How to manage your time more effectively as a business owner

As a small business owner, you need not be told how precious your time is. Before you even begin to manage your time you must know what time is.
Know your goals
Be sure to only engage in activities that support your business goals, everything else is a distraction and a potential waste of time. Your daily goal should revolve around doing tasks and activities that directly goes into generating income and growing your business.
Plan Ahead
The worst thing you can do is to jumpstart a day without knowing what you’ll be working on or what needs to get done. The time you’ll save yourself from planning ahead is much compared to when you’re clueless on tasks to accomplish for each day .
Try these options:
- The night before — all it takes is 15mins the night before to clear your desk and prepare what you need to get done the following day. Line up tasks accordingly; from most pressing to least pressing.
- First thing in the morning — arrive a little earlier than usual and prioritise in order of the steps listed below
Prioritise wisely
A quick cheat to organising your daily to-do list is to analyse what goes into the makeup of your day and where each activity fits into the different categories.
- Important and urgent — Must do tasks. Get them done first and quickly.
- Important but not urgent — Important tasks that must be done but on closer look, aren’t that important. You are to decide when to do these.
- Urgent but not important — Tasks making the most noise but once done, have the least impact/ long lasting value
- Not urgent and not important — low priority tasks that can be done much later
Learn to say NO
Always be prepared to focus on the more productive tasks and activities. Be prepared to say NO to mundane requests if you have to, so as to focus on what’s truly important and urgent.
Delegate more often
If you’ve done a great job hiring talented and dedicated staff, there’s always more you can have them get off your desk. The success of a small business rests on the owner’s ability to steer the company in the right direction for growth rather than getting swamped in daily mired operational tasks.
Use a collaboration tool
There are thousands of collaboration tools out there that can make you and your team more efficient. At Qeturah.com, we use Trello for our to-dos, Slack for communicating amongst ourselves.
Take care of yourself
An alert mind is a high-productive mind and this can only be achieved with plenty of sleep and exercise. A highly productive mind allows you to identify quickly distractions and time-wasting activities so you can prioritise them as deemed important.
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