A tried and true time-management success secret for all business owners is setting goals for your business. If you have daily, weekly, yearly and overall goals that are written down and scheduled for implementation, your goals will become more than dreams and become a reality. Without setting proper goals for your business, it’s hard to manage your time well because you’re just going with the flow without a plan. Lots of chances for time to get wasted when you don’t have a good plan of action for your days.
First, let’s define what proper goal setting entails. This is not about having a dream, this is about having an achievable, measurable outcome in which you can schedule tasks each day that move you forward to realizing that particular result. If you don’t know where you are going, what success means to you, then you will waste time taking the wrong path. In many ways, proper goal setting leads to better time-management success for business owners because it gives you a good plan for how to spend your time.
The truth is, you can’t manage time. That’s a huge time-management success secret that all business owners need to accept. Time is a limited resource. There are only 24 hours in a day, so you must learn to use them to their maximum benefit. You can go through your day, doing a little of this, or a little of that, feeling more and more unaccomplished as the day wears on, — or, you can know exactly what you are going to do each and every day, and feel satisfied and accomplished when the day is over. It’s your choice.
Studies in goal setting have shown that most people who write down a goal, never do it. But, you can improve your chances of success if you not only write it down, but create a plan of action that is broken down in small pieces that you can actually accomplish. Finishing things within the time you have to do them is an important aspect of time management. Setting goals for your business and managing them to fruition by creating a workable schedule and following through will help you to end time wasters and time suckers forever.
The way you set goals and manage them through is by being realistic about what you can achieve and separating income producing tasks from non income producing tasks. Once you know what brings in the income and what doesn’t you can better prioritize your daily activities around them. Be realistic about your family, friends, employees and contractors and the hours they either need from you or can devote to your business. Once you realize how working a scheduled and productive day feels like, you won’t want to go back to the unorganized time wasting ways of before you learned to set proper goals.
Throughout the year revise, check, and track your metrics so that you can ensure that your plans are on track. It’s easy to get off track when you’re a business owner even if you have all the success secrets to time-management for business owners memorized by heart, if you aren’t following through you will not see the success you desire.
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