Time Management Skills: A Key to Your Success

As a business owner you're directly responsible for all the functions in your business. You may be overwhelmed by all the details. Instead of focusing on what's important you get caught up responding to little emergencies and at the end of the day you may not be sure where the day went. Eventually your time management skills will either make you or break you, so it only makes sense to develop good time management skills before a lack of time causes you real troubles. Firefighting and micro-management are bad habits you don't want to develop. It's easier to respond to all the interruptions than it is to focus on the important things. Break these success killing habits now.

Set aside some time outside of your normal business hours to de-clutter and sort through all the stuff you've allowed to build up. Sort through all the piles of paperwork you have in and under your desk and shoved into drawers and cupboards that needs to be gone through to determine relevance. Quickly sort through this stuff creating piles or boxes for: needs action now, needs action at some point, reference, and throw away.

The reason you have poor time management skills is because you aren't sure what actions you should be taking at any given moment. Gather up all the stuff in your needs action now pile and identify all the actions you need to take making one list so you have everything in one place. When you have to search through files, folders, your calendar, and your computer to find what you're supposed to be taking action on you forget, and you just won't take the time to hunt through everything.

Knowing when to take action on the right things helps you to develop good time management skills. Prioritize your list of actions, delegate the actions you can, and dump any action that doesn't need to happen. Commit to dumping anything that isn't taking you closer to achieving what you want to achieve.

Delegation may be something you avoid. But you need to get tough with yourself and challenge yourself to find things that could be delegated to someone else, so you have time to actually run your business. There are a number of financially viable outsourcing options including: virtual assistants, employees, or even volunteers. Sometimes you can even get help from senior citizen centers who want work like addressing envelopes, and will have their members do this work for donations.

Now you still have a lot of stuff left on your list that needs to be prioritized, but I only want you to select the three most important things for you do to one day at a time. Do not prioritize the whole list just prioritize and commit to taking the required action on one to three actions each day. Good time management skills are inspired by the desired end results. As the owner it's up to you to develop the higher level big picture that you want to accomplish and that you need to focus on. With that big picture in mind decide on the actions you'll take and when, based on their alignment with what you're trying to accomplish.

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Author: Cheryl A. Clausen can help you get unstuck. To find Time Management Tips get her free ecourse. Improve your Time Management Skills, check this out.

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