A Guide For Time Management
by Bob Brolhorst
A Guide For Time Management September 2001 By Bob Brolhorst
Stop giving in to the clock and start controlling your own life again! No, don't set the clock back 24 hours to get more time. Learn to control the time you have and you won't find yourself exhausted at the end of every day. It's extremely exhausting trying to cram a great deal of activity into one day. If you sit back and take a deep breath and control the time you have, you'll feel much better when you get home and maybe even have energy left to do some of the things you see others doing and wonder how they do it!
1. Listen to -- and heed -- your internal clock. If you are not a morning person? Don't schedule important meetings or activities for the morning. You don't have to get up at 6 or 7 or even 3 a.m. with the rest of the world. Perhaps you need to sleep until 10 or get up at 8 and take it slow getting started. If this sounds like you, you're probably the most effective in the late afternoon, evening, and up to midnight (or even beyond!). But don't shortchange yourself on rest. This is not the time you must control. You must let your body determine the amount of rest and sleep it needs.
2. Make an appointment and get a physical. You must take care of yourself if you're going to take control. Make sure you're in good health and there are no underlying medical problems. If you're taking medication, have it re-evaluated regularly. As your body changes with age, you may react to medications differently.
3. Don't try to be everything to everyone. If you are a small business and on a limited budget try calling a local college or university for inexpensive part time employees. Students will usually jump at this chance because it not only will give them some necessary extra income it may also help with some expiernce in the field that they are studying. The greatest time waster is having to do so much of the paperwork yourself. Hire a person with intelligence, talent, and skill, and someone you know you can work with, someone who knows how important they can be working at your side, and pay them well. Nurture their professional growth by mentoring them. Keep them challenged and never let them doubt their value.
4. Delegate as many of the details as you can, not just to your assistant, but to others as well. It's hard to let go of something you enjoy doing, but how much is it costing you to do it yourself? I have kept a thing or two I enjoy doing. I look at it as a trade-off. But don't trade too much or you'll have to go back to Step 1.
5. Don't make the same mistake so many people take for granted. I will tell you right now that customer service has to be the first thing on your list. If your email software program has the capability to filter out junk mail, then make sure you use it, but respond to your email as soon as time permits. Check your email first thing in the morning and then right before you end your day. Don't be one of these people that reponds to each peice of email immediately when it comes in, believe me if you approach answering your email in this mannner you will find yourself just answering email Keep your Outbox full. Keep your Inbox empty. Enough said.
6. Another mistake that i used to make is to keep all the business magazines that I subscribe to just because they may have contained an article or two that I may have thought would be helpful. Take my advice and cut out those articles and either save them in a file or get a scanner and save them in a file on your computer, preferably the latter. You'll be surprised as how much room you will gain and how much more efficient you will be.
7. If you plan to end your day at a specific time each day, then make it a habit to quit thirty minutes prior to that and take the time to clean up and oraganize your office so when you start the next day everything that needs to be in its place is.
8. If your assistant needs an assistant, let her/him hire one. Trust your assistant to know what's best to handle your workload. Don't forget that word delegate. It not only helps you, but it will also give your assistant or other people that work for you a sense of accomplishment and keep them interested in their job.
9. Read time- and paper-management articles whenever you see one. Every time I read a new article on these subjects, I learn at least one new thing. If I hadn't taken the few minutes to read it, I would be wasting all the time the article just taught me to save!
10. Use your daily calendar in your email program to set up and above all remember all of your appointments. This one of the most important things you could do. The appointment that you forgot could have made you thousands or the negative word of mouth, because you forgot about the appointment could have lost you thousands.
Bob Brolhorst
Wave 5 Marketing
bbrolhorst@wave5marketing.com
http://www.wave5marketing.com
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