Good time management is an essential part of good business. Whether you work within a big corporation or you’re a one-man business, adopting good time management habits will help you.
Here are a few tips to help you get on track with your time. These aren’t rules, but tools. Use the ones you like and ignore the ones you don’t. Feel free to adapt them to suit your needs, but at the very least you’ve got nothing to lose by trying them out…and everything to gain!
Six Tips to Improve Your Time Management
Set a daily routine based on school lessons
Timetable your day. Our brains work at full capacity for about 90 minutes, then productivity drops off rapidly.
By setting your day out in chunks of 45 minutes, and then going on one task for one period (45 minutes) or a double period (90 minutes), then taking 5 minutes to ‘reset’ things.
Think of it as changing room. Before moving on to another, a different task for another period or two, you can work at full capacity on each task.
Measure Time
Time management or time tracking software not only ensures you get paid properly for your time.
It also lets you know what you’re doing with all those hours, so you can see where the wasted time is. Seeing it is the first step to fixing it with any effort! Thanks to that you can perfectly bill your customers because in a case of discussing projects with them you can show detailed reports with all the important data.
Double Up
If you can, get a second monitor for your computer.
You can then have your diary, your email, your CRM or anything else you repeatedly refer to during the day open in front of you while you’re doing whatever else on the other monitor. Sounds simple, but you’ll be surprised how much time you can save with this one simple tool.
Work Hard When You Feel Best
Every one of us has a ‘best’ time of day; the part of the day when you are at your peak. Identify when this is for you, and save the toughest work for that time period. The opposite is also true: if you have a time of day when you’re not at your best, that’s when you should do the drudge work.
Cut Out the Distractions
Close the messaging app on your computer, switch off the email alerts and shut the door. Check your emails at set times; twice a day is fine. Have a chat on messenger in the five minute ‘room change’ between periods; tell people you’re free for visits or queries at set times.
Plan in Advance
Set out your objectives for the day in advance, know when in the day you’re doing each task, and what the end result will be when those tasks are completed.
And a seventh little tip:
Work tidy!
Whether it’s on your desk or your computer, if you’re tidy you’ll get more done more easily.