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Time management tips – part two

Time Management How do you manage your time?  Time slips by too quickly and can leave you wondering what you have achieved each day. Following on from Part One, here are some more tips that can be helpful in organising your day.

  • Time track yourself.  See how much time a task really takes.  Perhaps you put things off thinking they take too much time or you think something will take half an hour only to emerge from it two hours later.  Time each task for a day or so, so that you know how long your principal tasks generally take and then you’ll be able to create a realistic work schedule.
  • Don’t procrastinate – do it!  If it’s on your list, do it.  Don’t waste time.
  • Stop for lunch.  Decide on a lunchtime and stick to it.   If you decide on 1pm, stop then and take a break.  If you find yourself eating at 2pm you’ll lose your focus and again find yourself trying to catch up.
  • Mail.  Dealing with both regular and electronic mail can eat up a lot of your valuable time and you can end up feeling swamped by paperwork or emails.  Delete or throw away adverts, don’t waste time on them in case they might be useful.  Action as much mail as possible immediately.  If you think ‘I’ll do it later’, chances are you will find it still sitting there days later.  You can answer some mail with a short email or note.  Choose a certain time each day for dealing with mail, depending on the time that it arrives.  If the mail arrives at 10am, choose 10 to 10.30am for it and include emails too.  Choose times that are best for you and your business needs.
  • Calls.  Make a list, and choose a time to do them as for the mail.  Decide roughly how long each call should take and try to keep to this.
  • Finally, be flexible.  Your schedule is not set in stone, it has to fit in with your day and take into account out of office meetings, urgent calls, sudden urgent work, etc. However, it can give your day structure and purpose.

 

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Time management tips – part one

How do you manage your time?  Have you found, when working on your own, whether from home or not, that you need to be disciplined and structure your hours, or time can slip imperceptibly through your hands and you can end up wondering what you have done with your day.

  Here are some tips that I found helpful to get you started.

  • Get up early!  This seems too obvious to mention, but if you’re ready to go at 8am you’ll get more done.  You may be a night owl and not an early bird, but if you start after 9am or take too long over your morning coffee, you’ll find that you spend the rest of the day trying to catch up.
  • Write a to-do list.  Obvious too, but how do you use this useful tool?  Write it at the end of the previous day so that it is ready for you in the morning.  Divide it into two. One will be a list of things that cannot be completed in one day but need regular time scheduled for them.  The second will be a list of what you have to do in the day.
  • Scheduling.  This is linked to the to-do list.  Decide on a time for each task, both large and small.  With your long-term tasks, block in half an hour or however much time you plan to spend on them, on your schedule – this could be useful for administrative tasks that need to be done regularly for your business, such as bookkeeping.  Stick to the time you have allocated, use a timer if you have to, or else you’ll find you’ve spent all morning on one task and are again trying to catch up.
  • Do two or three quick tasks first.  This will get you going and also it will feel encouraging to have crossed two or three things off your list quite quickly.  Then you are more motivated to tackle the bigger tasks.
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Avez- vous besoin d’un assistant virtuel?

               Si vous êtes un propriétaire de petite entreprise, vous savez que le temps est précieux.  Combien de celui-ci consacrez-vous à des tâches administratives alors que vous pourriez travailler au développement de votre entreprise?  Enfin, vous pouvez trouver que vous ne pouvez pas tout faire vous-même et que les tâches de gestion de bureau peuvent commencer à prendre le temps que vous voudriez utiliser pour créer votre entreprise et augmenter votre productivité et votre chiffre d’affaires.  Cependant, vous ne voulez pas employer un assistant administratif pour faire face à ces tâches banales.  Vous ne disposez pas de la possibilité d’embaucher un assistant en interne, vous ne pouvez pas payer les coûts supplémentaires en taxes, les assurances et autres que l’embauche d’un employé à temps plein ou partiel impliquerait, ou vous n’avez pas tout le matériel de bureau requis pour un assistant en interne. C’est là que l’embauche d’un assistant virtuel pourrait être la réponse.  Les assistants virtuels sont un groupe de professionnels indépendants qui répondent à tous vos besoins administratifs, techniques ou même de création, coûtant une fraction du coût d’embauche d’un assistant à temps plein ou partiel en interne.  Ils peuvent tout faire, à commencer par la correspondance générale, ou encore le maintien de sites Web et de profils de réseaux sociaux, l’écriture de brochures et de communiqués de presse, la transcription, suivi des appels et de la gestion d’un agenda.  Les assistants virtuels peuvent également se spécialiser dans la construction de sites Web originaux, de blogs internet, ou de services de traduction.