The average CEO works about 4,200 hours per year, but how much of that time is productive? Studies suggest it’s a lot less than you might think. CEOs use nearly 70 percent of their time sub-optimally. Between spending too much time responding to emails and in disorganized meetings, CEO spend time on activities that aren’t helping them reach their goals.
A CEO’s day is also packed with opportunities. By implementing the right processes and strategies, you can gain back time and spend more of it focused on helping your company grow.
Through these seven time management tips, you’ll become a more effective business leader, boosting not only your own productivity but the productivity of your entire company.
- Organize your meetings and other conversations in advance
It’s not difficult for meetings to get off track, but when meetings end up having several tangents, you’re losing valuable time. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who likes it when meetings go longer than intended. To prevent yours from going long and in the wrong direction, plan out your meeting agendas in advance.
One way to help you with agenda-setting is by having standard meeting templates. These templates will save you prep time and they’ll also ultimately keep your meetings from going off target. By implementing these templates you’ll boost your own, and your whole team’s productivity.
While meeting templates can be a big help for both one-on-one and larger conferences, you can also create templates for a variety of functions. One idea is to keep a file of standard email templates. Perhaps your inbox is often filled with press requests. Rather than responding to each one individually, keep a template on file to redirect the journalist to your executive assistant to set up a time for an interview. Perhaps you often receive emails from aspiring CEOs asking about your tips for being a business leader. If you make it a goal to respond to such messages and inspire the next generation of leaders, keep a template on file filled with words of encouragement to these inquiring minds.
- Automate when possible and reasonable
How much time do you spend on repetitive tasks? Probably more time than you think! Automating processes can help you take that time back. Our working world has many options for automation, but only some CEOs take advantage of this opportunity.
From financial processes to social media management, the right tools can automate your tasks and reduce the time you spend doing something a machine can do for you. While you want to be as engaged in your company as possible, automation can help you prioritize what you need to be hands-on for.
- Learn to and prepare to delegate
CEOs often believe they need to do everything, especially if the task at hand is a high priority. But if you constantly have a packed schedule and your employees have excess downtime, you may want to consider starting to delegate more. Delegation is a time saver that requires a time investment. Essentially, you’ll need to make plans to be able to delegate effectively so that your team can fulfill the task as well as you yourself would have done.
Make a list of tasks on your schedule that you don’t necessarily have to do yourself. Then, write out the instructions for the processes you’ve created to handle them. Remember that your team may have a learning curve, so you may need to be hands-on the first few times they follow your instructions. But, in time, these tasks will become second nature to them, freeing up a lot more time for you.
- Set and prioritize your goals
When you organize each day it’s essential that you spend the bulk of your day on your biggest priorities. With so little time available to you, you can’t afford to put your most important goals on the back burner. But before you can prioritize and work toward your goals, you need to be aware of what those goals are.
To grow a company, you need to always be look toward the future. What do you envision for your business? What do you most want to accomplish? Even more specifically, what do you see in your future? Throughout the year, engage in goal-setting sessions. Then, keep track of your goals and make time to reassess them. Once you hit your target, it’s time for another goal-setting meeting. With personal goals, you only need to make these plans with yourself. But for larger company goals, be sure to meet with the heads of each team so they can help you create reasonable expectations based on their experiences with their employees.
- Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is more than a buzzword.. It simply means the ability to be engaged in the present moment. And while the definition is simple, following through on mindfulness can be more challenging. Our minds often get overwhelmed, and we begin worrying about things in the future or in the past rather than focusing on what’s right in front of us.
By not focusing on what we’re doing, we are more likely to make mistakes and have to redo the same task repeatedly. By working to keep our minds on one thing at a time, we regain the time it would take to do it again. There are many ways to retrain our brains to practice mindfulness, so you can try several and see what works for you. One option is to do breathing exercises when you feel yourself starting to get overwhelmed. You could also add mindful meditation practices to your daily routine. Some mindfulness experts recommend journaling once daily to get the clutter out of your mind and onto a piece of paper.
- Learn to say “no” or at least “not right now”
Wanting to be available for your team is an excellent way to create a positive company culture. Engaged CEOs help foster more engaged employees. But by leaving your door open at all times, you may end up with more requests for your attention than you expect. While it’s nice to want to be there to help however and whenever you can, it’s easy to lose track of time and throw off your already-tightly-packed schedule by stopping everything you’re doing to assist your team.
We mistakenly believe that “no” is a bad word. Sometimes, saying no is a necessary way to protect your business. Saying no doesn’t mean that you’ll never be available for your team. It just means that you’re creating boundaries and recognizing your priorities. When you have a fully-packed schedule for the day, it’s okay to tell your team that you’re not available at the moment, or to remind them that someone else may be able to assist them with the task.
- Keep your inbox and mind clear with an effective email strategy
We spend nearly a third of our day reading and responding to emails. While email has become an essential part of communicating within and outside our companies, research suggests that we are drastically over-checking our inboxes. We’re also spending too much time responding to and organizing our emails.
We often get overwhelmed when our inboxes become cluttered. Suppose you received a necessary attachment on Monday that you didn’t need yet, but on Wednesday, you do need it. The only problem is that you’ve received hundreds of emails between Monday and Wednesday. Now you can’t find that vital attachment, and you end up wasting time scrolling through your inbox searching for it.
Some CEOs swear that the best way to combat this issue is by adopting the Inbox Zero method, a form of email management that strives to keep your inbox empty or almost empty at all times. Keep in mind that Inbox Zero does require a time commitment. You don’t want to allow your inbox to become too packed before you try to start de-cluttering it. But by implementing daily strategies to get to Inbox Zero, you may ultimately save yourself some time.
Time management is a skill that CEOs need to hone over time. Developing this ability means adopting certain processes. In many ways, organization is a crucial factor to better time management, like the organization of your inbox, your meeting agenda, and your instructions to your team, which allow you to delegate tasks more efficiently. Outside of organization, automation can also play a vital role in time management. Learning to prioritize will give you back time on your busy schedule as well. You need to prioritize your goals, but you also need to invest in taking care of your mind by preventing it from becoming overwhelmed. An overwhelmed mind is more likely to make mistakes, and those mistakes use up your precious time. By following these organization, automation, and prioritization tips, you’ll find that you’re spending your time better, which does make you a more effective leader.
Author bio: John Marquez is a coffee-loving community manager over at Stampli. He spends mostof his time testing different engagement strategies and in his spare time, argues his findings with his dog Zeus. You can follow him on Twitter @J_PMarquez.
Disclosure notice: This article was crafted by https://www.stampli.com/blog/ under their client agreement.
John Marquez
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