There are four major sources of time drain for busy business owners:

1. Scheduling appointments

Solution:  Get clients to self-schedule. One of the many advantages to doing this is that there are no emails back and forth offering various timeslots – a huge timesaver in itself

2. Day-to-day emails – too many!

Solution:  Schedule set times to check your emails.  Once or twice a day is enough, say first thing in the morning and again later in the day.  If you subscribe to various industry groups save reading these emails until you take a break from your work – maybe at the end of the day when you’re winding down.

3. Coming back from a Christmas/Thanksgiving/Summer vacation to an overflowing inbox

Solution:  To help manage emails when you’re taking a break set up an autoresponder on your website mailbox.  This is simply an email message that automatically gets sent to the recipient by your mailbox which has been pre-written by you!  Also known as an out-of-office reply.

4. Managing your day-to-day tasks/To Do list

Solution:  Spreadsheets are a great way for you to organise your To Do list. Set up headings in the first row and add your tasks below. You can then sort your list by any column that you choose, making it an interactive To Do list. And best of all, your list is contained in one place.

This tip was one of many time management strategies presented to the Office Organization Success Cafe members on their members-only monthly teleclass.

Want *2 free months* in the Office Organization Success Cafe?  Click here

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.