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What is one of the most precious resources you have as an entrepreneur?

If you answered “time” then we’re on the same wavelength.

Everybody gets 24 hours a day no matter how rich or poor you are. The thing about those 24 hours per day is that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep, eat, exercise and take care of our bodies. We need to spend time with our families and friends. So…we can allow ourselves just so many work hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must be efficient with our work. We can’t waste time on unnecessary details or on tasks that others can do.

When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there, you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this brief and to the point.

Email accounts. Let’s face it - as online entrepreneurs, email can be a huge distraction especially when your business grows to the point where you receive hundreds of emails a day. If you don’t want to hire a virtual assistant just to sift through your emails, here’s what you can do. If you have multiple email accounts, checking each and every email account more than once a day can be a huge time sucking activity. One thing you can do is to have all of the email that comes to all of your various email accounts forwarded to a central account. Something with lots of storage like Gmail would be a good candidate. One email account takes a lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various email addresses.

Always remember to cut down on the time spent reading and answering emails that are not going to add to your bottom line.

Prioritize your day. Do whatever it takes to set some goals for the day. Some people like to make lists. Others write down what they have to do on Post-It notes. Having a list of things you want to accomplish for the day will help you sort out and prioritize the important things that need to be done first.

Focus on building your business. Remember the 80/20 principle? Find out what your 20% is and focus on those activities. Don’t waste too much time checking your stats or lurking in forums. Those activities don’t always help you grow your business. Don’t get me wrong. Forums are a great place to meet people and network with others who share your same goals. And relationships that you form with other entrepreneurs are a valuable asset. However, you’ll need to strike a healthy balance so that you don’t end up neglecting the things that will prop up your bottom line now.

Outsource. Since you can’t clone yourself, the next best thing is to outsource some of the tasks that take up your time. Depending on your business model, outsourcing can work wonders to get you more of your time back. Things you can outsource include writing (articles, press releases, etc.) book keeping, PPC management, web design, article submission, and SEO, to name a few. Outsourcing doesn’t just mean that you farm out the menial tasks to others. You also outsource because others are better at certain tasks than you are. This will leave you to focus and develop your core competencies.

You will be really surprised at how much of your day that you waste if you keep a record of how you spend your time over the course of several days.

[tags]time management, solo entrepreneurs[\tags]

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