7 Tips To Improve Your Time Management and Excel At Your Business

I have been running my business for 5 years now and I can tell you with 100% certainty that having amazing time management will make your business. If you can not manage your time correctly you will not maximize your time and your business will not grow that the pace it could.

Over the past 5 years, I have figured out a few tips and tricks and today I am going to share them with you! Prioritizing Work  The key to managing time better is to prioritize your work. It not only helps you to make use of your time productively but it also helps in improving your self-discipline.

I use Asana to keep myself and my team organized. It allows me to enter in all of my tasks and set due dates and times.

The second thing I do is I make a schedule and I follow it.  A million years ago I wrote a blog post about making a schedule, even though the schedule has shifted the advice is still solid advice.

In your personal and professional lives, you will always face two types of activities – the important ones and the unimportant ones. The key is to identify the difference between the two and spend your time/energy in the right direction to achieve your goals. You have to make a list of “to-do” things on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, as per your requirement to identify the tasks that have to be completed urgently.

Dissection of time  Reflecting on how you spend your time on a daily basis is a very important tip that you should follow to manage your time more effectively than ever.

How many hours are you spending at work? Which is your most and least productive time? How often do you take breaks? How many hours have you worked effectively in a day?

These are some of the questions that you should analyse to know if you have been spending your energies in the right direction. When you know how well (or how badly!) you have spent your day, it will give you an idea of time management. After all, what can be a better teacher than your own experiences? While we do say that there is no use crying over spilt milk, we also stress upon dissection of the time that you have spent already, because this is an important yardstick for you to measure your performance for the next day.

While dissecting, you may have found that you have wasted a lot of time on a Monday, in checking and clearing emails. So, you can correct this when you start work on the following day. Mailclearing can be pushed to the bucket-list titled “not important”, and you may only read those emails that are related to your urgent/important deliverables for that day.

Resist Temptations  If you want to inculcate self-discipline in your lives, it is very important to exercise self-control over your likes and dislikes. If you want to manage your 24 hours effectively and make the most out of your day, you have to get rid of your temptation to wake up late.

I know when you work from home, it is so tempting to sleep as long as you want. When I tell people I have a morning alarm that goes off Monday-Saturday they look at me like I am crazy because I don't "have" to be anywhere. But, I do. Yes, I don't have a boss telling me where I need to be but my success depends completely on the work I put into what I am doing.

I promise if you set a schedule and set an alarm you will start to notice a huge difference within a week.

Breakdown Your Goals To plan your time effectively, you need to plan your activities properly. When you look at a big goal, it may seem daunting to you at first, but you will be surprised to note that the process gets simpler when you break down this big goal.

Write down a list of small sub-goals that you need to achieve and the timeline by when you need to achieve them. As you keep meeting these sub-goals one by one, you will eventually reach the big goal, without any hassles and by overcoming all the obstacles. Your major goal may to earn $100k a year.

This may be quite intimidating for you. However, when you break down it to about $8k a month, $2k a week, or $300 a day, the goal looks more achievable for you, isn’t it? You always need to understand that life is never complicated; it is we who make it complex and unreasonable, at times.

Healthy And Structured Lifestyle  You need to maintain a proper structure in your life and follow the structure at all times, come what may if you want to perfect the art of time management.

Time can be managed well only by those who are self-disciplined and have an undying passion for chasing their dreams. You can manage your 24 hours effectively every single day, only when you are physically and mentally fit.

You should eat and sleep on time regularly to maintain a healthy style. You have to make sure that you eat a balanced diet so that your body gets the required energy to stay fresh and fit for a long time.

When your mind is fresh, you feel relaxed, and it helps you plan your work well. You need to indulge in one hour of physical activity every day as it not only helps you to tone up your physique but also helps you in mental relaxation.

You can not perform at your top if you are not taking care of yourself.

I am not on a soapbox at all when it comes to this. I struggle so much with this topic. I can tell you that I feel so much more productive when I am taking care of myself. I perform my best when I am exercising and eating correctly.

Clean The Clutter  I am the type of person that I can not think straight if there is clutter around me.

When you are in a clean zone, you are encouraged to work hard and effectively. For example, when you are working on an important deliverable at office, the first step you have to do is to create folders in your mailbox and move irrelevant emails.

You should have only your project-related emails in your inbox so that you can refer to them easily. When you have to look for that one important email amidst 50-60 unnecessary emails, you end up wasting your valuable time.

What are the tasks required to be performed for the project on that particular day? Out of these, which ones are urgent? Should they be done by yourself or can it be delegated to your team members?  These are some of the questions that you should ponder about before you start work.

All of these questions will not only give you a clean space to work in, but will also make you more disciplined than ever to approach a task with a lot of clarity in your minds.

Don’t Put Off Things "Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today." -Benjamin Franklin.

The biggest enemy of effective time management is procrastination.

Instead of being too hard on yourself, analyze what makes you procrastinate something frequently.  Is the goal too challenging or complex for you? Don’t you feel motivated enough to carry out the task that you had set your mind to do on that day? Are you too tired to finish off the activity for that day?

There could be many reasons why you want to put off the task until later. You should first do a self-analysis to understand what tempts you to put off a task and then act on that particular reason so that you never procrastinate again in the future.

If the goal is too complex for you, you can follow one of the steps that we mentioned above – breakdown the big goal into smaller and easier sub-goals so that it becomes easier for you. If you don’t seem to have enough time to do all the tasks that you had thought of, on the same day, you may try to prioritize your tasks better so that you don’t spend your time and energy on tasks that don’t deserve them.

Do you have any tips that I missed? How do you manage your time? Let me know below!!