Business  Owners:  Do you have enough time to do everything you need to?  If not, here are my Top 17 Tips to Get More Stuff Done! Claw back your life & get some control.

  1. Do a Time Survey

Put together a spreadsheet where every half an hour of your day for two weeks can be noted down.  Write down what you do every day for 14 days.  You’ll be shocked at how you spend your working hours.  Knowing what you’re currently doing will help you master your time.

  1. Do a Skills/Fun Leverage Chart

Plot all of the activities that you’re doing (from the Time Survey) on a chart where you rate each activity in terms of how much skill it needs, and how much fun it is to do.  You’ll notice a great deal of your time is spent in the Low Skill & Low Fun quadrant.  You should look at outsourcing these tasks to someone who earns a lot less than you do.  Find a Virtual Assistant to do those tasks.

  1. Plan your next day at the end of the current one

Planning your day is important.  Planning the next day at the end of the current one allows you to hit the floor running first thing in the morning.  It also allows your sub-conscious mind to work on issues overnight while you sleep.  This increasing your productiveness.

  1. Eat a Frog Every Day

Create a task list of things that you want to get done each day.  Start that list with the most horrible task and get it out of the way.  This is called Eating a Frog For Breakfast and will help your productivity in a huge way. The rest of the tasks will look easy and be more fun once you’ve got the difficult one out of the way.

  1. Create a Default Diary

Put together a plan for your week with specific activities on it.  So that you know at any time what you’re supposed to be doing. If you get distracted with an emergency, when you come back you can pick up where you left off.

  1. Create Schedules of Activities

Create weekly checklists of activities that must be done.  Produce a monthly one and also a quarterly one.  Review these at the end of each week, month and quarter to make sure they’ve been completed.

  1. Introduce Key Performance Indicators

KPI’s are a great way of tracking your productivity and getting the most out of your time.  For each activity you do, analyse how long the task takes, and put together goals that you need to achieve in a timeframe on your default diary. Review these on a daily basis.  Put them in place for all of your employees too.

  1. Systemise your Routine Tasks

Invest time at looking at your repeatable tasks and researching ways to employ technology to speed them up or automate them completely.  A good Customer Relationship Management system can free up a lot of your time.

  1. Learn to say “No”

Life is full of opportunities, but there is a finite amount that one person can do.  Looking at what’s most important, focussing on that task and saying no to distractions is a great way to achieve your goals.

  1. Document Processes so other people can do them for you

You’ve heard the phrase “If you want the job done right then do it yourself” – well, that’s okay if you like working 70 hours a week and driving yourself nuts.  The smart manager will document how they do things so that any body can pick up the process with some training.

  1. Turn off the notifications on your phone

Constantly being bombarded with pings & things popping up on your phone? Turn them all off.  It’s incredible how liberating this is!

  1. Only go on Social Media with a purpose

Social Media can be a huge drain on your time.  It saps you of it on a daily basis. How much time do you waste surfing through meaningless posts?Unless your job is Social Media marketing – then stay off it unless you’ve got a specific reason to go on.

  1. Shut down your email

Instead of jumping on emails every 10 mins or when they pop into your inbox, plan an hour a day when you’ll deal with emails. Don’t look at them at all until the allocated time.  Put an auto-responder on to assure your clients you’ll answer their mail.  Tell them in the auto-response to call you if it’s really urgent…

  1. Stop taking phone calls

Allocate an hour a day to deal with phone calls.  Make sure that your voicemail tells people that you’ll get back to them in the window of time you’ve decided on.  Train your staff to deal with things without you.

  1. Avoid feeling overwhelmed

Break your tasks into smaller ones and cross them off the list when you’re done.  I like to physically write my To Do lists on paper and then put a line through them when they’re completed.  I can see progress and the act of crossing them off gives me a great sense of achievement.

  1. Don’t confuse activity with productivity

Take a good careful look at what you’re doing with your time (from the Time Survey) and eliminate the tasks that don’t contribute to your overall goals and business.  Being a “busy fool” might give you the illusion that you’re going places, but it’s exactly that –  a mirage.

  1. Take time to be still, and relax

Recent research has revealed that stress is actually good for you…  IF it’s in short bursts and you get a break from it.  Sustained stress is a killer.  So make sure you create time in your life for those that matter and plan activities with them that are enjoyable.  With no other purpose in mind other than to relax.

 

If you have your own top tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments…  The more I get, the more we can help people to get more out of their lives.

I’ve done a load of vidoes on this too.  Check out my News & Blog pages on this web site.