Manage your schedule as a busy entrepreneur
You have most likely heard it before – where did all the time go?
If there’s one thing all business owners can agree on, it’s how precious time is as a commodity— there’s never enough of it, for one.
The average workday is unstructured, full of distractions and fires, and it often ends with “one more thing” that keeps you in the office long after you plan to leave. And on the off chance you do find time to break away to work on your business, you probably can’t focus due to constant interruptions.
It is essential to everybody in a business, or society, in general, to always make good use of your time. Whether you’re a business owner, executive, manager, or regular team member, knowing where your time goes is paramount to the success of your business.
Time tracking is key to understanding how you spend your time, personally and in business. It is key to productivity, insight, and a healthy workflow. When you know which tasks take the most of your time, you can begin to reflect on whether that time is well spent. The most time-consuming tasks do not necessarily require the most effort to complete or bring the most value. Often, quite the contrary.
Ask Yourself
- Did the task work towards a broader goal? (e.g., the business mission)
- Is the task important enough to take up that amount of time?
- Could the time have been spent more effectively and beneficially?
- Did the task pursue a personal or career goal?
- Which concrete changes did the task take?
When you’ve got some of these questions covered, consider whether something could be changed for the better, making your workflow more efficient and effective.
Could the work be reorganised for the better? Does the software or hardware need an update? Did you experience that you needed to wait for somebody, or something, to proceed? What annoyed you in the process? Change it.
These are all critical questions to ask both yourself and your team. Rank the tasks based on importance and allocate your time accordingly.
Prioritize Your Time
Using two metrics to analyze your tasks is beneficial.
- To what extent will the task benefit the company or organization, e.g., in terms of profits?
- To what extent are we able to leverage this task?
These two metrics will tell us whether each task is within our business’s scope; we can solve the problem and compete with competitors in the field.
Tasks scoring high on metrics and aligning with the business strategy – are the tasks to prioritize in your daily work.
Benefits of Time Tracking: There are several benefits of doing your time tracking, including:
- Personal and business insights into time spent.
- We are learning from experience and increasing productivity.
- We are improving effectiveness and efficiency through learning.
- Quality improvements, following a streamlined workflow.
- Transparency into work processes.
- Cost-efficient delivery of the core activities.
- Ability to reflect and adapt accordingly.
The insights you get from time tracking can often be an eye-opener.
How much of your time do you spend browsing the web, looking through your inbox, or trying to find that one document in a pile of folders? These are often viewed as minor daily activities, but accumulated, they are probably some of the most time-consuming activities in your workweek – is that justified?
Keep a daily time log.
You can’t change what you don’t see. To develop better time-management habits, you first need to discover the truth about how you currently spend your time. So for at least two weeks, use a daily time log to track your workday, logging everything you do.