Be efficient. Beware of these thieves of your time!
This article was translated from our Spanish edition. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. This article was updated on October 10, 2021
As entrepreneurs we are always involved in different projects and seeking to achieve different goals, which makes our days generally saturated with work and pending …
Elena Koycheva vía Unsplash
We would give anything to make our day have a few extra hours. You will agree with me that time is one of the most valuable and costly resources for both individuals and businesses and that no one can really control.
However, we can identify “our time thieves” in order to avoid or reduce them and thus allow our day to have more hours to allocate them to what we consider important.
Outside thieves can take various forms that are continually bombarding us and making us less effective. Some of the main ones are shown in the following ways:
External
- Unexpected calls
- Unscheduled visits
- Joints spreading without a clear goal
- Collaborators with lack of experience
- Colleagues and coffee time
Internal
- Confusing and shifting goals
- Inability to say “no”
- Lack of order
- Inability to delegate
- Postpone conflict resolution
Surely you have identified any of the above as one of your main factors that reduce the efficiency of your day. Luckily, we have some tips to manage or avoid them and maximize the use of your most valuable resource:
1. Define your goals. Clarifying where you want to go will help you better discern between what is worth your time and what is not.
2. Organize your day and spend some time sorting between important and urgent tasks. You’d be shocked to know how much time we waste putting out fires by spending time on actions that are urgent but not really important to our business or our lives.
A successful entrepreneur must have good planning and must spend most of his time solving important but not urgent tasks.
3. Keep a list of tasks and prioritize according to their importance to you. It sounds basic, but many people don’t take the time to do it and keep wondering where their day is going. I suggest you make a to-do list the night before or at the beginning of your day to know what you should focus on.
