Time management, according to Wikipedia, is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. As an entrepreneur, improving time management is important as you might have to juggle between a lot of crucial tasks and responsibilities to handle all at once and not being able to do work accordingly might affect productivity and in extension, your business.
To effectively manage time, you must acknowledge the tasks ahead, the appropriate amount of time to assign to each task, who and how to delegate certain tasks that you do not have to handle to your team members, and work around creating time for you to relieve stress and run your business efficiently.
TIPS ON HOW TO IMPROVE TIME MANAGEMENT
- PRIORITIZATION:
This involves allocating time to the most important tasks and ensuring that they are completed first. To accomplish this, you must write down all pending tasks, whether vital, ordinary, or plainly daily routines. Then, identify the highest priority A-level tasks and rank the remaining tasks within categories. Start work on completing the tasks as soon as possible.
- DELEGATION:
Delegation is the process of sharing and transferring responsibilities to another person and granting them the authority to complete a specific task. This would allow you to focus on other higher-level tasks while still completing the other task. Delegation can also aid in the development of a team, trust, and professional skills.
- STRATEGIC THINKING:
Strategic thinking is simply a premeditated and logical thought process that involves the evaluation of critical elements that will influence a company’s, team’s, or individual’s long-term success. Analyze and experiment with your plan on a regular basis to improve it and stay connected to your creative side. This can help a business identify how to best use limited resources, drive innovation, improve decision-making, and minimize unforeseen damages, among other things.
- GOAL SETTING:
The process of goal setting can be defined as identifying and carefully considering something that you want to accomplish and setting priorities and timeframes in which you need to get it executed. All goals set should be timely, specific, and realistic. Goal setting aids in providing direction to everyone involved in the business, meeting deadlines, avoid wasting time, managing distractions, and significantly improving business.
- SCHEDULING:
Scheduling is the concept of organizing your activities so that you can achieve your objectives and optimize your priorities in the time you have available. Effective scheduling can assist you in ensuring that you have enough time for essential tasks, avoiding taking on more than you can handle, acknowledging what you can realistically achieve with your time, and attaining a work-life balance.
- USE OF AVAILABLE SOFTWARES:
Using time management apps and tools can help you become more productive by reducing the amount of time you spend on paperwork, invoicing, and other administrative tasks. There are now multiple software solutions for time management, so you should put in more effort to choose the optimal one by testing them and determining how well they meet your needs. Some of the apps that can help are Calendly, Asana, Microsoft 365 etc.
You can also manage your time by breaking activities down into simple problems, being conscious of how you spend your time and in all of your work, making time to care for your health and personal goals, deciding what results you want to achieve, and blocking out other distractions.
Being an entrepreneur can be demanding so the better you become at time management, the better the business will be.
