Time management is the fine art of not doing useless things.
At some
time or other we have all said it – “sorry, I just don’t have time for that”.
Well this is a lie, to others and even to ourselves. Harsh? perhaps but true non the
less and I can prove it.
Imagine
you’re lying in bed on Sunday evening thinking about everything coming up in
the week ahead – it’s fully booked, simply no time to fit in anything else.
Yet
when you get up on Monday morning, the car is dead or your cat is poorly
perhaps the central heating boiler has packed up.
So,
what do you do?
You
start making phone calls of course; arrange appointments, make time to drop off
the cat or stay in for an engineer.
You
don’t say, sorry this week is so busy I can’t get it sorted until next week.
True?
So,
where does this ‘extra’ time come from. The truth is not lack of time but lack
of priority.
When we
say ‘I don’t have time’ what we are really saying is ‘this is not a priority
for me right now’.
Yet, I
don’t believe we are always doing this consciously, particularly when it comes
to our business. Think about the things you wish you had more time for, perhaps
attending networking meetings, writing a blog, developing a new offer or researching
potential customers. At some point you believed these things to be important,
in fact not doing them makes you feel frustrated and stuck. So how can we get
them done?
What will have the biggest impact on my business?
Firstly,
we need to check if the things we don’t have time for are really important?
If it’s something that you feel you should be doing but in reality isn’t that
important, it's time to make a decision and say - I'm not doing. I always ask myself ‘what would be the impact of doing
that on my business?’ – no/low impact then don’t do it. The reverse question is also useful to recognise priorities - 'If i don't do this, what impact will it have on my business?'
Of
course, delegating/outsourcing is a great option – my maxim here is ‘ only do what only you can do’
.
How much time do you need?
A task will fill the time you have; be realistic, how long do you need to
get the task done? Try not to round things into hour sized slots, think in 15 -
30 minutes blocks instead. In 30 minutes of focused work you can achieve a lot.
When does it need to be done? The danger of a simple to do list is that it doesn't include deadlines. Be clear on when tasks need to be done allows you to look at your time not just today or this week but over a month or longer.
What's got to give?
Where
are you spending your time now?
When we
think about time, often we focus on the big chunks, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours
at work, yet it not the big things that are time stealers it’s the 20 minutes
of social scrolling, the hours in front of the TV. These unconscious,
unplanned slithers of time that we simply fill up as we go along.
Be
conscious of those little pockets of time, is the 30 minutes scrolling actually
an hour? How about instead of TV one night a week using the two hours to tackle
that task?
Schedule it.
Just
like making an appointment with someone else, make an appointment with yourself
to get that task done – schedule it in, fix the date, time and duration. Even if a task
will take a number of small blocks if you schedule it in it will happen.
The
bottom line is that time is ours to do with as we wish, good time management is the fine art of not doing useless things.
Janet Doran
, is a member of the Association of Business Mentors and works as a Business Coach/Mentor supporting small business owners in creative and professional service industries to build and grow their business. To explore us working together on your business please get in touch janet@thepositivepenco.uk
Find out more at www.thepositivepen.co.uk
or call 07505 120051
Posting daily, information/inspiration for small business owners, on twitter @ thepositivepen
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