Screw Up Your Schedule

Get President Obama on the phone.  I have a solution to the diplomatic crisis with Russia over Edward Snowden.  We give Pussy Riot asylum.  They can keep Snowden, and we'll give them three other commie pussies to make it even.

If you can't manage your time effectively, you have one of two problems.  Either, you aren't using the time you have efficiently, or you just plain don't have enough time to get your tasks done.  These two problems have different solutions.  If you don't know your problem, you'll get the wrong solution.

To determine which problem you have, step one is to track what you currently are doing with your time.  In my case, this is easy since we have time tracking software in our CPA firm.  At the beginning of a task, I start a software timer.  At the end of the task, I stop the timer and record the time against a project.

At the end of the day, I have a record of my day.  If I only have four hours of billable time, I know a lot of hours leaked out of my day.  I then immediately determine where the rest of the day went.  Sometimes, the time that leaked resulted in something worthwhile.  Some days, I got interrupted a few million times and got nothing accomplished.  The key is that I know immediately what happened to a day.  Over the course of a week, I can determine if I'm simply running out of time or have too many unscheduled nuisances crowding out productive work.

Tracking your time can be easy.  To start, keep a daily schedule.  This is your time budget.  Outlook is great for this.   At the beginning of each day, schedule times for the tasks you hope to complete.  At the end of the day, determine what tasks got done and why some tasks weren't completed.  Were you interrupted too often to get anything done?  Or, did you just run out of time to get everything done?

When you get interrupted, you don't just lose the time spent disposing of the interrupter, you lose another ten minutes getting back your focus.  Guard your schedule like a pit bull guards a drug dealer.  Shred your open door policy.  Batch your phone calls and e-mail responses.  Turn off the new mail indicator that shows up in your system tray.  Snarl every time someone appears at your office door.  Buy a gun.

Do what works for you.  Your schedule is your schedule not somebody's opportunity to transfer their unpleasantness to you.  You may become known as an asshole, but a you'll be a productive one.

If you guard your schedule like Fort Knox for a week and still can't get everything done, you simply have too many tasks.  The solution to too many tasks is delegation.  I am a master delegator, which is better than being a masturbater and pays better as well.

I was not always so good at delegation.  Desperation taught me well.  You can always come up with reasons why only you can complete a task.  I thought that I was the world's best tax return reviewer.  No one else had my experience, competence, and drive to keep garbage from going out our door.  Last year, my unwillingness to delegate tax return reviews became a major bottleneck in getting returns done.  That bottleneck was costing me money.  I had no choice but to try letting someone else do the detailed number by number reviews.

It didn't work perfectly, but it worked well enough.  I had let perfection become the enemy of pretty good.  Given time and training, pretty good becomes pretty great.  I gave up the time consuming detailed tax return reviews, and the world didn't come to an end.  Our client service actually got better.

Delegation will work for you too.  First, change your attitude.  If you believe delegation will fail, it will.  Next, write down how you complete the task.  This is your procedure manual.  Use your manual, and invest time training your staff.  Finally, you need a process to monitor quality control.

For tax return reviews, I perform a less detailed final review.  I review the initial reviewer's compliance with our review procedures.  If a review hasn't been correctly completed, it goes back and gets done again.  Training is continual and should be.

Fixing your problems with time management is critical to business success.  I once had a staff member who kept telling me, "If I can just get organized..."

I told him, "Don't get organized.  Be organized."  Organization isn't a destination.  It's a process, a battle sometimes.

Thanks for reading!  as always, please visit our main S&K web site www.skcpas.com for real tax and accounting advice.  Also please like the "How to Screw Up Your Small Business"  Facebook page.

Until next time, let's do it to them before they do it to us.