Are you a business owner?

And do you often tell yourself that you want to do a lot but don’t have time or you complain about it to others?

If yes then you must track your time.

You’ll find value in tracking work hours.

Even better if you can track non-work time also.

It’ll tell you how much time you are spending on social media, sleep, self-care, and other things that matter.

You don’t have to track your time for one year. Tracking it for a week or two gives you a good picture of where your time is going.

Once you have tracked your time for a week or two start labeling each task you are doing across these categories.

• Info Processing: emails, texts, Whatsapp, and other forms of communication.
• Hiring: Preps towards hiring, interviewing, and communication with prospects.
• Learning: Reading, consuming courses, and more 
• Team: Time spent with a person who is working with you on client projects. In the beginning, mention – team (external) and team (internal)
• Operations: Time spent doing paperwork, taxes, and other tasks that don’t fit into other categories.
• Growth/Strategy: Time spent thinking about mid and long-term goals and working on anything growth-related
• Sales/Biz Dev: Time spent engaging with prospects. Biz dev though part of growth, mention it separately for now.
• Marketing: Time spent doing things for marketing your business. Feel free to combine it with sales and biz dev.

This will give you a fair idea of where your time is going.

Also, sign up for Rescue Time (start with a 2-week trial) as an additional automated layer for tracking.

Once this is done, sit and audit this sheet and list down in which area you’d like to spend less time and where you’d like to spend more.

Now work towards achieving your desired time spends.

A great way to do it is to block time on your calendar based on your priorities, and aim to spend time the way you want.

The only way to increase the time you are spending in one area is to reduce time spent in another area. Because there are limited hours in a day.

To reduce the time you spend in one area, use the delete, automate, delegate framework.

Delete what does not need to be done, things that don’t move you forward towards your goals. Automate what can be automated, and delegate the rest.

This way you’ll reduce the time you spend in one area by up to 75% in some cases. 

Now it is up to you to allocate that saved time to other areas or just do nothing during that time and chill.

Once you start spending time the way you want, you will feel in control, and do more of what you want without getting worked up.