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Time management is one of those things that we all know we should be doing yet for some reason, we aren’t, kind of like eating healthy. At the end of the day it boils down to this, time is what it is and there is nothing we can do to change it, what we can change though, is how we interact with the time we have, in other words, how we use it. This is the heart of time management, controlling how we use our time in pursuit of increased efficiency. We learned some of the basics of time management earlier this month, this week I want to explore some interesting ideas and topics in time management.

To me, one of the interesting things about time management is that, at one point in time or another, we have all done it. Everyone goes through periods where they are so busy they have to budget their time down to the minute to make sure that everything gets done, and this is time management. However, we often lose this sense of urgency when the task list dwindles and we aren’t so overwhelmed. We no longer feel the need to schedule everything and our time management practices get left behind.

Have you ever found yourself wondering what happened to the time? If so you are probably a victim of failed time management maintenance. When we have a lot to do we don’t wonder what happened to the time, we know what happened to it, it was used accomplishing one of the many things we needed to get done. However, when we don’t have a lot to do, we open ourselves up to procrastinating. When we open our task list in the morning and add up the hours only to realize that we don’t have to spend every minute of the day going 100% in order to get everything done, the tendency is to relax a little bit. When we feel like we can relax we don’t feel this need to schedule our time in order to get everything done, so our time management falls to the side. We simply think that we don’t have that much to do so it will certainly get done.

The risk here is obvious and we have probably all experienced. We start doing something not task related and all of a sudden it’s the middle of the afternoon and we haven’t gotten anything done. Where did the time go? This is why maintaining our time management habits is so important. If we manage our time outside of crunch time like we do when we are busy we won’t leave ourselves open to these afternoon panic attacks, instead we would have everything done before the middle of the afternoon and have time to relax.

The biggest complaint about using time management techniques when we don’t have to is that people want to feel like they can relax and not have to stress about their work all the time. When things are slow we like to rest and recoup a little bit so that we are ready to go next time things pick up. This is incredibly valuable and we all need this down time so we don’t burn out, this is certainly true. However, you can use time management techniques and stay relaxed during the downtimes, in fact, time management can make your slow times even more relaxing.

Think about it this way. What would be more relaxing, taking some time for yourself in the morning only to realize that you let too much time slide by and now have to scramble to get the few things done that you had to do today, or managing your time, so that you get everything on your list done by two in the afternoon and can spend the last part of the afternoon relaxing and taking care of personal items. It is easy to see, that, while it may seem like managing our time forces us to stress about our work, it really can allow us more freedom to truly relax and enjoy those rare times when things are running smoothly and we don’t have to spend our whole day putting out fires and keeping the ball rolling.

So I encourage you to think about maintaining those great time management habits we use to get through crunch times. Keep them going and not only will you be rewarded with better personal time, but next time you get busy it won’t be such a struggle to schedule your time because you will already be in the habit.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, managing your time, Time Management, working smarter

I feel like we could all use a good laugh to get us through to the weekend, so I found some good time management cartoons. This one is my favorite:

I think this is a problem we would all love to have, but it does bring up a very important topic in time management, which is time management for internet resources. It is very easy to get sucked into blogging, commenting on blogs, and social networks for hours, and while these can be useful activities they can also completely cripple your ability to do your other work. One thing I see a lot of people doing is throughout their day spending short amounts of time on blogs and social networks. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal if you add it up and can amount to a couple hours, and every time we stop what we are doing we break concentration and takes more time for us to get going again.

One solution to this is to schedule in blocks of time for blogs and social media. Try setting aside a one or two hour window at some point during your day to take care of the blog and social media tasks you need to accomplish. What I found when I did this is that it both limited the amount of time I was spending on these almost never ending tasks, and allowed me to accomplish my other work more efficiently because I wasn’t being distracted by social media and blogs pulling me away from my work.

March is here, and that means it won’t be long till daylight saving time begins. Due to the coming of daylight saving time, and the loss of an hour it represents, we have decided to make this months focus time management. Sense we have one less hour this month then we should, we need to make the most of the hours we do have, and in truth there are rarely enough hours even in full months that we can stand to waste them. So to kick off time management March I am going to give a brief overview of time management techniques and ideas.

In a very broad sense time management is about prioritizing, scheduling, and monitoring our time. The name time management is actually somewhat misleading, it is not actually time that we are trying to manage, what we are managing is our behavior and how we use the time we have. The number one tool we have for helping us make better use of our time is the task list.

A task list is an incredibly simple thing, just like it sounds it is a list of the tasks we need/want to accomplish. While seemingly simple this list forms an incredibly powerful foundation for building other time management tools and techniques. Without the task list we wouldn’t have time management. Everything we will talk about this month in one way or another comes back to having a good task list. So what makes a good task list? From a very basic standpoint a good task list needs to be complete, everything you need to get done needs to be all on one list so you can see everything together. This is the foundation for good time management.

The next level of time management techniques map directly onto your task list. They are basically ways of organizing and prioritizing the things on your task list. While having a list with everything you want to accomplish on it is great, it becomes drastically more functional when you add some structure to it. There are many different ways to structure your task list and I don’t think one can really be declared better then another. How you structure your task list is up to you, whatever makes sense to you, whether it is ranking things in terms or priority, difficulty, or time needed to complete the task, or maybe something entirely different. The basic idea behind all of these techniques is that by sorting our task list we get a better understanding of what it is we have to accomplish, and this understanding will allow us to better allocate our time. This is what time management is really all about, allocating our time in the most efficient manner.

There are hundreds of other tools and techniques for time management, but we don’t have time or space to cover them all here. Plus if I gave everything away today what would I talk about for the rest of the month. This should give us a good starting point and lay the foundation for building a strong time management toolbox that will help us organize and make the most of our time in this shortened month. Check back later in the month for more time management tips and you can also read our other blogs: The Integration Dr. and The Efficiency Dr. who will also be participating in March time management month.

To close out this relationship themed month on our blog I want to talk about online relationship building, and before you ask, no I am not going to talk about online dating sights. By now everyone knows that your business needs a website, and if you are reading this blog chances are you are relatively tech savvy and have a nice website set up. What is the purpose of your website? Does it give information? Is it simply a place to list your phone number where prospective clients can find you? Or is it a community? Are you using your website as simply an informational tool or are you using it to build relationships with clients and prospective clients? This is what I mean when I say I want to talk about online relationship building.

When the internet first came around it was a great source for easily search-able information, and this is still true. Now days most any question can be answered if you know how and where to look on the internet. However, this is not the only use for the internet, like anything else it grows and evolves. Recently we have seen the rise of social networking and what is being called Web 2.o. The importance of these new innovations from a business standpoint is that they are shifting the way our customers use the internet, and therefore we need to shift the way we use the internet.

Web 2.0 is changing the internet from a simple search-able database of information into a forum for creating community and fostering relationships, and as business people who realize the importance of relationships this is great for us. People are no longer content to simply find information posted on your website, they want interaction, both with you and with other customers. We need to  make sure that we are tapping into this new way of building relationships and using it to reach a new customer base that we may have never thought of before.

To me it makes sense to think of the new internet as one big trade-show. At a trade-show you can have your booth and just put on information for people to come by and pick up and look through, or you can stand at your booth and invite people in, engage people in conversation, and start building a relationship with that person. The growth of web 2.0 has given us the opportunity to stand out front of our online booths and interact with the people coming in, not just let them pick up information and leave. As anyone who has worked at trade shows will tell you, it is the interaction more then the information that is valuable, and this is becoming true on the internet as well.

One final point that I think a lot of people forget is that the rules and tips for building personal relationships apply just as much on the internet as they do in person. This means that whatever you do to start building your relationship presence on the internet you need to make sure it is honest and genuine or you won’t get the desired response.

So I encourage all of us to start thinking about how we can increase our presence on the internet not just from an information stand point, but from a relationship standpoint. That is part of what we are trying to do with our blogs at McDCG. We want to use these blogs to not only provide information, but also start growing a community. This is why we always encourage you to leave comments and start discussions. So how is your business using the internet? Leave us some comments so we can all see what you have done and learn together.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Business, Business Relationships, communication, twitter

I came across this article on www.entrepreneur.com today and thought it fit very well with this months theme of business relationships. It is titled 7 Relationship-Building Strategies for Your Business and I think it has some great advice. Some of the things it mentions we have talked about before and some of it is new, give it a read and let me know what you think. You can find the article here. It has more of an entrepreneurial slant to it, but when thinking about business relationships we can all use to be a little bit more entrepreneurial, so even if you aren’t running your own small business you can still employ these strategies.