How I optimized my time and achieved better business performance

As a business owner, I often face at least 50+ tasks, receive over 100 emails a day, and make a lot of calls. In addition, I do a variety of activities that require radically different skills: from administrative management, through content writing, customer conversations to sales, financial management, advertising analysis, participation in brainstorming meetings for new creative concepts, etc. . All this combined with 2 children to take care of at home.

Over the years, I’ve normally made a number of mistakes in managing my personal time and personal energy, but I came to a few conclusions and developed several habits that I managed to optimize most of my time with.

Here are some changes I’ve made to my way of working that have helped me be more effective:

PREPARING FOR BETTER TIME MANAGEMENT

1. Know what you do – I do advertising, we make advertising with the people in my company. But this broadly publicized advertisement broke it into small pieces. We have separate processes that go through the realization of individual products, for example:
a. Administrative work – all kinds of things like drafting and signing contracts;
b. Finance – such as invoicing and reporting on company performance;
c. Internal marketing;
d. Project management – all conversations and emails with clients;
e. Design – from heavy intellectual work such as creative writing to more elementary as a design adaptation;
f. Content writing – posts, articles, etc., some in Bulgarian, others in other languages;
g. Holidays – yes, people need that too.
Etc. I split my entire business into its components. I have divided the activities of those who generate revenue (such as media planning) and those that are not direct revenue generators and are directly a spending item (for example, part of administrative work). A long list of over 100 task groups and sub-tasks was obtained.
Each task and sub-task is given a price or value that is worth it (even if it does not generate revenue for the company, it has value and should at least come in the expense part).
Each assignment was also assigned to the respective responder.

2.Find software that suits your needs – if this is your first time, start with software that is super easy to use. Otherwise you will encounter both internal resistance and resistance from your team to use it. We started using Toggle and now the company has been working with Harvest for the past few years.

Once you find your software, go inside the processes. This will make your own work and the work of your team members easier. It’s good to have this software either, or integrate it with a BI system.

3. Write down what you do during the day, week and month – we’ve all heard how nice it is to keep a diary. It all started with me when a colleague who already works in the States told me – you started wasting your time. So one day I just sat down and took notes on what my time was like. Use it constantly, both you and your team. It is very important to be objective – if you lie to someone, you are yourself. Do not write down your clients’ hours, do not underestimate the hours you have not worked and read Facebook for example. Enter everything as it is.

4. Analyze – this is the most important thing – to analyze what is happening during your day, week and month. Make it clear where you spend time and energy in your workspace, where you can optimize, where you make money from, and where you lose it because you don’t calculate enough for your clients. The good development of this software has helped us to rethink the way we work at the company and to introduce new practices that have helped us to be more efficient and profitable.

RITUALS WE HAVE

1. Make groups of tasks to perform on the same day – for example, we have introduced a billing and reporting process for the effects of campaigns and the previous month’s work on a single day. This is how we concentrate all the work and this has increased our efficiency by about 400%. If before for the reporting and invoicing of our monthly clients 3 people spent 1.5 – 2 days, now this process is carried out by 1 person in 1 day. Of course, such a change also requires the use of software to optimize the reporting process, for example. To be even more effective, spend days doing just one thing. For example, I don’t accept or schedule appointments on the billing day. This is a time where I concentrate with a person in my team to do administrative and financial work.

2. Don’t always be online – a common mistake is to always be available on your phone. I’ve learned to put aside my phone and other devices that can distract me when I do a job. Concentrating on one task enhances its quality and shortens the time you spend completing it. Do not be afraid if you did not answer a call or did not return a reply immediately. Most of us work in businesses that are not life-threatening.

3. We don’t do 2 things at once – if you look at the colleagues’ schedules you will see that they often work on 1 to a maximum of 3 projects during the day. Setting up blocks in which we work on a given topic has increased efficiency. We also try to educate our clients to get into that rhythm – when we work on the project, they should also be online so that we can communicate and get the job done faster. Keep in mind that most people need at least 15 minutes to fully transfer from one task to another.

4. Operations – We always start the week with a team meeting on Monday, 10am. This is a time where we tell ourselves what to connect, what we are not done. People need to see the big picture in the company or at least know what projects are being worked on. The operatives try to be short and precise so that they do not get bored. They usually run within half an hour.

5. Get answers on time – I spend at least half an hour each day answering all my emails and tasks or distributing them to my colleagues. Especially if you are a project manager or general manager, make sure you take the time to reply to your program every day. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a situation where your partners are not satisfied and create more downward tension.

6. Take the time to do nothing – well, not quite anything, but let’s call it that. From working with the time-tracking system, I have found that one can effectively work 5-6 hours a day. For the rest of the time, he just stands in front of the computer. For example, the company does not expect colleagues to have an effective 8 working hours. Especially when you are doing intellectual work, it is extremely difficult and if you practice it for a long time you will get a kick out. Take the time that your teams and you will sit in a room and talk about things in life, or read an article, or learn about something new and interesting. These are the moments that refresh you and give you a new charge. It’s important to take time for rest – the law says 15 minutes an hour if you’re working on a computer. True, it’s rarely complied with, but at least every two hours you can spend at least 20 minutes on activity that distracts you.

7. We have developed a planner – Everyday is good for Digital Marketing Group is a planner that we have developed with our team that meets the needs we have as a digital agency, but we see that it works for many of our clients as well. In it we record our weekly program, the projects we work on during the respective week, we set aside space for notes and reflections, and we conclude with an analysis of the past week. We found that it helps tremendously. We see it often in the offices we go to. There are some hidden things in it that help us be more productive.

8. Prioritize what is important, not what is urgent. If you want, check out the Eisenhower Matrix to find out what we’re talking about. Very often, we focus on those tasks that make more noise, rather than those that are really important to the business and ourselves. It is very difficult for one person to move 30-40 projects and tasks together. So we just made room for the projects each of us has to work on during the week. We avoid the so-called to-do sheets that sort tasks one by one and do them in order of numbers. We group tasks by type (for example, writing content for social media) or by client (today we will be working on several people per client X).

9. Determine when you are most effective and then do the most difficult and important tasks – for example, I am often not effective early in the morning. Therefore, when I come to work, I take about half an hour to complete tasks that do not require hard intellectual work. This helps me get into a working rhythm and have better concentration later. I have noticed that most people are most active either at about 11 o’clock or about 16 o’clock. That is why I try to schedule more important meetings during these periods. In the early morning or around noon, most people are still distracted.

A FEW THINGS THAT ARE SUPER IMPORTANT AND WE DON’T

1. Walking Out – Vitosha is just a few minutes from our office and South Park. Two great places to walk before, during or after work. In this respect, people in small towns are much more advantaged because they have more space to walk around and cars are not that super important.

2. Sports – in the office we have a swimming pool, fitness, sauna, steam room, super garden. Guess – neither we nor our colleagues use them regularly. Otherwise, our swimwear stand in the office bathroom. … And looking at how many people are at the gym, I think we’re not the only ones who find it difficult to do sports.
3. Laughter – I wish we had a little more laughter in the office, but often we don’t have the time or the joke to cheer us up.

Well, these are just a few of the recommendations we have developed with the team that we use to manage the company. And what are your methods for coping with many tasks and time management?