Setting up Time Blocks and Making Their Effective Use

Being an entrepreneur, you realize that time is money. Therefore, devising strategies to make more intentional use of that time facilitates creating an atmosphere that drives success. However, business owners must understand that they don’t need additional time; rather they require learning the art of making its strategic use. For businesses, time is an invaluable resource, and business owners have every reason to protect, organize and be calculated about it.

In order to encourage clients and employees to make effective use of their time, time blocking is a crucial step towards it.

Important Steps to Take for Time-Blocking

Determine Priorities and Goals

Analyze your weekly or yearly goals, and put the largest time blocks aside in order to particularly work towards attaining that target. Unless and until you achieve this objective, everything else will seem like an interruption.  

Put the Activities into Categories

Prepare time buckets for rest of the objectives in your list. Put similar activities in one group. Here’s how you can categorize all the duties:

· Customer Work,

· Marketing,

· Business Management,

· Team Management,

· Goal Setting,

· Dealing with Personal Secretary,

· Personal Duties.

Arrange Them as Consistent Appointments

Get a calendar and schedule all these activities. This will help you come up with a weekly or monthly structure. For instance, every Monday morning, you have to get in touch with all the clients, every Wednesday afternoon you’ve to handle financials, and so on.

By practicing this (bucket time), you will be better able to schedule activities and handle them during the blocks every week with maximum amount of concentration.

It is imperative that you follow your time blocks regularly; else they will not provide desired results.  Success lies in honoring your calendar and working systematically.

Now that you have setup blocks, practice one or more of these techniques:

Task Batching

Group all the activities that you need to get done within a single time block. This will provide you with some organization and structure. Let’s say you’re working in a ‘Marketing’ time block. You have to systematically shift from one component of the marketing strategy to another, instead of haphazardly working on various components.

Time Tracking Solution

Whenever you begin working on a new block, kick start your timer. However, not all time tracking software and apps will provide you with user-friendly and seamless time tracking.

There are myriad benefits of using a time tracking solution. This software keeps you accountable, while maintaining the integrity of time blocks. Moreover, time tracking solutions also provide reports on how each minute was spent over the entire week. If you’re on the lookout for making efficient use of your time, time tracking apps and software is just what you need. Time tracking solutions also help you determine areas of work that can be delegated, saving you more productive time.  

In essence, you need to come up with solutions that balance your time and work. Chrometa provides time tracking software and apps for PC, Mac, Android and iPhone to help users track time passively. Visit http://www.chrometa.com/ to learn more about their time tracking services.