Mastering Time Management: Strategies to Boost Your Productivity and Efficiency
Recognizing the Need: Overcoming Time Constraints in Business
Today's topic is a big one. It's something that we hear over and over again from all of our clients–whether they are new businesses or established businesses, the same theme is:
I really need to clone myself.
There's not enough time in the day.
I'm wearing all the hats.
If any of this sounds familiar, you too are probably looking for a bulletproof way to squeeze more time into your day. Well, there's a good and bad news here. The bad news is you already have all the time you need, you’re just not using it well. The good news is there are strategies and techniques that can help you be more efficient, more focused and better at prioritization. Let’s get after it.
Why is it so hard as a business owner to prioritize? Part of it comes from the nature of small business itself.
When you are starting out you have beginning business struggles, which usually entail wearing all the hats. You are the PR, the marketing, the sales, the janitor- the everything.
The first thing I outsourced was bookkeeping and I recommend you do the same. The books are not something that you need to get super in the weeds with. It will take up a ton of your time and it's not best practice. With that being said, it is important that you understand what the books are saying to you so you can make smart business choices and adjustments. Outsource the minutiae of the books, but learn to love them and what they are telling you. Look at them often, but don't put yourself in charge of them. It’s not a good use of your time.
Balancing Act: Managing Growth while Prioritizing Your Business
As you're growing your business, you are at that phase where you're just trying to keep up with demand.
You are working so hard in your business, you're not working on your business, and that means you're tapped and have no time. We’ve all been there and we’ve all done it and we all really struggle to get out of the hamster wheel.
And when you're a bigger business, you’re still in the weeds - just different ones. As they say: you never get rid of your problems. You just get different types of problems.
They become bigger, they become more complex, maybe even more high stakes. You still don't have time because you may have a staff but now you have to manage them and then everything that comes along with having a bigger team.
Embracing Routine: Building Habits for Smarter Work
The first thing we need to do here-no matter what type of business you run is: going back to basics.
Routine is your friend, similar to how kids love structure and love predictability. Our brains? They are still in that five year old phase. You need to build in routines and healthy habits that encourage you to work smarter more efficiently. This also means you need to flex your focus muscle. We all have things that we avoid and procrastinate on because you don't love them. Making the hard choice may scare you, or maybe it’s something you're not confident about so you just avoid, avoid.
We all have those things. We still need to do them. The only difference is you don't have a boss breathing down your neck to do it. So here's my PSA for you.
Don't avoid the things that you can't afford to avoid.
If you absolutely don't want to do them, then you need to make enough money to outsource those tasks with clear objectives.
Focus on Focus: Organizing Tasks and Aligning with Business Objectives
Next thing we've seemed to have a lot of trouble with is Focus. Capital F because it is that important. Focus is tightly linked to organization which is linked to your business objectives. If you don't have clear organization in your task structure, this means that you don't have clarity on what your business objectives are.
The main business objective everyone should have on their list is to make money. We are here to make money because without it, we don’t exisit. And if you have a business that helps people, that means that you can no longer do that. I know so many of us get really squirmy about dollars and cents but this is the bottom line. If you aren’t here, you can’t serve people so don’t shy away from going after the profits you need to be sustainable.
But how do we do that? Are we selling a certain product? Are we launching a new service program? When are we doing all these things?
Period.
The Magic of Three: Implementing Top Three Daily Tasks for Effective Progress
Something that truly changed things for us here at ALC is utilizing our top three daily tasks. This is a feature that Michael Hyatt uses in his Full Focus planner and other organizational masters use as their go-to strategy for getting things done. We ALL OVERsestimate how many things we can do in one day and UNDERestimate how long things take to get done and done well.
This eliminates friction and ensures that hell or high water–these three things NEED to happen to move things forward. That to-list needs to be whittled down to the essentials and it’s instantly easier to manage. We use this method and it's crazy, crazy, crazy how much it's impacted our productivity. It’s simple, yet profound. Our blog and newsletter cadence would be impossible to execute without this system.
We also use something called the Pomodoro Technique, which means that we are doing tight bursts of super focus, no tabs open no notifications, deep work. And then we're taking breaks.
Your brain can also only do so much deep work at a time. Deep work is something that many of us never ever make time for, but it is critical to move your business forward and dedicate space to do the work.
Streamlining Meetings: Maximizing Efficiency and Minimizing Time Drain
The last thing I recommend you try for squeezing more time out of your day is killing your meetings. The meetings that you're in, chances are they’re wildly ineffective. They are not working and they are time sucks on your precious, limited time. As women, most of us are highly relational. We love talking to people. We love bouncing ideas off of each other and we love sharing our success. I see you, and I am you. I am a verbal processor in every sense of the phrase.
However, we need to make time to do that over happy hour, not during our workday. So in order for that to be a thing, we need to have smarter, better, more efficient meetings. Could that update be a Loom video? Could it be an email? Maybe a Marco Polo? Could it be something where you have a tight agenda that you add to through the week, so when it's time for the meeting and you blow through it with clear things to tackle with timestamps?
I really hope that you get to work with people that are amazing that you love spending time-but unfortunately that’s not going to get your to-list any shorter with hour long meetings all day long. We need to stay super hyper focused on getting through the meeting and efficiently work through everything we have to talk about.
With these things in mind, I hope that you are able to transform, or at least improve, the productivity and the time management that you have in place. We’ll let James Clear close this one out with a boost on how to take these habits and implement them with our favorite saying of all time: Do the work.
“At the end of the day, how long it takes to form a particular habit doesn’t really matter that much. Whether it takes 50 days or 500 days, you have to put in the work either way. The only way to get to Day 500 is to start with Day 1. So forget about the number and focus on doing the work.”
