Between the phone calls, emails, competing priorities, and everything else that gets loaded on top of selling and serving customers, your time gets eaten up quickly. Oftentimes, it might feel like an an entire day flies by without you really getting a chance to work effectively with your best clients or think strategically about your business - all because you’re so busy running around putting out fires with the weight of it all on your shoulders.
The reality is, it’s crucial to look ahead and think strategically if you want to stay competitive. That includes looking at your current processes and consistently looking for ways to improve and optimize. The problem though, is it takes time, energy, and brainpower, all valuable and finite resources that you can’t properly allocate when you’re busy trying to stay on top of busywork, admin overhead, and keep track of everything your team is working on. Nevertheless, as someone who runs a business or manages many projects, you know more than anyone else that time is money. But - what if you could spend less time on all of those repetitive everyday tasks and processes that come with managing your business, projects, and client work, and instead, focus more of your energy on strategic initiatives, your best client relationships, and the “big wins”?
Today is always the best time to turn a new leaf and see how you can accomplish more, so here’s a basic outline to get you on the right path when it comes to assessing how you spend your time and making the right adjustments. That way, you can allocate more of your time to things that'll move the needle for your business.
To see the bigger picture, you need to step away and look at your days, weeks, and months as a whole and see where and how you’re spending your time. If you’re tracking your time at work, that’s great - you’re already ahead of most, but does all the time you track on client calls, emails, sales, and your everyday busywork flow or populate somewhere that gives you a clear overview (think: a dashboard or screen where you can easily see how much of your time goes where)? Since you’ve got so much on your plate to tackle, it’s important to make sure you have systems in place that make accessing the information you need quick and seamless so that you can make better business decisions faster.
What is your relationship with time? Keith Rosen, author of “Own Your Day” poses this question in his webinar with Harvard Business Review “How Sales Leaders Master Time Management”, outlining how business owners and busy professionals often think they don’t have the time to put into developing their team, effectively managing their days, or truly achieving their business goals. If you’re always trying to beat the clock, you really need to rethink your relationship with time. If you can agree that time is money, you ought to invest your time like you invest your money! When it comes to your money, you’re diligent, cautious, even protective of it, and that’s exactly how you ought to be with your time. You can start treating your time that way by developing a better routine, with streamlined workflows and operations. As Keith said, “a routine is the bank that will protect your time, which leads to a system that will refine your activities and optimize your routine”.
This might seem daunting, but if your priorities and goals are to run a more successful and profitable business, with a vision that puts your customers first, how will you be able to deliver on those promises if most of your day is spent jumping between spreadsheets, trying to keep up with team communications, and working so hard just to keep everything running smoothly? The truth is, things should run smoothly on their own, without you carrying the weight of the business on your shoulders. If you could focus more on your client work, your best customer relationships, and delivering value to them, along with thinking strategically about growing your business, you’d be allocating your time in a way that mirrors your values.
Once you’ve identified a problem, the next step is doing research on the technology that can help you tackle it.
When you have peace of mind knowing nothing if falling through the cracks, you’ll have the time and energy you need to focus on building an even more successful business, all with a routine that’ll get you back to doing the work you love. If you’d like to see how other professionals just like you did it.
