The You-Tube clip below is a great reminder of how precious time really is and how we must spend it wisely. The content here relates to personal time, but what about our business time? (the 3202 days spent at work in an average lifetime according to this clip).
VIDEO
It’s clear that we’re more time-poor than ever, particularly if we’re a small business owner-manager. Many go into business expecting to work less hours for better money to achieve greater work-life balance but for many that day takes a while to arrive with innumerable lessons along the way.
Time efficiency is critical for any small business owner so an informed choice has to be made when choosing what client work to undertake, which prospect meeting to pursue, which associate agreement to engage in, when to outsource or recruit, and which business events and training to attend.
What many small business owners often forget to do is to continue using the tools and processes that bigger organisations employ on a daily basis to monitor and leverage time. How many small business owners record time on client work via timesheets and then analyse them (unless they’re charging hourly); how many know their utilisation rate (i.e. the percentage of time spent on chargeable fee-earning work out of the total working hours versus non-fee generating back-office tasks which can quickly monopolise a working day); and how many business owners know how much they should be charging an hour to break even because they’ve assessed and valued the time a piece of work will require and all its on-costs.
Time management is not just the art of sourcing and implementing clever paper or digital methods for managing diaries and to do lists, prioritising workloads and hitting deadlines. It goes much deeper into the development of strategies to cope with stress, manage people, monitor performance and crunch the time versus cost statistics.
Time is money they say; so, if time is a finite resource, then it must be spent wisely whether for personal or business reasons! There are only 24 hours in a day, though we may wish for more. What matters is how we spend our time, how we manage it, how we cope with time pressures, and how we adapt our strengths and weaknesses to deal with time-constraints so that we can maximise our time-efficiency. Strategies, tips and tools that are plentiful via the internet or via practiced experts in the field, one of whom we’ve invited as guest facilitator of a special time management workshop in June. For more info click here