Managing your own business can be stressful and time consuming – especially if you’re a solo-preneur who works from home. We can eliminate the obvious home-based time zapping activities such as cleaning, cooking etc., by getting in extra help or allocating chores to other family members… but what about those less obvious business-related time zapping activities?
Spring clean your social media accounts
When it comes to time zapping activities, social media has got to be top of the list! We promise ourselves that we will only be popping in to check our notifications and, before we know it, we’ve watched every single cat video, joined in several group conversations… and lost hours of our available productive time.
Social media can be a great business tool – if you learn to tame it. Set aside time to give your social media accounts a spring clean:
- Stick to only one or two social media accounts. We’ve all spent time opening accounts on all the available social media platforms – when in reality, we only need to be on a couple of suitable platforms. Look to only use those accounts where your ideal clients are hanging out and build your expertise on those.
- Go through your list of groups and remove yourself from those that aren’t useful, in terms of networking benefits and/or potential client hangouts. You can then spend a week or so posting useful and relevant content and, if you have no response, remove yourself from those groups too.
- Set up a social media schedule. This will help focus your attention AND build your profile. By setting up a schedule you’ll ensure you’re posting both regular AND suitable content.
- Schedule your content. Once you have a schedule you can actually start to bulk write your content AND schedule your content monthly or quarterly in advance.
- Allocate a regular time slot for social media. When it comes to interacting on social media, allocate a 20-30 minute time slot – and set yourself a timer, so you know when it’s time to leave!
Your email inbox
We spend so much time trawling through our email inbox – whether it’s for permission-based requested emails or junk and spam ones – making this our number two business-related time zapping activity.
To compound our email problem, we have ‘time saving’ tools that help draw our attention to every single email we receive. We often have notifications set up on our laptop, desktop computer, mobile devices AND android apps, that play a noise to notify us of their presence! We need to eliminate the time we actually spend in our inbox, by giving it a spring clean!
- Unsubscribe – During the next 5-7 days, whilst you’re checking your emails, instead of just hitting the ‘delete’ key, actually give yourself extra time to unsubscribe from those emails you don’t read.
- Set up folders – Having masses of emails sat in your inbox can just leave you feeling overwhelmed, so set up different folders to help streamline your inbox. You can then set up folders for receipts, marketing, videos to watch later, specific clients etc. to help get those emails out of your inbox and into some order. This not only helps with overwhelm, but also makes finding emails easier AND, if you haven’t watched those ‘important’ videos after a week or two, you can just quickly delete the content from that specific folder.
- Turn off notifications – Whatever reason you have behind keeping them on… turn them off! These notifications only break your concentration and draw your attention back to your emails, so turn them off. Get into the habit of allowing yourself 10-20 minutes twice a day to check your emails.
By taming both your social media and email accounts you’ll be taming your time too. Simply follow the steps above and allow yourself an average of 21 days to break the bad habits and create new ones.
Do you consider email and social media accounts to be the worst time zapping activities in your business? Maybe you have additional tips for taming these two time zapping activities? Why not share your biggest time zapping activities and top tips in the comments box below.
Images courtesy of scottchan & cooldesign, Featured Image – Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
