Time management is one of the most important skills any professional should have, especially consultants.
Many of the problems that face consultants are because of poor time management and a dire need to procrastinate :p
To preserve your precious time, check out these 5 tips to help you use your time wisely.
1. Organize your day and attention.
Working on a tight schedule can be extremely helpful for staying connected and on top of work. Having several tasks during a short time kind of forces you to balance your time effectively.
Choose a helpful calendar that you like and always schedule everything in there, food time included.
While this way works out for many, some might find scheduling the entire day a bit restrictive, and that’s why I mentioned attention.
Managing your attention and focus could be far more important than managing your time.
Your whole well-scheduled day can be completely thrown off if you’re distracted.
Hmm... This actually calls for some tips on attention management, I’ll write about that soon!
2. Implement helpful tools.
As a consultant, you have a lot of information and issues to keep track of. Imagine you urgently want to check out a client’s last status, you won’t have much time to wait for an email back with the answer from your team lead.
This can be solved by implementing a project management system that helps you track all your clients, partners, and teams. Such a tool would make it much easier to know when you started working for a certain client, who’s the team working with them, and what were the details of the last meeting even!
3. Block distractions.
Although social media can be extremely helpful in your case as a consultant; seeing as you barely have time to connect with family or friends, you need to be aware of how time consuming it could be.
Sometimes you need a small break off work, so you find yourself opening Instagram. “All it takes is 5 minutes”, your mind says.
Meh, you know the rest.
How to solve this?
Mute your social media accounts notifications.
Schedule a certain time to surf those platforms.
4. Rely on your team.
Relying on your team is one of the most important causes for a successful workflow.
Not only does it mean that you trust them, but it also helps you get done with work faster.
You shouldn’t worry about day-to-day tasks or minor issues. You should rely on your team for that. This will give you more time to focus on solving major and important problems.
Not giving your team the chance to do work could be very toxic and might mean you are micromanaging every single detail, which is bad for both, your precious time and your team’s mental health.
Allowing your team to do certain important tasks can also help you in the long run. It will make them learn and gain more experience so you could later completely rely on them.
5. Set face-to-face meetings.
Schedule back-to-back, face-to-face meetings with your clients, partners, and team members. Such meetings are very timesaving as you don’t have to lose time waiting for email replies.
When I say face-to-face, I also mean online video calls. It might not always be easy for clients to make it to your office. A zoom call can fix it all!
This way you’ll also make your clients feel how important they are to you, making them have more trust that you’re working hard and care to solve their problems the correct way.
Here is a cool infographic I created to make this simpler.
Stay tuned for more tips in the future, we want you to make use of time in the most efficient ways! See you.
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