Entrepreneur's Edge by Dave Arthur

Time Management Tips  

Most people look back on their day and wonder where the time went and how come they didn’t get anything important done for the day.  By analyzing your activities you can see how you spent the day and most people will realize that emails, phone calls, personal errands and daily life struggles ate up their hours while the important stuff gets pushed back.  If you think about how important your time is, then you will treat it as a valuable resource. In fact time is one the most powerful resources we have to use.

An easy way to find out how much your time is worth is take your earnings and divide them by hours it took to earn that much.  As an entrepreneur sometimes it’s not that easy because some projects will not show income for awhile or the sales process takes lots of time.  So do the best you can and just get a baseline number for yourself, it might be very surprising how much each hour is worth. An easy example would be if you are making $4000 a week then each hour is worth $100.  Why is this important, well next time someone asks you to do a favor or spend time doing a meaningless task you will be more inclined to have someone else do it.  You will start asking yourself each day is this where I should devote my time to be the most productive. 

One of the best ways to improve your productivity is to make a list of all your priorities the night before your busy day and then rate them as the most important to the least important.  It is so important to prioritize the list before you do anything else, this will determine what gets done first.  So first thing in the morning is work on item number 1 and finish it, do not do anything else until number 1 is done, then go on to item number 2 and work on that until it’s done.  There may be some items on your list that can not be done in one day so you work on those items until you can not do anything more then move on to the next priority on your list.  By the end of the day you will be amazed of how much you accomplished by not letting any distractions take away from your productivity. 

            Imagine if you could manage to get one extra hour out of the day, that is 5 hours a week or 20 hours a month what could you do with that extra time.   One busy executive saved 30 minutes a day by not going to the local coffee shop every day after realizing how much time was being spent there.  Do you have any habits that take up too much time?  Is there anywhere else you can improve your productivity? 

Some truths about time management:

1. If it doesn’t get scheduled then it doesn’t get done.
2. Time can have a future value
3. Some activities produce better results then others
4. What you expect tends to happen. 

These ideas can only work if you put them in action, that is the most important advice there is … Action.