15 Business Time Management Tips for Business Entrepreneurs

You can make great increases in your daily productivity. If you stop the countless "wasted" hours here and there and refocus that time toward more productive use.

Here are seventeen of the techniques we employ daily, each one of which will help you to get at least one more hour out of your day of additional productive time.

• Maintain Balance. Your life consists of Seven Time Areas: Health, Family, Financial, Intellectual, Social, Professional, and Spiritual. You do not spend equal amounts of time in each area every day. Start spending time in one or more areas over the others and your life will get out of balance and potentially sabotage your success. Fail to take time now for your health and you will have to take time for health issues later on. Similar examples hold true for each area.



• The Power of the Pen. Get into the habit of writing things to do down using one tool... pen and paper. Your mind is best used for the big picture rather than all the details. The details are important, but manage them with the pen.



• Daily Planning. It is said that people do not plan to fail but a lot of people fail to plan. Take at the end of each day to take control of the most precious resource, the next twenty-four hours. Write up a To Do list with all you "have to" and all of your "want to"¯ for your next day. Without a plan is is easy to get distracted and interupted.



• Prioritize It. Your To Do list will have crucial and not crucial items on it. Despite the fact most people want to be productive, when given the choice between crucial and not crucial items, we will most often end up doing the not crucial items. They are generally easier and quicker than crucial items. We use a numbering scale #1, #2, #3.



• Control Procrastination. The most effective planning in the world does not substitute for doing what needs to be done. We procrastinate and put off important things because we don't sense enough pain for not doing it or enough pleasure to do it. Create a reward for the not so pleasurable tasks.



• Create an Interruptions Log. The average person gets 30 interruptions a day. The average interruption takes five to ten minutes. This could be four hours each day spent dealing with interruptions. Many are crucial and important, like new orders, and are what we get paid to do but many have little or no value. Start an Interruptions Log to identify and eliminate the wasteful interruptions. Just use a pad of paper and label it Interruptions Log¯ Create six columns: Date, Time, Who, What, Length, Rating (Crucial, Important, Valueable, Not valueable).



• Delegate It. We all have 168 hours each week and that includes personal time and your sleep schedule. The hardest part of delegation though, is simply. If you want a job done well, you better do it yourself¯. At the end of each day look at all that you planned for the next day and ask yourself, Is this the best use of my time?¯ If it isn't, delegate it to someone else.



• Manage Meeting Time. Meetings can be one of the biggest time wasters. Before a meeting ask, Is it necessary?¯ and Am I necessary?¯ If the answers to either are no¯, consider not having the meeting or excusing yourself from attending. Let people know in advance what is to be discussed and use a list to push things along. Set an alarm to end meetings or phone calls at work or home.



• Handle Paper. It™s easy to get buried today in the blizzard of paperwork around us. The average person receives around 200 communications each day via email, telephone, hard mail, memos, circulars, faxes, etc. Try to handle the paper once and be done with it. If it is something that can be done in a minute or two, do it and be done otherwise prioritize it.



• Run a Time Log. If you want to manage it, you have to measure it. This is where time management software will be very valueable. By using software not only will you have record but you can delegate and prioritze easily.

Organizational Items

• Color-code tasks in your planner or calendar and email. Use colored pens or colored dot stickers purchased from your local office supply or grocery stores for tasks kept on paper.



• Consolidate your daily tasks for maximum efficiency: return phone calls several or all at a time, read and return emails once or twice daily rather than as they are received, group meetings at the end of the day, and run errands one or two days per week rather than every day.



• Utilize your peak times for important tasks at work or home: are you a morning person, who comes to life in the afternoon, or a night owl? Try to do your most important (and best) work during these times.



• Include the phone number with important appointments in your planner to save time and streamline record management.



• When processing incoming mail, highlight important points or write notes in the margins on their original memo. Often you can return the original document to the sender without the need for dictation or formal correspondence on your part. Or pass the information along to a colleague or file for future use.

PositiveWare Product Features

PositiveWare offers a seamlessly integrated, web-based client management environment.

Encompassing project management, time management, collaboration, billing and budgeting, it provides an effective solution to the needs of professional services businesses or anyone wishing to improve how they manage their team.

Manage Projects - Collaborate Effectively

PositiveWare enables teams to work effectively together - whether they are co-located or remote.

Our richly-featured project management tools allow you to plan, schedule, assign and track tasks - all from one user-friendly web interface.

Your users can record their progress, communicate with each other and store and share documents - all through the same interface.

Track Time

Tracking time accurately and easily is vital to your business' financial and operational success.

PositiveWare enables you and your team to effortlessly track time spent on every client and project. All time records are automatically integrated with the project management, billing and budgeting elements of the system - providing a powerful solution.

Budget & Bill Clients

Ease of use and seamless integration were two of our main criteria when designing the budgeting and billing elements of PositiveWare. We believe we succeeded.

One simple interface allows you to create and manage budgets for each of your clients and projects. This information is automatically combined with time-tracking data to allow you to generate client bills in just a few seconds.

Produce Reports

For many businesses, making progress is not enough. You need to be able to measure and quantify that progress every day, for every task and for every team member.

PositiveWare comes complete with a suite of pre-configured reports. They combine to give you a complete picture of your business' activities, at client, project and budgetary level.

Multi-User System - PositiveWare Fits Into Your Organization

PositiveWare allows different users to take on different rights and responsibilities - just like in your business.

We offer a number of pre-defined roles that can be combined with individual user permissions to give almost infinite flexibility. This allows your employees to do exactly what they need to do, freely and safely.

Platform-Independent Web Application

PositiveWare was designed from the start as a web application.

That means we use the latest, most flexible web technology to deliver rich functionality through one simple, consistent web interface.

PositiveWare works equally well on Windows PCs or Macs - and will feel instantly familiar to users of either platform.

You will never have to worry about software upgrades, hardware maintenance or data backups, as we take care of all such work behind the scenes.

All you need is a web browser - which leaves you and your team free to do what you do best. Grow your business.