Time Management Tips
Jim Hingst
Sign Business Authority on vinyl graphics, printing, marketing & sales. Results-driven product management. Published 200+ articles.
By Jim Hingst?
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Getting Control of Your Day
Time can easily slip away. When this happens, promises to customers are broken, return phone calls aren’t made, appointments and deadlines are missed and new sales opportunities are lost.
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We all would like a few extra hours each day. But until the rotation of the earth slows down,?24 hours is all the time that you get.?The best that you can do is to adopt behaviors in your life which will help you better use the time that you have.?
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In this article, I will suggest some time saving tips that I have used over years.?My hope is that these ideas will help you better plan your activities, so you can focus on those activities that will yield the highest rewards for you and your business.?If, on the other hand, you already are using a time management system, perhaps these suggestions will help you coach any employees that might need some guidance.?
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Establish Good Habits?
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Thirty-five years ago, I worked for a general contractor as construction manager.?At any one time, I worked on 10 to 20 commercial and residential commercial projects. Working in a job that involved planning and scheduling a myriad of activities and having to deal daily with dozens of distractions forced me to adopt work habits that are still part of daily ritual.
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As I have my morning coffee, I review my daily things to do list. I also use this quiet time to read and write and to work on projects that require concentration. I prefer doing the toughest tasks on my “to do list” in the morning, because that’s when my mind is its freshest and I am not distracted by phone calls.?
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A second habit that I incorporated into my daily routine is to write a daily “things to do” list.?I will describe more about organizing a list later.?
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Along with these two habits, I also learned to value time. We have all heard the phrase that “time is money”. That phrase took on a very special meaning for businesses in the 1970s. At that time, interest rates were in double digits. If you ran a construction company that was borrowing millions of dollars, “time was BIG money”!??
The owner of the company never let me forget about the high cost of money. His daily reminders motivated me to keep jobs moving along.?If you didn’t keep your proverbial eye on the ball, project delays could kill your business.?If you are old enough to remember the days of malaise, when Jimmy Carter was president, you probably remember many stories of multimillionaires, who went from riches to rags. I knew one contractor, who lost his company and his life savings, and ended up as golf course manager.
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Establishing good work habits is as important as learning time management systems. In a matter of a couple of hours, you can learn the techniques of any system.?That’s the easy part.?The difficult part is to take action and put all of those techniques into practice.
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The key words are “take action” and “practice”.?It does you no good to read a great idea and not do anything about. So, if you learn something new, do something about it. And if you want to make these behaviors a regular part of your life, practice these behaviors daily. To turn these behaviors into habits, you have to practice them every single day, without fail, for at least a month. After that, the behavior will be part of your routine.?
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