I’ll admit it; I have lost business hours to well known time wasters. I’ve let my time on social media spiral, I’ve lost more than a lunch hour to Netflix, and I’ve slept through my alarm. Entrepreneurs are just as susceptible to wasting time as anyone else. The only difference is that it costs us money when it happens.
That means you need to find and stop your biggest time waster if you’re an entrepreneur. If you keep losing time, you’ll keep losing money.
Track Your Time
Tracking your time is a sure fire way to see how long you’re spending on each thing you do. Do it for one week and I guarantee your mind will be blown.
Tracking your time will show you everything you do in a day and how much time you’re spending on it. There are things that actually take a lot of time (writing, coding, designing) and things that can get away rom us and cost us time (hello, social media!) Knowing the difference can help you budget your time more effectively and can save or earn you more money.
Here’s a list of tools you can use to track your time.
Let Go Of Time Wasting Clients
Clients that take more than they give can be road blocks to success. How many times have you lost time waiting for an email or phone call, or had to work through too many rounds of edits with just one client?
Letting go of clients that have a death grip on your time means you’ll definitely have more free time to pursue bigger and better clients. This is a bit of a risk- letting go of a sure fire client in favor of the chance for a bigger one.
However, getting bogged down with clients that test your patience and waste your time is a guaranteed money loser over time. The longer you stay with a client that you don’t like, the less money you earn in the long haul. Plus, you’ll be unhappy! You want to do work that makes you happy, so let those clients go. Phase them out so that your income doesn’t take a drastic hit all at once.
Track Your Accomplishments
Something that I do each week is write down on my desk calendar everything I have to do in a week on Monday. I list out everything- from everyone that I want to email, to each meeting I want to take, to every piece of writing I need to do.
Then, on Friday, I list out everything that I accomplished. I cross out the items I accomplished and make a to-do list of the things that still need to be done (if any.) Most weeks I get everything done because I knew what needed to be done. By placing everything on my desk calendar stuff doesn’t languish on a to-do list. Each item has a time and a day.
Then at the end of the week I see what I did and didn’t do. This helps me determine things I’m good at, things I’m slow at, and things that use my time up.
Don’t lose money to things that you don’t need to do or aren’t good at. Find your time waster (or wasters) and make more money!
