The feeling of not enough hours in the day is a common occurrence for business owners. The fatal assumption that people who start a small business are entrepreneurs, known as the e-myth, lead business owners into not understanding the technical work required to successfully run a business. In order to increase productivity and maximise efficiency, it is important to plan your week smarter. Learning to delegate, having the ability to exclude and finding solutions for time management problems are some of the foolproof ways in which you can add hours to your week and more importantly grow your business.
1. Ability to Exclude
Strategic business is about the ability to exclude. Rather than prioritising what to do, choosing what not to do enables you to maximise your workload more effectively. Exclusion enables you to sharpen your senses, for what is most important, which then becomes a valuable tool in gaining more hours back. When you have a clear direction for your business, you can put all of your energy into the next most important step and filter out the unproductive tasks.
2. Learn to Delegate
Giving the power over to others when making choices for your business can be daunting but has powerful results. Shifting responsibilities over to your employees frees up essential time you could be spending on important matters and demonstrates your confidence in them. As long as you can communicate the task well by giving clear instructions and identify the right person to delegate to, this method will improve the efficiency of your business and give your employees room to grow.
3. Time Management Solutions
Having poor time management can negatively impact the effectiveness of your business. However, there are solutions for improving your time management at work. Shortening meetings whenever you can helps your team to develop their ability to communicate effectively. Summarising meetings is also an efficient tool in freeing up valuable time. If you are using meetings to update each other about what is happening in different departments consider using sharing documents instead. Ask your colleagues to produce one or two meetings that you can read in digest format. These simple steps can be key to adding hours to your week and enable you to manage time effectively.
4. Take breaks
This may seem like the opposite of what you would expect when looking for advice in ways to add more hours into your day. However, don’t dismiss taking time out as “wasting time.” Taking breaks actually enables your brain to rest and recharge, which means you are able to think creatively and produce a higher quality of work. Try to take at least a 5-minute break every hour, this will allow you to think more effectively. Also, make sure you have lunch, this is a common mistake many people make when they are under pressure with deadlines. However, if you are hungry, your work performance will suffer and you will not be managing your time effectively. Have a break and increase the productivity throughout your day.
5. Schedule tasks effectively
Another way in which you can get time back within your week is scheduling tasks more effectively. The workplace can sometimes make you feel as if you’re drowning in emails you need to answer, calls you need to return and decisions you need to make. But realistically, it is impossible to be on call 24 hours a day. Managing your schedule means evaluating how you spend your average work day and identifying what you spend most of your time on. Chances are you want more hours in the day because you are spending too long on certain tasks. Set yourself goals and time limits for what you would like to achieve and reschedule tasks you don’t need to prioritise.
Despite your busy work life, it is possible to squeeze more time out of your week with effective solutions to time management problems. Delegating tasks and rescheduling how you work during the day can vastly increase your business’s productivity and help you manage time more effectively. Once you have implemented these techniques as well as the ability to exclude, your focus will become much clearer enabling you to make the most out of every minute.