Prioritise Your Time.

When you prioritise your day, you choose to work primarily on the important tasks, those that take you closer to your goals. Knowing what your goals and therefore priorities are keeps you on track and helps to minimise stress.
A crucial aspect of time management is understanding the difference between activities that are:

• Urgent and important
• Not urgent but important
• Urgent but not important
• Not urgent and not important.

Activities that are important and urgent include emergencies, complaints, crises, customer demands, tasks or projects that are due, meetings, appointments, staff problems, reports, and submissions

Activities that are important but not urgent are ones which are crucial to your success. They include; planning, preparation, scheduling, research, investigation, designing, testing, networking and relationship building, thinking, creating, modelling, developing systems and processes, and developing strategies.

Activities that are not important but urgent are ones that include: trivial requests from other people, apparent emergencies, minor interruptions and distractions, misunderstandings, and pointless routines or activities.

Activities that are not important and not urgent are those that include computer games, surfing the internet, lots of cigarette or coffee breaks, social chats, daydreaming, taking social phone calls, or reading irrelevant material.
Time management experts say a lot of time is wasted on those 'comforting' non-urgent, non-important activities while very little time is spent on important but non-urgent activities that could actually make the biggest difference to a person's success.

To Do Lists.

To create your 'To Do' list, write down all the tasks you need to carry out. Once you've written them all down, identify those that would come under the 'urgent and important' heading. They're the ones that you need to focus your energy on and do first.
Make time during your day for non-urgent but crucial activities like planning, designing, developing, etc. When you're confronted with non-important but urgent tasks, determine exactly how urgent they are. Often, their 'urgency' will dissipate under close scrutiny. Activities that would come under the heading 'non urgent and non important' are ones that need to be minimised (if not stopped altogether).
This kind of 'To Do' list means that you retain control of your time and energy. You'll be able to schedule your work so that you focus mostly on your priorities - those things that move you closer to your goals.

The list will help you to keep focussed on your primary goals each day and help you keep track of everything you need to do. You'll also be able to see at a glance which of your less important tasks can be delegated to other people.
If any of your tasks or projects appears overwhelmingly large, chunk them down into manageable pieces. Keep chunking them down until you have something that you can begin work on immediately.

Now, it's a fact that business owner, you'll be interrupted throughout your day... so what happens to working on your priorities when yet another telephone call comes through or there's another knock on your office door? Allow for some interruptions and unexpected events - make them part of your schedule. You know they'll happen so prepare for them.

One way to minimise interruptions is to delegate tasks that take up your time but don't take you closer to your goals.

Action.

Of course, setting goals, scheduling, prioritising, organising and writing lists are only valuable if you take action and make use of the information.