The Three Ps of Successful Time Management

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No matter how hard you try, you can’t get more time in your day. Yet some people seem to get so much done in the same 24 hours you have. How? Why? It all starts with the three Ps of time management – prioritizing, planning, and performing.

Prioritizing – One of the most important aspects of time management is learning to put things in order by priority. Take a look at your daily tasks and put each of them in these categories:

• Urgent – Deadlines, problems, and crises often fall into the urgent category. Taxes, bookkeeping, client work, production – all of these should go first on any to-do list.
• Immediate – Some things aren’t important at all but end up being treated as urgent, such as phone calls, reports, meetings, and other interruptions. If you can get a handle on these type of tasks and minimize or eliminate them, you’ll do a better job accomplishing the rest of the items on your list.
• Important – Important tasks include networking, relationship building, or commenting on social media networks and blog posts. While important, none of these is urgent in the overall function of your business.
• Time suckers – Time suckers are any activities that cause you to waste time, such as chitchat, political talk, and office gossip. These things are neither important nor urgent and should be moved to off-business time.

Planning – Once you categorize your tasks, it’s easier to complete a plan for any project or day. Every plan you create should consist of the “five Ws:” what, where, when, why, and who. If you can answer those aspects of any project, you will be able to make a good plan of action. Spell out the plan in detail so it’s easy to review, to ensure nothing was missed. Ask for input from anyone who will be involved with implementation or evaluating the results.

Performing – The final and most important “P” of successful time management is to perform the things you planned. Without implementation and “doing,” your prioritizing and planning can become a crunch for another “P” word: procrastination. During the planning process, start with the due date and work your way backwards to today. Assign individual tasks to be completed by a certain deadline so by the time the major deadline comes up, the project will have been implemented and performed without stress.

Finally, it’s important that you’re realistic about what can really be accomplished in any given amount of time. No matter how much you want to be, you’re not superwoman (or man) If something doesn’t get done today, move it to tomorrow. As you get better at scheduling, you’ll understand how long it really takes you to do any particular task and you’ll have fewer days where you don’t complete your to-do list.

To better manage your time, you may need to delegate some business tasks. Let me help you with your writing projects, website maintenance, or social media planning.