How
do you organise your working day? Do you make a list of things to do and
religiously follow it? Or do you find that most activities roll onto the list
for the next day?
To
avoid this you have to discipline yourself. There are so many tempting
distractions right in front of you on your desktop. Of course you know all
about this, but it’s worth giving yourself a pep talk about it every now and
then. Here are some of the worst time wasters that your outsourced bookkeepers have
recognised in their clients’ work habits.
Compelling but
Unnecessary Distractions
If
you stop what you are doing each time an email pings in, read the new missive
and then take more time to reply to it, you then have to get back into the
mind-set of the job in hand, by which time you’ve probably lost 10 or 15
minutes out of your day. It is far more efficient to concentrate on one thing
at a time, so get on with the job and make time for emails later. If something
is really urgent the sender would be more likely to telephone than email.
That
brings us to those phone calls. If you don’t have the luxury of a secretary to
field your calls, it’s sensible to use an answer-phone system. If you are
concerned about missing any urgent calls, use one which allows you to hear the
caller and decide if the call should be answered immediately. Schedule time for
the ones you need to make but never pick up the receiver without knowing what
you want to achieve from it. If necessary take a few minutes beforehand to
think this through. Time invested like this can make the call briefer and more
productive.
Social
media can also be a huge time waster. While it’s necessary for some businesses
to use it for marketing purposes and to follow trends that will help you make
informed business decisions, it’s also easy to get sucked in while the minutes
tick by. You really should plan the time you can give to it, and make sure you
stick to it.
Planning to Make
the Most of your Time
Those
clients your outsourced bookkeepers
note are the most successful are those who review their achievements at the end
of the working day and draw up a plan for the next one before they leave. If
you are not one of them, give it a try. You’ll start tomorrow well prepared for
the day to come so that you can get even more out of it.
