Success in life comes through time management. Time is money. Once you believe this, your planning efforts will be more focused. You probably started out that way, but someone got bogged down with your growing responsibilities. Now it is time to protect your time, conserve your energy. Use these three precious resources only on things that take you nearer to your goals. Determine what your time is worth, and only do things that meet this value. By doing this, you will also be able to decide on which tasks you should take on and which ones to outsource or delegate to others.

What is your financial goal for this year? Let’s say you want to make one million dollars this year. Every one is blessed with twenty-four hours in a day of which we should be working ideally for 8 hours. Out of the 365 days a year, discounting weekends and holiday makes it 220 working days. Converted into hours you’ve got 1760 hours. So how much is your one hour worth?

If you look categorize your time into productive and unproductive you can probably classify what you do as follows:

Non productive time is chatting with friends, aimless internet browsing, checking and answering mails too frequently, attending the phone, learning time, monitoring your website stats, clearing up your desk, cleaning up your office and so on.

Productive time would be the time you spend on product development, promoting your products, tweaking your marketing process to improve it, managing projects that make money, initiating and setting up joint ventures and looking for ways to automate your business.

It follows from the above that you must look for a return on the time you invest, based on your financial goal. Let’s look at some proven time management rules:

• Prioritize - first things first
• Create a to-do list
• Set aside specific time to do things
• No frequent email checks
• Learn to say no
• Become computer savvy
• Make your work environment conducive to your productivity
• Maintain focus
• Be busy and show it.

It might be worthwhile to keep this in view where you can look at it from time to time.

To manage your time and get more out of it, do the following:

• Make a goal statement of what you want to achieve
• Remove yourself from the routine day-to-day involvement
• Set up a system with well designed procedures for specific tasks
• Provide your employees with the requisite training to use the system
• Make it so that your employees cooperate with and support the system
• Make a detailed operations manual for reference

These steps will help you have your business going the way you want, freeing up your unproductive time. To sum up, don’t micromanage your business. Delegate routine tasks for a start.

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