Our lives have been invaded by technology, that’s not a bad thing! However, it does present a paradox; we can work anywhere, anytime. Conversely, it means little escape from work. We tweet, blog, email and talk all the time. Next time you go for dinner, count the number of people who pick up during one of the courses!

We live in a world of interruption. First, it was advertising agencies intruding into our homes, now it’s via a little device that’s in our pockets. We must restore order over our time. Time has lost its boundaries which makes it even more excruciating to manage as we have little of it. We have ultimately lost control! It means that we are not often ‘there’ when we have conversations. We concentrate on several tasks at once rather than one or two that we do truly well. We answer our mobiles, become distracted by emails and faff about far too much. We have given technology permission to control our time not the other way round. For some it gives a sense of being important, but all we are doing is ‘biting off more than we can chew.’ It results in us living fast when actually being able to chill is far more appropriate and conducive to results.

We all need to find ways to control our time. Only opening emails three times a day, switching our phones off when we are at a dinner party, focusing on the people we are having a drink with and finding a little balance. You are dodging the issue if you think other people are controlling your time. It’s about learning to say no constructively. Controlling our time is not just about being more effective, it’s actually more about enriching our lives, enhancing our relationships and adding true value to what we do.

Controlling interruption gives us the opportunity to intensely focus on important, meaningful activity not the sheer volume. Time isn’t to be messed with; we let it pass us by far too easily without feeling it and enjoying it. We only get one shot at that moment in time, that day, that meeting, that client, that dinner party. Rushing through it, slightly dictated by interruption doesn’t add anything, it just really takes away.

Social media so called because of how it connects people and allows people to share information and ideas. But actually, social media is more fundamental than that. Its social because its helping shape the cultures of the future, its enabling engagement and its aiding collaboration on unprecedented levels.

It’s effect on the continuum of change ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the future, it will assist in the overthrow of governments, research and development activity that creates amazing products and currently, its helping me meet someone in my home city I have never met before.

To critiscise it is natural, to ignore it is futile but it will, itself need to change too. There will come a point, perhaps a Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, where social media must turn into social business on a more larger scale. There are case studies. Dell reckons its generated $3 million just via Twitter. Gavin Sheppard at www.devonshiretea.com recently said to me that its the best marketing decision he ever made joining Twitter because its bringing results.

It’s truly fab connecting with people, its amazing sharing ideas but its hard work, even daunting sometimes. Social media maybe a more effective way of marketing and removed some cash spend but it adds huge pressure to your time. At some point, even us fans, followers and early adopters are going to have to turn those connections into some kind of business. And that’s where we have to claw back the control, take a hold of social media/business, grab it by the horns and decide how we are going to make it work. That’s our role social media/business can’t do it for us, its really a question of time management and influencing your followers.

At the moment it gives us connections, reach and spreadability, in the future we need to start turning that into long term relationships, robust communities and cash.

Say what you want, have a feeling tourists very rarely make a decision to visit a land mark whether its three minutes or ten minutes away. Crazy idea, crazy waste of tax payers money and irrational decision making by managers who focus on busy work not real work.

The old sayings are the best!! It’s better to do a few things really well than a lot of things badly. Whenever we take something new on, something else has to go. A good look at what you are currently doing is the next step. You need to distinguish between real work and busy work:

-Â Â Â Â Â Â Real work contributes significantly to the growth of your business, busy work stunts growth

-Â Â Â Â Â Â Real work impacts positively on your bottom line, busy work distracts you from your bottom line

-      Real work utilises your skills, expertise and knowledge, busy work underuse’s you

-Â Â Â Â Â Â Real work is challenging, busy work is mundane and boring

-Â Â Â Â Â Â Real work only you can do, busy work is what anyone can do which is why you should outsource it!

If your work overwhelms you but doesn’t challenge you, you’re probably suffering from too much busy work! Put together a list of all the work that comes in on one day. Identify which is real work and which is busy work. You know what to do next!

It’s the most significant problem that small business owners face….not having enough time, spinning plates and juggling balls. Well, we can’t do everything and when we try, we fall straight into a huge chasm and little gets done. And, if we don’t watch it and keep it in check, we end up working in a unfocused, distracted and fragmented way. Indeed, it’s one of the most significant contributing factors to limited growth in a small business.

Work doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from the commitments you make. To reduce your work you need to reduce our commitments. You need to draw a line in the sand between outstanding work and today’s work.Â

Try this….list all of the tasks that are outstanding, how long they have been outstanding for and how long they would take to do if you had no other work. Calculate it and then you know what you are up against. Put it to one side and then start each day with the first task on the list. Eventually, depending on how many outstanding tasks you have, the list will go!

Been helping a couple of small businesses with some overwhelming time management issues recently. As usual no time to improve and think about developments for the future because the majority of the staff are engaged in fire fighting. It comes from the ‘top’ and therefore is a problem for the ‘top’ to solve. Time management, I believe, is a cultural issue. It’s no good individuals on their own attempting to manage their time more effectively if other people are not respecting it and adhering to the boundaries or working parameters, great time management requires.

We can work quite inefficiently, we often get distracted by random factors in the working day. We prioritise based on noise but work doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from the commitments we make. We came up with a quite a few exercises to help the process. Here’s one:

1. Make a list of all of the outstanding work you have at the moment. Write down how long the task has been outstanding for and the number of hours it would take to complete the task. When you’ve picked yourself back up off the floor. You now know what your backlog looks like and how big or small it is!

2. Collect a days worth of incoming work. Write it down. You now know what you have to do just to stay on top!

3. Put all of your backlog work into a folder then collect all of your work for one day and deal with it in one batch and do that for three days.

4. Spend the fourth day dealing with your normal incoming work but start the process of clearing one item on that backlog list and do that first thing when you get in the office. Keep doing it until the backlog is gone.

Remember whenever you take on something new, something else has to give.