You could probably fill all 24 hours of the day with tasks you want to get done.
Besides your commitment to patients, you own a business, manage employees, pay the bills and strategize for the long-term.
You’ve heard that time is money. But how do you know you’re making the most of your time?
Ensure you optimize each day by tracking your time. Be sure to look at how you (and your staff) spend time.
If you don’t believe it, here are five business-changing advantages time tracking provides.
1. Know how you spend your time
Have you ever wondered at the end of the day where all the time went?
Well, you can answer that question by tracking your time throughout the day. It may sound obvious, but many pharmacy owners don’t do it.
For tracking to truly work, you have to record all activities throughout your workday down to the minute, even for activities like checking personal emails or browsing social media.
That can be an annoying task.
But when you do, you’ll learn a lot. You’ll be surprised at how you divide your time. You may discover you’re spending a lot of time on low-reward tasks without even realizing it.
But with a clear record of how exactly you spend your time, you’ll have reliable data to evaluate your activities and see how they align with your goals.
2. Identify areas that need improvement
With a clear picture of your time allocation, you can see where you’re wasting time and where you’re lacking in time.
Obvious time wasters include personal activities, like shopping online or taking frequent breaks.
But less obvious trends will emerge and may reveal that you’re not spending enough time on the most important activities.
3. Focus on single tasks
Time tracking will quickly reveal how often you switch between tasks, and how much time switching wastes.
People often think they’re great multi-taskers, but in reality, they aren’t. When you think you’re multi-tasking, you’re quickly switching between tasks.
Others believe a little distraction here and there won’t hurt anything, only to discover those little distractions add up to a big sum by the end of the day.
After you see how much time you waste by switching tasks frequently, you’ll want to focus on one task at a time and be more productive.
4. Budget your time
When you create a financial budget, you look at how much you earn and you evaluate previous expenses to see how much you owe each month. Then, you allocate your income to the highest priority expenses first and so on until you reach the end of your funds.
A budget guides how you spend your money every day and ensures you distribute it in the best possible way.
Do the same with your time.
When you know how long each task takes and how much time you have to allocate to those tasks, you can budget your time before the week starts. This way, you spend your time on activities that accomplish your goals.
As with a financial budget, you may have to cut something out or re-allocate time to meet your time budget.
5. Improve your workflow
Ask your staff to track their time, too. Tracking time will reveal bottlenecks in the workflow, enabling you to find a solution and increase efficiency.
For example, maybe one employee spent an hour unloading products from the delivery truck while another employee waited to stock the products. With that knowledge, you can adjust the workflow by having the stocker and unloader share responsibilities to reduce wasted downtime.
Multiple changes like that across your workflow can result in big time savings.
Now that you know how tracking your time can change your business, you can start now.
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