Time management: An important aspect of marketing; Part I

If you are a busy entrepreneur…(is there any other kind?) then you will find that one of the main keys to improving your marketing effort is to improve your time management. I personally do not think that this is emphasized enough these days. You will be able to increase your output significantly and will be able to make sure that you take time to do marketing. I realize that much of what you do each day is marketing, but I am writing about the specific activities that will increase your marketing effort in two key areas. What are they you ask? The answer is strategic and tactical activities. Yes, I am referring to making time for strategizing and implementing tactics.

The first thing to do is analyze how you currently spend your time and devise a method for setting priorities. You can look at all of the tasks that you regularly do in a day and place them within one of three criteria

1. Tasks that are urgent and important

2. Tasks that are important but not urgent

3. Tasks that are neither important or urgent

The first question you should ask about each activity that you do is how urgent and how important is this? Things that are both urgent and important need to have your attention. I know, a lot of people think that everything is urgent and important so here are some additional questions to help you decide objectively. Always ask yourself the question what will happen if I don’t do this? If the answer is that your world will not fall apart or your business as you know it will not end, it is *not* both urgent and important. Urgent and important things are things that will impact your business negatively immediately. You may find that some of the things that you have self labeled as important and urgent are neither or at the very least only important.

Tasks or activities that are important but not urgent can be handled by allotting a certain amount of time daily to accomplishing them. I suggest that you use a calendar to plan your day even when you do not have meetings. Outlook is a good way to do this if you are working in front of your computer because you can get alarms to remind you when your allotted time for a specific activity begins and ends. When the alarm alerts you that it is time to begin a task, ALWAYS stop what you are doing unless it is absolutely urgent and begin the next planned activity or task. Likewise, when the alarm comes up for the next task; stop. I suggest a five minute alarm, i.e., five minutes before the next activity is to start have the alarm alert you to the next activity.

This will help you methodically monitor the time you are spending on each activity each day and it will make it easy to get the most out of your time. Hopefully this analysis will allow you to make time for marketing activities as they are both important and urgent.

In the next post of this series we will look at how you can eliminate many of the tasks that are neither important or urgent and, also. how you can begin to delegate activities and tasks and, incorporate this same method of time management with your employees.