We all have our excuses for wasting time. I know that I do. I waste time when I start exploring something new, like an interesting article, in the middle of my work day. The simple solution is to have a place to file new things for future attention. There are simple solutions to help you stop wasting time as well.

Spot the Time Sinks

The first thing you need to do in order to stop wasting time is to figure out where you are wasting it. If you can have someone shadow you and write everything down, do it! It could really help, especially if that person is more organized than you. In any case, another perspective never hurts.

Other than that, just be conscious of how you are spending your time throughout the day. You should keep a schedule and write down what you have been doing for each time segment. That way, when you find yourself having to put in a long day, you can look back and figure out if you could have done away with anything.

Organize and Segment Your Day

One of the biggest ways to waste time in your business is to multi task. Don’t do it. Instead, you should focus on each task at hand. This means that when you are working on one thing, tune everything else out. Yes, close the windows on your desktop that you are not using, especially the email. Turn off Twitter. Shut your office door. If people need to talk to you, they should make lists and you should have specific times where you can talk to them about what they need. You are still available in an emergency, but define what an emergency is. Make sure employees are not coming to you with questions that one of your managers should be answering.

If you schedule your day into blocks ahead of time, you will stop wasting time and be more productive. Take 30 minutes for email at 10:00, for instance. Work on the new design from 3:00 to 4:00. Build in a little flexibility with some small segments of miscellaneous time. And when something new comes up, write it down and work it in to tomorrow’s schedule, not today’s.

Use a Task Management Tool

There are a lot of great task and time management tools out there. I have used several. First, I recommend reading Chet Holmes’ book, The Ultimate Sales Machine. He has a great section on time and task management. You can get some of the details of his method in the Books Unwound article, Six Steps to Great Time Management.

Research some time and task management tools. I currently use the Action Method, and highly recommend it. A good tool will help you stay on top of tasks and to plan future tasks so you don’t feel you have to jump on everything right away. With a good tool, the right tasks will not be forgotten and will rise to the top. It will be easier to stop wasting time if you have a good time management system in place.

Get Help

Leadership means that you have to learn how to delegate. You can do this whether or not you currently have employees. If you do have employees, make sure you are not doing small tasks that they could be doing. This could be anything from responding to customer emails to spearheading a project. Take advantage of the people that you have. You can also outsource some of your busy work. A good virtual assistant will end up making you money. Use one to help update the website, to type up documents, to organize emails, or to do any of the many tasks that just end up wasting time. You can use a virtual assistant if you have zero employees or hundreds. They are often specialized so they can do a better job and a quicker job than you can. Take advantage of this option. For more on virtual assistants, listen to my interview with Diana Ennen.

Remember Why

If you are bad at time management, you are going to be spending more hours working. You will both be getting less done for your business and have less time to spend with your friends and family, or on the other hobbies and interests you would like to pursue. In other words, when you waste time in your business, you are taking time away from your family and yourself. It is time you remember why you started a business in the first place. It wasn’t to work constantly. You wanted freedom. Financial freedom, yes, but also freedom with your time. You didn’t want anyone to own your time. But in order to cut down your hours of work, you need to take ownership of where you are wasting precious minutes every day. Keep in mind that you have better things to spend your time on than those time wasters at work. Maybe thinking about your kid’s baseball game will get you to stop wasting time.

If you spend a week studying your habits and then take real action to better manage your time, you will be amazed by how much time you have been wasting and by how much more you can get done in less time. You owe it to yourself, your family, and your business to become a time management superstar.

–

photo credit: casey.marshall

So, what do you do when you are doing too much? Its pretty simple in concept (but a bit more difficult in implementation). You need to set a clear destination for your business and yourself.

Know Where You Are Going

A destination is important in any trip. With your business, you should have your destination clearly written out. It doesn’t have to be complex. You could want to be the most popular pizza shop in town. Or maybe your destination is that you want to sell your business in five years.

Identify a Route

When you know where you are going, you will be able to identify a route to get there. For instance, if you want to create a franchise business, you know you will have to systematize everything down to a T.

If the route you are on now doesn’t have any clear destination, how can you be sure its leading you anywhere?

You are still going to have plenty of work to do. But when you know exactly where you are going, you can start to determine whether or not the tasks that you are doing are going to get you there. You will have a much easier time prioritizing and saying no to that new idea that is tugging at you. At the same time, you will be able to say yes to a lot of exciting new things, as long as they result in moving you toward your destination.

Stay On the Main Road

The trick to reaching your destination is taking the most direct route possible. This isn’t that summer road trip you took back when you were in college. You want to reach the destination with your business as quickly as possible. After all, you have new ideas you would like to pursue once you get there.

This means not doing busy work, not pursuing certain ideas, and avoiding certain things so that you will have more time to focus on tasks that get you closer to your goal. You need to look at each and every task that you do and ask yourself if doing it is getting you closer to your goal.

In some cases, you may be taking left turns down side streets. These are things that you are doing or playing at that have no direct impact on your business and just distract you from your end game. Stop doing these things. If its not going to have a direct impact on the success of your business, avoid it. At least for now. You can always come back to it once you get your business where it needs to be.

In other cases, there are tasks that are vital to the every day life of your business, but are just eating away at your time. Don’t try to keep doing these and then hopefully fit in other tasks that will move your business forward. Read this article on time-eating tasks for a little help in that regard.

Do More Of Less

When you know where your business is going, it is going to be easier for you to identify the things that you can do to help it get there. If you want to be seen as an expert on car repair, you can see the increased importance of speaking and writing on the issue. Make time for the things that will move you toward your goal.

There are some things that should have such high priority that you do them first, every day. Don’t put off building your business to the evenings and weekends. Its just too important.

Identify those few tasks that are going to have the biggest impact on getting your business to its destination. Then do those things religiously. If you spend more of your time doing these few highly focused tasks, you will soon see movement, which will lead to momentum.

Before you know it, you won’t even miss all the busy work or side paths that are burning up all of your time and energy right now!

photo credit: drs2biz

Get Unique Content Weekly with The Letter

–

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

While you can’t create extra time out of thin air, you may be able to make time by systematizing some time consuming tasks. If you can take just one time-eating task that you do on a regular basis and either find a way to save time on it or systematize it so you can hire it done cheaply, you will be able to save time for some bigger picture work. And you must be doing bigger picture work if you want to grow your business beyond a job.

Identify the Time-Eaters

The time-eaters are different for everyone. I know of sales organizations that spend a lot of time filling out contracts and getting them signed. For some, its the process of invoicing. For others, its packaging the products so they look perfect. What inspired me to write this post was the task of putting together a tips post with over 80 contributors. I had to copy and paste each tip, along with a quick bio and pic, from email into a document. This proved to be seriously time consuming. The thing is, it is worth doing. Most time-eating tasks are either worth doing or necessary, otherwise you just wouldn’t do it. So, there is no option to just cut these tasks out completely.

With my time consuming task, I already know several things I will do differently next time that I compile a tips post. Instead of getting the tips sent to my email, I will have people fill out a Google Form so they will go straight to a spreadsheet, for instance. From there, I will try to find a way to auto-generate the post, using the spreadsheet as a database.

Automate and Simplify

The question you need to ask yourself is whether there is any way to automate even a portion of the task. If you are doing proposals, this might mean using a template with the basics already filled in. The same goes for preparing for presentations. Get one that works and repeat it over and over again. How much of a contract can be auto-filled from a CRM program? When you are producing or packaging, what can you do in batches? What building blocks can you create to make the task go by faster?

Systematize and Outsource

There is almost always a way to make a task go faster. However, sometimes you just can’t make it go fast enough. If it is still eating into your time, you need to seriously ask yourself if you need to be doing it. And if you do have employees doing it already, you need to consider whether it is taking them too much time, and whether you could do it cheaper through systematization and outsourcing.

One task that I have recently outsourced is online research. Getting customer information online is relatively easy, but it is time consuming. Often, it gets put off until it is needed really badly. If sales people do this task, it costs the company a lot of money, because it eats into their time like nothing else. So, I tried crowdsourcing. Using SmartSheet, I was able to get the information I needed researched quickly and much more cheaply than I could have possibly done by myself or by having sales reps do it.

Even if you are a solopreneur, you should consider getting some help on those time consuming projects. If what you are doing is easy, but time-consuming, you will be better off getting help. Through options like crowdsourcing and virtual assistants, you can get a lot done. While the task is getting done for you, you can be focusing on growing your business. Imagine yourself going out and getting a new sale while the necessary research is being done for a current client by someone else. If you have to do that research, you can’t go get the new sale. Your growth is limited by the time you spend doing time-eating tasks.

Take a moment to identify your big time-eaters. What can you do to simplify and systematize them? Maybe you can cut them down enough so that you can manage them better. Or perhaps you will want to outsource them. The first step, in either case, is to create an efficient system for accomplishing the task.

If you are ready to make your business simpler and free up some time, I might be able to help you. I know some good virtual assistants and would be more than happy to talk to you about crowdsourcing with SmartSheet. And I would love to hear about tasks that you have made simpler or that you struggle with because they take up too much time. Fill me in with a comment below.

photo credit: Junior Silva.

Get Unique Content Weekly with The Letter

–

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

If you are contstantly checking your Twitter updates throughout the day, you are letting it control you.  In order for you to be productive, you need to be in complete control of your day.  

The nature of Twitter makes this more difficult than controlling your e-mail.  With e-mail, you can check in when you have time and all of your e-mail will be there.  With Twitter, what is there is constantly changing.  If you are following alot of people, you will have a lot of scrolling and reading to do.  Turns out a lot can be said in 140 character segments.  

In order to better control Twitter you will need to do several things.

1. Follow Interesting People

Who this is will be different for everyone.  Find out who you like to follow and then focus on them.  Of course, this can be a little tricky, because it is considered polite to follow people when they follow you.  Consider this, though.  Are the right people following you?  If you have followers who are just following you so you will follow them, then the only worth for either of you is the larger number in your followers box.  It is better to have fewer followers who are actually interested in what you have to say.  Plus, you are more likely to be interested in what these followers have to say as well if you follow them back.  

Take your time to add followers.  Read what they have to say before you just randomly follow them.  Get to know a few people at a time.  When someone follows you, follow them back if what they have to say is interesting to you.  

2. Sort Your Followers

For those of you who choose to follow everyone who follows you and more, you will need to find a way to sort your followers.  I use a service called TweetDeck for this.  I can put those that I follow into different categories, such as favorites, business, or politics.  I still get a general feed from everyone, but I can better follow those people that I find most interesting.  

3. Check On Schedule

Avoid going to Twitter at random times, or checking it obsessively.  If you create a list of interesting people to follow and set up groups, you will be able to go back and read comments when you have time.  

+

Remember, Twitter is a tool.  When using Twitter, try to do it for a reason.  If you use it to socialize, thats fine.  Do it after work hours.  If it is part of your business plan, focus on being productive with it, and don’t get distracted by the latest entertainment news that everyone is Twittering about.  

If you approach Twitter with a plan and don’t overdue it, it can become a great asset for your business.  Make sure you use it as a two way conversation.  Give as you take.  But don’t let it become a drain on your productivity.

Pick just six things you must do today and order them chronologically on your calendar.  You will be surprised by the results.

One of the problems with running a small business all by yourself is that you may seldom get that feeling of accomplishment, or in any case, not be able to enjoy it fully.  Sure, you get done the things that need to get done.  But what about accomplishing some of those “big ideas” that are going to help your business explode and get you out of the daily grind?  Too often those daily tasks rob us of our grand dreams.

You have two options.  You can continue to put things off with an “I’ll get to that when…” attitude.  Or you can build yourself a system that incorporates accomplishing some of those big dreams into your daily business.  I choose building the system.  Without a good one, you will just stay where you are, hoping to catch a break.   

So how do you build that system?  What should it look like?  How about starting by picking just one long term goal.  Schedule the first hour of your work day for working on that goal.  First hour too busy putting out fires?  Try coming in an hour earlier, before the rush, at least until you accomplish your goal.  

One of my goals is to add some extra income into my business by becoming a UPS shipping location.  What is one attainable goal you can work on?