Most of us wish there were more hours in the day. But be honest with yourself – even if you had more hours, would you just waste them away?
Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that it’s not the number of hours you have, but how you use them. By learning and practicing effective time how to leverage time to get more done and also have more time to relax.
Leveraging time is a strategy of using time in a way to pursue your most important goals. Managing time is the day-to-day process you use to leverage the time—the scheduling, to-do lists, delegating, and other tasks. Without this strategy, time management won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals. Leverage: Taking the smallest action that will yield the largest result.
Here are simple things you can do today to work more efficiently:

1. Prioritize Better. Narrow down everything you have to do to just three to five manageable items. Put these tasks in order from most to least important so that you’re focusing on what’s essential. If you do this, you’ll eliminate nonessential, time-wasting activities.
2. Set Time Blocks. Create a block of time for each task you have to do and decide exactly how long you’ll do it. For example, one hour per day on an ongoing project or thirty minutes a day on Facebook. This keeps you on track and prevents you from spending too long on any one task.
3. Take Regular Breaks. If you work too long doing something, you may lose focus and burn out. Break up activities with short rest periods where you can refresh yourself and get your mind off work. Then, you can get back to what you’re doing with renewed energy and use your time better.
4. Remove Distractions. Things may be taking too long because you’re letting yourself get distracted. Turn off all notifications and sign out of social media. Let people know that you’re working and not to be bothered. If there’s something urgent, tell the person you’ll get to it when you’re done.
5. Perform a Time Audit. Keep track of how you spend your time each day with a timer and write down the results. Over the course of several days, a picture will emerge showing how you actually spend your time. You may be surprised at where you’re wasting it!
6. Choose Optimal Times. There’s an optimal time of day for each type of task. For example, you may be most adept at communications in the late morning or creative in the evening. There may also be a time of day when you’re at your most productive. Identify these times and use them to schedule your daily tasks more effectively.
7. Schedule Fun Time. When making your daily schedule, set aside time for entertainment, mindless distraction, and pure fun. You can indulge in these activities during breaks from tougher things, or use them as a reward for completing tasks.
8. Don’t Multitask. Contrary to what many believe, multitasking doesn’t make you more productive. In fact, it ruins your focus and prevents you from getting any one task done efficiently. Focus on one thing at a time.
9. Get Organized. Organize your workspace so that everything is where you need it and easily accessible. This will cut down on the time you spend searching for things and doing on-the-spot organizing. Set aside a little time daily or weekly to clean up, organize, and put things away.
10. Keep Goals in Mind. For each thing you have to do in a day, take a moment to consider whether it’s directly helping you reach a specific goal or not. If it’s not, consider eliminating it from your list, moving it to a later time, or delegating it to somebody else.
11. Emails - Handle emails as you read them.  Print out your emails and complete any associated tasks for each email.  The key is handle each piece of paper once by completing the tasks right away or scheduling them in your calendar for a later date. 
    

 
Want to learn more about setting effective priorities, leveraging time, and working more efficiently to achieve your business goals?

5 Steps to Building a Strong Brand
By Pat Simes


Branding has an enormous impact on every aspect of your business. Whether you’re just getting started creating a brand identity or you’re in the process of rebranding because of changes in the market, you need to spend some time clarifying the messaging you want to create and deciding how to implement it. Here are the 6 steps for creating a strong brand.
 
1.  Create a Branding Strategy - Your branding strategy clarifies which direction your branding should go. It means creating your messaging with an eye toward the future of your business. This step in the process starts with identifying your business goals and how your brand fits into them. How does it help you to achieve them?
 
2.  Research Your Market - Before you start making any major decisions, you need to understand where your business fits into the market and the position it plays in the minds of your audience. Research needs to be conducted in a few key areas.
Your Target Market. You need to create a detailed customer profile and identify the needs that your offerings fulfill for your audience. You also need to understand how your audience sees you, since “brand” is essentially an image that exists in their mind.
Your Products and Services. Branding revolves around a promise you make to your audience. What is your promise? What need does your offering speak to and how does it uniquely solve the problems of your target market?
 The Competition. Research the market and see what your competitors are doing in order to clarify your unique position in relation to them. People will love your brand because of its uniqueness.
 3. Create Your Messaging and Unique Value Proposition - Now that you know the market and your position in it, create a message that explains to your audience how you uniquely fulfill their needs. This message in some form will be conveyed through everything you do and at every touchpoint with your audience.
This message should focus on the customer and the benefits your offering provides them. How does using your products make the customer’s life better? It should emphasize what sets you apart from other, similar businesses.
 
4.  Create a Branding Plan - Now, choose the personality, tone, and design elements that will help to convey this message to your audience. Your planning should include where you will communicate with your market and what content you will offer them. For branding to work, everything should be consistent and in harmony with the message you outlined in the previous step.
 
5.  Implement Your Brand Identity - The process of branding is never truly finished. Once you implement it, you’ll need to monitor and keep gathering feedback from your market to make sure the message is hitting home.
From time to time, you’ll also need to consider rebranding. Companies re-brand when there are significant changes in the market, changes in their company, or a new segment of the market they need to target. In order to keep up to date with these changes, they have to tweak or overhaul their branding so that it will achieve their new goals.
Do you want to learn more about developing the right brand identity? Check out Innovative Business Solutions Self-Study Course, BUILDING YOUR BRAND, which teaches you the A to Z of branding and helps you achieve your business goals. https://www.providing-innovation.com/store/c3/Entrepreneurship_Self_Study_Courses.html