Many of us are now using cell phones and electronic calendars to keep our schedules in good order. If you are still using the paper system you can try and adopt or find a similar idea for your time management challenges. The trick to good time management is to block off your time so you are focusing on important parts of your business uninterrupted. Most programs like outlook allow you to categorize different areas and assign them a colour. You need to do this first, so name your categories, and assign each a colour. These colours work in both tasks menu and calendar menu. The categories I use are administration, client contact, business meetings, personal time, production time, and research. You can add more if you wish, but those are the six I use the most. It is important to add production time if your business requires you to actually work in your business such as an artist or an accountant.

Now when scheduling your day enter all the tasks you have to do that day in the task menu and assign each a category. After entering your tasks switch to calendar view and block off your time based upon the tasks you have to do that day. So if you have four tasks to do in administration you may block off one hour for administration time and in that hour you will handle all of the administration tasks. You would do the same for the other areas. This helps to make sure you are working effectively and handling the most important parts of your day. You can also look back on it and get an idea of where most of your time is going. Try it and see what it can do for your productivity.