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As a business owner, you have to wear a lot of different hats. You’re responsible for deciding on the overall direction of the company and motivating your team but you also have to handle a lot of the time-consuming admin tasks and financial issues. It can often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day and it’s impossible to get things done. However, if you change your approach to the way that you handle your business duties, you can be a lot more productive. Finding ways to be more productive with your time is key to business success and if you can master this skill early on, you will find it a lot easier to grow the business. If you want to be more productive, there are 3 key tactics that you need to master: Delegating. Automating. Eliminating. This article will explain each tactic and how you can apply them to your own working day, so you can be a lot more productive. Delegating. The old saying goes, if you want a job done right, do it yourself, but that isn’t always the best advice. So many business owners are unproductive because they try to do everything themselves and they don’t understand the art of delegation. Learning how to delegate effectively means that you have more time and tasks are carried out by the people that are best equipped to do them well. However, delegating doesn’t simply mean getting your employees to do all of the hard work while you sit back and relax. This will only lead to a lack of motivation amongst your team because you are not leading by example and they will feel that you are not doing your part. There are many tasks that you can also delegate to freelancers outside of the business. For example, content writing is an important part of your digital marketing strategy but it’s also very time consuming, so why not outsource to a professional content writer instead? You may also want to outsource tasks like bookkeeping. When you delegate to qualified professionals, you can ensure that the job is done right and you give yourself a lot more free time to focus on the areas of the business that you are better suited to. You could also consider delegating to a Virtual Assistant. A lot of the basic admin tasks that take up a large chunk of your time can easily be carried out by a VA, and they are much better valued than hiring more full-time employees. At Virtalent, we have a team of over 70 VAs who like to make life as easy as possible for business owners! Related: 10 Digital Marketing Strategies to Help You Scale Your Business in the Next 12 Months Automating. Technology is often the solution to your problems in business and it can be a huge help if you are struggling with productivity and time management. There are some amazing pieces of software that can automate entire areas of your business so you don’t have to dedicate any time to them. Accounting is a common task that businesses automate because manually managing your accounts on a spreadsheet is incredibly time-consuming and there are a lot of opportunities for errors as well. But cloud accounting software can manage everything for you so you don’t have to dedicate any time to it. Customer relationship management software is another brilliant way to use automation to your advantage. It can help you maintain regular contact with customers so that they don’t feel neglected. There are options for automation in almost all areas of your business and you can make some big cost savings as well as making more productive use of your time. Eliminating. Another reason that business owners fail to manage their time effectively is that they waste time on tasks that they simply don’t need to do. Spending time assessing your business processes and eliminating tasks that aren’t necessary is one of the best ways to boost productivity. Meetings are one of the best time-wasters that you can eliminate. Although meetings are important and you do need to have them sometimes, a lot of businesses hold regular meetings even if there isn’t a clear reason for them. Nothing productive comes out of these meetings and everybody involved wastes an hour of their day. Before having any meetings, you should always consider what you are actually trying to achieve, and make sure that you write an agenda so you stay on topic. If you can’t define a clear reason for the meeting, you don’t need to have it in the first place. Going paperless is also a simple way to eliminate a lot of tasks from your daily routine. When you start digitalizing things, it’s so much easier to manage documents with the need to print, distribute and sign things all of the time. Using cloud storage software to share documents makes life a lot easier for your employees, saves you money, and makes things more productive at the same time. If you find that you don’t have enough hours in the day to complete all of your tasks, you need to make some changes to your business. Delegating to employees and outsourcing services to Virtual Assistants is a great way to free up your time. You can also use automation to speed tasks up and finally, you can eliminate a lot of the unnecessary tasks in your business. Once you master these 3 skills, you will fast track your way to success in no time. Read More: Build Smarter Campaigns with these Top Social Media Marketing Tools Author Bio – Virtalent. Virtalent provides an award-winning Virtual Assistant service to busy entrepreneurs and professionals.