How to Effectively Manage Your Time and Increase Productivity

It’s very important that you learn how to effectively manage your time to be able to meet the conflicting demands of your business, family and personal leisure. 

We know that as a business entrepreneur you probably have your plate full right now and naturally, you want to tackle and accomplish the things on them all at once. Sometimes you find yourself devoting yourself to one area at the expense of other things, stay working too much on your business and forgetting to take a break to exercise or be with your family.

Here are some tips to help you manage your time and do things productively:

Create a sustainable schedule. You’ll be more productive if you list down your daily activities and structure that list. Even a loose structure is better than no structure at all. So get out a piece of paper and write down every little thing that you normally do day in and day out like:

• Waking up at 6:am
• Waking the kids up at 7:00am
• Breakfast
• Dropping the kids at school
• Commute
• Work
• Lunch/Snack / Dinner
• Hobbies
• Spending time with your kids / partner
• Walking your dogs

After listing down your activities, you need to identify activities that can make a huge difference in your daily schedule – the bottlenecks. Say, if you forget to wake the kids up at 7am, they’d probably be late for school and you’ll be caught up in rush hour on your way to the office which will end up with you being late for work. This can ruin your mood which can then affect your productivity throughout the day.

To make sure that you don’t get caught into this kind of situations, you have to stop when it’s time to stop. This means that no matter what you’re doing at 7am you have to leave it so that you can get your kids up and ready. 

Learn to adjust. Although sticking to your daily schedule is a great way to effectively manage your time and boost your creativity, things will not always go according to plan. When this happens, take off time from the not-so important tasks rather than the bottlenecks activities. This way you’ll be able to adjust and work through your schedule without major snags.

Take time to pause and think. With all the tasks listed on your daily planner, it is very easy for you to go through those tasks without stopping. Spend at least a few minutes every day engaged in thoughts and conversations that are important to your success. 

Over to you..

How about you? Do you start your day with a plan? Or are you more of a do-as-you-go type of an entrepreneur? What are some of the things that you routinely do every day?  We would like to hear your thoughts and comments, please share them below.