One of the top secrets of successful entrepreneurs is their ability to consistently double up on performance, drive increased productivity and create massive profits, using proven time saving strategies.
As an entrepreneur seeking to experience massive success, using the right time management strategies in your business could lead to impressive results in business growth, efficiency and profitability.
Considering that most business owners are struggling when it comes to identifying and implementing the right time saving strategies, in this post, I’ll be listing out the proven time saving strategies that’s worked for businesses and how to use them to drive improved outcomes for your own business.
Set Clear Expectations
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What do you really want to achieve today? You wake up in the morning as an entrepreneur, the first thing you have to do is to identify the things you want to achieve for your business.
This is one of the first time saving strategies you need to have in place, as a small business owner.
To make it even better, create a monthly, quarterly and yearly calendar of your priorities. And then break them down into daily and weekly priorities.
Doing this gives you an idea on what’s most important while setting out a daily direction and target to follow.
As a business owner, it is crucial you get your goals right. You can’t work without a clearly defined goal and still expect to achieve a lot.
As a small business owner, you already have a lot of things to achieve, without a lot of time on your side. So, the little time you have, you must maximize it by identifying and prioritizing your tasks, goals and expectations.
Organize your Daily Work Hours
After fixing your goal, the next time saving strategy you need to implement is to schedule and organize your days.
Having a decent schedule you can stick with is very important in improving your productivity, whether as an individual or entrepreneur.
To get started, you want to start with fixing your important activities at specific intervals.
Decide how many hours or minutes you want to spend on a specific tasks and work on spending that particular length of hours on the tasks.
While setting your schedule, remember that an effective schedule must work hand in hand with your business goals.
Therefore, you have to understand your business goals clearly, divide the activities that will get you to achieving these goals into tiny tasks then schedule them as part of your daily tasks.
There are a handful of free and paid productivity applications that can help you schedule some recurring activities like social media posts etc.
Work on engaging these apps as part of your work related apps.
Taking your daily schedule seriously will to a large extent determine whether you’ll achieve your business goals or not.
Prioritize your Tasks
According to the Pareto principle, only about 20% of the things we do are actually responsible for 80% of the results we create.
If this is the case (which is always the case in most instances) then you have to find out the most critical activities that accounts for your most productive outcomes…
Prioritize these activities by allocating most of your time to them. This is what prioritizing your tasks is mostly about.
Working on your daily activities in their order of priority is one of the important time management tips that can boost your productivity, especially when it comes to saving you some extra time to spend on more important tasks
Now, as a small business, in order to get your priorities right, you need to answer some crucial questions like; what’s the most important thing that could help me achieve my biggest goals right now?
As soon as this is sorted, you can then start with allocating adequate time to these important tasks.
Work on allocating your most productive hours to these tasks and then give it your best shot before attending to other things.
The more you successfully execute the most important tasks, the more you’ll get closer to achieving most of your business goals.
Start with the Easiest
Forget about starting with the hardest tasks. You’ll get burned out. The trick is to start with the easiest tasks at first.
So, again; you want to break down your daily or weekly work load from the hardest to the simplest tasks and then start with the easiest.
This is one of most unpopular time saving tips you’ll get out there.
While a lot of people will prioritize starting with the hardest, as a small business most times, starting with the hardest can demotivate you.
Especially where you get to experience some difficulty on the job. So as much as possible, you want to start with the simpler tasks and then move on to the bigger ones.
If it’s content you plan to create for instance, before you get started, chunk up your idea into an outline, starting with the title, sub titles, main key words etc. Doing this makes it easier for you to get started.
Practice this with other important tasks too… Before you know it, you’ll be surprised at what you’ve achieved and how much time you’ve saved.
The more you successfully execute the easy tasks, the more you’ll be inspired to push out the highly tasking activities with much ease.
In most cases, starting with a more demanding activity can make you feel overwhelmed or discouraged if you get to face some difficulties.
But, starting your daily activities with the simpler and inspiring tasks gets you all warmed up and in the mood to work with more ease.
Outsource Your Work
As one of the prominent time saving tips known to businesses, outsourcing is by far a leading strategy used by successful small business owners to boost productivity and drive growth.
Outsourcing has single handedly helped a lot of businesses to achieve and earn a lot more than they would achieve on their own.
One reason most small businesses do not want to outsource is because they think outsourcing will make them spend a lot more on a project than they would earn from the project.
But on the contrary, outsourcing saves you more time to invest on other aspects of your business, while boosting your productivity in the process.
So, this is one of the top time management tips you want to try out, if you really want to save more time for your business.
One of the major concerns with outsourcing is the argument that you may not have available competent hands to outsource your work to.
But to get around this, there are a lot of freelancing websites out there like Fiverr, Freelancer etc. that can take care of your outsourcing needs.
There are also some referral and networking system you can use to identify competent service providers you can work with, if you want to outsource your works.
So, the bottom line is, outsourcing can save you a lot of time. And you should take out time to select the most competent hands, review their pedigree before outsourcing your work to them.
Automate Your Work
Another crucial time saving strategy you need in your bucket list is to learn how to automate your work.
It’s true. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel, whenever you want to get to work. So, learn how to create systems and templates that will make your work far easier for you.
For example, if you’re a content creator, consider creating content template, based on the kind of content you create most often.
This could be things like email templates, social media post templates, design templates etc.
Whatever it is, creating your most used works into templates can help you in improving your efficiency whenever you want to create the work again.
As part of automation tools, you can also use scheduling apps and mechanisms to schedule your content, social media posts, email etc. This gets the work off your hands.
You can also automate other aspects of your business like ecommerce, customer care, sales, marketing, email marketing etc. Doing this further gives you more time to focus on other things.
Collaborate With Others
Like outsourcing, collaborating with other businesses is one of the important time saving tips that can set your business on a path to improved productivity.
Although in most cases you might have to share whatever income you earn from such collaborative efforts, at the end of the day, it gives you a better job done at a shorter time.
For instance, let’s say you’re a thought leader planning to host a conference… Instead of being the only one to speak at the conference you can get other expert thought leaders to share the platform with you.
This enriches the conference, adds a new perspective to the content, brings in new audiences from the other speakers while making the work far easier for you.
Same thing goes for major projects. Some projects will be achieved much faster via collaborative effort.
As a micro business, instead of working on a single project for months and forgetting other parts of your business during that period, you can decide to collaborate with other experts, finish up the project at a shorter time and save more time to use on other parts of your business.
Final Words
As a small business owner, there are so many time saving tips you can use to improve your productivity and grow your business. But, in addition to these, remember to reduce your reliance on multi tasking. It doesn’t really help.
Also, evaluating yourself, your activities and time spent on each business task is a very important activity you can use to enhance your overall success..
It gives you a good knowledge of where you’re lagging behind in time management, where you need to allocate more time and where you need to reduce your activities. Also, pay attention to delegating some tasks.
This will come in handy in improving your productivity.
So even after implementing these time saving strategies, at intervals, you still have to commit yourself to assessing what really is happening with your business.
Evaluate how much time you’re spending on each aspect of it and how much result this effort is generating. This is very crucial as it will give you ideas to further optimize your time management for imprved growth.
So, there you have the important time saving tips you can use to improve your productivity and drive your business growth. To learn even more about the right skills to build your business, sign up for our digital courses or reach out to us here.
Now, its over to you! What are your biggest challenges when it comes to time management as a small business owner? Drop your comments below.
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