Business
Developing time management skills enables you to accomplish high-level goals that accelerate your business success. Time remains our most valuable resource. The most successful professionals master their time utilization, so their "hours worked" align with meaningful objectives. These time management skills guide seasoned professionals in their craft. So, the five time management skills you want to master are: 1. Schedule Calls Within Time Blocks Business professionals love to hear the phone ringing. A prospect, partner, or client resides on the other line, waiting for you to pick up the phone. However, fielding calls throughout the day can present a problem. If you spend too much time fielding all your calls, you will not have enough time for outreach and building your brand. Hiring someone on your team to field calls for you greatly alleviates this issue, if you don’t already have someone in place. The person answering the phone can schedule a time for you to call back the prospect or handle the entire call themselves, so you don’t have to. Connecting with colleagues and people in your local area on Linked-in and asking for introductions to potential clients expands your pipeline. Taking calls throughout the day limits your ability to perform these activities. Scattering your calls throughout the day will give you little time to embrace deep work for your other objectives. Scheduling your calls within a time block gives you set hours to get into the flow with other activities. Setting a time block is one of the best time management skills to master. This practice cultivates deep work, which is an essential element of highly successful professionals. Some of the most productive people in the world swear by time blocking. Ever heard of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Michael Hyatt, or Cal Newport? Yep – all time-blockers. They’re squeezing every drop of productivity from their days, and you can do the same. 2. Identify and Prioritize Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) Time blocking gives you a scheduling framework to input activities. We all know specific tasks deserve more attention than others, but which tasks deserve the most attention for your business? Rather than take a guess, let your KPIs guide you. Decide the vital KPIs for your business and prioritize work that matches up with your KPIs. Revenue growth and profitability are two common KPIs. Professionals focusing on these KPIs would focus on activities that bring in revenue and increase profit margins. Digging deeper into general KPIs such as revenue growth and profitability gives you further clarity on your priorities. If you make the bulk of your revenue through specific products or services, prioritize activities that effectively fill up your pipeline with the greatest opportunities. If connecting with people on Linked-in more effectively fills up your pipeline than writing industry articles, then you should obviously prioritize Linked-in over articles. 3. Put Less Work On Your Plate When you identify KPIs, it gets easier to implement other time management skills. One of those skills is putting less work on your plate. Many professionals make the mistake of seeing a busy calendar as a successful one. Rather than focus on how many hours they work, successful professionals fill their calendars with impactful activities that are the highest payoff. Pursuing fewer tasks gives them more time to focus on what most contributes to the bottom line. Review all of the work you perform in a given day, week, and month. How many activities produce negligible results? How many activities lead to incredible results? According to Pareto’s Principle, 80% of our results come from 20% of our work. Discover the few activities that yield most of your results. Then, phase out the many activities that only lead to 20% of your results. 4. Slow Down To Speed Up Slowing down to speed up is one of the most underrated time management skills. If you speed up and always keep you