As you embark on your entrepreneurial journey, your head is buzzing with a lot of thoughts. You might occasionally take a pause and think about organizing your thoughts but are unable to do so due to the lack of a proper structure to organize your thoughts in. The article discusses a few tips for effective time management to help you create your strategy for your entrepreneurial voyage.
Organize tasks into a list
As an entrepreneur, you will be working across multiple tasks at the same time. There will be follow-ups to be taken, calls to be made, forms to be filled, and a ton of other minor and major tasks. It is essential to write each task and subtask down and form a checklist that can be reviewed conveniently whenever you want.
Prioritize tasks
Often, some tasks on your list are critical and sensitive, which carry opportunity costs with them. Such tasks need to be prioritized while creating the list and should be struck off first from your list.
Build relevant skill set
Your efficiency in completing the tasks related to your domain will increase multifold if you carry the relevant skill set. You can look up online courses from educational websites, find a good mentor or project in the domain, or even go for one-year MBA courses in the domain.
Set deadlines
The next step after identifying tasks and prioritizing them is writing a deadline against your tasks. Set realistic and achievable deadlines with decent buffers so that being able to finish tasks within deadlines constantly keeps you positively motivated. Scheduling in such a manner can help you reduce your time wasted in switching between tasks and thinking about the upcoming tasks and help you focus your attention on one task at a time.
Create reminders and alarms
Virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa are becoming increasingly popular and accurate by the day. They can make creating reminders and alarms extremely easy and make it very efficient to remind you of the tasks and deadlines that need to be complied with.
Delegate and outsource
We naturally tend to start working on the task at hand ourselves. But, when things get overwhelming, your time becomes valuable. It would help if you analyzed the trade-off between investing your time in the task or delegating/outsourcing the task to someone else and putting your time somewhere more critical. This is the first step in going from an individual’s idea to an organization’s goals.
Squeeze in self-recreation time
Among the exceedingly busy schedule, you are very likely to exhaust yourself. It can lead to a decrease in your efficiency and attention span and impact your creativity negatively. It becomes very important for you to rejuvenate yourself by taking up some hobby, passion, or past-time that relaxes you and makes sure you jump back stronger at whatever you were pursuing.
Practice your strategy
A lot of things mentioned above are easier said than done. Not everything falls into place as you plan when words go to action. Hence, it is very natural to master this skill by making mistakes and learning from them. You can participate in competitions, buy and try some simulations for the business or, for an even more comprehensive hands-on experience, enroll yourself in IIM MBA courses. You can play around and test the waters while building your time management skills in the environments as mentioned above so that you walk into your entrepreneurial journey with utter confidence and minimize your risks and opportunity costs.
Evaluate
Like any other process, it is important to constantly evaluate your strategy and keep updating it as you learn from your mistakes. Continuously following a set practice with adequate discipline would turn you into a highly efficient and responsive entrepreneur.
Conclusion
The above steps present a broad framework based on which you can draw up your own strategy that suits your job and requirements. We hope the article helps you smoothen the way to your entrepreneurial journey and helps you succeed, making you a highly efficient entrepreneur.
About the Author:
Sparsh is a part of the IIMU family, from the batch of 2021. Sparsh has explored his interest in computer science and is now aspiring to be a product manager. He is enthusiastic about technology and gadgets and anything on wheels, and spends a lot of time browsing through blogs, vlogs and articles about them. He has a keen interest in graphic designing, painting and, of course, writing. On a chill day, you could expect to accompany Sparsh on his exotic food quest and long drives! You can connect with him on LinkedIn