We know that managing your time can be a challenge, especially when you're just starting out in your business. In this episode, I cover the 5 Healthy Habits to Manage Your Time better for business success.

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In this episode, you'll hear about:

5 Healthy Habits to Manage Your Time
Reasons why waking up on time will help you be more productive

In this episode we are going to talk about the 5 Healthy Habits to Manage your time.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to one of our listeners and it was an interesting conversation that we had. When I asked her what is her biggest concern when it comes to managing her business, she said it is about managing her time — I wonder why this is a common issue that women entrepreneurs are facing across the globe?

When I dived deeper I realized it’s not because we have poor management skills, but it’s actually because we have difficulty determining which of our task is important and which is deemed as time wasters. Having said that, here are my 5 Healthy Habits to Manage your time better.

1. Wake Up Early and Sleep On Time

Habit number one is to wake up early and sleep on time. I think not many of you would actually go through this, right? Having the ability to determine your own working hours could actually be a challenge to you running your business as well.

When I first started I have to safely say that it wasn’t easy for me to determine my working hours. It would be, “Oh, I feel like working right now, so I’m just going to work right now” or "Oh, I feel like stopping, so I’m going to stop and take a break." But that just isn’t the right way.

So what you can do is to actually plan what time your going to wake up every single day and sleep on time. I’m not too sure about the scientific reasoning behind it, but when you wake up on time, and you sleep on time, you’ll start to feel that your body is a fully rejuvenated and ready for you to conquer the world in that sense.

Every single human being on Earth have 24 hours in a day, and you have just as much time as well. So you need just 7-8 hours of sleep a day and 24 minus 8, what do you get? Yes, you get the remaining 16 hours of your time! That is the 16 hours that you have left to determine and to do the things that matters the most in your business.

The net effect of waking up on time and sleeping on time is you’ll get a fully maximized day for you to do whatever it is that you need to do to run your business with success.

So for example, I wake up every single day at say 6:00 AM and then I go to sleep every single day at 11:00 PM. From 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM, I would get about 8-hours of sleep. What happens after that is:

24 — 8 = 16 hours

I will get the remaining 16 hours to fully do my work, to rest and to do everything else that I need to survive on a day to day basis.

The ideal amount of time for you to take to work is about eight hours. We’re not talking about employee working hours here, we’re talking about you as the business owner. So in total, the amount of time that you should be involved in your business should accumulate to about 8- to 10-hours in a day. This depends on how well and how determined you are to achieve your goals and to meet your targets.

I work on average between 8- to 10-hours every single day, and I make it a point that even for example, in a situation where that should I really have to wake up late because I’m not feeling well or anything like that, I would still clock in the 8- to 10-hours that I promised myself every single day. Every single one of us are actually motivated by different things. And for me it’s in terms of the time that I get to spend with my family or the time that I can spend to wind down.

If I get less time to do that, it is sort of a punishment for me, and it’s a reminder in fact that I should be managing my time better the next day.

If you would have 16 hours now to complete whatever it is that you need, are you going to tell me that you don’t have time to conduct your business, or you don’t have time to achieve all your goals?

That’s almost impossible now, right?

You have 16 hours and even if you were to split them in 2-hour blocks, you have eight blocks of 16 hours for you to work in and on your business.

2. Use an Online Calendar

So the second habit that I have for you is to use an online calendar. Online calendars such as using Google Calendar or Outlook calendar, they would be able to be synced to your mobile phone. This means you have your schedule at the tips of your fingertips. Like you have no excuses for not being able to fulfill your task.

So what I’m going to do is in the show notes is I will give you a screenshot of how my calendar looks like. It may seem a bit cluttered, I think at first. But, bear in mind that I have a team of five, and we all share this calendar. So at any single point in time I would know who is working when, what are they working on, and also for my own personal schedules, so what is the things that I need to do. And who is it that I need to meet. This will help give you a better idea of how to manage and schedule your time better.

3. Batch Similar Tasks Together

Habit number three that I can recommend for you is to batch similar tasks together, lump them up together.

So what are considered similar tasks?

For example, you have a task that is very administrative in nature. So what you can do is, you can lump all the administrative related methods into one chunk of time. Which is into one chunk of two hours or four hours. I think four hours is a little bit too long to spend on admin, but if it’s just four hours in a week, that’s fine. It really depends on you and it really depends on how you are running your business.

Let’s take the assumption that you’d need 2- to 4-hours for you to complete all your administrative related tasks. This includes things like checking your emails, responding to emails, doing bookkeeping for yesterday’s expenses, research, lump them up together so that you have some muscle memory in terms of the systems that is in place. In the next episode I will be talking about systems, so this will be very useful for you as a prelude to the next episode.

4. Delegate Time-Consuming Tasks

In relation to what I’ve just shared earlier, it’s about delegating your tasks. So habit number four is to learn to delegate the most time consuming task. The Chris Bailey, a productivity expert and author of the book, The Productivity Project says that,

“Many entrepreneurs unthinkingly waste a lot of time on low value work that can be delegated.”

Being productive means being more deliberate about your work — I totally agree with this. When I first started, of course I wanted to do everything on my own; but soon I realized I only have 24 hours in a day.

If I hire someone, I am borrowing their 24 hours in a day. When you are starting, delegate the most low value work item was time consuming work. You will start to open up spaces in your blocks of time, allowing you to do more high value work: thinking, brainstorming, going on networking — all the things that makes a lot of difference in the way that you are running your business.

So how do you delegate the task?

Perhaps for the first time, you wouldn’t be able to determine what needs to be delegated. So, you need to constantly be monitoring your time and conduct a time audit, where you time yourself on every single task. I’ve shared about this in depth in episode 13, so you can go on over to fempreneursecrets.com/013 to learn more.

Let’s say it takes me about four hours every single day to read my emails and respond to them, to do some research on the topics that I would like to talk about in the next episodes. It takes me about four hours every single day.

What do I do now then?

Is four hours a lot of time every single day?

Having four hours a day multiplied by five, you get 20 hours. That is 20 hours a week wasted on doing things that you could ask someone else to do.

The research part can be definitely delegated, saving you about two hours of your time every single day. This means you now have 10 hours a week (extra) to work on the things that matters the most in your business like thinking about marketing. I think a lot of business owners forget that marketing is really important. Think about what are the tasks that are time consuming for you and delegate it out.

5. Review Your Day, Every day

The last healthy habit on time management is schedule your time to review your day.

Let me explain to you why it’s important to review.

We are always working hard to meet our goals. So some of us make a lot of effort on creating goals. We hope to achieve the goals that we’ve planned for, but we neglect to review every single day.

What happens when we review the day at the end of every single day? You get to see what you could have done better. What you have done right and what are the things that you have no choice but to spill over to the next day.

It’s like a reflection in a way where you take a look at yourself in the mirror and see that there’s a lot of room for improvement for me just based on today. “I’m going to be better tomorrow.”

When you keep reviewing yourself every single day in this manner, you will start hitting your goals much earlier than you would have anticipated.

The reason is because you are constantly monitoring yourself and monitoring your small milestones to get to where you need to be to hit your goals. Reviewing your day, every single day is really important, and it’s a great habit to start even when you are a team of one. When you have a bigger team, reviewing the end of the day together would actually make a lot of difference in the structure and in a way that your business is going to hit your goals.

Really — Don’t neglect the importance of reviewing the end of the day.

So, that’s it!

Also, if you have any questions that you would like me to answer in our podcasts, go on over to fempreneursecrets.com/podcast to drop those questions.

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I'd love to know what you think of this episode. Do you plan on leaving your full-time job soon to start your business? If so, where are you now in that plan? Share with me in the comments below!

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