Whether you’re a business owner or not, we’re sure many of you understand the struggle of not having enough hours in the day. We’ve been working for ourselves for almost two years and time management continues to be one of the biggest hurdles with operating our business. Over the course of these almost two years, we’ve come across solutions that help us work smarter, not harder. We want to be as productive as possible with the limited hours we get each day and we hope these solutions help you work smarter as well:

Before jumping into the first task of the day, we strongly recommend writing down a to-do list of all the things you need to tackle that day. Once you have a lengthy list, rank each item by priority and give each item a time limit, that way you won’t spend the entire day working on one thing. As the day goes on, we’re sure things will pop up that are time sensitive and aren’t on your list… write those tasks on the list as well and adjust the priority ranking. By the end of the day, you’ll be able to look at your list and visually see how much you were able to accomplish. The next step is to write an email to yourself detailing all the items on that list that you weren’t able to get through or finish so that it carries over to tomorrow’s list. By emailing the to-do list to yourself, it is a guaranteed way of reminding your future self of tasks that need to be completed.

When we first started, we wanted to do absolutely everything ourselves. The reason being that we wanted to have control over the quality of the work and know how to do it all. As we started working with more clients (and with it more work) the busier we became and the less time we had to tackle all the items on our to-do list. We had friends tell us about Fiverr and other freelance platforms where people sell services, but we never really looked into it. It wasn’t until one busy week where a client gave us a pretty demanding website that we entertained the idea of outsourcing. The client wanted an animated logo; we literally had no idea how to do that but we were eager to learn. We spent a total of 6 hours trying to figure it out. 30 YouTube videos later and feeling discouraged, we took to Fiverr to see if anyone could help. Fast forward, in 5 hours someone sent us the animated logo and we paid $15 for it (worth every penny!). Ever since we’ve become advocates for outsourcing, but note that we only outsource mundane tasks or super complicated demands that we are clueless about. The takeaway: since hours are so limited, do the things you are best at /enjoy doing and anything that is less important = outsource.

It is so easy to spend the entire day at your desk doing work, but is that really what makes you most productive? Sitting in front of a screen can be draining, and doing it all day will not give you the energy or creative ideas you need to perform your best work. Instead, give yourself breaks to regroup and re-energize. Whether that be 30 minutes every two hours or treating yourself to an episode after you finish one major to-do item, you deserve to give your mind a break. Have you ever been working on something and finding yourself getting constantly distracted, staring aimlessly, etc? The reason for this being is that your brain is exhausted. Instead of dragging out that task which you are taking forever to complete, give yourself a 15-minute break to eat a snack, do some jumping jacks, pet your pup, and then come back rejuvenated to finish that initial task in a better state of mind. Experts say breaks correlate to higher productivity rates and we’re not going to question it 🙂