How To Be More Productive

Harvey MacKay said, “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.”  As a busy entrepreneur, time is your most valuable resource. Use it wisely! One way to use your time wisely is by how you manage your day and schedule. Most of us know when we are at our peak time of productivity, so it is vital to maximize that time as much as possible.  Here are a few examples of how some people organize their days to reach their peak productivity:

• Work in blocks of 90 minutes at a time, without any interruptions allowed.
• Theme days: a day for meetings, another day for sales calls, another day for creativity and writing
• Organize in blocks of half days.
• No more than four meetings per day.
• No phone calls or checking of email until 10:00 am as there always seems to be something that requires immediate attention.

You get the idea. Experiment with a few of these ideas and see what works best for you. Find your peak productive time.

The Harvard Business Review published an article regarding how CEOs spent their time. This study covered 24 hours a day and seven days a week for a period of three months. Although the 27 executives who participated in the study have many resources at their disposal, the thing they described as one of their biggest challenges was managing their time.

While you may not be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, all of us could benefit from using our time more wisely.  The best way to manage your time is by planning for it. To start with you could keep a log for a week or two to see how you spend your time. This exercise will show where to make adjustments in order to use your time more efficiently and purposefully.

Download a FREE daily calendar template in the hub to help get started in a more productive you!