We all know the feeling: time is an incredibly scarce resource. What I often hear from entrepreneurs is that they simply can’t find the time for the truly important things – like working on their business, not just in it.
The harsh reality is this: if you don’t make time to work on your business, it’s not going to get better. In fact, the situation will likely get worse.
But here’s the good news: you can learn how to master your time. In this post, I’m going to share my top three time tips.
1. Stop Trying to Find Time – Start Making It
This might sound counterintuitive, but you won’t “find” time. You can’t. What you can do is learn how to make time by scheduling it for the important things.
If you’re looking for a great read on this concept, check out Brian Tracy’s “Eat That Frog.” He shares the idea of identifying your “big frog” – your most important, often most daunting task – and tackling it first thing in your day. Get it over with, get it done. It’s fundamentally a matter of priorities.
2. Learn How to Prioritize
This brings us to the second crucial tip: learn how to prioritize effectively. You need to understand the difference between “must-dos,” “should-dos,” and “like-to-dos.” Stephen Covey’s “First Things First” is another excellent resource that dives into this concept for both business and life.
It’s about putting your priorities first. What we typically do is deal with all the daily “noise” – emails, interruptions, immediate demands – and then try to fit our priorities into the leftover scraps of time. This rarely works.
Think of the classic analogy: if you have a jar, and you fill it with sand, then pebbles, then rocks, you won’t fit many rocks. But if you put the big rocks (your priorities) in first, it’s easy to fill in the rest with the pebbles and sand (the daily noise). When you deal with your priorities first and let the noise fill in the rest of the day, everything fits.
3. Treat Your Business Like Your #1 Client
Sometimes, we feel guilty working on our business when other urgent tasks seem to be calling to us. But we all know that working on our business is absolutely essential for its long-term health and growth.
One incredibly effective way to manage interruptions and resist the temptation to get sidetracked when you’re working on strategic business tasks is to schedule it like an appointment with a client.
For that dedicated hour, your business becomes your number one client. If you were actually sitting with a VIP client, you wouldn’t let emails, phones, social media, or other noise get in the way, would you? Apply that same discipline to time spent working on your business. At that moment, it is your most important client of all. Because if you don’t nurture and work on the priorities for your business, the rest of it won’t matter – it will become a “house of cards” ready to collapse.
So, stop trying to find the time. Instead, actively make the time. Learn how to prioritize better and literally schedule yourself, allocating your time according to your priorities. Understand, in practice, the difference between “must-dos,” “should-dos,” and “like-to-dos.” And always, always treat your business like your number one client when you’re dedicated to working on its future.
If you’d like some help figuring out how to better prioritize things in your business, get your calendar right, and ensure you’re putting the right amount of time into what truly matters, reach out. We can schedule a 20-minute call to discuss how to prioritize best for your unique situation so you can get more done with less time and feel good about it.
Author: Mark McNulty, Business Coach in Louisville, KY