Time Management Tips for Small Business

Managing time in your business should be a high priority for you as a business owner. Because you want to maximise your profits, you should reduce time spent on non-income producing activities.

Here are four tips to manage your time more effectively so that you can make more money, help more people and spend more time out of your business focusing on income-producing tasks:

1) Identify your income-producing tasks

Before you can start focusing on the right tasks, you’ve got to first separate your tasks into two separate lists; one called income producing and the other called non-income producing.

Spend your time on the income producing tasks and outsource the non-income producing tasks to a Virtual Assistant. That way, you maximise your business profits.

Do not spend more than:

• 10% of your time on admin
• 40% of your time on marketing

These tasks should be outsourced to an assistant.

2) Get organised

There is no real secret to managing your time better than to get and stay organised. Without a clear plan of how you will tackle your tasks, you may find yourself working endlessly with no results.

Here are ideas to get organised:

• Use a task scheduler or app that can help you to schedule your tasks more effectively
• Organise your mailbox into folders titled “Urgent”, “Important”, “Moderately important”, “Not important” and “Completed”
• Make sure that you move your emails around these folders as the urgency changes and as you deal with them

3) Track results

This part is vital to time management. Track your results so that you can see where you spend most of your time.

How do you track results?

If you’re using a task scheduler app like Producteev or Trello, you can compare your weekly task list to what you actually completed and see which tasks took you longer to complete. Once you identify the problematic tasks, find ways to complete them faster or outsource those tasks to a Virtual Assistant.

4) Complete difficult tasks first

Perhaps you haven’t yet heard that completing the most difficult tasks at the beginning of your work day is the way to go? Well, we’re here to inform you that it works. This is because you’re more alert at the start of the day and by lunch time, your brain cells get tired, especially if you’ve had a heavy meal.

As mentioned above, you will separate your tasks into folders. Start with the “urgent” folder and within that folder look for the most difficult tasks by scanning the information. Once you’re done with the urgent folder, head over to the “important” folder and do the same. Continue with all folders until you have completed all tasks.