Effectively Managing Your Time

There is one truly limited, non-renewable resource that exists in the world. It is something that almost every single human being desperately searches for more of. Unfortunately, you shouldn’t get your hopes up of finding it in your backyard or beneath the ocean floor. It doesn’t grow in the ground, you can’t find it in the mountains, in fact you can’t actually find it anywhere. What’s great about it, though, is that it’s more valuable than oil, gold, silver, platinum and diamonds – combined! This resource is time.

Since there isn’t any lost time hidden in the back of our closet or under the bed, what can we do? Simple. Use the time you do have wisely. Today I’ll be telling you a little about how you can do this from a business standpoint. Properly managed time is one of the best tools you’ll ever encounter on your journey across the bridge of business. Time management will increase your productivity which, as we all know, increases profit… and in increase in profit, well, who doesn’t want that? (If you find yourself with excess profit and you don’t want it, feel free to send it my way!)

To start managing your time you’ll need to take a look at what you spend time on during a typical weekday. There may be certain things you cannot avoid: eating, sleeping and going to work. There may be other things you can avoid: playing an online game for 60 minutes. Start by making a list of everything you do during the day, then categorize that list into ‘Necessary’ and ‘Unnecessary’. Before doing anything else, see what unnecessary time expenditures you can remove from your daily schedule. The average person wastes a lot of time by doing things that are not necessary, so pinpointing and eliminating these should save you a significant amount of time. Your second task is to determine what actions take more time than they should. Let’s explore an example:

Right off the top we can account for eating, sleeping and things of that nature. If you wake up at 6:30 A.M. you can allocate 30 minutes to preparing and eating breakfast. We can say that 15 minutes goes into preparation and 15 into eating. Now that it’s 7 A.M. we’ll assume you need to use the bathroom, take a shower and get dressed. You’ve been allocated 1 hour to do this. It’s about 8 A.M. and now you can take your hour drive to work and arrive at 9. We’ll end our example here.

Sleeping is critical to performance and survival, so don’t try and reduce your sleeping time. Make sure you are getting the proper number of hours for your age group. Eating is another important task and it is difficult to reduce time with this one. However, if you’d like you may save a few minutes by buying a coffee machine that runs automatically right around the time you wake up – that way you don’t need to wait for it to brew the coffee. You can set out your dishes before going to bed so that they are all ready to go as well.

Rather than spending 30 – 45 minutes in the shower like the average American, you can reduce that dramatically by getting down to business immediately upon entering the water. Don’t just ‘hang out’ in there for fun! This will not only save you time but money as well. Shorter showers will decrease the amount of water you use, which saves the environment and your wallet. Don’t spend 10 minutes deciding on an outfit to wear in the morning. You can do this the night before and ensure it’s laid out and ready to go. One thing I always did was lay the clothing out for when I got out of the shower, and I left things like my shoes ready and waiting by the door for when I was leaving.

If it takes you an hour to get to work, attempt to find an alternate route. Is there a more scenic route that requires additional distance, but keeps you out of traffic? If so, you’ll likely save time this way! Try reducing your driving time by as much as possible. This is another case where you’re saving both time and money. See? The benefits to time management never end.

Planning a trip to the grocery store? Make a detailed list of what you need. This will help ensure you don’t forget to purchase anything and it also saves time because you know exactly what you need. Anyway, now that we’ve covered that, I hope I have conveyed the point that you should try and reduce time expenditures wherever possible.

Let’s look at your online business-related tasks. If you have an offline job, just push that to the side for a moment as I will assume you either do not have one, or perform online work afterward. You’ll need to write a plan of what needs to be done today. If you need to write a blog post, brainstorm an idea and then get straight to work – don’t try and postpone or find a distraction. I often browser webmaster forums, so I keep them all on my Firefox Bookmark Toolbar. They’re easily accessible this way. I go to them, log-in and then browse the threads to which I am subscribed, then the list of other new posts. If I see anything of interest, I will check it out and reply. If I do not, and have no threads to make, then I proceed to my next task. The number one time waster is getting distracted. If I am browsing a forum and see an advertisement for a game, then go to that website and sign-up, then spend an hour exploring it… I just lost out big time! Imagine what I could have done with that hour.

In conclusion, try and eliminate unnecessary tasks throughout your day. Reduce the amount of time your necessary tasks take. Organize your tasks by priority and don’t allow yourself to get distracted. Then, after everything you need to do is dealt with, relax and enjoy the rest of your evening.