Feel like there’s not enough hours in the day? Always running late, or making promises you can’t keep with deadlines?

 Read this article By Erin Duckhorn for some strategies to help you!

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Time is just another word for life.

—Michael Gerber

Time management is a skill that a lot of us struggle with. Even with the best intentions and the latest technological gadget that is supposed to streamline your work and improve efficiency, how often have you left work planning all the things you need to do in the morning because you didn’t get to them today? Busy business owners are just that: busy!

What kind of work is keeping you busy?
At E-Myth, we make a very clear distinction between the strategic and tactical work. Strategic work is the work you do to define the results you are there to produce. Tactical work is the work you do to produce the results strategic work has defined. When you think about your day, what percentage of your time do you spend in each area? Where is the greater value for your business?

Even if you know that you need to focus on strategy, how do you carve out time in your day for strategic work when you’re just trying to stay on top of the technical work you have to do? It’s a question we hear all the time from our clients. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store owner, a doctor, an IT professional or a contractor; everybody, it seems, is fighting the clock.

That’s why we dedicate a whole process in our Mastery Impact! coaching program solely on time management. With the intention of freeing yourself from the technical work, in this process we take a look at how you’re spending your time to accurately determine how much of your time is spent on productive activities that directly contribute to the results you want, and how much of your time is spent unproductively. This is a revealing process, and we usually identify areas for improvement very quickly.

Another thing we explore in our Time Management process is what we call “Time Bandits.” You know, those pesky “time stealers” and distractions that take attention away from strategic work—email, a talkative vendor, the telephone, your mother-in-law, broken office equipment… The list goes on.

Finding the discipline to eliminate Time Bandits is an important part of getting to the strategic work you need to do. Below are five Time Bandit Busters (there are 25 more in our process) that might instigate a change in how you approach time management.

5 Time Bandit Busting Tips

  • Prioritize and Stay Focused Evaluate your daily tasks and prioritize. If nothing else gets done today, what are the one or two items that absolutely must be done? The most successful CEOs of Fortune 500 companies only focus on one or two priorities for a given day.
  • Delegate as much as you can. Let go of the idea that nobody can do what you do the way that you do it! With the right systems in place, you can properly delegate the tactical work that keeps you from working on your business. There is critical distinction however, between delegating and abdicating, and you can read more about that here.
  • Set and meet deadlines for yourself and your employees. Set reasonable deadlines for all jobs and stick to them. Hold yourself accountable just as you would an employee. It’s true; work expands to fill the available time so set expectations

    • Read full story here….