Every minute in business is valuable so you need to be able to master your time
Experts say that working beyond 12 hours a day is already an indication of overwork. But sometimes it may seem like 24 hours is still not enough to finish everything on your daily checklist.
When I work with business leaders as a Coach, I always emphasise how time, not money, is the most valuable commodity one has when running a business. You can always make more money, but you can’t produce more time — you can’t add hours to a day, or a day to a week.
Something you can control, though, is to save priceless minutes (or even hours!) from your daily routine so you can allot more time on what’s more urgent and important. When you’re able to manage your time effectively, you become more productive and you begin to feel the amount of work become lighter and more achievable.
It requires physical and mental preparations
The worst way to start your day is to show up to work in the morning and then try to figure out what you should do first. Not only would that be a enormous waste of time, it also often results in lousy task management.
If it’s not yet part of your routine, try to prepare the night before. Before you go to bed, grab your planner (or any reminder app) and rank the top three things you need to get done the next day. Highlight things you shouldn’t forget while doing those tasks. When you arrive at the office in the morning, you’ll be able to dive right in and not waste a single minute in limbo.
Make meetings quick and straight to the point
We’ve all been a victim of office meetings that were a total waste of time. You might feel like you’re getting things done, but all you’re really doing is disrupting people from their work, dividing their days up into tiny fragments, and thwarting them from performing their jobs smoothly.
You’re the business leader; hence, the key to making meetings more efficient lies in your hands. Make your meetings more productive by clearing things up at the start. Simplify the goals and objectives of the meeting and make sure everyone knows what they need to know as soon as they go out the room. Also, sometimes sending out an email can achieve the same goal and can spare everyone the trouble.
Taking a break actually saves time
Believe it or not, you can actually save time by taking short breaks. Most business leaders think that the more they spend time working on a lot of things without pausing for a short breather, the more productive they become. In fact, what that does is make you feel more stressed later on, which will diminish the quality of your thinking and decision-making.
Don’t go down the email rabbit hole
Sometimes we fall into the trap of diving into our emails right away: we open our inbox, go through some messages, and before we know it, we’ve spent hours replying to emails and working on things that shouldn’t have been part of the schedule. That creates a ripple effect which will ultimately have an impact on your entire day’s productivity.
Unless you’re waiting for a very important message, try logging out of your account for a specified amount of time or schedule in a day. For a lot of people, doing this helps them focus on their most urgent tasks and avoid getting sidetracked by emails that could be dealt with at a later time.
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