Plan to Have Enough Time

Most small business owners don't have the time to run their businesses the way they would like to run them. As an employee, you feel you have to spend extra time at work because you don't want to let your boss and colleagues down, you feel you have to get your work done or you simply like your job. As a business owner however, you've got lots of ideas about how your business should be built up but you can't find the time to implement any of them. You need to plan.

Planning to make time for a particular purpose is different from planning your day or planning the execution of projects. Your plan to make time for implementing your ideas about your business should have three main characteristics:

1. It has to be consistent
Implementing your ideas for your business is a major and ongoing series of tasks which will take a lot of time over a long period. You need to plan to spend a certain amount of time each day or each week and consistently complete jobs during that time. It could be a time which is normally not too busy, such as half an hour after lunch each day, a time when you are normally losing focus such as a Friday afternoon or a time when you're ready for new challenges such as a Monday morning. But it should be regular and you should be able to get something done during that time.

2. It should not be too ambitious
This sounds contradictory but the aim of this planning is to succeed in implementing some small task each day or each week. If you plan to put aside too much time, the overall initiative is likely to fail. Even fifteen minutes a day will, over a year, get you far along towards implementing your best ideas.

3. The implementation has to be broken down
If you're going to implement these ideas in small, regular bits, you have to break the work down into easily managed jobs. This exercise alone is a large task which can be broken down quite handily: for example, take your best idea and decide what work has to be done first. If that work is too much to fit into your regular allotment, identify a part that will fit and do that. As part of the first job, you can identify the next bit of work and go from there.

Of course, as a small business owner, there are many other ways to make more time for whatever you want to do, but the key factor is planning. Here at the AARP Small Business Center are some more ideas about time management. You're in charge so plan to run things the way you want

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