5 Proven Strategies to Generate More Income From Your Time
You have a set number of hours in the day. Fortunately, though, that does not mean you have a set amount of income potential on any given day. What separates hire-earners from people who are just scraping by is productivity. People who know how to squeeze the most value out of their time generally make more money. People who understand how to work smarter, not harder tend to have higher incomes. And business owners who are great at making the tweaks needed to turn time into money generally have more successful companies. With that in mind, here are a couple of ways to squeeze more value out of your daily hours:1. Cut All non-Income Producing Activities
If you want to turn time into money, you've got to focus on how you're using your time. The first step, then, is to delete all non-income-producing activities from your daily schedule. To start, take a look at what you're doing each day. To make this as clear as possible, you might consider keeping a daily log for about a week or so.
Once you've got a clear picture of what your days look like, take a close look and determine which tasks are making you money and which aren't. While you can't stop doing the non-income-generating things entirely, you can delegate them or put them on somebody else's plate. This frees you up to focus on income-generating activities and other ways to make more money for your business.
2. Block Your Time
Time blocking is a favorite tool for entrepreneurs everywhere. The reason? It cuts your days down to manageable chunks, and you can then use those chunks to be as productive as possible.
Without a set schedule, it's easy for days to careen into chaos. You have a million things to do, and everything seems like an emergency. This means you work helter-skelter, and without much of a plan. Sure, you might get everything done, but your time won't be well-utilized, and your efforts won't be as productive as they may otherwise have been.
That's where time blocking comes in.
When your time-block a day, you go through your working hours and necessary activities and delegate a certain amount of time each day to a given event. For example, instead of checking emails all day long, you might check emails between 8 and 9, and again between 3 and 4 in the afternoon.
Once you've moved through that time block, you do not revisit the activity until its next scheduled time block. This might seem overly regimented, but it's an essential way to make your hours work harder for you. It's also a great approach to limiting the productivity loss that comes from continually switching tasks.
3. Schedule Your Days in Advance
The best morning routine happens a week in advance.
If you are sitting down at your desk each morning without any idea of what you're supposed to be doing or what happens first, you can virtually bet that you're not using your time as productive as possible. This, in turn, probably means that you're not squeezing as much income out of your working hours as you could be. To combat this, start planning your days in advance.
At the end of each business day, sit down, and plan out your next day. On Friday of each week, schedule your time blocks, workouts, meetings, and everything else for the following week. This serves two important purposes.
First, it allows you to prioritize the most critical, most income-generating activities. Second, it keeps you from having surprise meetings or obligations on your schedule, both of which sap productivity and makes it hard to make your time work for you.
4. Get Rid of Distractions
Distractions are a significant issue when you're trying to turn your time into money. After all, how are you supposed to get everything done when you're continually trying to answer the phone, respond to emails, take the dog out, and help your staff with questions and concerns? It's impossible and trying to make it all work will drive you crazy.
With this in mind, create a distraction-free work zone. Time-blocking sets the foundation for this by eliminating common distractions like surprise meetings and all-day email.
If you want to make it work, though, you've got to take a couple of steps further. Instead of working with your cell phone on your desk, put it on airplane mode, turn it face down, and only touch it at defined intervals. Consider working to instrumental music, which will block out background noise and make it easier to focus on the task at hand.
Set “do not disturb” hours, where your staff knows you're engaged in a project and that they should not come to you with questions. Learn to delegate tasks to other competent team members, who can help you do what needs to be done without being the only ringmaster in the circus.
Regardless of which approach you take, finding a way to limit the distractions in your daily working life will go a long way to make your time more productive and ensure you're getting as much as possible out of your regular hours.
5. Identify Peak Productivity Hours
Each of us has a particular time of the day when we are most productive. For some of us, it's the morning hours. For others, it's the late afternoon or evening. Once you've decided which time of day is most productive for you, do what you can to schedule your high-impact, high-income generating activities for those time frames.
The reason for this is simple. Not only will doing this allow you to knock out your most important tasks when your brain is fresh, but it will help ensure that you are using your hours to your advantage.