Time management skills are particularly important for SME business owners who often find themselves fulfilling many different roles during the course of a single day. The key to improving your time management is to initially understand exactly where your time is currently being spent.

Time auditing is a simple way of tracking where and how time is actually spent. For an agreed timescale you simply record time spent on daily activities. This may seem like a simplistic process but with everyone we work with the initial findings are always surprising, we all falsely assume that we know what we spend our time doing.

Once this has been completed we will then work with you to categorize your activities in order to give an indication of time spent on each. This will give us an initial overview of your current working schedule and will allow us to start working on each of the categories individually and devise strategies to improve efficiency in them all.

During the working day most SME business owners are bombarded with activities that cause distraction from their main priorities, and these remedial activities prevent the business from achieving its overall objectives. It is imperative these are identified and where possible, the time spent on them reduced. Time Target is a simple time management tool that helps you focus on remedial and important tasks and how they impact on your business.

The Time Target consists of four key areas:

Distraction: Tasks that are Not Urgent and Not Important
Delusion: Tasks that are Urgent but Not Important
Demand: These are tasks that are Urgent and Important
Zone: These are tasks that are Not Urgent but are Very Important

We can help you initially recognize where on the Time Target you are currently spending your time and then work with you to develop strategies and systems to ensure that you spend more time on 'Zone' activities.

Remember when you were at school and time management wasn't an issue...the bell rang and you simply looked at your timetable to see where you needed to be and what you needed to do. And no matter how much you were enjoying English you had to go to Physics because in the overall 'plan' of your education that was what was deemed necessary.

Imagine writing a business timetable for yourself, where you get to choose the core subjects and decide when to do them. Imagine then writing business timetables with your team, detailing core activities and allocating specific time to them.

This may seem improbable but every single client we have ever worked with has created a business timetable and implemented it into their business. And every single one of them says it's one of the most powerful tools they use to manage themselves and their teams.

It's not easy but it can work for any business.