Time is your most precious asset as a business owner – you’ve never got quite enough and you can’t make more of it. You’re stuck with only 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s important that you make the most of it everyday.
And even then, work has to compete with family commitments, sleep, gym sessions and social engagements to win its share of your attention.
But you don’t have to carry on struggling through your constantly growing to-do list every day, desperately trying to tick off three different tasks before you’ve even had your morning coffee.
We’ve got three simple time-saving tricks that’ll revolutionise your working pattern – and your business. Take a look.
#1: Let software take care of admin
Admin is a necessary evil. You can escape it. It’s a necessary business process. You need to stay up-to-date with paperwork and filing and all the boring documentation involved with running a business, but boy does it takes up a lot of time – in fact, recent statistics suggest you’re losing an entire day out of every week solely to admin.
Invest in human resource software to help take care of your employees and you could end up reducing your admin time by up to 40 per cent. Work on what you best instead of taken care of the paperwork that can easily be handled by great app.
Instead of pulling all-nighters and driving yourself to exhaustion to get employee records and pension plans in order, you can focus on the all-important big picture of keeping your startup afloat.
#2: Challenge and overcome your bad habits
How much time do you whittle away on Facebook each day, scrawling through your newsfeed and refreshing every few minutes to see the latest updates from ‘friends’ you haven’t spoken to in years? The social distractions can take away precious time you need to work on important business tasks.
It’s a hard one to answer honestly but “far too much” is probably the right response.
Use an app like TimeRabbit to track how long you’re actually spending on social media. It’ll send you daily statistics and once faced with the cold hard facts of your true time-wasting capabilities it’ll be much easier to motivate yourself into better working habits. You will be surprised at how much time you actually waste on social platforms.
#3: Put a limit on meetings
Lengthy meetings take up a huge portion of your tight schedule, especially when you need to leave the office to attend them. Most meetings are probably unnecessary. If you can avoid them. Hold meetings only when they are really crucial. If you can use collaboration tools or emails to communicate without missing anything, choose to use them instead of those lengthy meetings.
Sometimes face-to-face meetings are the only way to go, like when you’re meeting new clients or signing a major deal for the business. But in other cases, such as weekly team updates or project recaps, a virtual meeting can work just as well.
On top of video calls and Skype catch-ups, you can use online collaborative software to allow multiple employees to add their input to ongoing tasks – without having to call yet another time-wasting meeting.
The truth is you’re still going to be busy, but follow our time-saving tips and instead of wasting hours slaving away at unnecessary tasks you’ll be able to spend your days working only on the important jobs.