The 4 strategies you can use to better manage your time as an entrepreneur.

Time management skills are obviously going to be different the way they’re applied for each individual person’s circumstances but the generality of them all are going to apply to absolutely every entrepreneur out there. 

1. Begin eliminating things:

You need to begin eliminating things. And there are  three things that I want you to eliminate. 

   a).Eliminate excuses.– Time is 100% an illusion, and if you want something bad enough, you will find the time to do it. Someone may claim  that they don’t have the time to clean their desk, but yet somehow they have two hours to spend looking for their phone under the mess in their office. If you need the time, it will be there.

  b) -The notion that you can’t make sacrifices.- If you’re in a full-time job now, yes, you might have to do more work than someone who is able to work on their business full-time, but if you want it badly enough, you will make it happen. It’s not an impossible thing. That’s the thing. If someone else has done it before, then you can do it as well. Yes, it might mean waking up earlier and working on your business before you go to work. Yes, it might mean sacrificing some social events on the weekend. I’m obviously saying, you know, some people’s circumstances do allow them for more time to work on their business, but it’s not impossible to build your business with everything timewise going against you. If someone else has done it, then you can 100% do it, and the only reason why they did it is because they wanted it bad enough that they were able to eliminate and sacrifice some things out of their lives. 

c)Things that don’t serve your higher purpose.- And a good example of this is I find a lot of entrepreneurs using social media feeling like they need to be absolutely everywhere. They’re on Snapchat, Instagram stories, Facebook lives, YouTube, blogs. Find the things that actually are going to contribute to what it is you are trying to achieve and focus your efforts on those instead of trying to wear yourself in and be absolutely everywhere. And you can even take that one step further and eliminate the social media game for yourself altogether.

Outsource as much as you possibly can. As many things as you can eliminate within your business that aren’t serving you. Don’t just do things because someone else is doing them or because you think you should, because that is a waste of time. 

2. Chunk things.

 Okay, our brains are obsessed with chunking things because we really actually don’t work well when we multitask.

For example, if you are creating blogs, you can do this at the beginning of the week, you could do this at the beginning of the month, whatever obviously suits your schedule. But let’s say you’re sitting down to film videos for YouTube. You should be filming, you know, five to eight videos every single time you sit down to film. If you are writing newsletters, you should be writing ten different newsletters as you go along. Blog posts, write as many blog posts as you can. Try to chunk things within your business as much as you possibly can. Have one day a week for content creation.

Even chunk things down throughout your day. Have one hour where you spend on email management. Have one hour where you spend on social media. The more you flick between tasks, the more time that you actually waste. I think in the book, the one thing Gary Keller explains is that you waste up to 35% of your day when you are multitasking. And especially us in the digital age, we are so distracted. The more tabs we’ve got up, the more different things we’ve got going on at a time, the more we are going to be distracted and the less time we’re going to have to be productive. So from now onwards, have it in mind. Multitasking is not a strength but rather a weakness. 

3.Automate and schedule tasks  as much as possible

 You know, when you are running a one-woman show, there’s so many different things that you can do, and as much as you can use automation to help, the better. If you can’t hire a VA, all social media should be scheduled.

If you’ve just sat down and filmed and edited eight videos, then upload them and schedule them and you don’t have to think about them again for the rest of the month. Same with your blog posts, same with your Facebook posts, same with your newsletters. Every single social media platform within business has some sort of scheduling element to them. If they don’t, then there’s an external program that you can use for it. It is just about being organized, it is just about planning, it’s just about putting in that little bit of extra work and being in front of the game.

4. Mitigate distractions. 

We have the attention span of a goldfish and that’s just the way that it is.You know, we flick through things quickly, we scroll through things so quickly and that obviously doesn’t serve us when we are trying to sit down and create things within our business.

You need to turn off your phone when you’re sitting down to work so that you’re not tempted to jump on and quickly look at social media and then lose an hour of your time. Even if you need to, use those apps. Block all your social media channels when you are sitting down to work. That way you can  really manage your time as an entrepreneur.

So those are my four tips for how you can better manage your time as an entrepreneur.