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Guest post by: Tash Hughes Become an Author

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No matter how you cut it, there are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. You can’t change that.

What you can change is how to you use those hours and days.

You can waste time, and regret it, or find ways to be productive and efficient.

Increasing your efficiency

There are many ways to increase your efficiency and productivity, but we’ll just focus on setting yourself up to be efficient.

By setting up your mind and environment appropriately, you will be more efficient by default and that means getting more done in less time so you can take time to do other things like relaxing and being with loved people.

So here are 5 ways to establish some efficiencies

1. Forget multitasking whilst working. Turn off email alerts, shut social media windows and turn your phones to voicemail so you can focus on what you are doing. Trust me, the world will continue without your involvement for an hour or so and you will get so much more done. It’s not only the time you spend being distracted but also the 5 – 10 minutes getting back onto the task.
2. Automate basic processes as much as possible. Each time something is automated, you may save seconds or minutes plus you gain the mental energy and space of remembering to do all those steps. A blog is a great example of how to do this – write a post when it suits you, set the software to make it live at a time that suits your audience and use a plugin that updates your social media with the link to your new post.
3. Choose appropriate tools to get the job done. A tool that only sort of does what you need it to do makes you inefficient, probably resulting in wasted time and frustration. So even if it costs more or goes against what Great Aunt Jenny told you, find a better tool and use it instead.
4. Prepare some procedures and keep them somewhere you will easily find them later. How much time is wasted by trying to figure out how to do something you’ve done before – refer to a procedure and get the job done and out of the way. Very useful for tasks you don’t do often (like annual account reports) and for when training new team members, procedures are also a sign of professionalism that helps if you want to sell your business later on.
5. Admit when you need help and find the right help. I could spends hours trying to produce a blog template that looks pretty ordinary or I could spend 10 minutes asking a designer to prepare me a great template while l write more blog posts. Realise you can’t do everything, and not only will things be done faster while you work on other tasks but the final product will quite often work more efficiently anyway.

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