“Time is gold” may sound cliché, but the saying is quite true if you’re a business owner. Every tick of the clock is an opportunity to earn, but poor use of your time is also a way to lose. Being a business owner means always having more to do than there are hours in a day, so managing your time carefully is essential to your success.
To help you use your time wisely, we’re sharing a few simple time-saving tricks to help you accomplish more in less time.
1. Integrate automation in your business process
Your business’ payroll, social media posts, and bills payment—these are only some of the things you can automate that will save you a whole load of time. Automation tools take care of repetitive tasks, therefore, giving you time to work on more important things that require your attention. Apart from that, automation removes the burden of having to remember to do things—they just automatically happen.
2. Avoid multitasking
Did you know that only 2 per cent of people can multitask effectively? So unless you’ve proven that you can multitask without the quality of your output suffering, you probably fall into the other 98 per cent who can’t. If you try to do multiple things at once because you’re trying to beat a deadline, the probability of you committing errors increases while your productivity decreases. Instead of trying to complete four different tasks at the same time, focus on getting them done one by one.
3. Limit your meetings
Meetings are essential to the growth of your business. However, meetings can also be a huge waste of time. Meetings that last too long or happen too often are not productive and only serve to disrupt your workflow. Announcements that can be summed up in an e-mail or a memo do not need a physical meeting. Accept only the meetings that are mandatory or urgent, and if you need to be somewhere for these meetings, take a luxury chauffeur service to get you to your meeting places in London more efficiently.
4. Keep everything organised
Isn’t it easier to find a file for a project you’re working on when it’s labelled uniformly, organised alphabetically or arranged in proper folders? This is why organisation is key to the success of business owners. Try creating a filing system in your workplace. Label everything correctly in your computer and invest in organisation supplies like filing cabinets, labels and folders. Apart from these, you can also organise your personal space, like your wardrobe. If your clothes are organised, you can dress appropriately and faster, instead of spending half an hour every morning trying to find the right trousers.
5. Take a break
Ever heard of the Pomodoro Technique? It’s a time management method that works by breaking down your workday into 25-minute intervals with short breaks in between. Purveyors of this time management technique believe that focusing on accomplishing a task for a specific period and then letting the mind rest for five minutes will help boost productivity. It’s certainly better than working non-stop until your brain and body are tired and you end up with poor performance.
From now on, try implementing these time-saving tricks and see how they impact your work. These things may increase your productivity and reduce your stress, leading you to be more successful.
