I need to improve my time management skills. Who doesn’t? My life as a business owner revolves around three things:

  1. Selling more.
  2. Leading a team to sell more and..
  3. Delivering training to consultants and leaders to help them sell more.

Every day there are two things that get in the way:

Time and Energy

The time I have available for different tasks and the energy I have to complete them effectively. I often think at the end of a day “is that all I have achieved today?” and “how has my to do list not got any smaller?”.

During these dark moments there are a few things that help lift my spirits..

1. I am not alone

Type “time management” into the Amazon bookstore and you get 27,973 results, type it into Google and you get 167 million! More specifically, ask any billing manager what’s your number one challenge? Four out of five will tell you there aren’t enough hours in the day.

2. I accept that I will never master time management, but I can always improve.

It’s an ongoing path that never ends. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say “I have become a zen master at time management”. But I hope that one day I’ll be able to look back and say “look how far you’ve come”.

3. I let others help me get stuff done.

As a natural born control freak, I’ve had to work on delegating more to the team. The little voice that keeps telling me, “you can do it all”, never goes away, but I am learning to ignore it more.

4. Teaching others helps remind me what I should be doing.

It’s easier to spot other people’s faults than your own. When I do spot things people could do better I always ask myself, “am I doing that as well?”

5. Always be learning.

Every day I take five (or more) to read up on new ways of tackling age old time management problems. My current favourite article is this post from Kevin Kruse on Forbes: 15 Surprising Things Productive People Do Differently.

If you’re a recruitment leader, you’ve probably thought at some point “I need to improve my time management skills”. If you’re finding it tough to balance the demands of billing, managing and running a business you should make time to catch our last webinar. We covered my top tips and tactics from 18 years in recruitment and some of the mistakes I’ve made along the way.