One of the biggest questions that I seem to get
from people is “How Do You Manage Your Time?”
It’s no secret that I have 5 kids and work full time
from home, so naturally people look at that and wonder
how I can manage to work around being at home full time
with my kids and still have time for my business.
It’s not easy to do but I will share with you some
tips to help you gain back control of your time and
allow you to focus on the things that will help you
manage your time more efficiently and start to see
measurable results.
The first thing I tell people is you need to eliminate
distraction and eliminate interruptions. I can’t tell
you how much time is literally wasted each day by just
checking your email and having an instant messenger turned
on.
I’m guilty of this myself but I try to limit myself to
checking my email once or twice a day and that’s it.
This is especially true if I have a project that I’m
working on and know that I need to devote all my time
and energy to it and make sure it gets completed on
time.
The key to being productive is to eliminate everything
that takes you away from being focused on one thing. I
suggest that you check email at the end of your day, if
you begin by checking email first thing, it’s easy for
you to get distracted and move on to un-productive tasks.
The biggest thing is scheduling your distractions.
Obviously we can’t predict when a visitor stops by or
when we get an important phone call we need to take,
but what we can control is how much time we will devote
to those things we can control. Like checking email,
surfing the web, responding to customer emails etc.
Multi-Tasking is another time management killer. You
should minimize multi-tasking and cut it out all together
if possible and simply focus on one thing at a time.
People who multi-task and are working several things
at once are inefficient. More often than not it shows
in their progress and results.
Your primary focus should alway be on RESULTS. Write
down the things that you need to accomplish for the
day and work them one by one until you have finished
your daily list.
I would recommend that you have 3-5 things on your daily
‘to-do’ list and give yourself about 50 minutes to 1 hour
maximum each day to complete the task in. This allows you
to set aside a specific amount of time for each task and
you can easily measure your results. I call this my “Fire to Butt System”.
I like to take breaks after each task, I would suggest you
take at least a 15 minute break after each task. At lunch time
you can take more, I would suggest at least a 30 minute break
but I’m lazy so I usually take about an hour and relax a bit.
If you do this every day you will experience the most leverage
of your time and see bigger results. It will give you a clear
outcome and the motivation you need to work towards it as well
as setting yourself up for success.
