Setting Timers to Help Achieve Your Business Goals

Do you find yourself wishing there were more hours in the day so you would have enough time to get everything done? We all do. When it comes to business, it sometimes seems that there could never be enough hours in the day.

Time management is a stumbling block for many business owners. Sometimes it helps to find a way to hold ourselves accountable for how much time we spend on certain things. Timers are a great way to accomplish this.

What Should I Use a Timer For?

Timers can be used for just about anything that you feel that you may be spending too much time on. Some examples are:

Email - Some of us tend to get caught up in our email for entirely too long. We click links, then find interesting links on those pages and end up surfing the web. Or we read newsletters that could wait until later. Setting a timer when reading our email can help us remember to cut to the important stuff and save the rest for non-business time.

Research - The Internet is one of the best research tools anyone could ask for. But it is also home to numerous distractions. Setting a timer when researching can help us stay on track.

Networking - Networking online can help you grow your business. But it also has the potential to eat up time that could be better used getting work done. Setting aside a certain amount of time to network and not going over it allows us to make connections without causing our work to suffer.

If you are working on multiple projects, setting a timer for each one can help you dedicate the appropriate amount of time to them. Projects that involve a lot of work or have approaching deadlines may need more time than smaller or lower priority ones. You can always reset the timer if necessary and add more time.

Taking breaks is important. Breaks give us time to clear our heads and tend to non-business matters. But sometimes it's tempting to take longer breaks when we're working for ourselves, and that cuts into time that could be spent on business. And sometimes we get so caught up in getting our work done that we make our breaks too short to serve their purpose. Setting a timer can help us take breaks that are not too long or too short.

Managing time successfully is one of the most important thing a business owner can do. Setting timers can help us avoid spending too much time on some things and not enough on others. Give it a try. You just might find that the timer is your new best friend.