Posted by Managing time efficiently has always been a concern for CEOs considering the massive responsibilities.
Due to the pandemic, their long-term work rhythm has gone haywire. Unfortunately, after the resumption of all the activities and the reopening of the offices, hybrid working post-pandemic has become a challenge. Most CEOs are considering reducing vacationing while focusing more on interactions and conferences to grow their own business.
Planning effective strategies can be a new approach to time administration. They can devote more time to prospectus development and discussions with directors, and less time to attending conferences and responding to irrelevant emails.
Generally, it’s predicted that most CEOs work for 65 hours every 8 days, sleep for 7 hours each night, and work out for 30 minutes every day.
It’s extremely crucial for a CEO to effectively allocate their time and presence to ensure the good performance of the company.
If you’re a CEO and are constantly juggling managing time efficiently, then here are a few tips which you can implement.
1. Schedule all the regular activities and downtime
Plan your downtime throughout the day. We aren’t robots. Taking a 10-minute break isn’t going to cause any detriment to your company. These breaks would help you to declutter your mind, analyze what’s next, and recenter yourself before continuing the other activities.
Furthermore, you can also schedule all the other regular activities for the entire day, such as checking the mail, walking the dog, picking up your kids, etc. Scheduling tasks would help you strategically allocate your time for other important activities.
2. Have buffer time between meetings
It’s a good idea to include buffer time between your meetings so that if some meetings don’t end on time due to an extended discussion, it wouldn’t cause a delay as it would be covered in your buffer time. Schedule the time and add it to your calendar.
3. Delegate more
If CEOs get too involved in day-to-day work, then they won’t be able to manage other important things efficiently. It’s very important to plan and create a vision for your organization rather than merely getting engaged in day-to-day operations.
It can be done by delegating the work to your team and focusing more on planning by scheduling it regularly in the calendar.
4. Always brace-up for the next day
A responsible CEO will always plan for the next day. When you have already planned your agendas and have scheduled your meetings on the calendar, then you don’t have to worry about the next day.
5. Useless emails
Email can be an efficient way of communicating, but if you spend more time on electronic communication, it could be a time-suck. Sending way too many emails sets the wrong norms and may even put your reputation at stake, especially if you send them at any time at midnight or on weekends.
It’s a good idea to filter out the important emails by delegating the work to an assistant before sending them.
Also, spending a long time reading and replying can sometimes get overwhelming and can end up draining your energy. Prioritize your emails by creating folders and flagging the important ones.
Also, you can create batches by simply managing them once every two hours, which makes them more manageable.
6. Carve out some time for yourself
It’s nowhere written that the CEO has to slog and shouldn’t spare some time for themselves. They must efficiently allocate their time for everything while keeping health, fitness, and rest in mind to perform at their best on the job.
Over-exhausting or stressing leads to a lack of productivity, which might hamper work life. You must carve out some time to declutter your mind and unwind yourself.
7. Be transparent about future work plans
Often, it happens in most companies that they don’t formulate adequate strategies for future work plans, which results in stress. Even if work plans aren’t planned effectively, it can become a source of stress for the employees as well.
8. Limit Virtual Meetings
Ever since the pandemic happened, meetings have been shifted to zoom. Most companies have been excessively relying on Zoom meetings, which often ends them causing Zoom fatigue.
However, conducting meetings in person is more effective than conducting them via online mode.
To maintain efficiency, try to keep meetings shorter as standard meeting times are shorter than hours.
9. Split your days
You can categorize your days to ensure that you allocate your time efficiently to important tasks. Just like Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter believes that categorizing your days based on themes helps to manage businesses effectively without letting the tasks overflow.
You can also split your days by keeping “focus” and “buffer” days. It’s simple to break by focusing on high-priority tasks and avoiding checking emails and social media on focus days, while on buffer days you can focus on all low-priority tasks such as checking your emails and social media.
10. Spend less time writing reports
I know that writing reports sounds so mundane and time-consuming, but when you have to write reports every single month, it can become exhausting and tedious.
Instead, you can use a dashboard to track your KPI and results so that you don’t end up writing reports separately every month.
With a dashboard, you can view your performance with all figures.
11. Create a Playbook
You can create a playbook for time-consuming tasks by writing about all the future launches in the market so that you can easily delegate them to management without worrying. Also, it saves a lot of time.
Uber uses it to save time and efficiently when they want to roll out their services in new cities.
12. Say no to the least important tasks
As a CEO, you must be getting dozens of calls and emails. A lot of people must be approaching you for advice and approval. If you think that these tasks aren’t that important, then it’s time to say no to them. You can simply explain to them politely that you’re busy and won’t be able to guide them without being harsh at the same time.
You would be surprised to know that Tim Cook, Apple’s co-founder, believes that saying no to dozens of things doesn’t cause any harm to the company. It leads to innovation.
Conclusion
Efficient time management is quite essential to effectively running a business whether it a startup or well established IT company. However, sometimes time management becomes tricky, especially when you aren’t able to create a thin line between high-prioritizing and low-prioritized tasks.
Also Try – Are You Beginning Your Profession in The Internet of Things Industry?