Review These Time Management Skills Every Construction Business Owner Must Have

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"To leave time unmanaged is to be managed by your time." ~ Mike Myers, CLB Network

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Key Steps to Effective Time Management

One of the—if not THE—most important tools that an executive has in their toolbox. This tool is your conscious decision to control the amount of time allotted to your tasks to ensure efficiency and productivity. It helps you to achieve greatness in your business.

Without doing the planning necessary to manage your time, you end up running from seemingly-urgent task to seemingly-urgent task, never accomplishing the big goals that you want to achieve. You end up struggling against being overwhelmed with your work and struggling to have peace with yourself. Your company can struggle too, if you let your time and tasks manage you.

While it’s not actually possible to obtain more time for yourself or your company (we’re all traveling through time at 60 minutes per hour), you can effectively manage your time so that it will seem as though you had obtained more time. When you are nailing time management, you will have boundaries that keep your work life from creeping into your personal life. You will prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by having a plan, you will avoid getting bogged down because you will delegate. In this way, you, your team and your company will thrive.

1. Set SMART Goals - Create goals for your company. Where do you want to be in a month, six months, a year, 5 years? Without setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound), you and your company will flounder and waste time.
2. Prioritize - Organize your work based on which tasks will have the greatest impact, and focus your energy there. It may help to prioritize the task (or tasks) which is the most difficult or unpleasant so that, once completed, you will have the momentum and sense of accomplishment to keep rolling through the others.
3. Say No - There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much you can accomplish in them. This means that you have to be able to say no, even to good things in order to stay focused on your goal: not every good opportunity contributes to the overall plan.
4. Plan ‘Tomorrow’ Today - Before you leave work for the day, take a few minutes to plan your tasks for tomorrow. You will end your day with a definite plan for tomorrow (and hopefully not spend a lot of your after-hours time fretting about what might be coming tomorrow), and you can also get your morning off to a great start.
5. Delegate - Anything that is not your area of expertise or not of utmost importance is something that can be done by someone else. Hand in hand with delegation is avoidance of micromanaging. You’ve gone to the trouble to hire good people: trust them to do good work. There’s hardly a better way to grow your team than to entrust them with responsibility.
6. Single-task - Multitasking is a myth, and attempting to do it merely increases your chances of making mistakes or doing sub-optimal work. Focus on one thing and let the rest wait. It may help to block your time for certain kinds of tasks. For example, focusing on marketing on Mondays, concentrating meetings on Tuesdays, and blocking time at the end of the day for those time suckers: email and social media.
7. Schedule Down Time - You’re a busy exec, and you feel like you can’t take even 5-15 minutes during the day for a break. But you are a human, and you can’t function if you don’t have the occasional brain-break. Schedule 10 minutes between meetings to sit quietly, or give yourself a real lunch hour to think about something that’s not work or even sneak in a little walk to stretch your legs. You need it, and you will work better with little breaks scheduled in.
8. Track Your Time - It’s vital that you know where you’re spending your time, not that you just think you know what you’re spending your time on. If you track your time well, it will help you readjust your attention to ensure you’re focused on your important goals. An automated time-tracking app can aggregate all of your computer and phone use to give you a picture of what you’re doing (similar to Apple’s ‘Screen Time’ tracker) and help you rearrange your activities.

For more help with your time management, CLB’s experienced team of experts is here for you, and can help in ways you might not expect. Since 2016, CLB Network has worked with busy executives across the country— just like you— to help them succeed and help their companies become market leaders. We have the tools, training and support to lead you to greatness and take your construction business to the next level.