This post is one of series originally written for the Sage Business Experts blog

Time management may mean different things to different people.  For some, it’s about managing the resources available to their business, and may well extend into capacity planning and all sorts of complex issues.  For others, it’s about exercising some control over their days, and ensuring that they meet deadlines without having to work through the night and lose all concept of a work/life balance.

However, whether you are concerned with large-scale project management, or are a sole trader working from home, the basic skills of time management are going to be essential to your effectiveness.  There are any number of techniques that can be applied to time management, and many people have their favourites.  I will try to be very generic and cherry-pick a few that I think can readily be applied to almost any business.

For me, the key to time management is looking at all the tasks and issues facing you, and being able to prioritise them effectively.  One way of doing this is by using an ‘ABC’ analysis, which can be applied in a number of ways, depending on your needs and preferences.

For example, you may decide that A is urgent, B is not so urgent and C is lower priority still; equally you may define A as being tasks that need to be done within a day, B within a week and C within a month.  How you use the analysis is up to you, but the key is to think about each task you have on your list and be realistic about how important and achievable it is.

You may prefer the Pareto approach – the 80/20 rule – which indicates that 80% of the tasks will take 20% of your time, and vice versa.  Therefore you may decide to start each day by knocking off all those smaller tasks, irrespective of their urgency.  By mid-morning, you may then be ready to concentrate on the more meaty tasks – those 20% that will take up 80% of your time.

This approach has a lot in common with the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology, which advocates dividing larger tasks down into smaller ones, so that you can complete them immediately – breaking things down like this tends to avoid overload.

In practice, a combination of methods probably suits most people, and you may wish to use software to support you.  Personally, I quite like cross-referencing information, because you can find it by different routes, depending on what you are prioritising that day.

For example, there are software systems that allow you to add a task, and assign it to a particular project or client and also add tags to it, which may provide additional context.  You may choose to tag a task as a phone call, and as personal.  That way, if you search for all the calls you need to make, or all the personal tasks you have to carry out, the information can be retrieved.

Be careful of time-management software, though.  If you pick the wrong one, you will spend your life maintaining it and adding tasks, and it won’t be delivering any real value for you.  My advice would be to ask associates who work in the same kind of business as you do, and find out what they use, and then try it out.

Just make sure that you don’t spend more time than you can afford on managing your time!

Featured photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash