The most successful people are those who don’t do everything themselves. Okay, this is no ground-breaking secret but often this is the most easily forgotten one as most of us are led by the ‘no one can do it better than me’ ideology. This applies even more to start-up entrepreneurs who believe they know best about their business. Of course, they do – they aren’t the boss for no reason, but does that mean they can’t train other people to do some jobs for them and in return, save oodles of time that can be used productively?

Here are five of the biggest time-savers for start-ups that can help them make more time for the work that really matters:

1. Delegate your administrative tasks: According to Harvard Business Review, entrepreneurs and employees can reclaim as much as 20% of their workday by delegating right. Office management and administrative tasks such as scheduling meetings, document and vendor management, processing receipts, invoices, etc. can eat up too much time for a start-up business as there are often few people to do the job, leaving those in charge of product development, marketing, sales, and other core functions to do administrative duties instead. The answer – outsource office management to corporate administrative virtual assistants. Easy delegation, sans the hassle of hiring employees, managing office space, salaries, etc.

2. Leverage an online project management tool to track employees: As a growing business, it’s likely that you have engaged employees/consultants/subject matter experts from across the world. Managing their work and time can eat up yours considerably and by the time you realize it, the damage is done. Get everybody on the same page by using a centralized project management tool such as Podio, Flow or choose from several cloud-based options available nowadays according to your budget and team size. Less time spent coordinating and updating project status, means more time spent getting actual work done.

3. Replace travel with technology: Not only will this save you oodles of time but also money, which you can instead use to keep the lights on at your start-up. Use online meeting tools such as Gotomeeting, Vsee, Skype for Business, etc. to collaborate in real time with teams, prospective partners, clients, hires, etc.

4. Plan ahead: Scheduling right is one of the biggest time saving tricks of all time & its importance for a business cannot be overstated. The best part – you don’t have to do it all yourself. Delegate this task to a virtual assistant and see it getting done faster, better, and more accurately. For starters, scheduling can involve sending meeting invites & minutes of the meeting, scheduling appointments, maintaining calendars, travel planning, etc. Have your assistant send you a work plan every evening so you get a head-start on what lies ahead the next day.

5. Prioritize right: In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s easy to lose sight of what you want to focus on and what you should focus on and that is a sure shot way to fail fast. Time is the most valuable resource you have and if you don’t spend some of it deciding what should be the sequence of events your business should proceed in, you are doing yourself a grave disfavor. If you feel you are too busy to take out time for prioritization, let us tell you that as a business owner or leader, this is one task that you alone (or with a team, having yourself as a core part of it) should be doing – the rest can be easily outsourced to a virtual assistant.

These time savers are ones that our start-up clients swear by for success. What are your time saving hacks? Do share in the comments.

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