By Wayne Mates

It happens to everyone in business.  Your phone rings, your smartphone alerts you to a text, your email beeps and one of your colleagues is knocking on your door.  All of this while you were concentrating on a sales proposal for a large client.  As you try to determine the order you will handle each of these interruptions, you lose focus on the task at hand and your mind wanders.  Perhaps, you check the email, or the text or the voicemail message.  One seems rather important so you follow up on it.

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. ~Ambrose Bierce

By the time your day ends, you have not returned to the most important task of the day which was the sales proposal.   Worrying about how you will get it done causes you to toss and turn rather than getting a good night’s rest.  So, you rise the next morning, tired, stressed and irritable as you vow you will finish the proposal.

This scenario is too common in today’s’ business world.  As a result your business suffers and you do as well.  While you go flitting from small task to small task, your large client is shortchanged by your lack of focus.  And, maybe when it happens once too often, you will find them with your competitor.

I wrote about some of the common interruptions in an earlier post on time sucks.

Time chunking is one way to avoid the lack of focus and allows you to accomplish what you want and need to accomplish to move you closer to your goals.  Let me also be clear that this post is not about time management, but rather project and goal management.

Lost time is never found again. ~Benjamin Franklin

You know the typical tasks you need to complete on a day to day and month to month basis. You have email, phone calls, planning, maybe operations or sales calls or accounting.  You also have an inordinate amount of time spent in meetings many of which are either unnecessary or far too long.  Time chunking is not like having a to do list and simply checking off items as they are completed.  What it is is setting aside chunks of time on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to complete those items that are the most important in running your business.

So, for example, you may set aside an hour a day for planning.  Within that hour you will do all your planning work, whether it is sales planning, budgeting, or expansion.  You are not taking that hour and pigeon holing yourself into one set type of planning.  You may set aside another hour for phone calls.  Your calls may be for sales calls, placing orders, calls to colleagues or even calls to friends.  The point of time chunking is to group like activities and set aside the necessary time to complete them.

I once worked with someone who swore she was a great multi-tasker.  She would be on the phone and banging out email at the same time.  Far too often, she would need the person she was speaking with repeat what they had just said.  She was wasting not only her own time but the other person’s as well.

Here are a couple of links to articles on multi-tasking:
How Multitasking is bad
How Multitasking can be good

If you find yourself pulled in multi-directions, try time chunking for a couple of weeks and see how much more you are able to accomplish.  It works for me when I can focus on the task at hand and not be interrupted.  I know I get a lot more done!

Happy Entrepreneuring!!

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamiesrabbits/5640739307/sizes/s/in/photostream/

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