For this edition of Entrepreneur University we turn to Business and Management trainer Martin Haworth. From managers of small, developing businesses and their teams, through to one-on-one work with senior executives, Martin enables a new generation of managers – and their businesses – to meet their potential – and deliver performance they only dream about. We last connected with Martin in January where he shared his tips on How To Network Differently.

Today Martin shares with us his 5 best tips to help you manage your time:

“There’s only one thing you can’t buy more of in life and that’s time. Yet many of us complain that we just don’t have enough. So it’s vital to maximise what we do have and make the most of our time management with absolute effectiveness and efficiency.

Yet it comes down to personal habits and changes you can start to make, right away. Here are five ideas to get you started.

Get Organised

Whatever you do in your business, it won’t work well if you are disorganized. Truth is many business-people are, so they solve it by surrounding themselves with people who are very capable. They get people in to manage them! If your business isn’t that big, then there are always great team members who might have time management skills you’re a bit short on. Learning to be organized can be achieved to greater or lesser extents, but you have to have things in the right places at the right times, or things will start to go wrong.

Do What’s Important

By focusing on where you personally add the best value, you leverage the excellent skills you bring to your business. Using delegating skills to empower, develop and get the best from others is vital. Great bosses do what they are good at and lose the rest. Building team resources is one of the best places to start and to do so it’s critical that you recognize the areas where you add less value yourself. Letting go as a business grows is one of the biggest challenges.

Manage E-mail and Phone Calls

Now for some tactical steps. There are always demands on your time. Yet that is so precious. By analyzing where your time goes, you can easily find out whether it is the best use of your contributions. Impositions from others, often unexpected, like e-mail and phone calls, can not only be managed, but trained, even though it is sometimes tough to say ‘no’. So that’s a start in getting your time management effective. Follow this by making time-slots for fixed periods of time throughout the day for these communication processes and you will find that you don’t let yourself slide.

Make Time to Think

Once you get some control back, take some of it back by slackening off. If you create spaces for yourself to think in your day, you will find you are released from tactical day-to-day fire-fighting and start to get creative with problem-solving, planning and development. Which is what you must have to progress. Every time you solve a problem, ask yourself, ‘What would it take to make this problem not happen ever again’?, ‘What could I use the time for’? And provide solutions that fix sources of problems, not sticking-plaster one-off short-cuts.

Closed Door/Open Door

It’s great to be there for your people. Building relationships is one of the most valuable activities you can undertake in your business. On your own terms. Whilst having an open-door policy help make you approachable, it isn’t good time management to have that all the time. So open your door when you are ready to be interrupted – and close it the rest of the time when you need to do your own work. People get to realize what you are doing and understand – even take the tactic into the way they run their own work practices. That works!

Five little time management steps that can make a huge difference when you make a start. And there’s no time like the present!”

Have you tried any of these techniques? What do you to effectively manage your time?