Client PortalHow to Manage Your Time at Work by Outsourcing and Delegating
Are you expending a lot of energy researching time management tips and ways to increase productivity at work? Increasing your productivity and gaining the freedom to focus on core business tasks happen when you hire help. At first glance, you may immediately think you don’t need or can’t afford help. Allow us to walk you through discovering the value of your time and selecting specific tasks that can affordably be outsourced.
Mastering time management skills at work begins by understanding the value of time and defining what your time is worth.
Understanding the Value of Time
Have you ever taken some time to ponder what the value of time really is? If you have, you probably have discovered that time is a pretty valuable commodity. You can’t buy more time; it’s not for sale. You can’t create time; we all get 24 hours each day maximum. You can’t take back or reverse time; once that time is gone, it’s gone forever.
When you consider these limitations of time, it starts to become pretty clear why you have to properly manage and budget your time to get the most out of it. Think about this famous Gollum riddle from, “The Hobbit” written by J.R.R. Tolkien:
“This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.”
*Spoiler Alert* Yes, the answer to the riddle is time and when you understand the true power of time, you’ll be able to appreciate the 24 hours that you get each day.
How Much is Your Time Worth?
To better understand how to manage your time while working, you need to put a value on it. For business owners, there are many detailed strategies online to help you calculate the value of your time. Here are three strategies that we can recommend:
In this suggested article, the author walks you through a very detailed process that he developed after tracking his time spent over a 3-month period.
This suggested tool allows you to arrive at a custom worth of your time by asking a series of qualifying questions. This method allows you to see what your business and your personal time is worth in your eyes.
This article focuses on the return on investment formula and allows you to calculate time into the equation as well. It will show you the bottom line savings and revenue growth potential of any given time period.
Once you arrive at the value of your time you can begin to become more efficient and productive. Putting a dollar amount on your tasks also allows you to properly manage and handle your time by constantly asking, “Is this worth my time?”
The Truth About Multi-Tasking
Many business owners and managerial employees pride themselves on being able to multi-task. The problem with this assertion is the fact that true multi-tasking is technically impossible. As shared in a recent publication, “Humans are not biologically wired to pay attention to more than one brain-consuming stimulus at once.”
So multi-tasking, as it applies to cognitive tasks, is impossible as you can only focus on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is really just starting, stopping and resuming work on multiple projects at once. Working like this leads to many negative work habits that you cannot afford to develop:
- • Improper Amount of Focus on Each Task
- • Increase in Errors and Mistakes
- • Encourages Constant Distractions
- • Prevents Completing Priority Tasks
So when you think you’re saving money by doing everything yourself, you aren’t considering the true cost of multi-tasking. Psychology Today reports, “Recent estimates are that you can lose up to 40% of your productivity if you multi-task.”
Why You Have to Delegate Administrative Tasks
If you’re serious about becoming a business owner that wants to dominate time management skills at work, you’ve got to start delegating. Now that you know the value of your time, you can eliminate any administrative tasks that are actually costing you money.
While you focus on company strategic priorities and c-level tasks that make you money, delegate these common time-consuming tasks that save you money.
- 1.) Have a virtual receptionist team answer all of your incoming calls to eliminate distractions. Message taking services can cost as little as $19.95 per month.
- 2.) A virtual receptionist can schedule your appointments and manage your calendar in real-time. Spend 30 minutes having the important conversation and not 30 minutes scheduling an important conversation.
- 3.) Virtual receptionists can take detailed messages for callbacks at your convenience. Offer 24-hour access to your business without having to be personally available 24/7.
Outsourcing your calls and delegating non-revenue generating tasks to a live answering service will save you a considerable amount of time. As we’ve reviewed in this article, saving you time decreases your overhead cost while allowing for a more lucrative and productive work schedule.
Example Calculation of Proper Time Management
Let’s say you calculate the value of your time at $100 per hour; $25 for every 15 minutes. You answer an incoming business call that lasts 15 minutes; the amount of time to listen to the caller’s FAQ and provide a quick answer. Here at A Courteous Communications, our basic answering service rate is $0.45 per call.
Doing the math, this example call just cost your company $25 when it could have cost you less than $1. If you would have outsourced that call to one of our professional telephone agents, you would have saved $24 in just a 15-minute time period. #BusinessCents
Take Control of Your Time Management Skills at Work Today!
Providing administrative telephone support for the past 30 years has taught us that all businesses, no matter the industry, benefit from our business answering services. Increase your time management skills at work by understanding what your time is worth to your business’s bottom line.
Give us a call now at 1-800-785-6161 and speak with an account specialist to start delegating your non-revenue generating tasks to us.
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