We can’t get more than 24 hours a day no matter how hard you try. We all live in a 24-hour period and it’s the same for everyone including coaches. Yet, other life or health coaches seem to get so much more done in the same amount of time. But how?
And if you’re building a small team, it’s a must to be able to work hand-in-hand with your paraplanner and business administrators.
Plus, managing your time as the business owner, will affect your whole life, allowing more freedom to spend with family and without having to work 60 hours a week.
So, what do you need to do to manage your time? It all starts with the 3 P’s of time management: Planning, Prioritizing, and Performance.
Planning
Once you understand what’s urgent and important it becomes easier to complete a plan for any project or day. Write your plan in detail so it’s easy to review and ensure nothing was missed.
During the planning process, create your due date.
Solve a problem or fulfill a need. In order to create a plan, you’ll need to define the problem or need in a very detailed format. Ask for input from anyone who’ll be involved with implementation or evaluating the results.
You’ll need to know results you’re hoping to achieve from the implementation of your plan. Once you know the problem and the results you want, it’s time to create some solutions to act on.
Prioritize
Knowing that time is the biggest obstacle, which is an important part of time management, is learning how to put them into the order of priority. Here are a few categories to consider:
- Urgent – Deadlines, problems, and crises often fall into the area of urgent. Taxes, bookkeeping, client work, production. These should go first on any to-do list.
- Immediate – Some things aren’t important at all but end up being treated as urgent, such as phone calls, reports, meetings, reply to emails and other interruptions. If you can minimize or eliminate them, you’ll do a better job with the rest.
- Important – Next you have anything you need to do that is important such as networking, relationship building, commenting on social media networks and blog posts. Although none of these are urgent in the overall function of your financial business.
Performance
The final and most important “P” of successful time management is to perform the things you planned. Without implementation or taking action, all your prioritizing and planning can become a crunch for another “P” word: Procrastination.
- You can assign individual tasks to be completed by a specific deadline so that by the time the major deadline comes up, the project will have been implemented and performed without stress.
- You can use a project management tool such as Asana, Teamwork, Trello or Excel. Using some of these online tools will make it easier for you to oversee your project.
One last note: Remember you must also recognize these time suckers – Anything that causes you to waste time such as talking on the phone too long, any political talk, gossip, checking Facebook or other social media platforms too often and so forth. All of these things are neither important or urgent and should be moved to off-work time.
When you plan and prioritize, and perform, you’ll end your day feeling good about your progress and knowing you checked off another task off your to-do lists. You’ll find balance and have more energy to enjoy your personal life with family and friends.
Do you need help managing your time? Talk to us today and we can help you with priorities that matter and stay on task.