5 strategies to trick yourself so that you can stick to your schedule. 

As an entrepreneur your aspirations are to expand your company’s horizons. However, this growth seems stifled due to the multitude of tasks that invariably land on your plate, with no option to delegate them to your employees or escape their constant recurrence. If your goal is to effectively offload these responsibilities, a crucial step towards success lies in the careful documentation of these tasks. 

But you don’t find time to write down your procedures and your knowledge. 
And if you sometimes block your time, then you have to keep overbooking these appointments with more urgent topics, so that the documentary work regularly falls behind. 

We have put together 5 tricks on what you can do so that you take the necessary time for documentation, no longer overbook your appointments and take the first step to successfully handing over work.

1. Plan blocks very early in the morning

Set your planned work block to document your work processes on a regular, very early date. A good option is e.g. Tuesday morning from 6-8am. 
On Tuesdays, the most important issues that arose from the weekend have already been dealt with. In the time from 6-8 am you will also rarely have further appointment requests, since customers or employees do not like to work at this time. Regularity is important in order to get used to the process and to carry it out like a ritual. 

2. Ask a colleague to be your pain in the neck

Give someone the order, e.g. your colleague or, if available, your assistant, to make your life as difficult as possible for not canceling appointments. For example, ask the person you have an appointment with to remind you that canceling the appointment is not an option.  

3. Game Board (count days without overbooking)

Think of small challenges and try to achieve them. For example, draw a 5×5 grid matrix on the whiteboard next to your desk. Every time you carry out a scheduled appointment, you put a cross in one of the cells. If you overbook an appointment, you must delete all crosses. The first goal is to complete 5, then 10, then 20, then all crosses. You’re always competing against yourself.

4. Make time valuable by inviting colleagues

The main reason why you overbook time blocks for documentation with other appointments is that these appointments are just as important but at the same time more urgent. So the documentation date must become more urgent. One way to achieve this is to make this time expensive, e.g. by buying external documentation support. These appointments are booked and would cause unnecessary costs if canceled. This means that you are more likely to notice them. At the same time, you have the advantage that the documentation can be finalised more quickly thanks to external support. 

5. Call out a fun punishment 

Another incentive to keep to the deadlines is to make the documentation process public. Communicate the goal you have set, including a completion date, to your team. 
If you want to increase this incentive even further, formulate the intention in the form of a bet with a painful wager that really hurts you personally. For example, donate to a party you don’t like at all. The effort should not bring you or your team any good, as this can always lead to not taking the goal so seriously.  

By using these 5 methods, you can handle the difficulties of managing your time, and sticking to your appointments and goals. Each way adds a method to your toolbox helping you to take control of your time and get more things done. Especially if you want to write down your workflow to succesfully hand over work. Because handing work over is the key to more time and to make your business grow.