Are you wasting time every day in your business, but have no idea where your time is actually going?
Would you love to carve some more time into your day, utilising the time that you have, without having to work longer hours?
Read on to learn where you are possibly wasting time, and even more important – what to do about it!
1. Emails and other things that ping!
Do you always have your email browser open? Do Slack, Whatsapp and other messaging apps ping at you constantly and distract you from what you *should* be doing?
🔔Close the email browser down when you are focussing on work so it doesn’t distract you. Quieten down those notifications by adjusting your settings on your computer and your phone.
📅Try to timetable in two slots (or more if your business is really quite customer service based) during the day where you deal with emails.
📩Create filters, labels and folders so your inbox isn’t cluttered, stressful to look at, and takes ages to dig through.
2. Social media
Do you go to post on your Social Media platforms and then find yourself drawn into a comment thread with 603 people who you don’t actually know?
We’ve all done it.
Before you know it, half the morning is gone, and you’ve not even finished the post you *meant* to post on your business page. Oops.
⌚Set yourself a time during the week where you plan and create your social media posts.
📒Create your posts outside of the platform!
👩💻Make time each day for posting and engaging with your potential clients. Do not get distracted!!
3. Meetings that could be an email
These are the worst… 2 hours later you leave, feeling so frustrated as you could have been at your desk doing some ‘actual’ work rather than talking round and round an issue that should have been, at best, a 10 minute email.
Sometimes this simply cannot be avoided but there are steps we can take.
🚃 Allow buffer time for travelling to and from the meeting and another 15 minutes overrun time.
📆 Have an appointment that you need to leave for after the Designated Meeting Duration.
📝 Ask for an agenda beforehand. If some of the points can be covered by you in an email or short document – do that before the meeting.
4. Annoying piddly little tasks
The repetitive, necessary but boring tasks business demands tend to be different for different people. Things like website updates, inputting data into spreadsheets, databases, CRMs, proofreading documents, creating or sourcing images…
You may be a list writer who notices that, every time you start a fresh list, you carry over the same tasks that didn’t happen last time – because we avoid them and just don’t do them… If you are a Trello fan, you might have a card with these dreaded tasks on which you move around a bit, but they will never quite make it to the ‘Done’ column…
Ask yourself, do you need to do these things? Or could they be outsourced, eliminated or automated?
✉️ Could you hire a VA to outsource some of your admin tasks to?
🗑️If you’ve put it off and procrastinated about it, does it actually need doing? If it’s low priority and not urgent, I would suggest you eliminate it.
👩💻Some tasks can be automated. Look into Zapier for getting different apps to work together so things happen without manpower (see 5!)
5. Lack of automation
Sometimes we spend hours doing tasks that a computer or an app could do for us. Linking our applications via something like Zapier means that a chain of events is completed for us.
For example, just by starring an email, the automation will create a task in our Project Management tool, which triggers a notification to the person we would like notifying. Sound complicated? Not as much as you would think and it saves a lot of time that would be eaten manually sending emails and other tasks that an app can do for you.
So, save yourself precious time by trying these tips:
- Sort out your notifications
- Plan posts outside of your social media platform
- Tidy up your email inbox
- Prepare for meetings properly
- Get automations in place.
You’ll thank me when you have all that extra time!
Fancy saving more time, and getting more work done? Book in a 90 minute 1:1 session with me today and we can discuss how you can be even more productive.