5 of the Biggest Timewasters in Business to Avoid
Imagine yourself approaching the finish line of your financial year. Your goals for this year seemed clear and easily achievable. But before you know it, you’re cut short. The year is over, you’ve made little progress and you’re left dragging your feet back to the drawing board. Many factors may be contributing to your stunted growth. But you may have not considered one common silent killer, being timewasters in business.
These can creep up on you since they’re subtle and easy to miss. But when they’re dismantled properly you can reap the benefits of improved productivity, less stress and anxiety, higher quality of work, and better employee satisfaction. This might be just what you need to make it over the finish line in record time.
5 of the Biggest Timewasters in Business:
To help you get on the right track we’ve compiled a list of the major timewasters in business and what you can do to avoid their silent attack.
1. Unnecessary Meetings
In order to carve out more time for your day, decide whether the meeting you’re about to hold is absolutely necessary. If it is, make sure you’re involving the right people that will add valuable input to the problem-solving process. Make sure you have set out your agenda, stick to it religiously and set a time limit for the meeting.
2. Multitasking
It’s a myth. The truth is humans aren’t created for multitasking. While you may think you’re getting more done, you’re actually opening yourself up to wasting time. Science has proven that you can accomplish a lot more by focusing on one task at a time rather than all of them at once.
Multitasking can cause you to make more mistakes, produce lower-quality work, and limit your creativity. To get more done while still sticking to a time frame, you should follow proper time management techniques. This includes planning your day properly, prioritising your tasks, removing any distractions and getting each task done in its own allocated time frame.
3. Micromanaging
To free up more of your time you should set clear goals, objectives, and examples for your staff, so they know what is expected of them. Communicate openly with your team so you can build healthy and reliable relationships. Provide feedback when necessary. Don’t ask for constant updates but rather set specific milestones for revision. Lastly, encourage employee ownership. This means trusting your employees to perform their job properly and allowing them to take responsibility if things don’t work out as planned.
4. Disorganisation
To save your company time, you should make sure you have a reliable organizational system in place that everyone in the company knows how to use. This includes saving and filing documents correctly, using digital planners such as Trello and backing up all documents on a cloud system. Another tip is to ensure every document is stored, labeled, and backed up correctly when it is used rather than doing it later.
5. Irrelevant Emails
To counteract this, it may be quicker to just pick up the phone or meet face-to-face. Remember, keep these calls or meetings short and to the point to avoid unnecessary time wasting. This cuts down on the backward and forwards nature of emailing and the possibility of miscommunication creeping in. Ask yourself if the email you’re about to send is necessary and if it is a top priority for you and the person you’re sending it to.
Further steps you can take
Make sure you and your staff have the right time management techniques for when timewasters attack. We offer a Time Management Workshop that covers all you need to know. You’ll learn how to identify timewasters and gain valuable time management tools such as setting goals, prioritizing your actions, the 80/20 principle, active vs reactive and so much more. Make sure to reach out to one of our representatives today to find out more. After all, time is money.