Time Management Tips for Small Business Start Ups
Sooner or later you're going to realize there's only so many hours in the day even if you're an entrepreneur. While an established competitor has the peoplepower to exert the equivalent to your independent efforts exponentially, you have the same amount of time they do to create contending content or products. That's a difficult deficit to overcome and is only defeated through hard work and proper time management. While many of the tenets for business "timesaving" tactics are fundamental and obvious, there are a few easy ways to cut the fat from a small business day's work that might surprise you with their effectiveness.
Planning for Plans to Change
"Prioritizing" is so obvious I hate even mentioning it. As much as you hope to strategize a list of tasks in order of importance and optimal hourly coordination, all it takes is for an inspector to be late or a wireless router to break to throw a day's timing off. Definitely devote some time to scheduling lists of tasks, but always anticipate the altering of events, it's just always going to happen. Time management is less about prioritizing the duties and more about prioritizing your attention.
Stay Focused
Keeping your attention only on one thing at a time – and not letting unnecessary things get focused on instead – is going to be your actual top priority. Correspondence is probably your number one time consumer other than raw effort. Knowing which emails are important and which aren't is just a matter of saving addresses in folders marked as such. Phone calls coming in from out of town are going to be common in an online business, but so will telemarketers and other entities who see you as a customer and not the other way around. Performing a reverse phone lookup before you call a number back is a good way to cut down on time spent on unnecessary communications.
Cut Down on Waiting
Getting red tape unrolled out of one location can save plenty of people hours especially in the first few weeks and months of a small business. Checking to see if necessary documents are available online through your municipal websites can keep you and anyone else from driving from one hall to the other and waiting in line and wasting time. Legalzoom.com is worth looking into as well for paperwork you could otherwise be consulting attorneys or waiting in more lines to get. While I can't tell you any secrets to not spending the actual time to fill out forms, acquiring them doesn't have to suck time out of your workweek.
It's not possible to literally add more time to your day, but knowing what's important and what isn't while also anticipating the realities of an ever-changing world can help you find the time you otherwise wouldn't. When you're a small business competing against stronger foes, every second on the clock counts.
