3 Essential Time Management Tools

One thing that the New Year brings on is the desire to get organized, or reorganized, as the case may be. Managing your business depends a great deal on time management. If you are not managing your time efficiently you will tend to have lack of focus, scattered energy, projects never get completed, lack of follow-through, and not honoring commitments. Highly successful entrepreneurs have tools to organize their time, their activities, and their thoughts. Here’s my short list of valuable tools to help you get organized and have more efficient time management. 1) Managing your appointments: TimeTrade.com & Google Calendar The first thing you need to organize your time around is appointments. Before I started using TimeTrade, I was going back and forth with emails 3 to 6 times trying to find a time that worked for both parties. It was a colossal waste of time. For a mere $56 a year you can save an enormous amount of time and frustration and you will also get a handy reminder for all your appointments. It works in conjunction with several online calendars, including Google Calendar. Google Calendar also gives you a reminder when an appointment is coming up. You can set how long before the appointment you want to be reminded and choose between email or a pop-up (which won’t go away until you click on it). 2) Managing your activities: PlannerPads.com When I started my business, there weren’t any type of planners that suited me, so I made my own. It was organized via monthly, weekly, and daily. But I had to print a new one out every year and that got rather tedious. The closest planner I have found that is a viable substitute was Planner Pad. This planner is organized so you can sort your to do list by categories, plan out your activities for the week, and set your appointment dates---all in one view. This is a great way to not only plan out your activities in a coherent manner, but also organize your thoughts, ideas, and reminders. It’s harder for things to slip through the cracks because you are planning more broadly and you can see the big picture at a glance. 3) Managing your business mindset: ESC 30-Day Plan One of the best tools I discovered in my coach’s training and that I teach to my clients is called a 30-Day-Plan. The idea behind it is that you plan out what you need to accomplish in the next 30 days and then get clear on the energy around those activities necessary to complete the plan. For example, you would set your 30-day goal such as… • How many clients would you need for one month? • How many products would you need to sell for one month? • How many sales conversations would you need to have? • How much networking would you need to do? Once you are clear about these kinds of specifics, you chunk it down into weekly and daily actions. Then you take a look at your own energy around those goals and what else may get in the way of achieving them, including any beliefs you may have about not getting them. Clients find that planning out 30 days at a time is less overwhelming and an easy way to get more organized. And using the 30-Day-Plan’s inner and outer approach is a more efficient way of management. These 3 tools will absolutely help you become more organized and will use your time more efficiently. Better time management and more organization equals more productivity. And, more productivity equals more profit.