time waster

10 Biggest Time Wasters in Business

The key to profit is productivity. If you and your workers are wasting time on unnecessary tasks, like phone checking and emails, it can be costing you. On average, Americans check their phones 80 times daily?

A study which was done by Carleton University found that workers spend a 3rd of their day checking or replying to emails? Here are the biggest time wasters that can be hindering your business’ success. You should avoid these to be successful in your business.

 

Not Having A Plan

Walking into work with a plan or purpose helps you prioritize your tasks and may get you in the right mindset for being productive. Winging it, and starting your day with no direction, is a recipe for distraction. Devote 15 minutes of your morning to making a list of what wants to be accomplished in the day. It will help you walk into work without interruptions that cost your time.

 

Re-Forecasting

This month by month activity when your numbers are below budget require to be all but removed. If your forecast the previous month was off, what special insight did you gain in the last month to make certain that this forecast of the month is going to be better?

 

Meetings

Weekly staff meetings and weekly sales meetings are the big-time wasters. Is anybody listening to the other person as they drone on about what they’ve done? If you have to have such meetings, make them stand-up meetings lasting at some 15 minutes. Even better, hold the meetings when you have something to say.

 

Yearly Budgeting and Forecasting

The usual 3 to 4 months’ procedure in some companies is a morale-sapping, number-crunching exercise in determining how to be precisely wrong. Rapid sanity checks: Are you going to be capable of estimate sales exactly for Q4 2014 in August 2013.

 

E-Mail

This includes excess E-Mails of all kinds particularly the use of cc: or bcc: (blind copy). These last two are the final in protecting your butts. If you aren’t communicating with them directly, do all these other people want to know what you’re saying? Do they care? The other time-waster is the persistent checking of your E-Mails which we all do every 20 minutes in case somebody sent us something in those 20 minutes that will rock our globe.

 

Internet and Cell Phone Usage

In moderation, both of these tools are important for doing research and to communicate. Alas, nowadays, they are way over-used and suck time out of everybody’s days. Checking news and sports scores and calling family or friends are the 2 obvious examples. Being glued to your phone is a big way to slow down your workflow, or is something many employees and business owners require to be more aware of. Creating a work environment where cell phone use is limited during office hours will make a workspace of efficiency and concentration.

 

Detailed Corporate Financial Analysis

This involves the weeks and months’ long detailed project analysis and acquisition analysis. Having a basic strategy as well as a basic understanding of the financials of any project is important. This may be done in a day and two. The remaining thing is window-dressing, pure speculation to make a decision that has been made.

Related post: 4 Things that DESTROY your Focus at Work

Quarterly Earning Preparation

In public companies, the stock analysts expect that the CEO as well as the CFO know everything that’s going in the business. With any company bigger than $100M, that can’t possibly happen. So, executives, as well as finance departments, waste a lot of days to track down and answer possible questions that can be asked to make sure that the top dogs look as if they have their finger on the business’ pulse.

 

Sarbanes-Oxley

The legislation is sufficient for a time-waster without the CFO as well as accounting departments’ extreme over-reaction to the legislation making things even worse.

 

Profit Improvement Initiatives

With 3 or some initiatives going on, these may be useful and get done. When leaders, the staff get happy, they will become time wasters as the people in the trenches react to ridiculous requests or run around to make sure it looks as if they follow up on all 15 vital initiatives they’re supposed to be accomplishing.

 

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