Become more efficient, save time and money for your Business!

Anyone serious about achievement in business needs to be obsessed about time efficiency. Most executives and entrepreneurs are using the same time management concepts they used a decade ago.

We need to study time efficiency as ardently as we study sales, marketing, leadership and management.

Here are some effective ways to save time and help you get more done in your business day.

1. Plan your day before you start:  Ambitious people love to just jump into their work as soon as they enter their office. This can be a big mistake. One minute of planning at the start saves ten minutes of work later on.
2. Do the most important task first:  Notice I did not suggest doing the most urgent task first. They are often not the same thing. Important tasks like planning, learning, establishing joint ventures, marketing, skills development and building relationships lead to business success.
3. Delegate everything except your greatest strengths: Most people have never sat down and identified what they're really good at. And even fewer spend most of their day doing those things. Yet in that simple technique lies the secret to extraordinary achievement. Work out your strengths and how you can delegate most of the rest. You can rarely get rid of everything you should, but it is possible to delegate a lot more than you're doing.
4. Rush the unimportant: It's a nice concept to do everything superbly, but in today's lightning speed world it's just not practical. You can't do it all well. Pick what's not vital and rush it. Use the extra time to get the really valuable tasks done well.
5. Compress your time: Don't ever have an open amount of time to get a task done. Always challenge yourself to get it completed in a certain time period.  You will be amazed at how much more quickly you'll finish jobs when you put yourself under a little pressure. Leave your deadlines open and everything will be done slower..
6. Have a leaving time: Everyone has a starting time, few people have a leaving time. But when you know you have to leave the office at an exact time, your productivity throughout the day will rise.
7. Have smarter meetings: Have more telephone meetings instead of face to face meetings. It saves a lot of time. Learn to decline meetings that you really don’t need to be at and have fewer people attend the meetings, you will make decisions much faster. Don’t have 30- or 60-minute meetings.  Instead, make them a maximum of 20 or 40 mins. Even shorter whenever possible.
8. Do hard things early:  People get less effective as the day goes on, so do your tricky tasks first thing – when your brain’s flying!
9. Use your emails effectively:  Outlook calendar for example has a complete system for inviting people to attend meetings and it saves a number of phone calls confirming things and the reminders are automatic.  When sending emails, keep it simple, clearly communicate in a shorter email what you agreed, what the action is and what information you need to follow up on that action.  Long story telling emails can cause your recipient to tune out! Your chances of getting a result will be less.

For more information on time efficiency in business contact Jim Doyle on 053 9170507 or email jim@rda.ie