Feeling stressed out? As entrepreneurs we never seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done. We typically take on many of the roles in the company from the janitor up to the CEO and work ourselves to the bone. Here are a few time saving tricks I have been experimenting with over the past little while that have been paying off.
Automate Your Business
Think about the areas where you spend the most amount of time on a regular basis and find a way to automate it. I spend the first hour and a half of every morning working on more ways to automate my business. Today, for example, I updated my system to give the people who write on my website easier access to their passwords. I have over 950 writers for the website and this new system will save us all time. It was a quick 30 minute fix for me and will pay off after a week of implementation. I also began working on automating the creation of my newsletter. It takes me about an hour per week to put together and send out. After an hour this morning and another hour or so tomorrow morning I’ll be close to finished and it will free up more of my time every week. The key is to look at repetitive tasks that have similar characteristics. Find out what is common and automate it. Your time should not be spent on something technology can do for you. Being busy does not mean you will be successful. You need to get busy on the high value tasks for your company.
Do the important work first
Every day I come to work with a list of things I want to get done and the I start working on them before doing anything else like checking email, returning phone calls, etc. Since automation is a critical factor for me it is always the first thing I do. I used to finish off my day and wonder where all the time went. The important tasks never got done because I was too wrapped up with distractions. Now I make sure that progress is made on the key tasks because they are the first things I focus on when I get into the office.
Check Stats Once Per Day
Since I have an online business, there are countless programs that I am using that each have their own statistics packages. It is far too easy to get distracted by constantly checking your stats. I used to check my Google AdSense account, Alexa rating, live web statistics, Google sitemap figures, and countless other statistics multiple times per day. Now I do it once – first thing in the morning. I wake up, grab a bowl of cereal and check my stats. That’s it. The stats will not change if I watch them all day long or only once per day and it has saved me a lot of distraction time that can be better focused.
Answer Emails Once Per Day
This was a particularly hard one to start doing. Every day I get hundreds of emails from authors, media, partners, advertisers, and visitors who are interested in my site and want a response. I had my Outlook going all day long and answered emails almost as soon as they came in. I would leave projects I was working on to answer emails and then forget what I was doing and where I left off. There are actually very few emails that NEED to be answered right away. You would be surprised at how many people think their emails need an urgent response when in fact, they can wait. Now I answer emails once per day and usually check in close to the end of the day for any emails from my key partners. Otherwise the auto send/receive every minute has been turned off and I do not check my Outlook except for finding a contact or looking at my calender. It has surprisingly not had a negative impact on my business and has given me way more time to focus on important projects.
Chunk Your Time
When you chunk your time and set aside designated times / days for certain tasks you get a heck of a lot more done. When I am answering my emails once per day it is a pretty intensive 2 (or so) hours. I am typing at a mile a minute, do not let anything else distract me and everything gets done. It is amazing how productive you can be when you focus on a specific task. I have applied this philosophy to many tasks in my business. We do website updates at the beginning of the week. If a request comes up at the end of the week, we tell people that we will gladly take care of it at the beginning of the next week when we do our next update. I do my meetings with people on Wednesdays. We also do our newsletter on Wednesdays as well as most of our marketing. For most of our tasks we let them pile up for a reasonable period of time and then handle them all at once to get the most out of our time. Obviously you do not want to go overboard and have angry customers who ordered from you and you take six months to ship because you want to maximize your time but by chunking your tasks in a reasonable way you can dramatically increase your efficiency and free up even more time to focus on building your business.
These are some of the things I have found to be useful – what do you do to get more done in your day?
Evan Carmichael
