If you are a business owner, chances are you are always looking for better ways to use your resources. Saving up money is a big issue, but to be honest, so is saving up time. Although you probably won’t have obscene amounts of money in a way you could, time is a very different concept. No matter how successful you are, you are still going to have only 24 hours a day, and not a minute more.
What does this mean for your business? Well, to be honest, it has very serious implications. If you don’t know how to make the best use of your time, your business is bound to fail. And it all starts from the top. Obtaining higher productivity in your everyday life needs to be your top priority. Let’s take a look at this list and see how you can make sure that both you and your business are growing.
Work Smarter and Outsource What You don’t Know
Even though we have already said it, let us go back to the concept one more time – you only have 24 hours each day. How you spend your time, as well as how your employees spend theirs can make or break your business. One of the biggest time wasters is trying to figure out something that isn’t your specialty.
Let’s say you task your digital marketing expert to come up with the best way to handle large sets of data from your customers using a VLOOKUP function in Excel. They might be able to do it, but it will take them a lot of time, time they don’t really have.
The same goes for your own duties as a business owner. Let’s take tax regulations for example. Instead of spending long nights bent over the nuances of tax laws you could simply hire an expert. Use that time wisely, do some other task or simply go to bed early.
You can outsource things like putting events together, sending out newsletter, anything you don’t feel like you need to do yourself. It will make you more productive in no time.
Your Calendar is Your New Best Friend – Go Everywhere Together!
Being productive means being organised and not letting those little time-wasters creep upon us. The best way to do it is to track our own time spending and to schedule everything in advance. It does sound a bit rigid, but after a while, you will get used to it. In a way, you will see that you have more time now that you are using it wisely. Make sure that you are using a good calendar app to sync the schedules of all of your employees.
Start with Your Physical Space
There is no way you can work in clutter, so don’t even try it. The mess around you – in the kitchen, in the office, on your desktop, and in your inbox are reducing your productivity. In order to get to where you need to be, you need to invest a little bit of time now.
By doing so, you are saving yourself a lot of time in the future. Decluttering your space is beneficial not only time-wise. Many other physical and mental improvements are linked to an unburdened space. Start with the mess on top of your desk and don’t look back.
If it doesn’t Bring You Value… It Has to Go
There is a certain mental relief that comes with throwing away items you don’t need. As we said, you need space to work, and many useless things are getting in a way of that. But what happens when you can’t let go of other things in your business? Let’s say you have an employee that is always slacking. A distributor that runs late. Office space that is always leaking. All of that is draining your energy and making you way less productive than you could be.
Your mental energy is a very valuable resource. As a business owner, you are going to have to make some tough calls. If it isn’t helping your business grow, it simply has to go.
Avoid Burnout by Learning how to Relax
Our productivity reaches an all-time low when we are under stress. The easiest solution is to simply relax, at least in theory. In the real world, owning a business is a full-time job, with no bathroom breaks and email-free holidays. All of this leads to a condition now accepted in the medical community – burnout.
The solution remains the same – you need to relax, take some time off, indulge yourself… But how do you actually do it? Well, if you are disciplined enough to build your business from the ground up, you can use those same principles to ease your own mind.
Lock your phone in a drawer if you have to, but allow yourself time to heal. Your productivity and your business will be better off for it.
