Creating More Time in Your Day

We never have enough time to do all the things we need to do. How many times have you said – if only there were a few more hours in the day? Well, we all waste a bunch of time every day and don’t even realize it. Here are some brief tips to help you find a few more minutes, or even hours in your day.

Get organized

If your office is cluttered, you will not be working efficiently – period. If you are wasting time looking for stuff and moving the same piece of paper ten times, then you need to tidy up and organize things in a way that makes sense for you. It’s surprising how much better a tidy office will make you feel – and the better you feel the more productive you will be.

Say no more often

Learn to prioritize and quit agreeing to do everything you are asked. We all like to be helpful to colleagues, people who are referred to us, charitable organizations and others, but you can’t be all things to all people. Remember your own business is your priority.

Manage electronic interruptions

Telephone and email are massive time thieves – every time you get interrupted it takes several minutes to get back into the swing of what you were doing. Handling these disruptions will depend on your style of work. Some people prefer to deal with calls and emails immediately and can get back to what they were doing quickly and easily – if that’s you, and it’s working for you, great. But, for many people it spirals into a never-ending series of distractions that prevent any serious work being done. Turn off the sound that alerts you to an email arriving, and let callers leave a message. Then once, or twice a day check your messages and return those that are urgent. If you need to, you can check more often, but give yourself extended periods of uninterrupted work.

Disappearing time

How often have you said, “I just don’t know where the day went”? Looking back on what we have accomplished in a day, or a week, most of us feel that we could have been more productive. If you start to take stock of every minute in the day, you’ll find that your working day is a great deal shorter than you think it is. Consider the number of minutes wasted driving to meetings, looking for parking, going to lunch and coffee breaks, water cooler visits, washroom breaks, daydreaming, dealing with interruptions, checking your Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter accounts, and you can see how easy it is for an eight-hour day to turn into just two hours of productive work. Be aware of the disappearing minutes and try to steal some of them back!

Meetings – the productivity black hole

If ever there was a way to create more time in your day it is to manage your meetings more efficiently, or better still cancel most of them! If you have to have a meeting, use a timed agenda and stick to it. Set the time of a meeting at an odd time like 9:50am, or 3:40pm. You’ll be surprised to find that more people actually turn up on time when you use this strategy. This will reduce the massive waste of time waiting for people to show up. Also, don’t let people add items during a meeting – train them to provide items in advance of the meeting so that they can go on the agenda.

Don’t try to be a hero

Entrepreneurs are terrible at delegating work – we always think we can do it better and faster than anyone else. We may be correct in that assumption, but doing everything ourselves is a time waster and not sustainable in the long-term. Delegation is as much a time-management skill as a human resources one, and is grossly underutilized by business owners.

Perfection is often unobtainable

Spending additional hours fine-tuning a document, or a project, can sometimes be necessary but ask yourself whether it is in every case. And, is anything ever perfect? When is excellent good enough? Those extra few hours spent polishing and polishing something are often not necessary and can be a major time-thief.

Don’t touch the same piece of paper twice

How often have you looked at a document only to put it down and decide you’ll deal with it later? Unless you are wading through a mess of papers on your desk looking for something specific (and this shouldn’t happen because tidying it is one of the ways to create more time!) once you pick up a document, or piece of paper with a note on it – do something about it, don’t just shelve it for later.

Stop procrastinating

You’ve probably heard the old sayings, “procrastination is the thief of time” and “don’t put off to tomorrow, what you can do today”? Well they’re true. One way to deal with this time-destroying plague is to make a list of all things you need to do and prioritize them. Then do the most difficult, or least appealing tasks first. Doing that is tough, but it will make you feel like you achieved something constructive, and that will spur you on to do more.

Plan, prioritize, focus

At the start of each day, think about what you need to achieve, make a list, and plan how you will execute what you need to do. One trick is to schedule specific times to do the most urgent tasks – treat them like an important meeting and carve out uninterruptable time.

Be nice to you!

You will be more productive if you are not working so hard that your stress levels are through the roof. Give yourself breaks – go for a walk – you’ll end up getting more done because your mind will be fresh and alert.

Think about all the time thieves in your day-to-day work life and do your best to eliminate them. If you do, your day might end up being a whole lot longer than you thought!