As a small business owner are you having time wasted during your day?
Do you ever get to the end of your day and feel that you haven’t achieved all that you wanted to get done?
If you are having time wasted in your day, more often than not you’ve had some time thieves which have being robbing you of your time. These time thieves are disguised as emails, phone calls and people and steal your time and stop you from getting the important things done.
Here are three things you can do about it…
1) Identify your time thieves
The first thing you need to do is to identify what your times thieves are.
Who or what is stealing your time?
- Do people call you call the time?
- Are people dropping in?
- Is it that your team members are asking you questions?
- Do you get lost in social media?
- Are you ever distracted by emails?
By identifying and naming them you are now in a position to do something about them.
2) Focus on what you can control
Next look at what you have control over and what don’t you have control over. Focus on the things you can control. For example, you have a control over whether you answer your phone or not.
A simple and effective time management strategy for small business owners is to turn your phone off or divert it to voicemail or someone else when you are working on something important such as doing quotes. That way you are not interrupted while you’re getting the quotes done and you can turn it back on afterwards.
Another example is to start setting boundaries around when you have time on social media and when you don’t. You can also control things like switching email reminders off so you do not get a notification when a new email arrives … which could rob you of some time.
By focusing on what you can control you’ll start to eliminate what is wasting your time.
3) Get to the root cause
The final thing is always get to the root cause. Identify the root cause of your time thief.
Like one of our electrician customers, whose biggest time thief was his employees asking questions about the jobs they were on. They would be ringing his phone regularly and it was stopping him from working on his quotes. He identified that the root cause was that the job briefs were not clear so he put a checklist in place to make sure everything that was needed for the job was clear and available on site. That way he started to eliminate the calls coming through.
By getting to the root cause as to why your time is being wasted, you’ll be able to eliminate if from ever happening again.
So, just to recap. To stop your time from being wasted:
- Work out what your top time thieves are
- Look at what you can and can’t control and focus on the things you can control; and
- Always get to the root cause so you can eliminate it at its source and stop it form reoccurring
By doing this you’ll get more time back, you’ll be more productive and get more done each day.
