How well do you budget your time? Are you so focused on the long term goal that you forget about the daily goals?
Ronald Reagan once said, “Balancing your budget is like protecting your virtue. You have to learn when to say no.â€
What I get out of this in regards to time is that you have to manage your time in order to protect your long term goals. Not only that, you have to say “No†to certain tasks in order to achieve success.
So exactly what is a budget?
A budget simply shows us what our income and expenses are. In this case we all know what our starting income is, 24 hours. The only way we can increase our income (hours) is to create more hours or more realistically hire help. As for the expenses it all depends on what your business is.
There are many businesses out there that people do and whether it is online or offline doesn’t matter, we all have the same amount of hours to further our business. The only way to further your business is to take the time that you have and use it wisely for something that will either make you money or help your business grow.
The trick to budgeting your time is to watch what you do and figure out if that is the best use of your time. What you need to understand is that a budget is not set in stone, it is simply a plan showing you how you are to use your time. The ideal budget would be one that is 100% correct at the end of the month but as well all know, there is no such thing as an ideal budget in business.
Now in order to positively affect your business you need to create a budget where each task you do has a set amount of hours allocated to it. The purpose of this is to allocate more hours to the more important aspects of your individual business. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are in, you have to allocate your time wisely.
Whether you are a freelance writer or a landscaper you have to market your business. It doesn’t matter if you spend an hour putting posts on forums and sending emails or handing out flyers and creating newspaper ads, that one hour is an hour you will never get back.
If you don’t think that 1 hour is that much time then think of it long term. 1 hour per day is 365 hours per year or roughly 15 days. Are you prepared to lose 15 days of work per year due to your poor planning? Or think about it the other way, what would 15 extra days of work do for your business?
The way you budget your time will ultimately affect your business and that is why you need to put a good amount of time into the planning of the budget every week or month. My personal advice would be to create a budget every week since businesses change so often it would be almost impossible to predict what you will be doing in 3 weeks from today.
What you need to understand is that every hour of your day is important. It doesn’t matter whether you plan on working 3 hours per day or 10 hours per day as long as everything you had planned on doing is completed. Budgeting money is something that a lot of people are just now getting around to however, budgeting time is something new to almost everybody.
Do what you can in the time that you have and watch your business grow exponentially over the next year or two.
Adam Snyder has been teaching people how to earn money online for a couple years now through is site DormroomCash. Whether you are into making money through blogging or doing freelance writing, Adam gives you great ideas and advice.