Improve My Business

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.