Part 1 of Essential Business Skills Time Management A Critical Skill Set

If at the end of your day, you find yourself burned out and you didn’t get everything accomplished that you wanted or needed to, you may need to consider how you are managing your time. Effective entrepreneurs usually manage their time very effectively.
There are many ways to plan and organize your time to achieve a successful time management scheme. How you organizing your time depends on what you are trying to achieve. To achieve maximum effectiveness whether in the work place or home it is essential that you understand how you use your time throughout the day, We often take our time for granted and give it little or no thought until we run out of time.
Planning and scheduling tasks will determine how much you achieve in a given day. There are many habits we can take on which will increase our output. Time wasters: These include: the telephone, email, web surfing, casual or personal visitors, clutter, ineffective resources. Let’s take each and examine how they affect your output.
The telephone is an effective time thief. Corporate executives know this and hire secretaries to filter out unnecessary phone calls. Whether you own a small storefront business or work from home, you need to do this for yourself. An answering machine can work well for this purpose. You pick up the important calls and let the machine handle the others. If you need a more personal touch an answering service can give your customers the feeling that they are important to you without taking up your valuable time.
Email can take up an exorbitant amount of time if you let it. Scheduling a particular time to check your email each day. Never leave your email open on your desktop and make sure that in the options page the notification sound is turned off Set yourself up to check it once in the morning and once before you quit for the day.
Web surfing; you would be surprised at how easy it is to get caught in the trap of following links to information you are seeking. Whether it is a new product you are researching or a service you are looking for, carefully reading the description returned by your favorite search engine will help you conquer this time waster.
Casual or personal visitors at your place of business or during your workday at home will eat up much valuable time. None of us want to be rude to our friends or family but your work time is when you earn your living. Taking time to chat with a friend or talk with your son about why his girlfriend dumped his will kill your work day. Casual visitors come in the form of sales people who just drop in to sell you on their product or service. These folks must be made to make an appointment when you can block out time to listen to them, no exceptions.
Clutter is the bane of every working person. Take a good look at your work area. If you have items on your desk or at your workstation which are not germane to your task right now you will soon be overcome with searching for what you need. Business people can keep what they need filed and in the filing cabinet. Lawyers usually keep their files in alphabetic order and in filing cabinets. Accountants will often keep their files in this way also. People who deal with large numbers of files each day will often assign an account number to each and require a client to know their account number for ease of access.
Poorly categorized Resources and tools. Imagine for a moment that you are a mechanic. If you are careful to keep your tools arranged carefully you will have an easier time finding them when you need them. If you just drop them somewhere when you’re finished with them they will soon become so mixed up that you have to take extra time to find each one. Resources are no different. Keeping your phone numbers in a rolodex, your sales people in separate files according to product, employees in alphabetically organized files will make your life much easier.
Most of our time management skills can be easily updated. Other habits are ingrained and will require some effort to overcome. Knowing how we handle each of the above subjects will go a long way toward streamlining our workday.

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