Effective Time Management in Business
Time is one of the most democratic of possessions. Each week you and I have exactly the same 168 hours (1,440 minutes) as everyone else. It’s how you choose to use them that is the difference between those who accomplish a lot and those who don’t.
As a business owner or entrepreneur, effective time management is important. It is a reflection of your own self-worth and your ability to be self-disciplined. Think of a successful person and, invariably, you will be struck by how much they effortlessly appear to achieve. Except it is not effortless. They have developed an attitude towards time that treats each minute as a precious commodity.
Time Leaks – Some Causes
Take a good look at your own approach to time. How subservient are you to these saboteurs of effective time management?
1. Time Vampires – people whom you allow to interrupt your meetings or who catch you unawares. They are deadly creatures who you must learn to avoid at all costs. If you let them drain you, they will.
2. Mobile Phones/Blackberries – do you treat yours as a security blanket that accompanies you everywhere? And, if you are a man, please don’t admit that you use it whilst standing at the urinal (now a disturbing commonplace sight!).
3. E-mail – do you open it up first thing in the morning and allow yourself to be immediately distracted by meaningless trivia. And throughout the day keep saying to yourself and everyone around you, ‘I must just check my e-mail’.
4. Meetings that over-run – you allow a simple meeting to overrun into a discussion about what Tiger Woods was really up to the night he crashed his car?
You then suddenly realise you are behind schedule. The rest of your day is spent in catch-up mode.
5. Displacement Activity – you know what you should be doing but, for some reason, you find all manner of things to tinker with before you actually settle down to do the thing that will generate income.
These are just some of the activities that you have to command and control if effective time management is your goal. If you don’t, you will inevitably end up like the vast majority of the working masses who are unwilling to take control of their behaviours and actions.
This has nothing to do with being boring and not ‘going with the flow’. It has everything to do with achieving what you set out to accomplish.
You don’t need to take some costly course to learn effective time management. Firstly, you don’t have the time (!) and secondly, it’s more to do with your attitude.
How to Achieve Effective Time Management
Here are some suggestions to help you achieve effective time management:
1. Improve Your Environment – make sure your office is set-up in such a way that it allows you to work unmolested. Make others know when you are busy and when you cannot be disturbed. If your office is looked upon as a ‘fun/open’ zone, it will be treated as one.
2. Block out your time – know when you are going to start an activity and when you will finish it. Mark this out in your diary. Make sure others know what you are up to and when. Once you start to block out your time, you quickly realise how precious every minute it is. And it makes you very aware how important effective time management is.
3. Schedule your e-mail – E-mail is highly addictive. In the wrong hands, it is one of the most unproductive inventions ever created. Avoid looking at it first thing in the morning. Aim to achieve something productive instead. At all costs, resist dipping in here and there.
4. Use voice-mail – that’s why you have that facility on your mobile phone. Remember? Let others leave you a message so that you can call them at your own convenience. Start to control when and how others have access to you. Not the other way around.
5. Give meetings an end time – if you don’t do this, a meeting, in theory, could go on forever. Don’t be afraid to tell others that your time is limited and when your next appointment is. They will respect you for it.
Effective Time Management in 21 Days
Effective time management requires self-discipline. And the bigger your working environment, the harder this is to implement. However, that makes it even more of an imperative.
It takes 21 days to develop a new habit so, if you have the inclination and the will to make changes based on what you have read, don’t expect miracles to happen in a couple of days.
Instead, focus on dealing with one aspect of your time that you would like to improve. Crack that one and move onto the next. As strange as this may seem, you are dealing with an addiction and you will have to go through a bit of cold turkey to overcome it. Stick with it.
If you don’t, you will just end up like the marauding hordes with phones stuck to their ears, their eyes constantly scanning e-mail and their minds in one constant frenzy. Is that how you want to live?
Think about it. The more you allow unimportant stuff to interrupt how you think and behave, the harder it is for you to concentrate on the things that really matter. ‘Time leaks’ prevent you from effective time management and focusing on the creation of new services and products to stay competitive in your market.
Like this post? Take a look at effective time management in relation to film-making. There is a link.
