Do you want to get more out of your day, week and year? Your team, may benefit from these Time-management
strategies.
In so many industries we are permanently killing fires, that we never get to do those things that bring money into the company. Do you ever get so overwhelmed you don’t even know where to start?
If you are permanently killing fires, your work-life balance may suffer, your marriage and everyone else in your life may think that you don’t care about them.
In the well-known Eisenhower Matrix, we learn about prioritizing tasks according to the 4 quadrants.
- The Urgent and Important tasks -the fires.
- The Not urgent, but important tasks.
- The Urgent, but not important tasks.
- The not urgent and not important tasks.
The Eisenhower matrix encourages you to move into Quadrant 2: the Not urgent, but important tasks. To start working on the things that will make a huge contribution to your bottom line and to your life.
The reality is, if there is a fire-you need to kill first, before it spreads and infects your other clients or business.
What are the fires?
Urgent phone calls from clients, the things that needs to get done today. Do them as quickly as possible, prioritize the most important and tick them off the list. Even use a stopwatch to ensure that you don’t use too much time on those tasks.
Once you are done with those -move to Quadrant two.
What goals and strategic objectives are you pushing out every day or every week. You know that if you do those tasks, the most difficult and time-consuming tasks, you will be able to move forward rapidly as a business.
Ever heard of the saying called: “Eating the Frog”. Start with those tasks first. The ugly tasks, that drain you and use most of your brain power. Force yourself and you will find that once that task is done, you can progress to the next one and find that your day becomes easier and easier as it progresses.
- Plan for it. Make a list of important tasks, that will drastically move your business forward.
- Have a look at the same issues, complaints or problems that keep on popping up with your clients.
- Is there a way-to educate your clients to prepare for those, rather than to keep on killing the fires, when you know that those issues will pop up eventually?
If we can learn to be more Pro-active, planning for the worst things that can potentially happen, the things that usually go wrong, and come up with solutions-before they hit you, you will be killing less fires and focusing on building your business with the correct foundation.
In the 3rd quadrant:
The urgent but not Important Tasks. Can you ask a team member to help you with those? Can you delegate those tasks, and supervise rather than doing everything yourself?
In the 4th Quadrant:
The not urgent and not important tasks -those are the timewasters.
Do your social media after hours, stop forwarding personal emails during the times when you should be doing strategic tasks for your business.
In a nutshell: kill the fires. Prioritize and Schedule the Important not urgent tasks in quadrant two, so you can drastically move your business forward. Spend more time in quadrant two and you will not have to run to quadrant four to escape on social media. Delegate tasks in Quadrant 3 to your team members. Go out there and have a super productive day.
At Y-Connect we offer various courses and Leadership Coaching packages, also focusing on Time-management have a look here at our various courses for your team to get the most out of them!
If you are looking at ways to get your team to be more productive set up a briefing meeting at: yokevandam@y-connect.biz.