It is not our intention in this course to teach you any one particular time management system. What we are going to discuss are the general principles on which these systems are built. Time management skills are especially important for small business people, who often find themselves performing many different jobs throughout the day. These basic principles will help you increase your productivity and stay organized.
Time Management is a Myth
We can't change time. There will always be only 24 hours in a day. All we can actually do is to manage ourselves and what we spend our time doing.
Discover Your Time Thieves
Many of us are prey to those time thieves that steal the time that we could be using much more productively. It is so easy to while away the hours surfing the 'Net, reading email, or making personal phone calls. You need to analyze how your time is spent and implement time saving methods to keep your business on track. Here are some examples of some of the biggest time wasters:
- Putting things off by worrying about them , which locks you into indecision
- Creating inefficiency by implementing first instead of analyzing first
- Allowing unanticipated interruptions that don't accomplish anything
- Scheduling unrealistic time estimates for your tasks
- Crisis management
- Poor organization
- Ineffective meetings
- Micro-managing instead of letting others perform and grow
- Poor planning and lack of contingency plans
- Failure to delegate
- The Internet
So how do you discover your time thieves? By tracking your daily activities. This allows you to 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.
Don't make this a complicated process. You just need a device to record your daily activities that you constantly can have with you. Don't depend on your memory to write it down at the end of the day. Very few of us have photographic memories and we may miss the things that actually waste the most time.
A Day-Timer, calendar, PDA, digital recorder, or just an ordinary notebook will all work to record your daily activities. The important thing is to choose something that you are already comfortable with and actually use it. The procrastinator would go out and buy a new PDA and waste a week learning how to use it so that they could record how they waste their time. The doing is more important than the format.
It is also important that you don't waste time record unnecessary information. Remember, it's the activity and the time you spent on it that's important for your purposes. For instance, my entry for write this course would simply be, 'Writing Time Management Concepts,' and the amount of time I worked on it. There was no need for the details, but just the task name and time spent.
To get a broad overall sense of how you spend your time, record all your daily activities for an entire week and the amount of time spent on each. Don't distinguish between business and personal activities. Remember that personal tasks are just as important as business tasks in a well balanced life.