Time for work-at-home entrepreneurs is their single most
valuable asset. Nothing can replace time…valuable, precious time!
No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter how many
things are on your ‘to-do’ list, you still just get the regulation twenty-four
hours each day. Sometimes I could use another twenty-four but that isn't going
to happen. I’ll bet that you could use more hours in your work day as well.
The thing about those twenty-four allotted hours per day is
that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep some of them. We have
to take time to eat and there is the occasional shower, too. J
Our families and our friends require some of our time.
Relationships must be nurtured. So…we can allow ourselves just so many work
hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must make
the very most of the hours that we work. We can’t waste time on unimportant
details or on tasks that others can do.
When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there,
you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few
suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this
brief and to the point.
- Email account efficiency: We all
have various email accounts. We use one account for this and another
account for that. Checking each and every email account more than once a
day can be a time consuming task that you very easily make less time
consuming by having all of the email that comes to all of your various
email account to come into one gmail account. One email account takes a
lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various
email addresses.
Additionally, you don’t need to
spend a lot of time reading and answering emails that are not going to add to
your bottom line.
Email comes in several varieties.
There are emails that are business related, emails that are important but not
business related and emails that are simply frivolous and time wasting. If an
email has been forwarded several times, don’t waste your time.
If an email is addressed to a great
many people, don’t waste any time on it either. Email can consume a lot of
time. You need to filter the important from the irrelevant and only spend time
on those emails that are related to your business.
- Set up time tables to help you
prioritize your work day: A scheduled work day is an efficient work
day. You will get a lot more done in a lot less time if you know in
advance and can see at a glance what task is next on your list. I like
visual aids. A time table is a visual aid. It can help you allot your time
efficiently and productively!
- Focus on result producing activities:
When you make your work day schedule, you need to be certain that the
tasks that you schedule are the ones that will in fact make your business
grow and thrive. Don’t waste your time, effort and energy on tasks that
can be done by others.
Take time to investigate
outsourcing. You can add hours to your day each and every day when you
outsource the mundane business tasks to others.
You can outsource such tasks as
bookkeeping and accounting, article/E-book writing and submission, travel and
event planning and ad writing. Others can do these tasks better and more
efficiently than you can and your time is better spent on growing your
business, making those contacts and closing those deals!
- Shave time off of counter-productive
activities: Like I said, your friends and families do required some of
your time but you can also waste a whole ton of time on such unproductive
activities as watching TV.
You will be really surprised at how much of your day that you waste if you keep a record of your time expenditures over the course of several days’ time.
Now don’t misunderstand me. We all need down time. We all
must relax our minds as well as our bodies. We can’t be all business all the
time but we can limit our unproductive or counterproductive activities.
Time is precious and time is limited. We need to make the
very best use of every minute of every day that we possibly can.
No comments:
Post a Comment