Time management

How do you ensure you spend your time right?

How do you evaluate, plan and improve your time management?

My motivation for being self-employed is the freedom it gives me. The freedom of managing time as I like. 

It is easy to skip registering non-paid hours: activities that are not invoiced to customers. You have the freedom not to.

However, it makes it hard to remember back how you spend time. It is difficult to evaluate, plan and improve.

Lean life

This is not a LEAN way of working. If you are not familiar with Lean, I found an article from Mack Story describing "The Lean Life".

"Living a Lean Life means we are continuously trying to improve ourselves and our circumstances by focusing on things that add value to our lives and make us more valuable to others while eliminating the things that waste our time, energy, and resources.”

Time management

If you do not know how much time you spend on various tasks, how do you know you spend your time right? How can you plan, make good decisions, adjust the direction and improve? That's what Time Management and this video is about:

Time management is about:

1. Set a goal you want to spend time on
2. Creating a strategy and plan to achieve the goal
3. Act on planned activities
4. Measure and adjust along the way

If you do not have a tool to measure and adjust along the way, what are the chances of succeeding?

Danny Iny at Mirasee shared a good example: A plane, flying from New York to Los Angeles, do not travel in a straight line to the target. Along the way, it makes numerous adjustments to get to the destination. There are parallels to achieving a goal. The road to get there requires adjustment along the way. It requires that you measure.

Focus on the value adding activities

The Time management product helps you focus on the right activities to create a sustainable business. It includes an excel spreadsheet with drop down menus to easily register your activities and hours. It includes tables and statistic to evaluate, plan and improve.

You can quickly see how you spend your time; what activities and projects that requires your attention and identify time thieves. You can also compare different periods.

What can you achieve by Time Management? You can evaluate each month how you spent your time, identify improvements, and plan the upcoming month. You can also look at how much time you can release by outsourcing activities and compare it with the cost. It provides a good basis for decision making to prioritize correctly.

If you are interested you can buy the product Time management. It includes a Mind map of how to create a sustainable company, an activity plan and time registration tool in excel.