Personal Development Worksheets

It’s an old cliche that we all know and understand, but to what extent do you really apply it in your business? For example, do you make a phone call when an email would do just fine? Sure, there’s something to be said for spending a little extra time building rapport with your clients, but phone calls often stretch out into ten, twenty, thirty minutes when taking five minutes to craft an email would have gotten the job done. Remember, your clients and strategic partners are busy too — they may appreciate the efficiency of an email instead of a phone call.

Do you feel the need to be more organized and/or more productive? Do you spend your day in a frenzy of activity and then wonder why you haven’t accomplished much? Time management skills are especially important for small business people, who often find themselves performing many different jobs during the course of a single day. These time management tips will help you increase your productivity and stay cool and collected.

The objective is to change your behaviors over time to achieve whatever general goal you’ve set for yourself, such as increasing your productivity or decreasing your stress. So you need to not only set your specific goals, but track them over time to see whether or not you’re accomplishing them.

Money value: It becomes imperative to devise a way of knowing whether the time spent is worth the value/return. The easiest and simplest method seems to be money value for each hour spent in dollars or cents. Somewhere, one has to make a beginning, and start with the total money earned in a period, week/month and divide by the number of hours worked whether drawing up a plan, talking to customers, supervising or checking progress directly or through systems and/or reports, or the sum total of whatever done for the business.

It will also help you to determine when the all-important big step of hiring employees is the most cost-effective thing to do. If you can generate more income from each hour if you are free to devote your time to business development activities than it will cost you to pay an employee to take over the routine, administrative tasks that are currently sucking up all your time, you should hire the employee. If you don’t know what your time is worth though, how will you ever know when that time has come?

Once that figure in dollars or cents is calculated, the chances are, that it is abysmally low or not even matching what a salaried person earns within the business. The entrepreneur now has all the data before him, and only needs to set his/her goals to take it higher, in steps and match with supporting actions, on managing routines or delegating the right things to the right persons.

The bottom line is that you must be willing to promote your product or service because you believe it has great value. If you had the cure for cancer you would probably be willing to passionately promote the cure. So when someone has a difficult time marketing their product or service, it is often because they don’t fully believe in the value they have to offer.

Knowledge is power: Further the business owner becomes more equipped with the knowledge of the actual value of his/her contribution, and what or where one has to change in his/her routine, or delegation to others, such that the business operates more profitably. Ultimately it leads to better time management, optimal practices in delegating business activities to others, such that more efficient routines get established, leading to profitable businesses all the way.