plan.
Rewrite your business plan and set some KPIs. Set milestones and add them to your calendar so you can reach them month by month or quarter for a period of 1-3 years. Identify the repetitive tasks (content creation, social media engagement, meetings with partners) and allocate time for them accordingly.
Take Regular Breaks for Brainstorming
Entrepreneurs who succeed spend more time working on the business than they do working on it. When you are knee-deep in your overlapping tasks, you lose perspective on their purpose.
Breaks between activities and aligning progress with goals can bring you more creative ideas. Go out and take a walk, get some fresh air, and relax – you might even come up with a few new ideas.
Attention Management
It has already been told that time management isn’t a matter of getting more and more time as much as it is a matter of changing your attitude toward managing your time. The ability to focus on a specific task is very important when managing your time. Why is this? You spend much of your time switching between tasks, even if you allocate a portion of your time to that task. If you do, it is more likely that you will achieve mediocre results.
Spend your time wisely
The amount of time you spend on a task or activity does not matter how trivial or important they may seem. Time management is more about how you manage your time than how much you have. That’s why we’ve provided a variety of tips to help you properly manage your time.
As an entrepreneur, you may have a ton of tasks, plans, and business concerns in your head. When it comes to taking care of too many tasks, time management apps can help you. With these apps, you can streamline your work and be more productive. They save you a lot of time, but they also enable you to work more effectively with coworkers, whether they are in the office or not.
Hire a Virtual Assistant to Get Some of Your Work Done
If you’re a one-man operation, it is okay to do the basics on your own. Eventually, however, you realize your time is more valuable than being wasted setting up meetings, balancing accounting entries, or proofreading marketing correspondence. A virtual assistant can come into play in this situation. Instead of hiring a full-time assistant (which would be expensive), you can easily hire a virtual assistant on one of the many freelance job exchange websites. You can engage a virtual assistant (VA) for a variety of tasks based on their expertise.
The secret price entrepreneurs pay every day is related to the stress they deal with. Spend your time wisely, and you’ll succeed, along with building a strong business.
Start Your Day Earlier
I am amazed at the positive effects that even half an hour of early morning time can have. It can help you gather your thoughts, plan your day, and get things done in super-charge mode. The most famous people of our time have a lot in common, aside from their successes and biographies, including the fact that they slept at a reasonably early hour and started their days prior to the majority of the population. Being able to enjoy some time to yourself, knowing that emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings won’t be bothering you for some time, is very empowering.
