Essentials of Time Management for the Entrepreneur
By Corey Graham 2.0
This is been a personal challenge for me and just about every entrepreneur out there. From another vantage point it might be labelled 'productivity'.
Obviously we would all love to find ways to improve our productivity levels. Over the past few years I have adopted two philosophies for improved productivity and time management that I would encourage everyone to explore.
· Stephen Covey & The 7 habits of Highly Effective people - http://www.franklincovey.com/
· David Allen & The Getting Things done philosophy GTD. – www.davidco.com
Stephen Covey's system deals primarily with establishing priorities while David Allen’s system is concerned with getting things done in the midst of a crisis or chaotic situation.
Interestingly enough I must make mention of Bob and the guys at Rexwireless.com for marrying these technologies into one application for your blackberry called ToDoMatrix, which I have written about in this post. You might also find Alertmatrix to be an interesting companion to ToDoMatrix.
Another thing that business owners tend to complain about is lack of focus or being called away from the task at hand. I learnt a very simple process. It's quite simple - time yourself!
Timing yourself also allows you to make sense of this elusive thing we call time. When you are able to look at a spreadsheet that shows how you are performing in terms of time on your tasks, it empowers you to plan your time better for future projects
It makes time into another resource in your business you need to manage. You will find that all the creative ideas start to emerge on how you can double up your tasks. While you wait on one process to complete, you can get another one started.
You might want to listen to podcasts on your Industry while you are on the road. Maybe you can use your time in the bank line to send those emails you seem never to get the time to send off. These ideas are some simple tactics that can lift a big load off your shoulders.
The key is it all starts with timing the processes in your business and then measuring that against the big picture for your business.
P.S. This took me 2 hours to write including all the editing and rewriting to make my points clear and looking back into some of the theories deciding if to include them or not.
Add 10 minutes for dotting the initial ideas, that's 2 hours 10 minutes. You know the weird thing? This is probably how long it takes you to write an in-depth email. Well could be easily 40 minutes. The question is do you set aside 40 minutes to write your in-depth emails?
Corey Graham 2.0 is a Social Media Maven and entrepreneur. He is a blogger with CoreyKGraham.me/bizblog and Director of Connections & Chief Conversationalist at DrenalinProductions.biz. Also he is co-founder and partner of GramStep, a networking group and support system for entrepreneurs.
