Almost half of Americans make a New Year’s resolution, and a very small percentage of those people are successful.  But one of the most frequent New Year’s resolutions is the wish to spend more time with their family or loved ones. If your business is taking too much time away from the things you wish to do, isn’t this a year to fix it?  Efficiency in the workplace can be accomplished, thus giving you more time to take care of other issues that will enable you to have more time to enjoy life.   For more about time management and efficiency in the workplace, follow the links below.

5 Fundamental Ways To Save Time And Increase Personal Efficiency In 2015

One constant in my management career – and I strongly suspect in many, many others – was that with challenging projects, challenging people, and a host of intractable business problems, there were never enough hours in the day to do what, in a perfect world, needed to be done.  Simply put, in management you never have enough time.  Accordingly, here are 5 fundamental ways to save time and increase personal efficiency in 2015.

Letting go – Are you delegating all you should be?  Are you holding on to things that others on your staff could be doing just as effectively as you?  Do you tend to bottleneck projects, with others waiting for your decisions and being delayed in the process?  The fact is, all really effective executives are also highly efficient delegators.  There’s no choice.  With multiple projects and priorities swirling around, they have to be… or they wouldn’t be effective for long.

Keep at bay the Great Devourer of Time – I’m speaking of course of meetings, which have a vast appetite for corporate time… and, as everyone in business knows, are too often inefficient.  Time wasted in meetings when other projects needed doing was a constant pet peeve of mine in the business world.  To the extent you can save time both in those meetings you attend (Do I really need to go? Can I send someone else in my place? Can I find out what I need to in a quick phone call instead?) and those you set up (Do I really need to schedule an hour? Might a half hour do? Or even 15 minutes?), your schedule will thank you for it.  Naturally some meetings are valuable and essential, no doubt about it.  But if you approach them all from a certain skeptical standpoint of operational efficiency, you’ll likely find yourself returning useful time to your calendar on a regular basis.

5 Secrets to Managing Your Business While Traveling

Traveling the world and running a business at the same time seems like a glamorous lifestyle: You can work from anywhere you want, make your own schedule and be your own boss.

But the characteristics that make it desirable also turn it terrible.

After all, with complete freedom to choose between exploring far-off lands (and people) and sitting in an Internet cafe doing SEO chores, participating in conference calls and writing emails, who would choose to do the latter tasks? Not many people.

Given the option, you would probably close your computers and go exploring with those beautiful Scandinavians who just invited you to the beach.

The digital-nomad lifestyle may seem appealing, but there’s nothing glamorous about freaking out because your Internet connection in a small town suddenly went out two minutes before an important conference call or product launch.

Yet it’s possible to find a balance and successfully run a business from the road, relying on time management and careful planning.

Build Your Business For Lasting Success With This Tip From The Grateful Dead

Whether you’re into hippy jam bands or not, you have to admit: The Grateful Dead were masters of their business. Sure, they only had one Top 10 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. They didn’t win a Grammy during three decades of active music production (though they did finally receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007).

But they found a niche and they dominated it — and their strategy is one that businesses of all kinds can learn from.

You’ve heard about the fox and the hedgehog: the ancient Greek poet Archilochus penned the oft-repeated phrase “… the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The poem is a philosophical touch point for business theory, personality testing, and more. The Hedgehog’s one big thing — curling into a ball to protect himself from attack — helped him fend off the more cunning fox, whose every creative effort to eat the hedgehog is foiled.

The hedgehog approach is key to starting a successful business. A successful startup knows its one big thing and does it better — or cheaper, or faster — than anyone else.

It’s exactly what the Grateful Dead did in developing and marketing their music. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of Hubspot, argue in their book Inbound Marketing that the Grateful Dead found extraordinary success by doing three simple things: they created a niche market, they upended traditional marketing strategies to build an audience, and they focused like a laser on the one thing they could do best.