Is something wrong with this picture or is it just me?

What would you change about the time allocation in the chart above?

Have you been tracking how you allocate time spent in your business according to high value and low value activities?

If not its time to get back to your operations plan to see if you have been investing the required hours to each activity in order to deliver the results you desire. Match the reality of how you spend the typical day or week to your planned time allocations. Time translated means money and or life, since cash is the life blood of your business you need to ensure you have and effectively manage your time budget.

Now, if you have not yet translated your business or corporate strategy plan into an operations plan or weekly work plans then just track back down memory lane and estimate what your time allocation looks like. Next create a rough sketch of your own chart —do it on paper, in MS Excel or even MS Word.

Let that picture be your guide for improving and stepping up the discipline required to get the right things done. Don’t throw out your time checkup chart, file it with your monitoring reports.
Based on the insights gained from your chart make a plan for allocating time for ensuring the lion’s share of time goes to the most important activities for delivering strategy and profit.

Plan, there we go again — in the real world, the time plan might not go according to plan each day, but charting the time allocation to revenue and profit serves as a guide and your benchmark. Monitoring that plan will alert you to the need to adjust your time budget in order to catch up when you are falling behind. After all life happens even in business but with the right systems and mental training in place we can stay on top of things. You will find that with time your consciousness will act as a trigger to warn you about your time spend.

The easy way out.
Take a look at the same picture from another viewpoint

Think about how you spend your work days and work weeks.
Can you spot areas in which you may have run the time red light in your business activities?

Create a Things To-do List and write down your high and low value business activities. Estimate and write down how much time it takes to deliver the most important ones. Estimate how long it takes to deliver the most time-consuming activities that must be done in order to complete other activities in your business process, place an asterisk beside those activities (Those are your bottlenecks).

Now assign time values (hours or days) or percentages of time required to deliver each activity on your list.
You can create the list in your diary, calendar or even on sticky notes (Bear in mind that you could lose your stick notes). You could even type your list into Outlook or other electronic calendar and set it as a recurring event so you receive a reminder at the start, mid-point and/or end of each week.

Those reminders will help you to monitor how you are doing with time. If you fail to manage how time is spent and cost time spent in your business you are sure to end up with a grade C or less on your business report card.

At the end of the day what is wrong with the picture or your version of the picture will depend on the following: your business and revenue models; production process; the service or product you offer; access to human capital; your strengths; your priorities; milestones and business growth objectives.

Thanks for sharing what should be changed about the picture above.
Let us know if the tips shared worked for you.

Copyright © 2017 Meegan Scott
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