By Jessica Davis

As an entrepreneur or business owner, you must be familiar with the feeling of never being done with your work.

You’ re always on the move – daily tasks to complete, stats to analyze and new goals to accomplish –and there’s not much down time.

Time management is tedious but crucial. Without time management, you might as well work 24/7 without any extraordinary results. Find out how you can save time (and your sanity) with these five unique tips.

1. Social Content Calendar

Create a social calendar that helps you organize your upcoming posts. This could be done monthly to keep track of articles or topics.You can also figure out which articles/topics work best for your audience as they are all logged.

A simple spreadsheet with the name, themes, keywords and links (once published) is all it takes.

Once you find out what works for you – you can change the calendar accordingly to accommodate new topics and remove old ones.

A calendar is also useful for allocating your writing – you already know the topic and keywords, all that’s left is a little research and actually writing the post. If you’re meant to publish on Thursdays for example, you can start writing bits and parts on Tuesday, finalize the piece on Wednesday and make final edits before publishing on Thursday.

A social calendar will make it easier to stay motivated and organized.

2. Create Templates

Create templates for everything – blog posts, social media posts and even your emails. The amount of time this saves is mind blowing. Instead of custom creating every blog post/ social media post – you can just copy, paste, make relevant changes and you’re done.

If you know it’s a list post about social media tools, for example – having a template of your most used tools and small points about their features will allow you to spend less time while still putting out quality content. You can then create templates for social media – short templates focusing on individual points for Twitter, longer posts for Facebook and Google+ etc. This is the same for emails, having templates is like having your own FAQ page – copy and paste is all you have to do to save time.

3. Scheduling

Scheduling content in advance is a life saver. Many brands/ pages focus on pushing out as many posts a day as possible – this waters down the content and may even push your readers away. It is recommended to focus on scheduling content to go out at specific times of the day – based on your target audience’s location, most active time, the tool itself, etc.

There are various tools that help you with this – including DrumUp, Sprout Social and Commun.it – these tools let you schedule in advance on various social media platforms with ease. Also limit the number of posts you put out in a day – don’t push your audience too much.

4. 90-minute rule

As the name suggests, the 90-minute rule is a block of 90 minutes where you remove all the distractions from your life and focus completely on your work. Create a space for these 90 minutes every day and pinpoint one main task that you feel is most important. For those 90 minutes, all distractions need to be eliminated – close your email, close all the other tabs on your browser, put your phone on do-not- disturb mode – do whatever else is necessary to remain 100% focused on the tasks at hand.

It takes a while to get used to this, but once it becomes a part of your routine, you’ll notice that you get more work done in those 90 minutes compared to the rest of the day. A plus point is that you don’t have to worry about important tasks for the rest of the day and can work on already scheduled daily tasks from your social calendar.

5. Write Everything Down

You would have noticed that inspiration doesn’t really come when you’re sitting at your desk. It is a waste of your time to sit and wait for ideas to come along. More often than not, they come at the most random times – while commuting, eating, out with friends – and you tend to make a mental note about it but eventually end up forgetting.

To avoid this, write everything down – topics, themes, ideas about different areas – no matter how small you think it is, write it down. When you’re more focused, come back to the ideas and see which ones are actually beneficial and start working on them.

As a bonus tip, always remember to measure and analyze your efforts, this allows you to eliminate the least effective strategies and stay consistent. Using these tips in combination with each other will help you save time and open up your calendar for new ventures.

 

AUTHOR BIO: Jessica Davis has a keen interest in social media and content marketing, and writes extensively about it. She represents Godot Media, a leading content marketing firm.

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