When starting up a home business, time management is an area of business management usually overlooked or ignored.

Sure enough, we all know a person in small business who races about like a chicken with its head cut off all day, without enough hours in a day, all they do is hurry and get overtaken – perhaps this person is you! Come the end of the day, when the pace settles, what have you completed? Do you think about the day and think “what happened to the time, I didn’t get as much accomplished as I planned to do. If this feels familiar, then you might just have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people never appear to rush, they seem composed and unflustered. The difference between them and everybody else is they have accomplished time management.

What is time management? It is just arranging the clock in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can truly get how to time manage our day, we need to ask ourselves what we are hoping to achieve today, this week, this year and even up to ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The most effective key in my view to complete goals is to write them down. You should review your goals at points to make sure that they are relevant and workable but not so simple that you don’t have to put in the hard work to succeed at them otherwise what is the meaning of any goals in the first place?

At the beginning of every working year you could takethe time and think about what you hope to get this year. It might be that you want to gross up your profits by 20%, you may plan to move into bigger premises, you could plan to reduce your debt once and for all. By the start of every working week you should write down on a note pad or in your diary the large projects that must to be taken care of this week, and look back to them on each day to be sure you’re making progress and hopefully polish some of the projects off your list.

You might place your list on your desk or on a place where you should be continually reminded of what needs to be achieved each week. The list may be in order of priority so that the key work at the top of the list get finalised earlier. Any jobs not achieved this week should be taken onto next week on a higher ranking, this will require it gets completed.

The next thing you may not be doing is creating a daily list of chores to achieve. This may help keep you on track on each day. Again, this list will be put up where you can persistently look back to it and mark off the chores finalised. Wiping off the jobs will allow you a sense of accomplishment and remind you how you are progressing during the day. Always stick to the list where possible and try to keep working from the highest priority to the lower priority. I know issues will turn up throughout the day that sometimes throw the whole day out, but you need to either deal with the crisis and get back to the list or if the newly arisen issue isn’t as time sensitive as some of the work on the list then place it later on your list and continue on doing what you were doing.

Each chore you need to complete can be written down for a multiplicity of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t put off to do it and secondly, so you keep the day outlined and you accomplish your daily goals. Beware initiating chores and not finishing them. This may turn tomorrow in a cloud of incomplete tasks and could cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with a list at a mile long and you will throw it out in despair and revert back to bad habits of running around in confusion each day and achieving nothing.

Remember for each day you plan your goals and write off every item on your list, you get a little bit closer to succeeding in your weekly and ultimately your yearly and long term goals.

A few pointers on Time Management:

• Do it once and do it well, it’s wasteful reverting to the task and needing to redo it.
• Learn to nicely communicate to people when you’re busy and that you will speak to them later.
• Learn to delegate jobs that really don’t require your participation.
• Don’t embark on wild goose chases.
• Don’t fizzle away time during phone calls that cannot assist with something.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Refer to your list of jobs to do regularly during the day.
• “Map out your day” in the shower and write out your daily list the second you arrive at work. Don’t stop what you start.
• Prioritise in everything you do, always start tasks in their order of necessity to you and your customers.

Be evasive with time wasters, people that only like to chat all day, and if they are employed by you, set them straight, or get rid of them.

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