Of course, planning your day can only be effective if you are working towards a greater plan.
Having a Vision, a Mission, Values and Key Strategies all based around your Major Goals is crucial for success. These are your road map. The best way to get nowhere is to start out without this road map.
Break this down into 90, 60 and 30 days, and then daily. Planning like this, you’ll know what you need to achieve each day to reach your goals. Time is a precious commodity, with a plan in place the benefits from your daily time management will come.
Once you have goals and actions, what is your biggest challenge in managing your time?
What’s preventing you controlling your time?
Always last minute? Never enough time in the day?
Remember: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.
If you do nothing else spend 10 minutes at the start of each day to plan what you will do today.
Some tips for what to look for to properly manage your time:
- Prioritise tasks.
- Balance the free work, prioritise getting the paid work done.
- Organise your tasks into:
1: Important and urgent (e.g: deadlines, incoming sales calls)
2: Important but not urgent (e.g. update website)
3: Urgent but not important (e.g. general distractions)
4: Not urgent and not important (bin them) - Set aside time for email, admin, business planning, financial checking, marketing goals, ‘How can I do better’ time. Set yourself a routine time for these things.
- Try and work on 1 email at a time.
- Colour coding works.
- Set a realistic task start time for when you should start the task, to allow enough time to do a great job. Starting at the last minute is procrastination.
- For events and promotions, working back from delivery to inception is the best way.
- Make time for breaks, meals, your family and yourself. Managing our time helps achieve a good life balance.
- Once broken down into tasks, set a time frame.
- Remember, squeezing one last thing in isn’t always the best use of time. In fact this is often a great way to miss what is important.
- Social media, unless you are a professional is one of time management’s worst enemies.
- Delegate if you can, and learn to say NO.
Now eliminate distractions such as smart phone, email, news websites. Switch alerts off so you can focus on a task. Emails are a great way to burn time up. You will win back a lot of time in any day if you are disciplined on the times you check your emails.
Lastly, proper planning of your time helps you sleep at night, keeps your business achieving results and your spark alive. In turn this allows you to enjoy your leisure and your family – the real reasons for working in the first place.
(Written by Chris Norris from a session between members of the Independent Board facilitated by Steve Myatt – Horizon Business Solutions)