Do You Have Troubling Managing Your Time?

Let me tell you something: you are not alone!

The #1 complaint of most business owners and entrepreneurs is that they have no time and wish they could have more hours in the day. Is this you?

If so, this post will assist you in getting your time management back on track.

The joke of the whole thing is that you cannot manage time. There are only so many hours, minutes and seconds in a day, it’s what you do with them that is important!

You can truly only manage your commitments!

Here are a few major suggestions to help you get better at managing your commitments:

1. Set Office Hours

If you work from home, set office hours and only do income-producing work during these hours!

Print them out and put them up on the outside of your office door.

I joke about it with my kids as I often work from home, and I tell them that the only time they can disturb me is outside of office hours or if they have one of the following situations: blood, water, fire or wind.

2. Friendship/Personal Hours 

Having lunch and tea with personal friends and not business opportunities during office hours is a loss of income-producing time for your business.

Book friendship times for evening and weekends – just like you would do if you worked in a standard office environment in a job.

3. Meetings

There are many people that will monopolize your time if you allow them.

Ask people that want to meet with you to send you an agenda of what they want to talk about. You will be amazed at how short and focused your meetings become!

Some people may get irritated when you ask for an agenda, but just remember it’s your right as your time is extremely valuable!

4. Saying "No" More Often 

Often you say yes to all meetings and other opportunities without understanding why you are taking valuable time out of your day in the first place

If something does not interest you or someone will not send you an agenda, you have the right to say “Thank you for wanting to meet, but maybe we can do it another time”.

There will always be more opportunities out there, but when you are short on time, you need to focus on meetings that can bring you monetary results in your business.

Learn to say no more often and free up a ton of time in your business for growth and income generating meetings.

5. Set Meeting Intentions & Expectations

Before you go to any meeting, do you set expectations of what you want from the meeting?

What kind of results are you looking for? Are you looking to take an order, book the next appointment, or have a demo?

What are you actually after?

You can sit and chit chat and have a meal or a tea during a casual meeting, but why are you there in the first place?

Consider this before your next meeting in order to save yourself some time.

6. Set Your Commitments

Take a weekly calendar and sit down on a Sunday evening and plan your week ahead.

Fill in all your commitments – eating, gym, yoga, kids to school, etc. This should include all the activities that you have to do, not just your business activities!

Now, fill in your weekly business activities you know you have to get done: blogging, marketing, emails, social media, follow-up, etc.

Now you will see the time you have left in the week to get all the other items on your to-do list done. Often, you will see that the time left over is a lot less than the number of items on your list.

You now know what you have to get done and what will have to wait for next week! This truly does assist you with prioritizing what needs to get done from week to week.

Planning your week and realizing that commitments are your issue not time management is key in this process.

In business we have limited time every day and by implementing the items above as you go into 2017 and beyond will make you start to see that time is not an issue, rather it is how you are filling it that is the issue!

The issue is you and the commitments you make that uses up too much of your time doing activities that are not focused on growing your business.

This post first appeared on https://www.mymsuccess.com/. You can check out the original content here: https://www.mymsuccess.com/you-cannot-manage-time/

Author: Colin Sprake is the CEO of Make Your Mark, a Canadian company of live seminars, online entrepreneur academy and live accountability groups that have helped 10,000’s of Entrepreneurs achieve rapid results in small business growth and development. Colin is a best-selling author of ‘Entrepreneur Success Recipe’ and trains for BMO, Sun Life Financial, Scotia Bank, T.D. Bank and lives by the tagline Business With Soul – putting heart back into business!