When you start a home business, time management is an area of business management frequently overlooked or ignored.

Surely we all know someone in small business who races around like a bull all day, never enough hours in their day, all they do is rush and get overtaken – perhaps this person is you! To the end of the day, when the dust settles, what have you accomplished? Do you reflect on the day and ponder “what happened to the day, I didn’t get as much finished as I planned. If this sounds familiar, then you might have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people rarely appear to rush, they remain composed and unflustered. The difference with them and everybody else is they have accomplished time management.

What is time management? It is just scheduling hours in your day in an organised and efficient method. Before we can actually go ahead on how to time manage our day, we need to question ourselves what we are hoping to accomplish today, this week, this year and up to ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The easiest key in my view to achieve goals is to write them down. You should go back to all your goals at times to feel that they are appropriate and achievable but not so simple to do that you don’t have to put in the hard work to succeed at them otherwise what is the meaning of your goals in the first place?

From the start of every working year you should sit down and reflect on what you wish to achieve this year. It could be that you want to raise your profits by 20%, you may hope to move into different premises, you perhaps plan to take down your debt substantially. From the start of each working week you should write down on a note pad or in your diary the major chores that must to be achieved this week, and look back to them at every day to ensure you’re making progress and hopefully check some of those chores from your list.

You should put the list on your desk or on a place where you could be repeatedly reminded of what has to be achieved each week. This list should be in order of priority so that the major jobs at the top of the list get taken care of earlier. All the work not done this week will be taken onto next week at a higher urgency, this will ensure it gets checked off.

The next thing you may not be doing is having a daily list of tasks to accomplish. This might assist keep you on schedule on each day. Again, this list can be put up where you can constantly check on it and wipe off the items finalised. Marking off the projects should allow you a sense of accomplishment and let you know how you are going throughout the day. Always hold to the list if possible and continue working from the highest priority to lower priority. I know wormholes sometimes come up through the day that might throw the whole day up, but you must either take care of the problem and get back on to your list or if the new project isn’t as important as some of the chores on the list then put it at the bottom on the list and continue on doing what you were doing.

Each project you have to complete needs to be written down for a few reasons. Firstly, so you don’t forget to do it and secondly, so you keep your day outlined and you get your daily goals. Be alert to starting tasks and not finishing them. This might turn tomorrow in a mushroom cloud of half baked projects and will cause “list blowout”.

You will end up with a list being a mile long and you will throw the towel in in despair and change back to old habits of being in a hurry all day and completing nothing.

Remember that each day you plan your goals and write off everything on your list, you will get a day closer to succeeding in your weekly and eventually your yearly and long term goals.

A few basics on Time Management:

• Do it once and do it well, it’s pointless returning to the item and needing to redo it.
• Learn to politely say to people when you’re too busy and that you would get back to them at a later point.
• Learn to pass out jobs that truly don’t require your involvement.
• Don’t make off on wild goose chases.
• Don’t use up time during phone calls that aren’t going to achieve something.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Look at your list of work to do continually through the day.
• “Map out your day” in the car and list out your daily list the minute you arrive at work. Don’t stop what you begin.
• Prioritise all your jobs, always start things in their order of priority to you and your business.

Stay away from time wasters, people that merely go off to chat all day, and if they are your workers, set them straight, or get rid of them.

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