Many entrepreneurs operate all alone. They they're the web designer, accountant, manager, financial planner, and more. They may also be husbands and wives and moms and dads trying to keep everyone happy and addressed. A planned time management does not exist. They try to be everyone and everywhere. While you may be able to keep this up for a while very often you reach a point where it seems you are working 24/7 and still feel like nothing gets accomplished. That is the time to stop, take a breath and try a different way to tackle the daily routine.
Once you realized that you can't possibly do everything you deem necessary ask yourself "how can I best use my energy and time today?" Take the time to make three sorted lists of all things you planned to do and check what a) absolutely needs to be done in order to not risk your business, b) and what you need to do to reach your long term goal and c) what is not absolutely necessary or only done to make you feel good accomplishing it. Do all things in list a) and at least half of list b) and one or two things of list c). Only when you are done with these you can tackle finishing the rest of tasks.
You can create one big prioritized list for the week and reconsider every five tasks to include new important things that may have come up. Starting with the most important items will give you great satisfaction when completed and energize you to move on. At some point down the list it should be much easier for you to call it a day and get some rest.
A very successful tactic is also creating sub-tasks, i.e. smaller junks of tasks. Let's say you had to complete a brochure for your business. Tasks one would be to brain storm what you information you want to include, task two to identify the different sections, then the color scheme, etc. Or you wanted to answer customer emails, make each sub-task a block of five customers. The reason for the success of this tactic is that you can see the progress, whereas before even though you had already answered half of your customers emails you still hadn't completed any task.
Make it a priority to care about your physical and mental health. Arguments with neglected spouses can be the nail to the coffin of your motivation. Eating nothing to safe time will just wear you down much quicker. So make it an item within your time management to eat lunch at best with friends or family or add some workout as high priority for next Wednesday. You will see a refreshed mind and body are needed to make sure you can keep going.
Setting boundaries is very important to make sure you don't burn out. One boundary can be a maximum number of hours you work per day or the number of hours you work without a break. Meaning that just when you reached these maximum numbers of hours you stop working no matter whether are done or not. When you are honest with yourself you know that at a certain degree of exhaustion or sleep deprivation you can as well stop working because it doesn't change your output significantly. That is actually one of the best habits in terms of time management of successful entrepreneurs. They know when it is enough.
Acknowledging when we cannot do more and should ask for help is also a very difficult but absolutely crucial for success. The math is simple if you try to do everything and you reach a point where the quality of what you do suffers, you need to involve other people within your operation or outside of it. For example outsourcing simple defined tasks concerning design, advertising, website creation, accounting etc. is relatively simple to do and definitively money well spent.
Once you realized that you can't possibly do everything you deem necessary ask yourself "how can I best use my energy and time today?" Take the time to make three sorted lists of all things you planned to do and check what a) absolutely needs to be done in order to not risk your business, b) and what you need to do to reach your long term goal and c) what is not absolutely necessary or only done to make you feel good accomplishing it. Do all things in list a) and at least half of list b) and one or two things of list c). Only when you are done with these you can tackle finishing the rest of tasks.
You can create one big prioritized list for the week and reconsider every five tasks to include new important things that may have come up. Starting with the most important items will give you great satisfaction when completed and energize you to move on. At some point down the list it should be much easier for you to call it a day and get some rest.
A very successful tactic is also creating sub-tasks, i.e. smaller junks of tasks. Let's say you had to complete a brochure for your business. Tasks one would be to brain storm what you information you want to include, task two to identify the different sections, then the color scheme, etc. Or you wanted to answer customer emails, make each sub-task a block of five customers. The reason for the success of this tactic is that you can see the progress, whereas before even though you had already answered half of your customers emails you still hadn't completed any task.
Make it a priority to care about your physical and mental health. Arguments with neglected spouses can be the nail to the coffin of your motivation. Eating nothing to safe time will just wear you down much quicker. So make it an item within your time management to eat lunch at best with friends or family or add some workout as high priority for next Wednesday. You will see a refreshed mind and body are needed to make sure you can keep going.
Setting boundaries is very important to make sure you don't burn out. One boundary can be a maximum number of hours you work per day or the number of hours you work without a break. Meaning that just when you reached these maximum numbers of hours you stop working no matter whether are done or not. When you are honest with yourself you know that at a certain degree of exhaustion or sleep deprivation you can as well stop working because it doesn't change your output significantly. That is actually one of the best habits in terms of time management of successful entrepreneurs. They know when it is enough.
Acknowledging when we cannot do more and should ask for help is also a very difficult but absolutely crucial for success. The math is simple if you try to do everything and you reach a point where the quality of what you do suffers, you need to involve other people within your operation or outside of it. For example outsourcing simple defined tasks concerning design, advertising, website creation, accounting etc. is relatively simple to do and definitively money well spent.
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