If you have too little time to make
plans for your business or to step back and see the big picture
clearly, then chances are you have a clutter problem. That’s right,
clutter.
Not just the paper piles and congested
files that the word implies, but also those day-to-day details that
crowd your mind and get in the way of you accomplishing what’s most
important.
If you want to take back your time,
then you must clear your plate, your office and your mind so you can
spend more time thinking about — and then acting upon — your
business priorities.
Where do you start? First, assess the
way you currently spend your time, and then develop an action plan
for yourself.
Where Does Your Time Go? Henry David
Thoreau said, “It is not enough to be busy; so are ants. The
question is, what are we busy about?”
The first step in taking back your time
is being honest with yourself about how you are currently spending
your time. People tend to be unrealistic about the number of
directions they’re trying to run in simultaneously until they
analyze how they spend their time.
There are only 168 hours in a week —
how are you spending them? Each morning, your Time Bank credits you
with 24 hours (or 1,440 minutes), and no balances are carried
forward to the next day. How much daily credit are you wasting?
Now, decide how you’d like to spend your
time. Learning how to say “no” is an essential skill to master. What
are your goals and priorities? Once you’ve identified them, you can
focus on them.
Time management can produce some
dramatic changes in your business, because giving yourself the gift
of time to think lets you be proactive, not reactive.
Triumph Over Time. Stephen Covey said:
“How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply
important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage
ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters to us.”
We can identify our values and
schedule our time so that we spend more of our time on the things we
value most. This will put you ahead of most businesspeople, who
don’t consider taking the time to get organized a top priority. They
often don’t realize the cost of being disorganized.
For example, people in offices lose an
average of four hours per week — that’s 10 percent of their weekly
work time — searching for misplaced or misfiled items. If you’ve
cleared away the physical and mental clutter, you can take that time
back.
You owe it to yourself and your
business to make the most of every day. It’s never too late to
establish a timesaving system that works for you and improves your
business’ bottom line.
If you say to yourself, "There just
aren’t enough hours in the day," remember your day has the same
number of hours as Oprah Winfrey’s or Nancy Pelosi’s. It’s all in
how you choose to spend those hours.
Exercise your power to focus on top
priorities, and you will have more time to do what you want to do.
You can take back your time. The choice is up to you.
Specializing in organizing systems for
busy professionals, Nancy Black of Organization Plus in Beverly has
been helping individuals and businesses improve their organization
and time management skills for over 24 years.
