How well do you manage your time? Have you considered a Default Diary?
One of the first things we look at with clients is diary management. All too often they are on the hamster wheel…doing, doing, doing. They often feel they’re consumed by the business. Even sometimes are exhausted by it!
At ActionCOACH we use a thing called the ‘Default Diary’…and if you think back to school, it’s not dissimilar.
At school we didn’t get to the end of the week and forget to do maths, or english. It was all timetabled, nothing got left out because we planned it.
Firstly take the 4 main buckets of activity –
- Sales and marketing, getting business.
- Operations, doing the business activity. (whatever that may be)
- Finance, getting paid for the business’ activity.
- People, the running of the business.
Now we look at what we want our working we to look like, and put these buckets of activities in our calendar. It has to be in the calendar.
This isn’t to confine us. It’s to give structure to make sure things don’t get missed, it’s called the Default Diary. We know there will be curve balls, but this is our default position. And you do this as the business evolves so this, I think, I must be on my 18th iteration of mine.
So give some thought to how you structure your time…what improvement could you make?
