Running A Business

5 Time Management Strategies to Help Your Business Become More Profitable

Jun 27, 2016 • 3 min read
small business time management
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      In today’s times, when you’re running a business in an intensely competitive world, you need to make the best use of the most scarce resource of all – Time. Using the appropriate time management strategies, you can maximize productivity and profits and ultimately make a success of your business. Managing your time effectively also eliminates the stress you feel and makes you feel more in control of the running of company operations. At the same time, make sure you prepare for unexpected situations that will need you to rework priorities. Here’s how you can manage your time efficiently and maximize profits from your business.

      Identify the Most Important Task

      Despite how well you organize your schedule, and the tasks you need to accomplish on a particular day, you might have to deal with what seem like too many emergencies on a single day. While each of them may appear significant enough to be addressed immediately, you need to prioritize. Identify the most critical tasks and list them in order of importance. Set aside your preset schedule and get your team to working on the ones that need tackling right away. For instance, if you have a breakdown in the power supply, repair work is the single most important task without which none of the others can proceed.

      Rework Deadlines

      Meeting deadlines is one of the vital facets of time management. No doubt, you have your task scheduler planned in such a way that you’re ready with the deliveries before the due date. However, at times, unavoidable circumstances can arise because of which you find that you’re falling behind work. For instance, adverse weather conditions or a delay in the shipment of raw materials. To deal with the possible missing of deadlines, check your schedule for the orders that you must fill at once. Make sure you fill them before moving on to the others. If you need more time, a smart entrepreneur would check with customers for extensions well before the due date.

      Identify Sources of Revenue

      When dealing with a long list of tasks that all seem important, you need to keep one vital factor in mind. If you have enough cash in hand, you can overcome the most difficult of situations. Accordingly, you could identify the activities that can bring you the cash flow you need and prioritize them. For instance, if you ready and send out a batch of products, you can expect that the customer will make payment within a day or two. You can use the cash to perhaps, repair a broken piece of equipment that can put your company operations back on track.

      Keep Your End Goals in Mind

      An important rule of time management is to keep your end goal in mind always. Create plans and schedules and check back from time to time to see how well you’re working with them. These plans will likely help you meet your short-term goals, but you also need to keep your long-term goals in mind and work backward to them. For instance, your company could be facing a deluge of orders, and you wonder if you should expand operations by leasing more working space. If your long-term goal is capturing markets in the peripheral towns also, setting aside time to plan for expansion is a great strategy.

      Eliminate Interruptions

      Interruptions can take many forms such as emails, messages, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media updates and so on. Allowing these interruptions to intrude on your working time is a bad time management strategy. Instead, you could set aside time to deal with communications. For instance, when you come into work in the morning, spend a half an hour checking your inbox and responding to all emails. If you receive calls at odd times of the day, you can let them go to voicemail and get back to the callers at specific hours of the day.

      Using these five time management strategies, you can make the most of your working day. And, making optimum use of your resources will help you earn great profits and the success of your enterprise in the long run.

      About the author
      Lendio Editorial Team

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