11 Time Management Tips

Coming To Grips With The Time Management Myth

Do you feel the need to be more organized and/or more productive? Do you spend your day in a frenzy of activity and then wonder why you haven't accomplished much?

Time management skills are especially important for small business people, who often find themselves performing many different jobs during the course of a single day. These time management tips will help you increase your productivity and stay cool and collected.

1) Realize that time management is a myth.
No matter how organized we are, there are always only 24 hours in a day. Time doesn't change. All we can actually manage is ourselves and what we do with the time that we have.

2) Find out where you're wasting time.
Many of us are prey to time-wasters that steal time we could be using much more productively.

What are your time-bandits? Do you spend too much time 'Net surfing, reading email, or making personal calls? "Tracking Daily Activities" explains how to track your activities so you can form a accurate picture of what you actually do.

3) Create time management goals.
Remember, the focus of time management is actually changing your behaviors, not changing time. A good place to start is by eliminating your personal time-wasters. For one week, for example, set a goal that you're not going to take personal phone calls while you're working. See "Set Specific Goals" for help with goal setting. For a fun look at behaviors that can interfere with successful time management, see my article "Time Management Personality Types". Find out if you're a Fireman, an Aquarian or a Chatty Kathy!

4) Implement a time management plan.
Think of this as an extension of time management tip # 3. The objective is to change your behaviors over time to achieve whatever general goal you've set for yourself, such as increasing your productivity or decreasing your stress. So you need to not only set your specific goals, but track them over time to see whether or not you're accomplishing them.

5) Use time management tools.
Whether it's a Day-Timer or a software program, the first step to physically managing your time is to know where it's going now and planning how you're going to spend your time in the future. A software program such as Outlook, for instance, lets you schedule events easily and can be set to remind you of events in advance, making your time management easier.

6) Prioritize ruthlessly.
You should start each day with a time management session prioritizing the tasks for that day and setting your performance benchmark. If you have 20 tasks for a given day, how many of them do you truly need to accomplish? For more on daily planning and prioritizing daily tasks, see "Start The Day Right".

7) Learn to delegate and/or outsource.
No matter how small your business is, there's no need for you to be a one-person show.
For effective time management, you need to let other people carry some of the load. "Determining Your Personal ROI" explains two ways to pinpoint which tasks you'd be better off delegating or outsourcing, while "Decide To Delegate" provides tips for actually getting on with the job of delegating.

8) Establish routines and stick to them as much as possible.
While crises will arise, you'll be much more productive if you can follow routines most of the time.

9) Get in the habit of setting time limits for tasks.
For instance, reading and answering email can consume your whole day if you let it. Instead, set a limit of one hour a day for this task and stick to it.

10) Be sure your systems are organized.
Are you wasting a lot of time looking for files on your computer? Take the time to organize a file management system. Is your filing system slowing you down? Redo it, so it's organized to the point that you can quickly lay your hands on what you need. You'll find more information about setting up filing systems and handling data efficiently in my Data Management library.

11) Don't waste time waiting.
From client meetings to dentist appointments, it's impossible to avoid waiting for someone or something. But you don't need to just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. Always take something to do with you, such as a report you need to read, a checkbook that needs to be balanced, or just a blank pad of paper that you can use to plan your next marketing campaign. Technology makes it easy to work wherever you are; your PDA and/or cell phone will help you stay connected.

You CAN be in control and accomplish what you want to accomplish - once you've come to grips with the time management myth and taken control of your time.

Tracking Daily Activities

Small Business Success Program: Business Success Lesson 1

Welcome to the Small Business Success program!

Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step. The first step to becoming more successful is to evaluate where you are now, which will give you a benchmark against which you can track your progress through the Small Business Success Program and evaluate your success at the end. We'll do this by tracking your daily activities.

Tracking Your Daily Activities
First, we need to know what you actually do each day. As business people, we all wear many hats during the day (and sometimes at night, too). But what does this mean? What tasks are we actually performing and how much time do we spend on each activity?

Tracking your daily activities lets you see where your valuable time is being spent, and gives you the data you need to set goals and make the changes to your work habits that will make you more successful.

Daily Activity Tracking Tips
Use a device to record your daily activities that is constantly accessible to you, so you can record exactly what you do when you do it.

Memory is fallible - and kind.

A Day-Timer or calendar, a PDA, an organizer software program, a digital recorder, or an ordinary notebook will all work to record your daily activities; choose whichever method you are already comfortable with and find the easiest to use.

I use a Day-Timer because I like the way it's organized and most of my work takes place in my office. Using a device to track your daily activities that's preformatted into days and hours saves you the time of formatting the device yourself.

Don't record unnecessary information; it's the activity and the time you spent on it that's important for our purposes. For instance, my entry related to writing this article would be only "writing Tracking Daily Activities", covering the amount of time it took to write it.