As you manage your ergo service business, time becomes even more valuable. When we spend too much time working, we end up sacrificing our personal and family time. This could easily make you feel really burned out. Having time freedom is something that we all want, but only a minority of us actually have. If you’re working a 9-5 job, you’re maybe familiar with the feeling of being glued to your desk all day. The reality is that having time freedom and flexibility in your business isn't a simple conversation. This is difficult and undoubtedly uncomfortable. 

Pursuing time freedom means working on meaningful tasks and making more efficient use of your time. Of course, achieving time freedom as an Ergonomic Service Provider takes a bit of planning. So in today’s article, I’m going to talk about how you can simplify and streamline your schedule, processes, and manage your ergo service business more effectively. 

Below are some ways I’ve achieved time freedom which you may find works best for you:

1. Get Clarity on Where You’re Spending Your Time

The first thing that you want to do to be efficient and productive is to be clear about where you’re spending your time. Take the time to monitor your business operations and track your time. Go through your days, get a little notepad, and write down the amount of time and the tasks that you do. You can also put it in a Word document, or if you want something fancy, you can use an Excel Spreadsheet. Not all tasks are created equally. There's a much different level of value for each task. So this is a great starting point because you’re aware of the tasks that you need to do and tasks that you wish you could be doing but there's simply not enough time. 

After jotting down all of the tasks that you do on your day-to-day, make a list of it in addition to the hours that it takes to finish each. What you're going to do next is put these in four different quadrants.  These quadrants are:

• “Things I'm good at and make me happy doing” (These are things in your genius zone)
• “Things I’m good at but I don’t particularly like doing” 
• “Things I'm not good at but I know I should do”
• “Things I don't know how to do” 

Basically, the first part involves mapping out your tasks, identifying which quadrant they belong in, then adding the relevant time. By doing this, you'll get a really fantastic perspective on your daily life from each quadrant. Monitoring your day-to-day business activities can help you save time and give you a really excellent indication of how much time you need to complete particular tasks in your business. So, if you're frustrated about not having enough time, but aren't sure how you're spending it, then make sure to work on the first step.

2. Hire a Virtual Assistant to Help You

One of the best moves you can possibly do to help your ergo service business succeed is to hire a Virtual Assistant.  Having a Virtual Assistant to perform most of your business tasks has many benefits to your business. One benefit of hiring a Virtual Assistant is that you can now have more time to focus on making your Ergo service business generate more revenue. You won’t have to personally do certain tasks, such as designing Canva graphics, writing blog posts, formatting, and many other so-called “lower dollar amount” activities. Virtual Assistants will allow you to concentrate on other important aspects of making your Ergonomics service business more successful. 

2 Strategies to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Your Ergo Business:

1. Invest in Expertise
   When you invest in expertise, you're utilizing someone's skills for a certain service. A top-notch Virtual Assistant usually has the technology know-how and possesses the required education, knowledge, and skills to effectively provide your Ergo service business with the highest quality of service. So this isn't going to be free. It's going to cost money. But at the same time, hiring one can help you save a huge amount of cash. This will enable you to cut back on your operational costs. You’ll only be charged for the time spent working on projects for your business. 

2. Invest in Talent
   Based on my experience in hiring a Virtual Assistant, I’ve found it makes the most efficient and the most effective way to hire someone to do the tasks that you're good at but you simply don't like doing. Meaning, you want someone who has the skills to work and communicate well with you, who is ready to learn, and who is trustworthy. This is also called the “mailroom technique,” where you’re not investing in expertise but talent. It could be that you want someone to do the graphic design tasks for you so that you have time to focus on more purposeful things in your business. Usually when you're getting a Virtual Assistant to help with these kinds of tasks, you must train them in your process. In this strategy, the cost of their services per hour is usually lesser. If you really take the time to train and coach your Virtual Assistants, most of the time, this will be successful. Plus, this strategy is going to be mutually beneficial for both of you.

3. Know How to Be Efficient and Effective

Shifting between various unrelated tasks is known as context switching. This, in fact, is more common now than it ever was. Every day, more and more people are engaging in this activity. The fact that you’re constantly jumping between social network communication applications and project management software is really wearing on your productivity because your brain cannot easily switch between two or three different activities at once. Research from the University of California came to this conclusion. They found that after 20 minutes of continuous interruptions—checking your emails, social media, and text messages—people reported much more stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.

• Task Batching
  So if you think that you’re doing “context switching” when it comes to managing your ergo service business, then I have a solution for you, and this is called task batching. Task batching is the practice of grouping mentally and intellectually related tasks and then block out a period of time to do them. It’s a great productivity hack that will increase your effectiveness and profitability. This is something that I do in my business too. With this approach, you may avoid wasting all of your time in doing “lower dollar amount” tasks in which you can just outsource, and instead focus on more important matters that you as an ergonomics expert must do for your business, such as creating those connections with clients or establishing a marketing strategy.

So there you have it! Make use of any one of these three tactics to achieve the desired level of time freedom. If you follow these strategies, you'll be able to gain benefits that will be extremely useful to your ergo service business.

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If you’re a healthcare professional or an Ergo service provider that wants to offer your own range of services to your clients, then I invite you to attend the Thriving Ergo Business webinar happening this November 3, 2022. In this live webinar, I'll show you how to attract more clients, stand out from the crowd, and make more money. This webinar is very helpful, whether you're just starting out with your own ergonomics services or have years of experience running your own ergonomic consultancy. Save your spot now and gain some highly valuable learning.