How Well Do You Leverage Your Time and Effort?

By: Neil Graber

Regardless of whether you are the owner of a successful business, starting a new venture, or a parent trying to stay ahead of the kids, there are steps you can take to make the most of the time available. Do you find your life or work seems like the overflowing laundry basket where you and perhaps others have been throwing things at the end of each day? Yet those same items that now create a disorganized pile, once were a much smaller stack of neatly folded and organized shirts and pants?

Let’s start with some planning and organization as the first means of leveraging your time and effort. By taking a few minutes at the start of the day or week, and thinking through all the various things you want to make happen, you may well end up saving hours of time and frustration. It can be as simple as making a grocery list all week before departing on the weekend trip to the store. Otherwise you may find yourself unpacking your groceries and realizing you don’t have all the ingredients needed for this evening’s dinner, so you find yourself retracing your steps right back to the store. In business, it may be determining the route you will follow to be able to call on a number of customers by driving the fewest miles. It can be combining a business purpose with a personal one, as both will take you to the same part of town. The challenge is stopping and taking a small amount of time to plan and organize, for the results later that will be significant.

Leveraging others this is not about taking advantage of others, but focusing your strengths on tasks at which you are truly proficient and allowing others to handle ones which you have less interest or skills. In some cases you may hire an individual to perform certain tasks, you may enlist the help of volunteers, your children can assist in picking up the toys. You think, “Is this the best use of my time or talents?” If not, “Who can handle this task for me?” For individuals working in network marketing, the key is to assist others gain to a level of success when they become successful, so will you.

With today’s technology, we can leverage a multitude of tasks that took a significant amount of time in the past. We can touch multiple people with a single email, pay our bills by sitting at our computer, reformat documents with simple cut and paste functions, and leverage information from an Internet search. Video conferencing replaces some business travel; websites will continue to have a greater impact on retail stores. The use of blogs, articles and social networks allow us to leverage our brand or the marketing of our business/products. If you are not presently using or at least thinking about using some of these technologies, now is the time.

For individuals with a home-based business, one can leverage an extra bedroom and create an office. Not only do you save time commuting to work, but there are big benefits at tax time as well. On top of that, if the business is started on a part-time basis, you have the benefit of an income stream to fall back on should something happen at work. Here we are not leveraging time, but diversifying the security for your family.

Leveraging your time and effort starts with a mindset focused on efficiency and making the best use of our own skills and the talents of others. Avoid spending time on tasks where you have little interest or don’t have the appropriate skills. Thinking you have to do everything yourself, or spending an inordinate amount of time by being a perfectionist will result in certain other tasks not being addressed at all. Or, if time is allocated to them, it will be taken from family and friends impacting important relationships. In today’s busy world, leveraging is the way to keep your sanity, create success in your endeavors, and accomplish the tasks required.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/business_and_finance/article_10510.shtml