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Better time management has the potential to release you from working so hard that you feel like your pips squeaked several years ago and that you’re running hard to maintain turnover in your business.

Time Management Turned Evil

If you use some of the tactics of time management without integrating them with your business strategy you can end up in trouble. The reason is that you can truly grab more productive hours for your day using  these tactics.

However, it’s rather like a builder chopping down trees in a forest to join a road on one side to a road on the other. If the builder simply chops away at trees without any other tools he can achieve more with his extra hours. Here’s what he could achieve:

• Every tree in the forest pulled down, although a straight line between the two roads only needs 120 trees removing
• 120 trees are pulled down as required but he doesn’t go the shortest route so needs to pull down more trees
• The builder doesn’t know where the other road is and keeps chopping down in the presumed direction only to find that he goes in a circle and ends up back at the starting point

From just those 3 examples you can see that the builder didn’t use his extra time well.

He certainly was able to get much more done in those extra hours. However, getting much more of the wrong thing done is plainly going to cost you more money and time.

So releasing those hours by managing his time better never really helped him build that road more quickly or better.

Time Management Used For Good!

What the builder should have done is take a step back from the forest and say, “I’ve got these extra hours from better time management. I should sit down and plan what to do with them.”

Then he could have looked at his road joining project and asked the strategic question:

How do I join these two roads together with minimum effort and wastage?

From asking that strategic question he would have asked himself further detailed questions about how he could join them with minimum effort. How could he ensure that he stayed on the minimum distance line and how could actually chop the trees down faster than he had been.

Time Management Strategy

Once you’ve identified the ways time management releases your time for other activities you need to decide whether those activities relate to your business’ strategic direction. Because like the builder you can work very, very hard or go round in circles or wander aimlessly and go bust doing stuff.

If you haven’t applied time management principles to yourself, your business and your staff I guarantee that you can release a minimum of a day that will enable you, your staff and your business to move forward more quickly.

And if you haven’t applied time management strategy you’ll be amazed at what you achieve.

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