As a small business owner, one of your most valuable commodities is time. How time is spent is crucial because unlike other commodities you can’t get time back. Improving your time management skills is important as better utilization of time leads to more benefits for your business.
Create a schedule
A schedule is a great way to log time and make plans on how long you will spend on something. This helps improve your organization and allows you to plan ahead on how to tackle objectives, leading to more efficient time usage. When coming up with your day, try to determine how long you will spend on certain tasks during the day. Be flexible and be able to understand what you can do in a certain amount of time.
Identify your time wasters
When making your schedule act through it and identify what tasks took longer than expected. When you find these, try to think why these tasks took longer than usual and figure out strategies to optimize your performance the next time this task comes up.
The 80/20 rule
The 80/20 rule is a concept in which 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. Meaning that this 20 percent of work is you at your most optimal. If you can figure out when you are able to be in this state of mind of productive work try your best to make the most of it so you can have an increased reward gain from your work.
Take small breaks
Constantly working on something can lead to burn out and frustration and more often than not will lead into you wasting your time. Small breaks can be used to refresh you and can be something you look forward to while working.
Delegate tasks
As a small business owner, you might look into hiring employees to help with your business. When you do hire these individuals you will be able to delegate tasks to them helping to free up your workload and increase the productivity as more people working means more tasks will be done. Hire based on strengths and find the ideal people to help you with your business and delegate tasks to them in which they will excel.