1) Creating a daily to-do list with 3 top things to be done. Doing your best to complete those 3 tasks – usually by ‘blocking’ out time without interruptions (from staff, no phone calls, reading emails, etc). You are essentially making an appointment with yourself (or have your PA do this for you). Any uncompleted tasks are rolled over to the next day.

2) Creating a 30-day to-do list. These are tasks to be completed this month – you pull your daily top 3 from here.

3) Focusing on high leverage tasks (entrepreneurial), rather than on medium and low leverage tasks (employee).

4) Delegating, training, systemising and giving staff the authority to make decisions on their own – so your business can run without you!

Here is a list of high leverage ‘Entrepreneurial’ business tasks (this is where you should be spending most of your time)

• Strategic planning and vision for the business
• Marketing planning
• Utilising media (press releases, advertising, direct mail, etc)
• Developing business systems (admin, legal, IT, staff, service delivery, supply, marketing, sales, etc)
• Developing information material or products (every business whether wholesale, retail, service or professional services needs these)
• Looking at your products and services and keeping up with trends in your industry
• Working on business uniqueness
• Reviewing financials and ensuring a good return on investment
• Creating Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances
• Promoting the business – developing presentations and speaking at seminars, trade shows or networking
• Reviewing staff performance, feedback and suggestions and developing staff systems for your General Manager
• Organising customer research or reviewing customer feedback
• Meetings with your ‘Mastermind Group’ – peers in business
• Meetings with your mentor(s)
• Meeting with your ‘top’ staff – financial controller, marketing, sales and general managers (these many be shared roles in a small business)
• Delegation : Staff and outsourcing

Here is a list of medium leverage business tasks

• Sales – that is, YOU making sales
• YOU supplying the services that the business sells (auto servicing, computer servicing, chiropractic care, financial planning, etc)
• YOU supplying products that the business sells (wholesale, retail)

YOUR time spent on the above tasks really isn’t that important for you as the business owner. Everyone has access to the same amount of hours in a day. Performing the above actions will limit your income.

Please note: Sales is crucial to a business – what I’m referring to is you spending a major portion of YOUR time conducting one-on-one sales for products and/or services under $10,000 (you can hire someone to do this for you).

Here is a list of low leverage ‘Employee’ business tasks

Again – you don’t want to be doing these tasks yourself – you want to systemise and hire someone to do them for you.

• Bookkeeping and Accounting
  • Data entry
  • Payroll and staff entitlement records
  • Invoicing
  • Following up outstanding payments (account receivables)
  • Tax preparation
• Inventory
  • Ordering stock
  • Receiving and inventory of stock
  • Stock rotation
• Administration
  • Staff admin
  • Opening the mail
  • Filing
  • Basic computer stuff
• Supervising and training staff (you should be working on staff systems instead)
• Answering the telephone
• Deliveries
• And so on … you get the idea…

The four time management procedures (daily list, 30 day list, high leverage, delegating/systemising) are simple to understand and easy to follow. All it takes is a bit of self-discipline initially and then it will become routine.

If you have staff there may be some resistance to change as they may be used to ‘bugging you’ every time they have a problem – but, don’t ignore them – document their frequent questions and the answers – that way they can consult training or company procedures instead. Soon you will quickly notice how much progress you have made ‘working on your business’ and not ‘in it’.