50 Time Management Guidelines For Business Owners
Planning:
- Plan your time but do not let it control you.
- Assess your work – projects, tasks, etc – and allocate priorities
- Arrange and allocate your priorities into categories A, B, C and D.
- Throw away D’s.
- Keep the C’s to be read during non-priority time.
- Date and time check the Bs: they are usually important but not urgent.
- Sub-prioritize your A’s – A1, A2, A3 etc.
- Do the A1s now, then your other As – not those attractive Cs.
- Chop the big task down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
- Estimate the finishing time for a task, not just the starting time.
- Always ask the questions: what? Who? Where? Why? When? How?
Operating
- Use the “To Do” system
- Have a daily “To Do” list – particularly for your A items.
- Review your daily list, first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening and plan your priorities.
- Keep your daily “to do” list always in sight
- As you clear each item, delete it in brilliant red – just looking at a list of completed tasks makes you feel even better.
- Do not include too many items – remember the jobs which always crop up unexpectedly.
- Maintain a second to-do list for longer term tasks for those to which a date cannot yet be given.
- Transfer items form the second list to the daily list whenever relevant.
- Use the to-do lists, do not ignore them – they are probably your most powerful time management tools.
- Write it down: do not try to keep your to-do lists in your head – keep that free for actually doing them.
- Leave some time for the unexpected.
- Have the things you need constantly to hand in one place.
- Identify and concentrate on the high-yield tasks if you have the choice.
Telephone control
- Master your telephone techniques
- Plan your telephone calls: use telephone to-do lists as telephone agendas.
- If possible arrange a specific “call back” time – Do not just say “I’ll ring you later” or even worse “you ring me later”.
- If interrupted during a task by a telephone call, before answering jot down your next thoughts. When you return to your task, you will know what you were going to say next.
- Cross-index your telephone directory: name as one entry, organization as the other.
- Quickly get the purpose of the call, it is pleasant to socialize (gossip?), but it wastes a lot of time.
- Make sure you get a call-back name and number correctly: do not hesitate to ask for information until you have got it right.
Discipline
- Time management is 99% self-discipline.
- Do the unpleasant task first, or as early as possible, particularly if it is your A1. It is most people’s experience that these tasks usually turm out to be less unpleasant than was anticipated.
- Use the recommended time management techniques, they have been proved to work.
- Learn to say ‘No’
- Make sure you do it right first time: every time you have to re-try, you are wasting time.
- Avoid procrastination: get on with it.
- Set yourself deadlines for most tasks and stick to them if at all possible.
- Stick to the task you know MUST be done.
- Do one thing at a time.
- Actually have something to do: even if it is constructive relaxation.
- Always be on time yourself.
- Handle paper only once if at all possible.
- Read only what you must: the rest can be read in your ‘C’ time.
Traveling
- Do not leave it until the last minute to set off.
- Do not be a one-side-of-the-town-to-the-other commuter: plan groups of visits within easy range of each other.
- Use car cassette learning or iPod learning.
- Use voice recorder on your mobile or other device to record your thoughts while driving.
- Use train time to: read, write, brainstorm ideas with yourself
Summary
- Plan what you have to do: how it is going to be done, where it is to be done, by when it has to be done. Why has it to be done at all??
Everything you do should contribute to your self improvement and thereby the improvement of your business. So use this checklist at regular intervals to review your progress and assess how much you have acheived – you probably be pleasantly surprised.
Modified and re-written by ShriNagesh to suit contemporary entrepreneurs, Original source: “Training and development” April 1988, in an article by Leslie Rae FITD, p.40
I made this checklist available as a pdf download. If you wish to have a hard copy, you are free to print it and stick it around your workspace. Here is the link to 50 time management guidelines for business owners pdf.
You might find my blogger’s goal sheet useful. You can read the post or download the pdf too.
Good Luck
Shri
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