5 Diary Management Hacks for Busy Entrepreneurs

When it comes to running your own business being organised is absolutely essential. If you aren’t organised it’s so easy for tasks to get forgotten about, leads not to get followed up with and for invoices not to be sent never mind being chased up!

If you really want to grow and scale your business you need to be as organised as possible so that you can manage your time correctly to focus on the tasks that matter. This is why it’s so important for your diary to be managed efficiently and effectively.

Here are 5 diary management hacks that every busy entrepreneur needs to be aware of:

1) Colour code

Colour coding your diary is something that I can’t advise you enough on. By colour coding your diary you can see straight away from a quick glance what type of appointments or tasks you have scheduled in for that day. You should give each weekly or daily task a separate colour from client meetings to project time to team meetings. Each task should have an easy to identify colour attached to it.

2) Leave wiggle room in your diary

We’ve all been in those meetings that run on a little longer than planned or we’ve been held up from starting the next task in our diary because an urgent email has come through. There’s no shame in admitting that this happens, it happens to us all. A great way of dealing with and anticipating this is to allow some wiggle room in your diary. Basically, if a meeting is supposed to end at 2.30pm, book your next task in for 2.45pm or 3 pm. This gives you a bit of extra time in case the meeting runs over and also creates realistic expectations that once you get out of a meeting you may need 5 or 10 minutes to grab a coffee and debrief.

3) Block out specific time for work and include deadlines

Planning your time and organising projects are great, but you also need to block out some time in your diary for actually getting the work done. This should be a number of hours in which you have nothing else booked in, and try to remove all distractions possible the allocated hours. Once you have your work time booked in, create a deadline for it. Deadlines are an essential part of managing your diary successfully. Without deadlines, tasks don’t feel like a priority so you may end up doing something else in that time slot rather than the task at hand. So for each task or project that you book in and put into your diary, assign a deadline to it to help ensure it gets completed when it should do.

4) Schedule in some ‘you’ time

This is one of the most overlooked tasks that every diary should include. If you don’t carve out any downtime for yourself, you’ll soon burn out and begin to feel frustrated with the work at hand. Schedule in some time just for you to do the things that you like such as reading or going catching up with friends or exercising. This will release endorphins and help you to feel much more productive.

5) Hire a Virtual Assistant to manage your diary for you

Hiring a Virtual Assistant to manage your diary for you will not only unlock more time in your day but you can also rest assured that your diary will be managed efficiently. You can just leave it up to your trusted professional assistant to schedule in any projects that need doing or client meetings etc. This will ensure that you never miss a meeting again whilst not having to worry about what you need to do next!

My name is Selina Johnson and I'm a Business Support Expert providing Virtual Business Support to businesses. We help SME's with administrative, technical and creative support so you are free to grow your business and increase your profits.

0333 3030 907
hello@selinajohnson.com

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