Time Management: Prioritizing your tasks

In my September Big Thinker’s E-zine I had an article on “Make Your Business Work for You.” I wanted to share the piece on prioritizing your tasks to help with time management because I feel the exercise is a really great way to start the process of freeing up your time. If you would like to listen to the entire article please go to my BLITZ YouTube Channel. This Thursday I will share part III of my series on Building a Mastermind Group.

If you have so much to do how do you get it all done? Even with help we are still the manager of our business and we have to stay on track. There are many great tools out there to help you manage your time. Here is one I like.

Prioritize

We all put a priority on working with our clients but we often do not do that for working on our business. What if I told you that meeting your referral partner was going to turn into a $20,000 sale? Would you go? Of course you would, but often we excuse ourselves from our networking events and other business building task because we do not see the immediate value. You must make business building a priority.

Exercise: List all the things you do and put a priority on them. Label them as A, B or C. If it is labelled ‘A’ then this is something that must be done. You cannot trade this time for a client’s needs. You will be surprised how often I have said, “I’m sorry I am not available until after 1pm does that work for you?” and they will say “Yes” or give me an alternate time. I have never had a client say, “sorry if you cannot meet me at this one time then the deal is off.”

Anything you prioritize as ‘B’ should be attended unless you have a real need from a client. If you have something else that is going to build your business or bring in cash that is an ‘A’ priority, then substitute it.

For items labelled with a ‘C’ you should be finding someone else to look after these. I love working on my website, coding HTML, creating e-mail layouts, etc. but it is not important for me to do that. I got a VA (Virtual Assistant) to manage all those tasks and now I have hours of extra time each month.