Time management is a crucial part of any business. Basically, this helps you be more productive, have more energy for working, and feel less stressed. Overall, these factors contribute to getting more things done. However, you can’t really manage your time ﹘ you can manage day-to-day activities.
That’s why it’s crucial to use your planning, self-analysis, and evaluation skills and develop an effective time management strategy. However, we decided to help you out. So, if you want to learn more and stop wasting time and money, keep reading our detailed guide. Let’s explore the best time management strategies!
Determine How You Spend Your Time
Being aware of how you spend your time is a must if you want to stop wasting it. Basically, the easiest way to do this is to time log everything and record your activities in 15-minute intervals over a week at least. Once you have the ‘results,’ it’s time to evaluate them.
You need to establish whether you’ve done everything you need to. Also, determine which tasks are the most time-consuming and in which part of the day your productivity is at its highest. Another very important thing to be aware of is what you devote most of your time to, whether it’s family, job, personal, or hobbies.
Once you evaluate all of this and identify what you spend the most time on, it’s easy to come up with an action plan. Additionally, if you know how much time your job tasks require, you can plan and estimate better what’s left for other activities. Of course, some apps will help you keep track of this, but we’ll talk about them a bit later.
Set Clear Priorities
While there are important and not important tasks, you must start distinguishing between urgent and just important. According to experts, sometimes, the most essential tasks aren’t always the most urgent ones. To understand this better, we suggest you implement the Time Management Matrix.
Categorize your activities regarding whether they’re urgent, not urgent, important, or not important. Then, focus on the important tasks so they don’t become urgent. More precisely, focusing on crucial activities leaves you with more time and reduces the amount of work you have.
A simple way of prioritizing your daily tasks is creating a to-do list. You can make a daily, weekly, monthly, or even annual list. However, the most important thing is to order them according to their priority. You can have high-priority, medium-priority, and low-priority tasks. As a result, you can avoid doing things that don’t fit your schedule and business goals.
Utilize Different Apps
Using apps that help you manage your time is crucial. Personal planning tools, such as calendars, phone apps, planners, wall charts, or notebooks, will let you write down your tasks and schedules to focus on your priorities much more easily. However, finding the right tool depends on your needs and business type.
Also, you can go for online platforms, such as the signature maker tools, which cut down your time on repetitive tasks like signing deals and documents. Also, you can implement communication platforms where you can schedule when to send a particular reminder to your employees.
Furthermore, you must schedule your tasks consistently. While there are apps for this, too, you need to know how to get the most out of them. In other words, your time logs need to help you identify when you’re most productive. So, plan your urgent tasks for as soon as possible or set up challenging tasks when you have the most energy.
You can do this by creating lists or email drafts that send reminders when you need to complete something. A great working example is Asana, a freelance platform for organizing and scheduling upcoming tasks.
Focus on Only One Activity
How many of you have tried to multi-task at least once, thinking they’ll finish their job quickly? Well, while this may sound accurate, multi-tasking has a completely opposite effect. As long as you’re going back and forth from one task to another, you’re just losing more time, and you can’t even focus properly on what you’re doing.
Even if you finish the job, you’re more likely to make unintentional mistakes that will contribute to additional tasks in the future. So, instead of making it harder for yourself, set a clear goal, make a schedule, and focus on one activity.
For example, if you need to sign some deals and update your existing website, determine which one is more important. If the deadline for the contract is up on the door, then this task is urgent. In this case, first focus on what you’re signing and read through the files carefully. Only then can you make some changes to the website.
If both tasks can no longer be prolonged, it’s even better to assign one to someone you rely on and believe can finish the job well. As a result, everything will be completed when needed, and the whole process will be more efficient than with multi-tasking.
Stop Procrastinating
Postponing some of your job tasks is okay until it isn’t. In other words, you need to make a difference between urgent and essential, as we were discussing at the beginning. This means that the more you postpone, the more tasks you’ll have to do in a shorter time.
However, if you feel like you can’t finish everything in one day (if the task is more challenging), it’s also acceptable to break down the job into smaller segments or ask for help. Regardless of the approach you’ll use, it’s only necessary to start as soon as possible.
Final Words
Organizing and managing your time requires a lot of work. Knowing which activities are urgent or important, or the opposite, creating schedules, using time-saving apps, and a lot more, which we’ve talked about, will only help you be more effective in this than ever.
Nowadays, when efficiency is a must and time is money, you must stop wasting your time on unnecessary steps. So, start by implementing some of our tips, and see how your business journey will change!
