There are only twenty-four hours in a day. If you wish to live a healthy lifestyle with any kind of longevity, it’s important to get at least seven hours of sleep a night, but ideally eight or nine depending on your needs. Commuting to and from work takes time. Committing to your household chores, spending time with your family, eating any kind of nourishing diet, and enjoying just a little free time, if only to read a few pages of a book each day, is also important.
Oh yeah, and you have a business to run.
Managing your time as a business owner can sound like an impossible task, because the unfortunate reality is that you have a human to take care of on top of a business, and this human is you. At least that’s how it can feel from time to time. For all of the business advice out there, it does seem as though many articles forget this simple fact.
Thankfully, you only have to live 24 hours each day. This means each day is a new opportunity to perfect your schedule. In this post, we’ll discuss how to manage your time as a business owner, and where to get started with that in mind:
Business News, Reviews & Education
Enjoying a digest of news, insight and even community connectivity can be a vital way to stay abreast of the latest topics and keep insight into your industry. The Chamber of Business is a fantastic place to start, as will be following journals on news aggregate sites, or you could potentially use Twitter in order to view these sources each day, and more readily.
Perhaps you may have time to read a long-form article during breakfast also, allowing you to think on wider business topics to prepare yourself for the day ahead. There’s an idea that business owners have the time to read a full non-fiction guide to business before breakfast, are constantly contributing to the discourse regarding business management online, and have the chance to keep up with every single post in the Wall Street Journal, but the truth is that distilling news and insight is the best way to still maintain some dominion over your daily life.
Delegate Authority & Automating Tasks
When you delegate authority and automate tasks, you tend to be able to free up time you would have spent on tasks that won’t require your dedicated focus to achieve. So for instance, an assistant that can help manage your worthwhile schedule, take appointments, and also sort through your correspondence is a good investment.
Alternatively, using software programs like calendars, reminders, note-taking apps and collating tools will help you manage most of your organizational material with some clarity, allowing you to make adjustments where necessary. Portable devices, like dedicated smartphones, tablets, laptops or a work computer can make a big difference here, and push you in the right direction.
The Power Of Routine
Routine saves time by helping you cut out the ‘dead weight’ of daily distraction. Keeping your schedule tight can also help you maintain energy from one task to another. That way, when it comes to caring for the performance reviews of your staff at lunch, you’ll have already had the chance to consult your team, call the supplier, and make sure you renew a contract to clean your offices for another year.
Routine is not accidental, it’s a direct structure we must maintain. But it does save time, and it also helps us avoid having to decide what we’ll do anew, from a schedule perspective, each and every day going forward. The value of this is hard to truly express in full.
Prioritizing Priorities
Of course, our time is limited each day. This means deciding what to do is not always as important as deciding what to leave for tomorrow, or that someone else can attend to. Becoming smart about prioritizing the priorities you have, such as those that really do require your attendance, those that pre-empt an issue from becoming larger, and those that you feel able to do from a professional standpoint is key.
This might sound obvious – you have to do what you have to do. That said, in the long run, an approach like this can help you thrive more easily, and it also helps you avoid some of the ‘decision fatigue’ that comes when we constantly ponder what to do. When you can make some quickfire decisions about your priorities, you’re more likely to attend to them, and attend to the most difficult tasks first.
With this advice, we hope you can manage your time as a business owner in the best possible way.