The Entrepreneur Africa

Time Management Tips For Entrepreneurs (Part 1)

 

Time is of essence and entrepreneurs are meant to be accountable for the time they spend on daily activities. Your productiveness is no longer tied to the length of hours you spend working, but on how you are able to achieve much in a short period of time. It is more of working smart than working hard these days, especially in this age of digital technology.

Let us look at some tips to help you manage your time effectively, being the busy entrepreneur you are:

 

Create a Priority Management System and Delegate

Get an organising and reminding app to list out your tasks, starting from the most urgent to the least urgent. You can use a notepad or other available tools to achieve this. You can also get a personal assistant whom you can delegate scheduling and other routine activities to. This person can serve as your productivity boosters if he or she is in tune with her responsibilities.

Avoid Procrastination

According to Jake Gibson, co-founder and adviser of Nerd Wallet “Whatever you don’t want to do, do it first, and it eliminates the nagging dread that will sap energy away from other tasks as you postpone the inevitable.” Attend to a task you dread first because this will help free your mind to attend to others.

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Attention Management

This is more likely to increase productivity. Most people have short attention span; this is because they rarely focus on accomplishing one task before another. They want to do it simultaneously.

As entrepreneurs, you will need to strengthen your attention, because if you allocate time to a task, but spend that time switching to different tasks (most people call it multi-tasking), the end result will likely be uncompleted projects and wasted time you cannot account for.

Reduce your Cognitive load

A programmer once told me the brain is not meant for storing things, it is meant for thinking. In as much many would not agree with this, don’t you feel relieved when you write something down instead of “storing it in your brain”? Manage your cognitive load in order not “keep remembering things”. Evernote is an important tool for documentation, and there are other easy-to-use tools that are available too.

 

(To be continued)

The Entrepreneur Africa

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