Whether you’re a business owner or a manager, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Between balancing your team and their needs, as well as tracking output can be a nightmare if you don’t have concrete processes in place. The biggest keys to time management are discipline and prioritisation. By dividing your to-do list into urgent tasks, short and long-term goals, you’ll be able to allocate your time more effectively. Here are five of our favourite time management tips for business owners:

1. Prioritise communication

Email is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand it’s a great way to communicate but can also be one of the biggest distractions, especially if you’re checking it every ten minutes. A great way to avoid the distraction is to disable the email notification pop up in Outlook and then set aside two or three periods of time during the day to attend to your emails. This will take discipline but will yield great results if you can get it right.

2. Conduct a Time Study 

Do you often get to the end of the day and wonder what you’ve accomplished? A great way to get a handle on your time is to conduct a time audit for a week where you enter everything you did in the day, broken into 30 minutes intervals. Set your cell phone alarm for every 30 minutes and when it goes off, enter what you’ve just done. At the end of the week, sit back and analyse what you spent your time on – there should be plenty of light bulb moments. Look specifically for time-wasting activities and lower value tasks that you could delegate to somebody else. 

3. Block off focused time 

One of the challenges of being a business owner is that you get pulled in all sorts of directions and unless you make time to work ‘on’ your business, you will forever be working ‘in’ your business. Working ‘on’ refers to tasks like planning, strategizing, analysing, marketing etc. The only way to ensure this gets done is to block off chunks of time in your diary to do these activities and then ensure you have the discipline to stick to it.

4. Book meetings in chunks 

When it’s time to book meetings, try to clump them shortly after one another. This will not only keep you forcibly punctual but won’t break up the remainder of your day.

5. Be intentional with agendas 

Long, drawn out, ineffective meetings are the worst. You have the power to change this. Give your meeting purpose by creating an agenda and keeping the meeting on track.

For a free copy of our Time Study Template please email Chenal: adminkloof@actioncoach.com

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