” Your Future is Created by what you do Today, not Tomorrow” – Anonymous

As a business owner, it can sometimes feel as though you’re being pulled in 10 different directions at once. There’s so much to do and only so much time in the day, so we often end up running out of time for one thing or another.

At ActionCOACH, we believe that it is possible to achieve everything you need, simply by learning a skill called time mastery.

You see, mastery in general is all about making sure we have mastered the basic skills of business, before we go running into the extra bits and pieces. These skills help build the foundation of a successful business and are critical to success.

One of the areas we work on with our clients is time mastery – helping them take back control of their own time and focus on the more important tasks ahead of them.

How can you take steps to truly master your own time in business?

1. Urgency vs Importance

Look at your to-do list for your business. If you don’t have one – make one!

Write down a list of all the things you need to do.

Then, write another list of all the things that you might need to do (such as answering the phone, emergency calls outs etc.)

Next, put each task under one of the following headings:

  • Not Urgent, but Important : Tasks that will drive your business forward and help achieve your goals. Things like planning, budgeting, training.
  • Urgent and Important: Things like client work. This should make up around 70% of your day
  • Urgent but not Important: Things that have a deadline and do need to be done, but aren’t important to the growth of the company.
  • Not Urgent and not Important:  Time killing activities

You now have your tasks set out in order of priority.

There will potentially be a whole bunch of tasks under ‘urgent but not important’ – the things that need to be done, that don’t help you achieve your goals.

If that’s the case, maybe you need to look at hiring a VA to help handle those tasks.

If you have a lot of ‘not urgent and not important’ tasks, get them off the list. By prioritising in this way, you can focus on the tasks that are going to be beneficial to your business going forward. The tasks that you, the business owners, really should be focusing on.

2. Use Tools

It often feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything on your list.

However how much time do you actually spend on each task? Are you expecting too much of yourself each day? Or are you maybe spending too much time on unproductive tasks, or getting distracted by things that won’t help you achieve your goals?

The first step to mastering your own time is to work out what you’re spending all your time on.

This can be tough, so we recommend using some tools. This could be a spreadsheet, a paper diary, an app.

Anything that helps you log what you actually spend your time on and how long.

Then, make sure you log how you spend your time during an average work week. You may quickly find that you’re actually spending a lot of time on things that are ‘not urgent and not important’ and no time on the things that are both urgent and important.

Once you’ve used your tool to record an average week, try to readdress the balance and plan your next week.

Record that and keep improving until you’re happy with the balance.

3. Eat A Frog Every Day

There are a lot of activities that every business owner does every day. Some of them are very important, and some not so much, or not at all. Some of them we enjoy doing and always do on time. And some always end up at the bottom of the to-do list, done only as a last resort.

We call these tasks ‘frogs’ – usually big, warty, ugly ones too.

Those dreaded frog tasks often end up taking a lot longer than they need to….

If they also happen to be important and miss a deadline, this can cause a lot of issues.

One of the skills we teach in time mastery is called ‘eating your frog ’. It helps you tackle those frog tasks easier and more efficient.

If that sounds like an area you need to improve, lets chat about how you can eat a frog every day.

Time is the only finite resource we have as business owners, so it’s important to make sure we’re using it properly.

The time mastery section of the ActionCOACH programme is one that most business owners we come across struggle with, and have been for a while.

It’s also the area that can make the most difference, both to your productivity, your business and your attitude towards it.

To find out more about how we can help you become the master of your own time, just get in touch today.