Time. Such a precious resource, yet we all seem to take it for granted.

And ironically, a lack of time is one of the biggest gripes most entrepreneurs and small business owners have.

Thankfully, there’s a very simple way to get back more time and it shouldn’t be as hard as you think to implement. It comes entirely down to documenting what you do. It’s really that simple – documenting process, intellectual property and day-to-day tasks.

However, like all things, a documented process is only valuable to the degree you follow a methodology when documenting it. You can either come up with your own or follow someone else’s best practice.

Here’s a simple way to do it. For each task, process, delivery methodology in your business, ask:

– What do we need to do?
– Why are we doing it?
– How do we do it?
– When does it need to get done by?

You can follow this for the simplest of tasks such as adding someone to your CRM, sending an email template, learning a sales script or delivering your product to your customers. You might write the process down, create a screencast video on your computer or do an audio recording into your phone.

Once documented and stored in a user friendly database or portal – the document does the work for you. You can outsource the task to a more relevant team member or to a cheaper form of labour. Not only do you not have to do the task anymore, but you don’t have to train the other person either – the document (text, audio or visual) does that for you. If things don’t go to plan with that new staff member, you haven’t wasted huge amounts of time taking them through training that a document could have done for you.

Here’s the trick…break your day down into 90% implementation and 10% into spinning off these documented assets and you’ll rapidly claw back your time.