The last blog discussed strategies for time management for a healthy body. How are you doing???

This blog will address time management for a healthy business. Clients I work with generally have two issues: They either are starting a business and struggle with keeping their ‘day job’ while working ON the business, to get it ready to actually start seeing clients. OR, quite often, they already have a business but need to squeeze out time to take it to the next level and find it VERY challenging to find that time that’s necessary.

The first step is similar to what I had mentioned in the last blog; keeping that ‘time diary’ in order to find out exactly where their time goes. Only after we have enough information can we take the next step, which is to help them figure out how to make the most out of the limited time they DO have!

One area that zaps a lot of time is email and now social networking sites, which is all I’ll address in this blog. I have more areas and tips in a whole chapter of my book, “Just Jump” at http://www.californiabasedpublishing.com.

Do you have your emails filtered so that all of your listserv email (electronic email lists) is going straight into folders? I can’t imagine NOT having my email all organized! I get over 100 emails a day and couldn’t function without this time-management tool. And, just to prove it to myself, I recently updated/re-vamped my email reader on my laptop and hadn’t set up the filters. OH MY GOSH! I couldn’t keep up with it!

Once you have all of your non-essential email going into folders, life suddenly will become simplier. But then there’s still the social networking aspect of life.

Do you have Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? Great! They are effective tools today for building relationships and informing people what you have to offer. However, you should control them, rather than allowing them to control you. This means adding time spent on them to your schedule! I allot UP TO 1 hour a day for these. And if I don’t have that one hour, then it will have to wait. I then can ‘play’ over the weekend, if I wish. However, if there are other projects I have to get done, because I have a priority list (I create one every day), I just hope for the hour the next day…. Or by the weekend…

This brings up a great point: Priorities and HOW you organize your day. Do you have a list of prioritized ‘things to do’? If not, how do you know what’s most important?? If you have time management issues, I strongly suggest you read Stephen Covey’s book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People”. If you don’t have time to read it, get the book on tape and listen in your car!

Next blog, we should address that time management tool of prioritizing.

Margie