Time Mastery

By Don Clark

If you want to be successful in business, you must master your time.  Since time is a limited commodity, so must learn to make the best of it. 

One very useful concept is to target time by categorizing your efforts into three different targets:

1.  Not urgent and not important

This is essentially killing time – don’t succumb to it often.  Most people spend 5% or so of their time in this zone.

2.  Urgent and not important

Farm these items out to assistants or outsource, leaving time for you to focus on the next item.  Again, a lot of people spend 5% of their time here.

3.  Urgent and important

Most business owners/managers spend 70% plus of their time in this zone, taking care of the immediate day to day things necessary to run their business.

4.   Not urgent, but important

Your ultimate goal is to spend some quality time in this zone, because this is the stuff that helps build future business – planning, budgeting, goal setting, etc.  These types of tasks are very important, even necessary, but are not overly urgent.

In order to achieve these goals you need to focus on three areas:

Self Mastery:

1.  Make a list at the end of each day for the next day.

2.  Be specific and rank the items (A, B, C)

3.  Assign a time to each item – this step is critical

Planning Mastery:

Twenty percent of your time should be planning your time, eighty percent doing things.  If you don’t plan, you won’t succeed.

Delegation Mastery:

Delegation requires training and educating people, a system of delivery, a system of reporting, and a feedback loop to correct any problems that creep into the process.  Without those requirements, it is not truly delegating, only setting yourself up for more problems

Draw up a plan not to help get control of your time.  If you want more information or help doing so, contact a professional at ActionCoach (disclaimer: I attend ActionCoach) or contact me via a comment for a referral.

You won’t regret it.