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Time Management

Sidebars: Did You Know? The List Balancing Act
Oct. 1, 2005
3 min read

Sidebars:
Did You Know?
The List
Balancing Act

Clay Nelson, a remodeling industry consultant and president of Clay Nelson Life Balance, suggests four short-term practices and four long-range tasks that will help you get the most out of your 24 hours and your business.

To do today
  1. Commit to having balance between work time, personal time and family time.
  2. Write down everything you do for three days. Look carefully, and see what doesn't need to be done at all and what someone else could do.
  3. Give up doing all the work yourself and start delegating to your team. "If you could get what you want by yourself," says Nelson, "you'd already have it."
  4. Encourage employees to think for themselves. "Be the question instead of the answer," says Nelson. "If you don't start asking your team what they think, they won't think. If you are the answer all the time, you are always the one depended upon."

    To do in the next year
    1. Have a long-term plan in writing. "If you can't write down what you want, you can't speak it," says Nelson. "If you can't speak it, you can't tell anybody what it is and they can't help you get what you want."
    2. Communicate with your team to make it happen. "Learn to write plans, speak them, hold people accountable for them and graciously accept them," says Nelson.
    3. Learn about new technologies and make them serve you. "At the pace we're going, any remodeler who doesn't have technology serving them isn't going to make it," says Nelson.
    4. Get on top of your financials and stay there. "You've got to have a kick-butt accounting system that you understand," says Nelson. "Remodelers are great people who hope they make their margin in the end. You can't afford to not have control over your margin anymore."
  • For more information, visit www.claynelsonlifebalance.com.

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    Did You Know?

    Managers spend an average of 30 percent of their time on administrative activities and only 9 percent on planning.
    Source: Pace Productivity Research


    The List

    Top 10 Time Wasters

    Pace Productivity, a time management consulting and research firm, surveyed 690 employees and entrepreneurs across North America to find out what factors impede their productivity the most.

    1. No response; nothing
    2. Paperwork; administrative tasks
    3. Interruptions by phone or in person
    4. Time management
    5. No focus; doing too many things; not prioritizing
    6. Procrastination
    7. Poor planning
    8. Socializing; gossip; breaks; calls to friends
    9. Customer requests, situations, complaints
    10. Lack of knowledge and training on products, duties

      For more information and ideas, go to Pace's Web site, www.getmoredone.com.
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