A day in business takes around 8 hours from beginning to end. At least, that’s how long it is in theory. In reality there’s a good chance you’re working upward of 10 to 12 hours every single day, and that simply isn’t good for anyone.
Think about it; how often do you take work home with you? How often do you stay ‘after hours’? Even when you’re working within your own home, it’s still possible to lose personal time to professional responsibilities.
So, what’s dragging out your working days and making them longer than they have a right to be? Work out what the issue comes from and you can make a healthy change to your work/life balance!
And to help you isolate the offender and target them properly, we’ve put together a list of the most likely culprits in terms of business tasks that no one really accounts for properly.
Checking Your Inbox
How many emails would you say you get on an average day? A lot of working professionals get more than 100, and every single one requires some kind of in depth response. Quite a few business owners get more than this per day, and even 1000 or more per week, and that’s quite a few messages to get back to!
So long story short, checking your inbox is going to take more time than you ever plan for. Even if you only want to take 10 minutes to go through and get back to people, you’re likely to still be there half an hour later.
If that’s a common situation in your working life, try to put limits on inbox checks and the time they take. Set an alarm for 10 to 15 minutes every time you check your email, and stop when the timer goes off. Similarly, make good use of filtering functions and folders, so you know that only the most important are going to be brought to your attention.
Answering Common Customer Questions
Customers tend to have a lot of the same questions. Set up an FAQs page to help yourself and your customers.
Save yourself some time and a lot of frustration by putting in the effort to create and post this list sometime soon.
Getting Paid
It might deserve more time than most other tasks involved in running a business, but it can still soak up more than half of your overall working week. And anyone who knows how frustrating it is to send an invoice and have it ignored knows just how much time, worry, and sleep you can lose in an interaction like this. Now imagine you’re having to cope with this more than once or twice a week!
Automate your invoices using software, be sure to set up online payments that make getting paid a total breeze, and make a note of any clients that take their time in getting payment back to you. And how about a discount for clients that pay immediately?
Brushing Up Your Skills
Everyone is learning on the job, even when you’ve been doing it for 10 years or more. You’ve always got something new to either pick up or ‘brush up’. Most of the time, this is constructive. Learning and/or reinforcing new skills is good for your brain and your resume.
But it’s not something you should be losing time to, especially if demand is constantly creeping up on you. If it feels like you’re never equipped with what you need, chances are you need some help from someone who knows!
You Can Save Time When You Know What’s Taking So Much Time
Your work day can be squeezed back down to that 8 hour max total – really! You don’t need to squirrel around half your day on putting in the grind, and you can certainly make more time for other things that matter in life.
All you have to do is lock down the tasks that are holding you back, do what you can to automate them, delegate or even try to get rid of them completely.
Stepping away from day-to-day activities and overwhelm, helps to be more creative. You might notice that solutions for, what looked like impossible, problems present themselves when you are preoccupied with non-work-related challenges. That is one of the great values of time-outs.
If you are struggling and want to talk it through, simply book a free coaching call with me.
