by Cheryl A. Clausen..
You’re either directly responsible or overseeing all functions, and you’re overwhelmed by the details. Rather than focusing on the important you seem to fight the fires and at the end of the day you aren’t sure if you’ve really invested your time in the best way. Long-term your time management skills will either make you or break you, so it’s time to improve those skills before it’s too late. When you’re solely responsible for everything in your business it’s easy to get caught up in firefighting and micro-managing. It’s actually easier to respond to interruptions and crisis than it is to focus on the important. But that’s a success killing habit that you’ll want to break now.

In order to develop good time management skills you’ll need to set aside time outside of your normal business hours to de-clutter and sort through all the stuff you’ve allowed to build up. This is 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.

You can’t be effective when you aren’t sure what actions you should be taking at any given moment. The easiest way to increase your effectiveness 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. Your odds of forgetting important things increase when you have to search through files, folders, your calendar, and your computer to find what you’re supposed to be taking action on, and you just won’t take the time to hunt through everything to figure out what you should be doing.

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.

Develop procedures for routine tasks so you can delegate those tasks to someone else and free yourself up to actually run your business. Realize there are a number of opportunities to outsource tasks to virtual assistants, employees, or even volunteers. There are some senior citizen groups that want activities that members can work on together.

There is probably a lot of stuff left on your list that needs to be prioritized. Just select the three most important things to do one day at a time. You don’t need to prioritize the whole list. Prioritize and commit to taking action on only one to three actions each day. As you recognize the desired outcome is actually doable it becomes easier to develop good time management skills. It’s up to you to develop the higher level big picture that you want to accomplish and that you need to focus on. Decide on the actions you’ll take and when, based on their alignment with what you’re trying to accomplish.

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

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