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MANAGING YOUR TIME
Where does the time go? It is three hours since your last employee left for the day. You are still sitting in your office with a stack of work to do. The financial records your accountant sent over this morning still sit in your side chair where you dropped them. You planned to review them first thing, but never even got time to open the envelope. Right now, you are working on that estimate for Bryce Electronics that was due yesterday. How could you have forgotten that it was due? You meant to start on it three days ago but then there was one thing after another and you just never got to doing the estimate. Now you know you are going to be here well after midnight. When you are running a business, there is just never enough time. In this chapter, we offer some suggestions for managing the time you do have available.
Develop Your "Time Budget"
Everyone has the same amount of time - all the time there is. If you are constantly running out of time, it isn't the lack of time but your use of time that is the problem. You really can't manage time and you can't create more time. What you can do is manage how you use the time you have. To do that, you need a plan. In fact, you need two plans - one long term and one short term.
For your long-term plan, you need a "time budget." Like any budget, your time budget is your plan for how you will spend a valuable resource - in this case, your time. To create a time budget, you first need an inventory of demands on your time. You need to itemize your expected time expenditures. To do so, take a ledger sheet and divide it into six columns. Label the columns as follows:
1. Daily
2. Weekly
3. Biweekly
4. Monthly
5. Quarterly
6. Yearly
Under each heading, list recurring activities you must perform according to their frequency, together with an estimate of how much time you need to allot to each activity. For example, you might have to make bank deposits. List bank deposits under the daily column with an estimate of how much time this takes, say two hours. Weekly, you might have to prepare the payroll and sign payroll checks. List payroll under the weekly column with an estimate of how much time it takes you to prepare the payroll. Continue until you have all of the recurring activities you can recall. To get a more accurate list, try keeping a daily time log for one or two weeks.
Once you have a complete list of recurring activities, review this list to see if you can delegate any items (or part of items) to others. For example, if you normally prepare the payroll all by yourself, could you delegate part of the work to an assistant? Perhaps Mary,
your secretary, could complete the time sheets and total the hours. She could then submit them to you for review and final approval. How much time would you save? Make a note on your list to train Mary to perform initial work on the payroll and reduce your estimate of the time you must spend accordingly.
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