Manage your time, grow your profits

As a business owner or director your available time limits the growth and performance of your business unless you manage it properly.

How can you manage your time better?

- Schedule a weekly review with yourself. Set aside the same 15 minutes at the start or end of each week to write down the things that were achieved/missed in the past week and the things to be achieved in the next week
- Don’t just react to the latest stimulus. When a task or interruption appears, train yourself to decide what is urgent, what is important, what is both and what is neither and prioritise accordingly
- Start each day with a written list of things you are going to achieve that day and review the list at the end of the day
- Time-box your day - have targets for the next hour, by lunchtime, before I have a coffee...
- Set aside a time each day when you will accept NO distractions
- Have a schedule for everything that happens regularly - and stick to it
- Delegate everything unless there is a compelling reason not to. Aim to deskill tasks and process them using the lowest-cost resource. Taking responsibility for the things that distract you may well enrich the role of someone more junior
- Fix things for the long term. If you do have to break-off to deal with an unplanned issue don’t deal only with today’s interruption or distraction – understand the root cause and remove it, look at the trend and educate the people involved, set up simple processes, scripts, forms or rules to handle similar events in future
- Turn email alerts off. If you have an assistant, set them up with access to your email and get them to deal with everything they can, delete the junk and just leave the important stuff that you have to do yourself
- Set aside a time each day to deal with email – don’t look at it before that time and stop dealing with emails at the end of that period

Make sure that every day you have done something to make the business less reliant upon you.

My workshop programme covers this and every other key part of running a business, from strategy through to invoicing. For more details of this comprehensive and affordable course visit my business advice website.

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