Did you know that the average knowledge worker only works 3 hours out of an 8-hour day. Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, believes that this is a symptom of our hyper-stimulated society in which we are constantly being bombarded by distractions which inhibit our ability to concentrate and be productive.

As the time you have to allocate to your business is limited, it becomes all the more important to use it efficiently.

A first habit is to keep a  task list for your business which will save you time figuring out what to do next. Next, prior to starting each work session, select the tasks to be completed during that specific session. This will ensure that you actually prioritize the tasks which must be prioritized. You can even go as far as to actually schedule in those different tasks during that work session to give yourself a clearly allotted period of time to complete each of them as there is nothing like a deadline to keep you on track and to force you to perform more efficiently. A Time Timer can be helpful in this regard, as it allows you to set a particular length of time and it just counts that time through a red disk that gets smaller and smaller.

Remember Parkinson’s Law which establishes that tasks take the time allocated to them to get completed. However, sometimes we lack inspiration for certain tasks or just simply are not in the mood to complete them. This issue is all the more concerning since if your side hustle becomes a pain or an aggravation, you will likely stop devoting time to it which will lead to its failure.

A trick to deal with those situations is to use another task as a reward for completing the first one or if it is a task which requires a more significant time investment, then this reward can be applied after completing some milestone in the task. Notice how I wrote milestone and not a certain period of time. Forcing yourself to spend time on a task, rather than forcing yourself to achieve a particular result pushes you to actually make progress.

It really is amazing how much you can get done if you set yourself up to be efficient and to use your time to focus on your most important tasks. However, don’t let tasks that cloak themselves as being urgent push aside tasks that are actually important.

Responding to a client’s email should not push aside preparing your collection for your upcoming season. A strategy to deal with that “urgency” is to acknowledge receipt of that email and then to advise that it will be responded to in due course. You can even advise that they should expect to receive a response by a given date and should follow-up if no response is received by then. Although everyone wants to be prioritized, most will be satisfied with simply being acknowledged.

Keep in mind that some clients are just not worth the associated hassle. As your time is precious, you cannot allow any client to monopolize too much of it. Don’t be afraid to telephone clients instead of writing them long emails. Or, something which is a new option, consider responding to detailed queries with voice recordings. For example, Zoho Mail now includes such a feature which automatically attached the voice recording to your email.

Alternatively, advise your time-consuming client that they need to ask their questions when you see them next or have your next session together, assuming your business functions like that. Another option is to inform them that to answer their volume of questions, you need to put them on a particular support plan at the cost of $X/month. This will either encourage them to ask less questions (and give you a justification not to respond) or make it worth your time to respond to them.

Finally, as a matter of last resort, you can simply advise the client that you cannot service their needs and suggest that they send business elsewhere. Rarely is one client worth your business, so don’t let one push everything else aside and stopping your business from moving forward.

Good luck!