Get More Done By Doing Less
The purpose of Time Management isn’t just to fill your day with endless activity, productive or otherwise.
The purpose of Managing your Time is to Reclaim It so you can do the value adding activities important to you and your business.
The Focus that we’ve talked about previously is just one component. The driving force to get things done and what is still missing is the Direction.
Knowing the Right Action, and the Right Time to do it.
To that end here’s two pieces of advice that you can put into action today.
Batch Similar tasks.
Work Smarter, not Harder
For a glimpse into the kind of difference this can make to you and your business, meet John the baker.Like many of us in business, John is great at his job but is sometimes overwhelmed with the paperwork, and wishes he had more time for himself, and his family.
John knows how important the paperwork is, so he grits his teeth, and blocks away an hour a day to do all the paperwork.
Every work day for a month he sat down at 5 pm, pulled out all the physical receipts, and books and spent between 45 minutes and 2 hours to do this work.
As things stood he was losing up to 12 hours a week to dull, repetitive paperwork.
That just wasn’t good enough. So John looked around, and found the first piece of time management advice.
Batch Tasks
For the next month, John didn’t sit down at 5 pm to do the paperwork. Instead each work day, he added the paperwork to the week’s file, and went home to his family. He came back in on Sunday and wrapped up all the paperwork then.
John found that by batching all the paperwork to once a week, he was able to cut the time in half.
But this still wasn’t good enough. John really disliked paperwork, and he didn’t want to give up his Sunday each week. That’s the time he wanted to spend with his family.
Once again John looked for help, and he found advice and tools to help with the second strategy.
Work Smarter, not Harder.
It took a few weeks, but John was able to digitise the last of his ‘paper’ paperwork, and let his old work computer take care of the rest with the help of some clever pieces of software (If you’d like to talk about the tools we use, send us an email). 6 hours of paperwork a week became 3.
As he got better at using the tools and ironed out the last of the problems, 3 hours on Sunday became 1.5 on the quiet Monday mornings, reconciling the previous week.
It took some time, but John’s not only keeping his business on track, but he’s free to both do the value-adding work he loves, and spend time with his family.
