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Articles:Entering Fixed Assets as Journal Entries Estimating, Project Management Overview Paying Liabilities and Transfers Between Accounts Profits - Strategies to Improve Take Your Business to the Next Level
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Time ManagementPeter Drucker was arguably the most well-known management expert of the 20th century. The entire first section of his book, The Effective Executive, is devoted to how the executive must manage his time in order to be effective. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to get the most from their business. Time Management is more than just managing our time; it is managing ourselves in relation to time. It’s the art of arranging, organizing, scheduling, and budgeting one’s time for the purpose of generating more effective work and productivity. And it is most essential for the person who owns his or her own business. As with any system (including software), it comes with a price. That price is the time you must spend first learning and then maintaining the system. As Steve Pavlina says, “The essence of time management is the following: Drucker agrees. He advocates stripping away or delegating tasks which are not essential to the process of managing, and reserving a large chunk of undisturbed time regularly for pure thinking and research. He claims it’s essential that the effective manager or executive divorce themselves from the practice of spending most of their time dealing with crises and putting out fires. In the article Time Management Matrix, I displayed a diagram of this concept with topical tasks in which we get caught up every day. Drucker might have disagreed that Crisis belongs in the first quadrant. He might have swapped with Preparation/planning in the second quadrant. You have to be the judge of that. The important thing is that you decide which things are the most valuable on which to spend your time, and do that. Easier said than done, right? Maybe this will help: a recent approach with which I’ve become acquainted through various sources is the Ready, Fire, Aim approach. First you get ready by deciding what to do (usually the first “right thing” which occurs to you), then do it. In other words, Fire without worrying too much about aiming. If you miss, aim again, and fire again. To many times we get caught up in Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Aim……and by the time we’re ready to Fire, something else has come up. This approach can help dispose of tasks which don’t involve a lot of strategic thinking, or are tactical tasks which are necessary to your strategy. As you can see, what we’re talking about here is a top-down approach. A story I remember hearing some time ago involved a high school science class. The teacher showed the students a large container, and next to it a pile of rocks of varying sizes. He asked, “what’s the most efficient way to fill this container with the rocks, so that there are the fewest rocks left over?” The answer was to put the big rocks in first. The analogy I’m drawing is that when we look at the bigger questions first (e.g. where do I want the company to be in one year, two years, five years?), the medium-size and smaller questions tend to sort themselves out. The trick is to keep the bigger questions, and the answers, in mind at all times. And setting aside the time to think about and re-think the goals and strategies is essential to this process. As I quoted above, time management is about deciding what to do, then doing it. It’s the deciding that can often be the hard part. Think it through in the context of the big picture. Then don’t waste a lot of time getting into action. Fire away. You can always aim again. At this point, your time is more valuable than money. Spend it wisely. Please contact me if you would like to learn more about instituting a comprehensive training process. Thank you, Andy King
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