Tips on Time Management for Entrepreneurs

If you’re already familiar with basic principles of time management, you might know that these insights help to increase productivity per unit of time. Of course, time management is applicable not only to entrepreneurship – it permeates our activities starting from the early morning and ending with going to bed late in the evening. Your daily routine, no matter who you are – entrepreneur, professional writer, athlete, driver, etc. – can be improved with an art of time management.

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Working on DesignContest for a long time, I couldn’t help noticing excellent entrepreneurial skills of many of our designers. Many of them had or still have small but quite successful businesses. So I decided to find out the tricks they use to boost the productivity of a day to the maximum. As a result, I’ve collected a set of useful tips I want to share with you now.

#1 Introduce the Concept of a “Personal Effectiveness”

So, your personal effectiveness is the amount of work done for the benefit of the enterprise. This indicator is always measurable.

Take, for example, sales managers: XX calls per day and X meetings. By gathering monthly statistics, you can find out how many calls and meetings have led to a positive result and how many were useless. You can also analyze the amount of income that each employee has generated for the company for the last month. That’s nothing but a personal effectiveness.

Being an entrepreneur, you’re in charge of the enterprise. The collected statistic will help you to track measures done for the benefit of the future development of the company and eliminate/reduce to a minimum the useless activities.

If the effectiveness during the last period was low, you have to develop a series of measures to improve it. Please don’t just sit and cry. You’re entrepreneur – don’t forget about it!

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#2 Set Inspiring Goals

Not only the financial but also the ideological inspiration is needed to improve the daily effectiveness. If the work brings pleasure, it’s always done in time. When we’re inspired, we notice neither the time flow nor the fatigue.

The world witnessed a great number of cases when a person dramatically changed his activity and achieved major success. The best business is a business build on your passion. If you’re engaged, you exert every effort at every time point.

#3 Stick to Pareto Principle

Any important action must be carefully planned and thought out. However, too painstaking preparation for ordinary and passing operations delays the execution. Therefore, you have to distinguish the important operations that directly affect the success of your business from ordinary ones.

According to Pareto principle, you have about 20% of really important doings while the rest 80% can be done at a reasonable level of mental strain. You may not know, but it’s psychologically easier to do the job if you don’t perceive it as “extremely important.”

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#4 Get Rid of Bad Habits

It is necessary to understand the harmful habits and eliminate those that do harm to the work. At the same time, your brain needs rest even during the working day. The best way to refresh is to switch the activities:

For example, you have a meeting with a supplier of raw material in the morning, then work on drawing up the plan, then check the production in the workshop, and finally write letters to a few instances. Thus, by switching between collective and individual activities, you diversify the daily working routine and develop thinking flexibility.

If you cross at least a couple of unnecessary habits out of your life, the amount of time to perform the work will increase at times! Let’s take smoking as an example:

How many cigarettes do you smoke within 8 hours of the working day? Sum up the time of smoking with the time wasted on going to a smoking room and the time wasted on buying cigarettes, and you’ll obtain about an extra hour per day!

If you do need brakes, better take a couple of physical exercises.

#5 Do not Plan too Much “Heavy” Days

Do not overload the daily plan with a huge number of cases. According to statistics, an average entrepreneur is able to make 6 cases at a fairly good level. Sure, you can plan more – but is there any sense in such a pursuit?

The too hard regime will quickly exhaust you, and your productivity will become even worse. Break large tasks into a set of smaller and more realistic ones.

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#6 Avoid Procrastination and Nervousness Even If Something Went Wrong

If you do not have time to do something and feel your plan fails, then just postpone the task. Excessive panic and self-flagellation can kill the entrepreneur in you. Is that money worth depriving yourself of sleep, personal life and health?

Bio: Brian Jens is a logo designer who loves blogging. Brian is currently working on DesignContest – the cornerstone platform in the niche. His studies are always backed up by fact and personal experience. Brian never refuses to answer readers’ request. He’s an open-hearted person ready to discuss your ideas and do a unique and high-quality research.

Tips on Time Management for Entrepreneurs

  • ZandarKoad

    I’d suggest changing point five to ‘Do Not Plan Too Many “Heavy” Days’.

    One thing that strikes me as a little odd when anyone refers to the Pareto principle is the notion that we can somehow alter our habits to capitalize on the principle. Can we somehow cut out 80% of our activities and still be 80% as effective? Wouldn’t that then violate the Pareto principle? It’s often presented as a universal constant found it all sorts of disparate data sets, leading one to believe it can’t be overcome or altered…?

    There are also many tools one should put to use to automate and scale. We use Time Doctor and JIRA to manage our development teams time and payroll, and it woks very well.

    Good summary!