There are numerous distractions, which compete to get any business professionals attention every day. The biggest challenge they face, is to know where and how to focus their attention. When they lose their focus and they give their attention to the wrong things or they try to do too many things at once, they lose their ability to build or sustain a successful business.
Allowing too many distractions to cause you to spin your wheels or attempting to get too much done each day, where you are not ensuring that each hour you invest, is the most valuable use of your time. Is a recipe for disaster in any economy, but because the external conditions are as challenging as they now are, the astute business professional must focus their time and energy on doing only the highest priority things and avoid wasting their day spinning their wheels, with unimportant things.
Action idea: Look back at the way you invested your time, every hour for the next week and ask yourself one simple question, ‘Was that the most productive way I could have invested my time”? If you consistently keep coming up with the answer that you are spinning your wheels and you find you are merely keeping busy, going through the motions every day. It is time to look at introducing three important concepts into your life, namely Delegate, Delete or Do.
Delegate
Most business professionals feel they are the best person to carry out any task and they cannot bring themselves to delegate. I want you to examine all the tasks you carry out and to see if there is not someone else who do the task as well as you could do, at a lower cost. When I speak of cost I am referring to how much each hour of your day actually costs you. Look at your revenue expectations for the year. Use the formula below to calculate your hourly rate.
Hourly rate = annual revenue (Income)
(12 months) * (4 weeks) * (7 Days) * 8 (Hours)
After doing this calculation you will astound yourself at how much an hour actually costs you. Armed with this information take another look at how you are investing your time and see if typing a letter, filtering out junk emails or attending unnecessary meetings is indeed the best way for you to spend your time. Delegate any tasks that bring low or no value to you and your business. You will astound yourself with how much time you can add to your day by simply delegating the low value tasks to someone else. Top achievers like Oprah, Richard Branson or Donald Trump; do not have more hours in a day. They just allocate their time better, delegating tasks, which only consume their day, to people who can in many cases do them better than they would.
Delete
We fill our days with so many unnecessary functions, such as reading junk email, we copy everyone in on every email, so they in turn fill our email box with copies of every email they send, we constantly look at our smart phone throughout the day, distracted by the constant barrage of emails and text messages, which come through all day. We also break our focus and concentration to attend meetings, which serve very little purpose at all.
These constant distractions keep us from ever focusing our attention on our biggest priorities. So we spend our days spinning our wheels, arriving home every day feeling like we have really worked hard. When in reality all we have done is spent the day distracted, sitting in unnecessary meetings, where we constantly look at our smart phone, because the meeting had very little interest to us, read emails that meant very little and had almost no interest to us and in-between all this productivity we try to get some meaningful work done.
Action Idea: Delete or remove all unnecessary meetings from your day, stop copying everyone you can think of, in on every email you send and ask everyone else to do the same for you.
You can gain a few extra hours every day when you learn the art of deleting all the time wasting activities from your day.
Do
Stop putting off all the really important things you know you need to do each day. The things you procrastinate or put off every day are in most cases the most important things you need to do.
Action Idea: Plan your day the night before, set aside time every day, preferably first thing in the morning, close your door and get those tasks, which you normally procrastinate done. Once you have completed these important tasks each day, the rest of your day just seems to work better.
When you introduce these three simple principals into your life, you will not only gain a couple of hours every day, but you actually get to finish all your priorities each day.
Author: Andrew Horton Time Management Training
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