There are 24 hours in a single day, of which the average person spends eight hours at work and eight hours sleeping…
That makes 40 hours per week of free time that you can do with as you wish during the workweek plus an additional 32 hours of awake time on the weekend.
The average person actually spends twice as much time away from work than at it. So what can you do with all of the spare time you acquired from reading the few sentences above? Over 72 hours a week in all!
First, you should realize that most successful people do not work only forty hours a week. So you may start by applying at least 10 of those 72 hours towards furthering of your career.
If you have your own business, it will be easy to spend an extra eight hours of work productively. If you work for someone else you can take home extra work and show the boss you put in the extra effort that other employees don’t.
Better still, you may want to use this extra time to start a business of your own…something that fits in with your hobbies and can be fun as well as profitable, like baseball cards, or model planes.
You could start your own cleaning business, or maybe a consulting practice to sell your knowledge to large businesses or local businesses.
The possibilities are almost endless; and if you spend enough of your extra time doing them, you may well find you create another career for yourself. This is how many successful companies originated.
At least one hour a day should be spent in furthering your knowledge of your business or industry through reading, courses, and seminars. This takes another seven hours from your free time but still leaves you with just over fifty-seven free hours.
An absolute minimum of ten to fifteen minutes should be spent on planning for the next business day. Reviewing your plans for the day should be the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do when you leave work at the end of the day.
You still have over 55 hours of free time to spend as you please, but rather than continue eating into your free time, let’s take a look at how you can better use your working time.
Work Time
Many people complain of a lack of time to do all the required daily business tasks. The best way to resolve this is to plan your days in advance, in blocks of time, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute.
By writing down how you plan to spend your time, you will instantly become far more productive. More productivity means more money and more success.
You must use your time wisely. Time is the only thing you have to sell to your company or business. How much of the time that you spend at work is really spent working? The truth of the matter is very little of it is spent working efficiently.
Instead you are probably spending the day as most people with poor time management skills do: putting out fires that other people started, shuffling papers around, and writing memos.
Here is a simple eye-opener that will let you see just how much work you are really accomplishing. Show up at work tomorrow with a stopwatch and write down how you spend all of your time in five-minute intervals. Keep the sheet and stopwatch in front of you at all times.
As you start each new task, write down on the paper what that task is and start the stop watch. As you change tasks — phone calls, interruptions from co-workers, etc.– write down what the new activity is and how long you spend on it.
At the end of the work day, grab a pen and piece of paper and write the following headings on it.
1) Meaningful work
2) Wasted time for the day (this includes interruptions, unimportant phone calls, etc.)
3) Problems that need solutions.
4) Low priority/low return work.
List underneath each of your headings the tasks you have dealt with that day. Then add up the total time spent in each category.
Now you will have a shocking picture of just how few of the hours you spend at work are spent on high-priority, money-making, business growing, or goal-oriented tasks that help your business.
Instead, what you will probably find is that looking for information, interruptions, and wasted time are the winners in the battle for your precious time.
Develop a Time-Efficient Work Environment
This means to have all your tools and resources in working order and at your disposal. More of your time is lost through disorganized paper management and searching for misplaced documents and reports than through any other cause.
Make a habit of keeping all your work areas and desks free of all paper except what is needed for the task at hand. When have completed a piece of work, remove it from your workspace as soon as possible, mail it, file it, trash it, or do whatever action is applicable, but do not leave anything on your desk or it will take up time when you are looking for it the next day.
Start Each Day With a Clear Detailed Plan
If you truly want to get the most out of every day, it is essential that you begin each with a clear plan. I usually plan the next day’s events at the very end of the business day. Take a day planner and write down all those tasks you want to complete the next day.
Write each task down on paper or in excel and number them in the order of importance. Start with the most important task and stick with it until you have finished it or reached the point that you wished to reach for that day. It gives me great pleasure and satisfaction to line out each task as it is accomplished.
After an overall list of tasks for the day, I plan the day’s specific activities in 15-30 minute intervals using a daily planner. Plan all of your meetings and phone calls. Proper daily planning has allowed me to write 20 books on marketing strategies and also manage a golf marketing company and a golf management firm.
Always set a time limit on meetings, especially with people who are don’t pay for your time. Stick as closely as possible to your time-lines.
If you schedule 60 minutes to talk to a marketing representative, then let them know that is all the time you can spend with them. They will make their points faster, thus allowing you to save time.
As you come close to the end of your allotted time for a given task, give a two minute warning to yourself via a stopwatch or by using outlooks calendar function. Try to bring your business to a close quickly and efficiently.
Always Write Things Down
Keep a pen and paper by your phone. I can hardly believe the number of companies I call only to be asked to hold while the employee finds a pen and paper.
A pen and paper are the world’s most indispensable business tools, and you should NEVER be without them. I keep my appointment calendar somewhere near my desk at all times so if I am speaking to someone I can grab it and take notes as we talk. I note why they called and how I am supposed to follow up.
In that way, I have a record of the time, date, and purpose of their call so I can refer back to it if necessary at a future date if I need it. I also always write a person’s phone number under their name. In that way, I never have to search further than my appointment book for names and addresses.
Don’t Waste Your Time
Treat each minute as the extremely important and cherished resource it is. Every single person in this world starts out each day with the same amount of time in which to accomplish tasks and objectives. The only part that differs from person to person is how that time is used.
Successful people try to squeeze every second of opportunity from the day, while those at the lower levels simply waste it away.
If you want to make $100,000 dollars a year, you must make $40 dollars an hour. That is exactly .66 cents per minute! If you spend 20 minutes on the phone talking to your buddy down the street about Monday night’s football game, you have just wasted $13.20 of your very increasingly valuable time.
If you are taking hour long lunch breaks instead of 30 minutes ones, you just lost $19.80 of your important time. Once lost, time will never be regained.
The next time you find yourself involved in a time-wasting situation, ask yourself this question. Do you think I would pay my friend down the street $13.20 in cold hard cash out of my wallet, right now, to listen to me talk about last night’s game?
The answer, of course, is no. Yet, that is exactly what you are doing. Wasting $13.20 of your cash, which should be dedicated to reaching your goals and serving your clients or business.
If you are working on a project and are interrupted by a call that takes ten minutes, it often takes another ten minutes to get back to what you were doing. Instead of being interrupted twenty times a day, schedule 30 minutes a day for returning phone calls that are not important.
These are calls from college buddies, telemarketers, salesmen,or other people who are not actual customers. Your time at work is far too valuable to allow constant interruptions throughout the day. By setting a specific time, it also eliminates annoying games of phone tag and keeps you focused.
If you wanted to earn $60,000 a year you would need to make $5,000 per month. This works out to be $1,153 per week, based on a 48-hour, six-day week, which we will say is typical for most successful people.
This breaks down further to be $192 per day or $24 per hour. This information is something you now have to help you reach your goals. You know exactly what you must make each and every hour that you are working in order to reach your desired income level.
Now let’s see which of your daily tasks really produce that desired figure of $24 per hour?
- Advertising your yourself or business to others.
- Increasing your inventory of skills.
- Researching new marketing ideas and using it for your business.
- Marketing yourself to other businesses.
These are some of the tasks that really could produce $24 per hour. Good marketing will create new prospects and leads. Selling, whether it is a direct sale of one of your products or getting someone to give you an interview for a better job, always pays off.
Marketing can keep other businesses involved in the life of your company and brings new blood in the form of contacts and prospects. Increasing your skills makes you more valuable to yourself and others, and this will pay off quickly.
Then, of course, there are the tasks that do not produce $24 per hour.
- Paying bills
- Ordering inventory
- Typing letters
- Adding to a database
I am not suggesting that any of these things are not important to the overall success of your business. Rather, I’m suggesting that you can find someone else to do these kinds of tasks for just a few bucks an hour, allowing you to focus on the important high-return task.
The Word that Will Allow You to Successfully do Time Management
The simple act of saying, “NO,” will save you more time, energy, and effort than you can ever imagine. In an overexerted effort to try to please everyone, we often find ourselves taking on more and more responsibility, activities and stress.
At some point, you simply have to say, “NO, I am sorry but I can’t spend time doing that.” Try it; it’s not that hard, and the people asking get over your refusal very quickly. They are probably calling someone else right now to help them.
Set aside a certain amount of hours in your plan each week to donate your time to the charity you think is a good cause. Once that time is used up, it is gone, and there is no more.
Remember the words of Napoleon who said, “You can ask me for anything you like… except for my time.”
