Time Management - Tips for small business owners

Is your time and money being spent on the right things?? 

Here is one way to find out...

Step 1: Write down a short list (max 6 things) that sum up the various roles you play in your business.

Step 2: Now break an average day in your life into 10 parts and give each role a percentage out of the 10 parts, depending on the amount of time you spend on it(the total should add up to 100%)

Step 3: Now highlight the role/s that ONLY you are able to fulfill in your business, i.e – you could never outsource this as this is the main part of your business.

Example:

1. Blogging                                                         50%

2. Website maintenance                                      20%

3. Creating new products/ services                       30%

Step 4: Answer the following question truthfully - 

"Out of your 10 part day, how of your time is being spent on this/ these roles?"

Step 5: Address the issue...

If you find that very little of your time is actually being spent on the ‘product/ service you are offering’ then you may need to reassess your time management...and quickly.

Starting your own business is fun and scary and all things wonderful, but what we, most new entrepreneurs, tend to do, is to do it ALL on their own. From their branding, to their website design, to their blogging and then of course creating their actual products/ providing their services. This is awesome and I’m all for being hands on with your business, but while your website, blogging and branding are all key to the success of your business, the simple truth is that your business will cease to exist the moment you stop creating new products, offering new services or tweaking old services, making them better and improved. If you are able to maintain a healthy balance between these two things then keep at it, but if you are currently spending too much time on things that someone else could actually be doing for you in a quarter of the time its currently taking you, then it’s time to reassess.

You only get so many hours in a day or week, and each of these is valuable to the building of a successful business. What I recently noticed was happening to me, was that I was spending 90 percent of my time trying to master the things I know so little about, like website design and branding, and 10 percent of my time on the actual service I am offering.

I get that you may ultimately want to be able to do all this {branding, graphics, editing, social media} on your own, so you are avoiding outsourcing, but there are other ways around this....

Here are 3 ‘outsourcing’ tips:

-      # 1 - Log onto Fiverr (www.fiverr.com) and see what services people are currently offering for only 5 dollars. This may not be a long term plan but could save you huge amounts of time right now.

-     # 2 - Contact a friend who is in website design, branding, etc and ask them to sit with you one afternoon/ evening and explain to you some of the simple things that are currently taking you hours to figure out. {Offer them compensation as this way, both you will take this time more seriously}

     # 3 - Consider signing up for a short course in one of the areas that is currently stealing all of your time but that, through a short-course, you could learn to master quickly. 

Lastly, I’m sure your products/ services are already good...so imagine just how good they could be if more of your time was being spent focusing on your strengths and not your weaknesses.

Do what you do best...and outsource the rest!! {Click to tweet}