Time management is one of the keys to small business success. Worse than someone else misusing your time is you being your own time gobbler. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have full control of their schedule making it essential to maximize and monetize every working hour. Here are some tips and strategies you can use to maintain a handle on your time and manage it to your best advantage:
- Carry A Paper or Electronic Schedule & Record All Your Thoughts, Conversations And Activities For A Week. As an entrepreneur, this will help you understand your peak performance times, how much you can get done during the course of a day and will help you keep track of where your minutes and hours are going. You’ll see how much time is actually spent producing results and income versus how much time is wasted on unproductive thoughts, conversations and activities.
- Any Activity or Conversation Important To Your Success Should Have A Designation Assigned To It. To-do lists often get longer and longer to the point that they become unworkable. Appointment books work. Schedule appointments with yourself and create time blocks for high-priority thoughts, conversations, and actions. Schedule when they will begin and end. Plan to spend at least fifty percent of your working hours engaged in the thoughts, activities, and conversations that produce your best results and most of your income.
- The Most Important Part of Your Day Is The Time You Schedule To Plan Your Schedule. Take the first thirty work minutes of every day to plan your day. Don’t start your day until you complete your time plan. Even schedule room for interruptions as needed, because every entrepreneur faces them daily. Plan to be pulled away from what you’re doing because you will be.
- Plan As Many Power Hours Into Your Day As Needed. My day as an entrepreneur breaks down something like this: 8-9am: Newsletter. 9-10am: Blog. 10-11am: Emails. 11am-12pm: Networking Follow-up. Schedule power hours during your peak performance times. Also, as stated above, schedule breaks, stretches, nibbles and sips into your day. You’d get them if you were working for someone else, so give them to yourself.
- Don’t Equate Urgency With Necessity. Put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign when you absolutely must get work done. Practice not answering the phone just because it’s ringing and e-mails just because they show up. Block out other distractions like Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media unless you use these tools to generate business.
- Use Time Management Techniques To Make You Feel Good. Don’t start your day off rushing. You’ll feel like you can’t catch up with yourself all day long. Skip a rushed shower in the morning. Get up a half hour early and take a relaxing bath. I guarantee your whole day will be better.
The dictionary defines time as “the point or period at which things occur.” Simply put, time is when stuff happens. There are only two types of time: clock and real.
- Clock Time: 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. All clock time passes equally.
- Real Time: It’s all relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you’re doing. Two hours at the DMV can feel like 12 years. And yet our 20-year-old children seem to have grown up overnight.
There are also only three ways to spend time: On thoughts, in conversation, and in action. Regardless of the type of business you own or work in, your work will be composed of those three items. As an entrepreneur, you may be frequently interrupted or pulled in different directions. While you cannot eliminate interruptions, you do get a say on how much of your day you will spend on interruptions and how much you will spend on the thoughts, conversations, and actions that will lead you to success.
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