#915 Dance withTime

Are you clocking in early and burning the midnight oil every single day? As a small business owner you may feel that is required to get ahead, but it doesn't have to be the pattern for your days.

It's not when you waltz in, but how well you dance as you hit the floor. The art of time management is an elusive dance, but here are a few simple steps that will help you glide to success.

Create a daily to-do list. Instead of drowning in a sea of week-long and month-long chores use this lean list of the musts for the day ahead to help you get things done. Whether you wield the inked charm of old-school notepads or the digital finesse of tools like Insightly or Todoist, the magic lies in breaking the workload into bite-sized chunks. Today's tasks stay in the spotlight; the rest wait their turn.

Master the art of the elegant "No." Don’t put stress and pressure on yourself by taking on additional tasks when you know you can’t complete your current workload. You’re setting yourself up for failure. If you have to add a task, take something off your list. This forces you to compare the priority and value of each task.

Pause. Yes, that's right you need to take breaks. Non- stop work is not sustainable. After awhile your productivity falls so it's okay to take a breather. I get up and go for a short walk, take a short detours through social media, or call a friend. Sometimes it is just standing up and taking a few deep breaths to get me away from my computer to clear head so I am ready to start again.

Focus, focus focus. Multi-tasking is a myth. Close the tempting browser tabs that lure you into the time-sucking vortex. Hide your phone, lock Facebook away. Your mission, is to devote your undivided attention to the task at hand. Afraid your email will blow up? Relax, emails don’t have expiration dates. Contrary to the adrenaline-fueled panic, it's fine to answer at the end of the day.

Sure, you can dance into the office at the crack of dawn, exiting with the setting sun, but that is not a dance with productivity. You won't really get more done, you will just burn out sooner.