As a small business owner, you understand that time is your best asset. You can eliminate money and get it back. You may even lose a company and get it back. That’s why you have to protect it like a hawk. Here are seven time management tips for small business owners — 7 ways that you can do a better job protecting your time today!
1. Begin with time logging.
Grab a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet and begin from the minute you wake up to the minute you hit the sack at night. Your task is to track every moment of your day, listing the job and the complete quantity of time spent. You will need to monitor everything for this to be helpful. Try not to change your behaviour on this day. Just be sure that you measure what you would consider a “typical” workday for you.
2. Identify your substantial time wasters.
As soon as you finish a time logging day, you will quickly see where you are wasting plenty of time. Take your time log and complete the time of the day you monitored and then attempt to categorize all your activities. Then, do some necessary calculations to ascertain the proportion of time spent on each event. The goal here is to discover the areas where you are spending way too much time.
3. Use the Pomodoro technique.
A popular time management method is the Pomodoro technique that involves setting a timer for 25-minutes as you concentrate on one specific job, then taking a short 5-minute break before beginning the next. Time logging can help you see where you are spending too much time and too little time.
4. Apply the 80/20 rule.
One effective way to ascertain where you should spend more time would be the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule essentially says that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. So effective time management is to increase the quantity of time you devote each day and every week at that 20% class where you are going to have the best results in your company (and less time anyplace else). Keep applying it each week until you’ve got a clear idea of where you can find the most bang for the moments.
5. Delegate but do not abdicate.
Being a successful small business owner means relying on others that will assist you to get all the work done. The crucial thing about delegation would be to prevent”abdicating” — which is, you will need to avoid giving workers duties without adequate training and preparing them for the job. Part of doing this job is hiring the right people, but also, it requires investing time training them.
6. Avoid your employees.
Speaking of employees, as soon as you’ve got them trained and functioning effectively, it is time to avoid them as much as you can. Employees will eat up your time if you are not careful. The “bad” workers will consume your time with continuous problems (so better to employ the ideal ones and train them well). Still, even the”good” workers will waste your time with their well-intentioned attempts to market your attention.
7. Beware of shiny object syndrome.
Lastly, do whatever you can to prevent being pulled under by”shiny object syndrome” into your company. Brilliant items will pop up from time-to-time, and they’ll do everything to distract you from what you are trying to achieve today. New opportunities are great, but be sure that they do not become worse.