Have you ever heard someone say, “work smarter, not harder”? It's funny because although it is a good point to make, most people have no idea what that really means or how to make that happen. What if you could find a way to actually work harder and save time?
The way society is today, you basically have to trade your hours of each day for set salaries in a company unless you are an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, you have the chance to make big things happen in less time by working smarter, instead of harder, but, you have to know how to manage your time and other aspects of your daily tasks.
5 Easy Steps To Work Smarter And Save Time:
1. Multitasking is a bad habit.
When people think of multitasking, they think they're actually getting more things done in less time, when in reality they are hurting their production. For every task you try to do at the same time as another, the quality of work you do will drop dramatically.
Focus on one important task at a time and just knock them out one by one. You will find that you won't be getting as distracted from doing too many things and you will do a much higher quality job on each task by staying focused.
This will allow you to complete each task fully before trying to do other things. Remember, your brain is not meant to do multiple things at the same time effectively. When it comes to important work, don't chance it.
2. Turn off your smart phone.
The last thing you need when you are working hard is a bunch of noises, notifications and vibrations coming from your phone all day. This is one of the biggest distractions for people these days. Phones have so many uses these days that people can easily spend hours and hours just wasting time on them.
As an entrepreneur, or any kind of productive member of society, you need to eliminate any distractions you may deal with. Your smartphone is always going to be one of the biggest ones. Do yourself a favor and put it on “do not disturb” while you are hard at work.
3. Structure is important.
Having a routine is something that can really help your production in a big way. The successful entrepreneurs of the world don't allow themselves to forget important tasks or get scatter-brained. Instead, they have a structure to their day that allows them to stay on track and get everything done.
One thing you can do to help yourself accomplish this, is to use Google Calendar to actually keep track of your tasks, meetings, deadlines, etc. If you want to take it a step farther, do what I do and write down a list of your actions that you need to do daily, and have each step of these actions written out on paper.
This will allow you to go through and check off what you have done and not forget anything. Without a good structure or schedule, you can easily waste a lot of time throughout the day by randomly checking emails or taking phone calls, as well as missing certain things throughout the day that you need to be doing.
4. Take a break and recharge your batteries.
Have you ever noticed that when you don't recharge your phone that it doesn't work very well? The same thing goes for you. You need to take frequent breaks to recharge, gather your thoughts and avoid overloading yourself to where you just crash.
In fact, there have been studies that people should take a 20 minute break for every 90 minutes of work throughout the day to help them recover and come back fresh.
It'll even keep you in a better mood because you'll always have those little breaks to look forward to and won't be depressed about burning yourself out everyday.
Related: How to make working from home more fun
5. Urgent doesn't always mean important.
As an entrepreneur, you need to exhibit good judgement on a regular basis. Trust your judgement to hire people and outsource certain parts of your business. That same good judgement should also be applied to the different types of tasks that come up.
You need to learn to be able to let other peoples' urgent tasks to be solved by themselves, instead of you always having to go out of your way to stop your important work to fix them. Learn to spend the majority of your time on important tasks and not always worrying about random “urgent” things that come up with customer or employees.
This will save you a lot of stress and time. One way to help with this is to take these tasks into consideration only at certain times of the day where you can answer questions, help employees, or show people how to fix their problems.
Conclusion
As an entrepreneur, you have the ability to take advantage of working smarter instead of harder to make more money. Eliminate distractions, have a structure, take breaks and drop bad habits to allow yourself to work smarter and save time to spend time your family or other things you love doing.