03 Apr

Taking The Time To Better Manage Your Time

Posted in Synergy Suggestions on 03.04.15 by John Meloche

Time ManagementToday is a statutory holiday in Canada. But that doesn’t mean that all business owners are taking the day off. In fact, it’s a common personality trait of business owners to be round-the-clock workers. And while they tend to put so much time and effort into running their businesses, they often complain that they “don’t have enough time”. “There’s never enough time in the day” is a common quote from many an entrepreneur.

So while most people take today off of work to catch up on family time, handle personal matters or observe traditions associated with the holiday, a large number of entrepreneurs will be thinking about their next business moves. At Synergy Marketing, we recommend creating a new sense of time management as a task to pull off today. After all, since you should have more time today than usual, perhaps you can come up with ways to make more time for yourself in general.

Basically, it’s all about time management. As least, this is what is believed by Joe Mathews, Don Debolt and Deb Percival on Entrepreneur.com. Very interestingly, they distinguish the difference between “clock time” and “real time”. Understanding the difference is the first step in being able to better manage your time. We all know what “clock time” is. Each minute is 60 seconds, each hour is 60 minutes and so on. It’s the same for everyone in the world.

However, “real time” refers to the fact that “all time is relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you’re doing. Two hours at the department of motor vehicles can feel like 12 years. And yet our 12-year-old children seem to have grown up in only two hours,” according to the team of writers. It’s so true, isn’t it? How can there never be “enough time in the day” when every day has the exact same amount of time as the day before it?

This rhetorical question is one of the main reasons that the Entrepreneur.com team insist that having good time management skills means ignoring “clock time”. Because “real time” is “mental”, they say, you can create and manage it. Mathews, Debolt and Percival insist that there are only three ways to spend time: thoughts, conversations and actions. They believe that no matter what type of business you own, your work will be made up of those three items.

“As an entrepreneur, you may be frequently interrupted or pulled in different directions,” the trio writes, “While you cannot eliminate interruptions, you do get a say on how much time you will spend on them and how much time you will spend on the thoughts, conversations and actions that will lead you to success.” So what are the best ways to address the time we spend on handling interruptions? It all starts with documenting your current habits.

The team recommends that you carry a schedule around with you to “record all your thoughts, conversations and activities for a week.” Doing so will help you to understand how much you are accomplishing each day and how much time is being wasted on unproductive items. Are you producing results? Or is your time being used ineffectively? It’s important to assign greater amounts of time to actions that actually promote your success.

“Plan to spend at least 50 percent of your time engaged in the thoughts, activities and conversations that produce most of your results,” the team insists. They also recommend actually scheduling time for interruptions so that being pulled away from what you’re doing doesn’t completely throw a monkey wrench into your plans. Also, it’s important to begin each day with planning your day out. Here’s hoping you’ll be able to make the most out of your time today!

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