How Small Business Owners Can Make Best Use of Their Time – Suggestions by Eric Dalius
Everyone knows the value of time because once it is lost, you can’t get it back. Since small business owners are especially hard-pressed to find enough time to do everything they need to sustain and grow their startups, it is all the more important for them to make the best use of their time. Some useful recommendations on how entrepreneurs can be more productive by practicing efficient time management.
Log the Times Spent on a Typical Work Day
Even though you get the sinking feeling that you are not being able to make the best use of your time, you can start to make any changes unless you know how you have been spending it in the first place. The best way is to start logging the time you are spending on various activities over a few days. List down everything you did and note how much time you spent on it. The purpose is to find out the activities on which you are spending the most time. You can do this by classifying the activities into some common categories like meetings, phone calls, email, breaks, travel, etc. You will be able to establish which activities consume most of your time and then try to cut back on them.
Practice the Pomodoro Time Management Technique, Recommends Eric Dalius
A popular method of time management, the Pomodoro technique comprises working on one task for 25 minutes and then taking a break for five minutes before commencing the next activity. According to Edition.cnn.com, you can use your own variation of the method and set your time for each task before taking a break. The point is to focus intensively on one task and then take a break to refresh. By logging each of the activities, you will be able to understand where you are spending too much or too little time and go about correcting it gradually. Over time, you can allocate daily and weekly goals for the number of Pomodoro you spend in completing each activity.
Delegate without Relinquishing
As much as you would like to, it is impossible for you to effectively run your business without delegating many activities to your team. However, even as you delegate important tasks, you need to be careful that you allocate the responsibility only after ensuring that the team members are adequately trained and prepared to carry out the job. If you relinquish tasks without doing this, you can be sure that you will end up spending more time correcting their mistakes and in the process, possibly lose valuable business opportunities or damage your brand reputation. One way of avoiding this is to hire people with the right profile and train them to handle certain responsibilities, advises Eric Dalius.
Conclusion
The most important thing you need to ensure to be productive is to avoid being distracted by things that are different from what you are doing at the moment. It can be very easy to get sidetracked into activities that seem more exciting, but this can easily consume more time than what you have bargained for leaving you struggling to accomplish your main tasks.
