As a small business owner, you don’t always have the same resources that larger companies and global organizations have. In particular, you’ve likely discovered that your time is your most precious asset. And while you can’t increase the amount of time you have in a week, you can learn to use it more intelligently.
5 Time-Tested, Time-Saving Strategies
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you want to save time and be more productive, simply follow the strategies that other successful business owners are using to enhance their own workflows. Here are a few that we recommend you start with:
1. Create a Distraction-Free Zone
Think about how distracting your office can be. If your office is like most, you have a computer, tablet, smartphone, and maybe even an office phone. Then there are scanners, printers, and fax machines. The ringing, dinging, and buzzing is enough to drive you crazy. And that’s just the technology! We haven’t even mentioned people poking their head into your office, the distractions of looking out your office window to the busy street below, or the smell of microwaved fish wafting in from the break room.
Offices are designed to be places where you work, but as a business owner, they’re often non-conducive to productivity. That’s why it’s highly recommended to create a separate workspace known as a “distraction-free zone.”
Your distraction-free zone could be a spare office, an empty utility closet, a private boardroom, or a home office. It’s less important where it’s located and more important that you have one.
A distraction-free zone is a place where you only focus on productivity. While you’ll probably need a computer, everything else should be stripped away. Notifications should be silenced, people should be avoided, and your only focus should be on getting stuff done.
Try to spend at least one hour per day in your distraction-free zone. This will almost always be your most productive period of the workday.
2. Leverage the Right Apps
There’s an abundance of productivity apps on the marketplace. Some of them are useful while others are just noise. Make sure you’re using the right ones, while avoiding the apps that merely look like they’re helpful.
At the moment, some of the best productivity apps include Things, Quip, Evernote, Focus Booster, Remember the Milk, Wunderlist, Todoist, and Trello.
3. Use Business Intelligence Tools
It’s easy to get bogged down by data. Numbers, statistics, and reports pour in from every platform, channel, and software solution your organization uses. And if you aren’t careful, you can get so caught up in organizing data that you never get the chance to actually use the data.
Business intelligence (BI) can help you address this issue. The best BI tools on the marketplace make it easy to collect and analyze data, monitor trends, and make smart, proactive decisions that are rooted in sophisticated predictive analytics.
BI is all about decreasing time spent analyzing data so that you can get straight to the implementation stage of the game. Not only does this eliminate wasted time, but it also makes your business more agile.
4. Outsource Whenever Possible
Releasing control is one of the toughest things for a small business owner to do. But if you want to use your time more efficiently, you have to learn to focus on the 20 percent of tasks that produce 80 percent of the results. The rest of the tasks can be outsourced and delegated to make the most of your time.
5. Hire People You Trust
Want to make delegation easier? Learn how to hire people you can trust. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier.
When you trust people, you don’t have to micromanage or worry that they’re taking advantage of you. You can hand off tasks and then focus on your own responsibilities. That’s how you improve productivity without compromising.
Multiply Your Productivity
You can’t increase time, but you can amplify what you do with your time. Productivity doesn’t have to be as elusive as it seems. By tweaking your approach to how you schedule and leverage time, you can get more done within the same amount of time.
Which time-tested time-saving strategy will you implement first?
