Improve Your Time Management With the Help of Your Business Plan

Do you realize that your business plan can actually help you with time management? Schedules can be difficult to manage and productivity can suffer. In business, how can you stay on track and systematically move through the year to achieve your goals?

Every year smart business leaders create business plans with annual goals of what they look to accomplish by year’s end. But annual goals can be complex, containing multiple areas that need to be met. So it is wise, therefore, to break down an annual plan into quarters and determine what part of the goals can be completed each quarter.

Breaking things down further, what parts of the quarterly goals can be accomplished each month? You see, if things start to go haywire over a month or two, smart business leaders can assess what needs to be corrected, and whether a goal is still viable or needs to be modified before getting too far off track.

Then finally, what I do within each month’s list of benchmarks, is create a weekly schedule of activities I want to complete. With weekly schedules, it becomes easier to create daily to-do-lists. Following a daily to-do-list puts you on the path to achieving monthly, quarterly, and finally, annual goals—it’s like reverse engineering. Look at the endgame of what you want to achieve, break it down into the most detailed components, and you can clearly see how to proceed.

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I have found it is most effective to plan your daily to-do list at the end of your workday for the following day’s activities. Planning the day before has benefits:

• You have a better sense of what to expect tomorrow.
• You begin the day with a purpose and you’re less likely to be reactive.
• You can keep a clear focus as you move through the day, not wondering, “What should I do next?”

You see, time management is the ability to use your time effectively and productively. Here is a tip for determining your daily priorities:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a simple matrix every day to establish his priorities, and help him determine which activities would move him closer to reaching his weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. He determined that if a task was important and urgent, he would handle it first; if important and not urgent, he would schedule it for later. He delegated those items that were urgent but less important, and if tasks were non-urgent and unimportant, he would not handle them at all.

You can use this method to help with your focus and to handle those things that have the most impact on the success of each day.

Effective time management is about making wise choices. You can make more revenue. You can accumulate more material possessions, but you can never make more time. Once time is gone, it’s history. And being more productive with your use of time can definitely bring more business profit.