Building efficiencies is an awesome way to create more time in your day. It involves reviewing your own patterns of work and figuring out how to spend less time there so you can spend more time where you want to.
If you’ve applied my tips for planning your day, you’ve already built some efficiencies.
If you’ve applied my tips of being mindful of negative self-talk, you’ve also built some efficiencies. Negative self-talk can really get in the way of our motivation.
I want you to think about things that you do over and over again, things that you do regularly, and how long they take. Then I want you to think about how you can spend less time doing those things. I’ll get you started by sharing a few tips that have worked for some of my clients to inspire your thinking.
One tip is building templates for things that are repeatable. I have a client in a customer service industry who regularly meets with clients. They found creating the agenda to be a time-consuming task even though it’s usually the same. Creating a template saved them at least 15 minutes. 15 minutes might not seem like a lot, but think about the cumulative impact of getting 15 minutes back over and over again.
I have a client who takes a lot of notes during meetings and found themselves looking over their notes for the action items they agreed to do. Because the actions were hard to find, they found themselves having to read pages of notes to find the actions, basically reliving the meeting and it was very time-consuming. I shared a tip with them to either write the actions in a different color pen or something else that would visibly stand out when they scanned the page. I write “AI” with a little box around it because that stands out for me when I scan my own notes. It’s simple and it works; it’s saved that client a lot of time.
How many other examples are there like that? Things that we are just so used to doing a certain way that it never occurs to us to examine how we’re doing it or try out different ways of doing things that could save us time with just a few minor adjustments.
It could also be because we’re just too close to our own situation and an outside perspective can help.
I’ll leave you with one more example to inspire your thinking. I realized that cooking dinner was taking up a lot of my time, more time than it needed to. So, I took my tip of delegation and delegated a lot of that cooking time to my crock pot.
I’ll share a few of my favorite crockpot recipes below in case you find yourself in a similar situation.
Now that you have some ideas, I would love to hear one way you’re going to build an efficiency for yourself this week. I’ll be back tomorrow with another tip.
Here are some of my favorite time-saving recipes:
Chicken Corn Chowder (Slow Cooker) - Chelsea's Messy Apron (chelseasmessyapron.com) I use half the amount of both cream and cheese and I add a can of diced tomatoes.
30-Minute Indian Butter Chicken Recipe | Instant Pot Butter Chicken (twosleevers.com) I use this recipe in my slow cooker on the 6-hour setting.
Three Packet Slow Cooker Roast Recipe | Allrecipes My good friend shared this recipe with me. I omit the gravy mix, use about half the Italian and ranch dressings, and add a ton of vegetables instead of the water.
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