One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business owner is spending your time on the wrong things.
Worse yet is when you don’t realize how much your time is worth.
It’s odd but business owners are (usually) pretty good with money management and they are (usually) horrible with time management.
They can see the dollar amounts and know how much is “enough” but when it comes to the “time amount” they go completely blind!
Anyhow, the point is, if you are a business owner..you need to start managing your time like your money.
Your time is just as important (if not way more important) than your money.
There are lots of cool tips, techniques and shortcuts and such when it comes to time management..but the reality is if you want to succeed and make the best of your time everyday..you need to start with the basics.
And, most importantly, you need to understand these 3 principles I’m going to show you….
1. The 80/20 Rule
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 30 years or so, the 80/20 rule simply suggests that 80% of your results (or outputs) will usually come from 20% of your efforts (or inputs).
When it comes to time management, this single principle can either save you loads of time or make you tons of money or it can waste a ton of your time and make you little money.
For effective time management in your business, you need to start with the tasks that bring you the bulk of your profits and spend quality time on those tasks – schedule them first and work on them especially when you are highly productive.
And then once those are done, you can either choose to worry on the 20% of the tasks that don’t make you much money or better yet, you can spend the time expanding on the tasks that do make you money.
Simply put, you want to take as much of your time as possible and put it into doing the 20% of the tasks that bring you 80% of your profits.
You can either do more of it or you can optimize it to get better results.
2. Parkinson’s Law
Although Parkinson’s law isn’t as popular as the 80/20 rule, it’s extremely powerful and can make the difference between procrastination or lack of action and incredible productivity in your business.
Parkinson’s law simply says that any task will expand to fill the time you allot to it.
This means that if you have a really simple 2 minute task and you schedule 30 minutes for it, guess what? It’s going to fill the entire 30 minutes of your time.
When it comes to productivity and getting more work done in less time, you need to make tasks as challenging as possible (without inducing panic).
When you make a task challenging and set a challenging deadline..the likelihood of it getting done…goes up..
And when you schedule less time for a task, you’re also working with the complexity factor.
Ever sat down to do a simple task and then managed to simply freeze?
Yeah, me too!
The truth of it is even if you have the best time management techniques around, if you don’t tackle procrastination, the minute it strikes you’re pretty much out of luck…
Want to learn how to tackle procrastination in your business?
