The Small Business Toolbox Blog

“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
M Scott Peck

There is no doubt that we live in turbulent times but as M Scott Peck says in the quote above it is what we do with our time that makes the difference. How do you monitor what you do with your time?

Many of us manage other staff and we are very focused on assisting them to improve performance, however do we dedicate as much time to increasing our own effectiveness?

Time management is a fallacy. You cannot manage time, you can only choose what you do with the 24 hours we all have available to us. Whether you are the Queen, a Street Sweeper or the MD of a company we all have 24 hours!

If you do the things today that others will not do, you’ll have the things tomorrow that others will not have!
So what can you do to increase your effectiveness?

First: Determine what your goals and priorities are. You cannot be effective if you don’t know what you’re aiming for. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there! We are now half way through this calendar year. What do you want to achieve by year end?

Second: Make sure you allocate time to those goals. After all if you aren’t focusing on them, no one else will be. Make sure you make an appointment with yourself, which you stick to, at least twice a week to drive the next stage of your plan. Keep the pressure on and try to take many small steps that are easy to implement rather than planning giant strides that miss the mark and demotivate you and your team.

Third: Get comfortable with stretching yourself and your team. We are all creatures of comfort but we need to get really comfortable with working outside our comfort zones. The current business climate will not reward comfort; it will reward stretch, calculated risk and action! Our dreams and goals are not achieved by remaining comfortable. Take responsibility for lighting your own fire and sparking with your team. Let the energy of your team be released with your goals in clear line of sight of everyone.

The companies that are thriving in these times are the ones that are reinventing themselves, re-energising their teams and re-focusing the entire team on new goals and activities. Are you?

Tags: effectiveness, goals, performance, priorities

This entry was posted on July 3, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Leadership, Market Research, Marketing Plans, Running a Small Business, marketing strategy, small business marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.