Maximise your time

Be Successful, don’t makeexcuses

In Business you must be on top of your game to optimise yourperformance. Giving your all day in day out is often a massivetask, but everyone, regardless of seniority, is expected tocomplete the tasks they are set to a satisfactory degreeand on time.

During office hours we are often faced with the threat ofprocrastination, it is easy to give in to distractions fromthe digital world. Here are a few ways you can maximise your time,avoid procrastination, stay in the game and make money!

1.) Go on the offense-Youget in and decide to whack out a few emails to use as creditablemeasurables. Unfortunately, emails are simply the filler incompleting a task. You’ll find it extremely rare that an email willbe responded to within the first 30 minutes of sending it. In facttime for a stat attack: 56% of emails get responded to in the firsthour and 89% within the first 24 hours.

A better way to handle this is to go on the attack and get anupdate directly. Try calling your prospectiveclient/candidate. That way you’ll be able to instantly update them,leave a voicemail with important information and at the very worstthey’ll receive an alert that you tried to reach them. You’ll findthis far more effective than having a message buried in a stack ofemails

2.) Not effectively using SocialMedia– Everyone loves a good tweet, whether you’veadded 100 filters onto the photo of the ham hock sandwich you justate or if you’re sat waiting for a reply from yourfavourite celebrities’ account. Social Media is a tool and can beused with your job. Having trouble filling a role? Tweet from yourpersonal account a basic job specification, a call to action andadd a few relevant hashtags to increase SEO. You’ve instantlyincreased the reach of your ad significantly and given it thepotential to get shares, now we’re talking! Also make sure youexplore all channels: LinkedIn and Twitter are a good start,but you may be missing more niche channels like BizCrowd andCreative Pool.

3.) Schedule andprioritise– Okay you’ve got a million things going on, it’sTuesday and you’re panicking. Wait; while you were panickingyou forgot that thing which needsdoing for that person.

Yes we often have tasks pouring out of our brain and into therealm of forgotten. Make sure you don’t simply scrawleverything you need to do messily onto a scrap of paper. Does youremail system have a calendar function? If it does, perhaps scheduleyour day to day tasks into appointments on your calendar, so youcan work hour by hour. A calendar doesn’t have to be restricted tosimply special events.

4.) Finish what you start–You may find yourself writing a job spec when a prospectivecandidate phones you up, who you haven’t spoken to formonths. it turns out they’re interested inregistering with you again; you then spend the next hour firingover relevant roles. In an instant, you’ve dumped what you weredoing for something that came thick and fast out of the blue.You need to prioritise what you’re doing daily. There are many waysto do this.

One is to, ‘do it, delegate it or delete it’. What is costeffective? how are you spending your time? Think about each taskand do the hardest one first when you are at your peak performancelevel.