Seattle Small Business Blog

In today’s fast-paced world, time management is more important than ever. Here are ten tips to improve your management of your time.

1) Plan goals a week in advance. The key tasks you need to accomplish each week should be worked out in advance so that you know where you need to focus your energies in the coming week.

2) Make sure you have a clean and tidy desk. It has been proven that one of the biggest business time wasters is a desk that has less than 80% of its surface area free from clutter. If you maintain a clear and clutter free desk, you will maintain your productivity at its maximum.

3) Learn to use your email program’s filter system. Set up a priority email folder and have all of the emails from your most important clients and contacts routed to it automatically so you don’t have to wade through a mountain of email manually to get to them.

4) Program in some ‘me’ time into every day. No matter how busy you are you should always make time for yourself to do something entirely non-business related. Recharging your batteries in this way will help you to deal with your work commitments at maximum efficiency.

5) Tackle the task you dislike the most first. Putting this task to the bottom of your to-do list will lead to a lot of wasted time fretting about it. If you get this task out of the way as quickly as possible you will feel such relief that the other tasks on your list will be a breeze.

6) Don’t think you have to be totally accessible all of the time. When you have important tasks to complete try to make sure you switch off your cell phone and stop checking your emails for the duration. This will allow you to make optimal use of your time by focussing entirely on the single task at hand without time-wasting distractions.

7) Allow time in your day for the unexpected. If you give yourself a task list that takes up every second of your day, an unexpected event will throw a complete spanner in the works. But if you allow time for the unexpected, when it occurs you’ll be able to cope.

Have an agenda for each meeting. Make sure that you have a clear list of everything to be discussed at every meeting and that every attendee gets that agenda ahead of time. During the meeting make sure that you keep from becoming sidetracked so that you waste the minimum amount of time.

9) Get used to saying ‘no’. If you get asked to do something that doesn’t fit into your schedule then learn how to refuse to do it. This can be hard to do at first but will get easier when the benefits become apparent.

10) Try to reduce the number of meetings you attend to the absolute minimum. Excessive meetings can be the biggest business time wasters. Try to only attend essential meetings to avoid this drain on your time and energy.

Of course, there are many more time management techniques you can use but the above will be a good starting point to help you manage your time more effectively.

Around midnight students across the country become record setting authors by finishing essays, and study groups for tests in unheard of time. This unnerving process often leads to below average results. Many people wonder why this is happening. The answer is poor time management. A few pointers on how to avoid such a scenario follow. Before you read more, be sure to give yourself a few minutes of time in case you’re cramming for something right now, you don’t want to miss something important.

Make lists early and often to become experts at time management. Lists that will be available to you for reference can be recorded anywhere. Studies prove the more one makes lists the more apt they are at logically completing tasks. Further, lists can provide people with a realistic look at their workloads. Often people will put more on their plate then they can chew. Sometimes it takes a list of all the foods on the plate for the stomach to get the picture.

The mind works the same way, often we need to see things all together on one comprehensive list to understand the magnitude of it all. If you create detailed lists you will be able to budget out the assignments thus avoiding the common scenario outlined above. When making lists be sure to include everything categorically so nothing gets missed. If you are making a list of things to do, make sure even the laundry and dishes make it onto the list so you don’t forget to budget time to do those tasks. Once the list is created, make a potential schedule to execute the duties on the list. If you have a small list it might just take a few minutes to complete, larger lists can take days, months or even years. So plan in advance.

Keep to appointments to avoid a scheduling traffic jam. The more you put off appointments the harder they can be to reschedule. If you are a busy person, like most of us, you have a lot of daily commitments. By missing appointments you create more pressure on your other appointments. Further if you miss multiple appointments you may just start doubling your schedule, this was explained to me one time as when you schedule two things for the same time frame. In terms of results, this is not a good plan. Imagine if you had coupled your dentist appointment with studying for a big exam. Not good time management at all. Most likely bad results are to follow, so be sure to keep appointments at all costs.

If you can make lists, and keep appointments your time management skills will increase greatly. When in doubt think of your time as something that can be on your side if you choose to master it, rather than just ignore it.