With everything at our fingertips today with smartphones, ipads, tablets you would think that we would have so much extra time. We would all be out enjoying our leisure time, relaxing and enjoying the good things in life.
But……
It appears the opposite is happening
As a business owner there are more and more demands on you. From your staff, to customers, to suppliers it seems like you are forever solving other people’s problems and never getting to the things you want to do.
When do you get to spend time on growing your business?
Spending some quality time with customers?
Planning for the future.
Let’s look at the 9 biggest time traps that small business owners face and how you can deal with them……..
- Prioritization
Setting workplace priorities is by far the most common time management complaint.
This comes from either the employee having problems juggling multiple projects and can’t set his or her own priorities, or the boss has problems setting priorities for the employee
Often, everything is labelled urgent, which leaves employees throwing their hands up in frustration and simply guess which project to focus on-which may cause drama and stress later on, if they guess wrong or the boss proves unreasonable.
Whether the failure to set priorities is the boss’s or the worker’s, the worker ends up scrambling, and may soon fall prey to overwork and overwhelm (which represents another common time trap; see below).
The solution, while easy to state, may be difficult to accomplish: Prioritize your projects.
Then ruthlessly triage your task list, focusing first on the items that truly matter.
Prioritize everything else according to relative value
2. Interruptions and Disruptions
This consists of anything unscheduled but routine that disrupts anyone’s focus and damages productivity at work.
Don’t you hate disruptions. You sit down to get some quality work done and then you are disrupted. It drives me bananas. I don’t know about you but it is frustrating.
I think you could fill up a whole page (or more) with a list of the various interruptions and distractions that impact your workplace productivity: people who drop in at random intervals; ringing phones; noisy neighbors; and micromanaging bosses.
Communications issues, especially those involving email and phone calls, plague us all constantly, and represent almost a third of this category of complaints.
This issue requires a firm application of self-discipline. If something distracts or interrupts you, make the effort necessary to guard against it.
Tighten your focus.
Use ambient sound or music to block out noise. Turn off your email alerts and close your browser.
Forward your calls to voicemail when you have no time for calls and respond a few times a day.
Go somewhere quieter for a while or work from home one day a week.
3. Overwork
How many hours in the day. Not enough on some days when you have a lot to do.
This problem boils down to: “There’s not enough time in the day to do everything!”
Given the human need for rest (and sanity), you sometimes can push yourself only so far within the unforgiving limitations of the 24-hour day.
Time is a constraint no one can bargain with or stretch.
Take firm control of your time, jettisoning the unimportant tasks from your schedule, and maintaining an unremitting, tight focus.
Examine each task and determine if you’ve been overdoing it; in other words, can you give it to someone else to do? If the task really belongs to someone else, give it to them.
Remember the 80/20 rule where 80% of your results will come from 20% of your work, the things you do. Are you doing nice to do things or must do things to move your business forward and make it grow?
To the maximum extent possible, find ways to delegate tasks to others, and practice purposeful abandonment: if you run out of time for something of minor relevance, let it go.
Stop seeing your task list as a “must do” list, instead viewing it as a “want to do” list.
4. Lack of Self Discipline
For some people, the biggest time management problem is actually a lack of self-discipline: i.e., not having the willpower to say no to distractions, or to stick tenaciously to the task at hand.
The bulk of your frustrations will come from what you haven’t done not what you have to do. You constantly think of what you need to do, or want to do. Then focus on getting it done.
Be strict on using your time and who you allocate time for.
Many employees are unable to concentrate or attempt to multitask too much. Too often, they lose track of the projects they’re juggling, which echoes prioritization and planning issues as well.
Others have problems with setting or sticking to goals…and a few just can’t seem to get anywhere on time.
To overcome these problems, fire up your willpower, crack the whip on yourself, and decide to concentrate on a task until complete.
About a quarter of those with self-discipline problems see procrastination as a bigger issue than a simple lack of focus.
Most often, they find themselves daunted by huge, complex projects.
So in addition to applying tight focus to the problem, break it into smaller chunks you can handle more easily.
How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time. So break your work into workable chunks so you can see yourself achieving progress.
Set milestones, buckle down, and get to work.
5 Disorganization
Many business owners accept a high level of chaos in their lives, and as a result find themselves stuck in the time trap of disorganization.
Many business owners accept a high level of chaos in their lives, and as a result find themselves stuck in the time trap of disorganization.
Information constantly gets lost or misplaced.
Tracking action items, managing the staff, filing, planning, and overall project management sometimes overwhelms you, because you don’t have a logical information processing system in place.
Learn to use your email software to its fullest, establish a logical, simple organizational system, and process every piece of information as it enters your life.
Don’t let it pile up, and never dither about what to do with an item-whether a piece of paper, an email, a voicemail, or any other bit of information that crosses your desk.
Always make time for planning.
And allocate time to step back and look at the big picture, so you can see how everything is working. As necessary, take steps to fix what doesn’t work, and be on the lookout for ways to improve efficiency.
Tracking action items, managing the staff, filing, planning, and overall project management sometimes overwhelms you, because you don’t have a logical information processing system in place.
Learn to use your email software to its fullest, establish a logical, simple organizational system, and process every piece of information as it enters your life.
Don’t let it pile up, and never dither about what to do with an item-whether a piece of paper, an email, a voicemail, or any other bit of information that crosses your desk.
6. Scheduling
Do you have problems getting things done in the time you have?
Common complaints include an inability to properly estimate how long specific tasks will take (a skill that comes with experience), and deciding where on one’s calendar to place each task.
The second case requires thoughtful (and stringent) application of both task triage and prioritization, as well as a willingness to say no to new work when possible.
You especially have to learn to let things go.
You can’t get important things done you’re your calendar is burgeoning with unimportant meetings.
Most of us prefer to do the easy, fun tasks first-an unproductive attitude at best.
Do the hard, high-significance things first. You can let go of the rest if time runs out.
7. People Problems
Your staff can present a variety of difficulties when it comes to getting your work done. As we have already discussed, many workplace distractions emanate from others; who hasn’t been annoyed by staff gossiping in the hall, or playing their music too loud?
Productivity at work suffers more when people act as roadblocks and bottlenecks. A few seem to do it on purpose, often from sheer lack of respect.
Some don’t care about your deadlines, so they don’t get important information to you in a timely fashion. Others just can’t seem to get anywhere on time, thereby wasting your time.
And when someone can’t (or won’t) make a decision, you might end up twiddling your thumbs until they do.
Some bottlenecks you can go around. Some you can break by stepping in to help, or at least by asking the blocker flat out what the hold-up is.
Whatever the case, try to smooth the way so you can get the workflow process moving again.
If you can’t, then accept the situation as something you can’t change and move on to something else.
8. Meetings
No organization can function without face time; so inevitably, meetings take up some portion of the average worker’s daily schedule.
In some organizations, they get out of hand, directly harming workplace productivity.
Finding enough time to actually fit in work when you regularly spend half the day in back-to-back meetings can be difficult. In fact how do you get anything done when you have back to back meetings.
Sometimes meetings can be where other people try and pass their problems onto you.
When meetings go bad, the problem, again, tends to be because of oblivious people. They go off on tangents, won’t get to the point, or simply can’t communicate well; whatever the case, they err by wasting everyone else’s time.
You can overcome the meeting trap by cutting down your commitments to meetings, going only to those you absolutely need to attend, and setting time limits you communicate to everyone as soon as you arrive.
If you can, leave once you’ve made your contributions. If the meeting goes over the allotted time, politely excuse yourself, citing another meeting to attend.
9. Crises
The time trap of the unexpected runs neck-and-neck with people problems. Most workplace crises arise from human behavior in one way or another.
Bosses dump urgent projects on you at short notice, slow coworkers keep dragging their heels until you can barely meet your deadlines, human bottlenecks tie up resources, and everything suddenly comes due right now.
You can’t do much when other people spin things into crisis, except react-which means you must remain perpetually flexible.
Establish systems and processes in advance to handle the unexpected when it lifts its ugly head, including guidelines for each type of emergency you can imagine.
When a crisis arises, practice SLLR: Stop, Look, Listen, and Respond. After you have a handle on the situation, spring into action.
You may have to triage your to-do list again, with some tasks moving down or off the list as a result. If you’ve already scheduled a little extra time into your schedule, let it take up the slack.
Do all you can to address the new work while letting as few of your normal tasks go as possible-and get all the help you can while doing so.
We all have to deal with these time vampires. When you run your own business most things will stop with you. Staff will try and hand everything back to you.
You need to say No and hand it back or find someone else who can do the job.
Here’s to your success and prosperity.
Thank you for the photos;
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
