SmallBusinessNewz

A variety of tasks confront the small business owner each day. Addressing the most urgent and important ones may mean the difference between success and failure.

The worst part of time management is watching someone who operates a business you like run it into the ground with inattentiveness. We witnessed that not far from the lead-lined writing room of SmallBusinessNewz, where a franchise of a certain casual dinner chain featuring chicken, meatloaf, and other market items navigated itself straight into the pavement.

7 pm, it turned out, wasn't a good time to tell customers they were out of food. Especially when they did this on a consistent basis with a laissez-faire attitude.

Sad to see them go, but poor management doomed the place. We don't know the exact causes, but we're confident time management skills did not figure prominently in its operation.

Newsday talked about this recently, citing a nice quote in the process:

"Many people concentrate on ant stomping when they should concentrate on elephant hunting," explains Peter Turla, president of The National Management Institute, a time-management consulting company in Flower Mound, Texas. "When you focus on stomping ants, you confuse activity with accomplishment. You're going for the small, insignificant tasks that are easy to do."

Other than recommending bigger shoes for the elephant stomping, we have a simple suggestion for figuring out which tasks need immediate attention. It requires a piece of paper, a large square drawn on it and divided into four equal sections, and a little labeling.

The top row should be marked Urgent, the bottom Non-urgent. For the columns, the left one should be marked Important, the right one as Non-important.

Urgent indicates timeliness, while Importance signifies how essential it is to the running of the business. The top-left quadrant becomes the Urgent/Important section, the bottom-right turns into Non-urgent/Non-important.

Then it's a matter of organizing tasks into these boxes. Our ill-fated restaurateur should have placed ordering supplies to make those home cooked meals into the Urgent/Important box. Things that need to be done quickly, but aren't on an immediate deadline, go into Urgent/Non-important.

Tasks that need to be done, but not ahead of other ones, may be categorized as Non-urgent/Important. It's the place to look after Urgent/Important items have been cleared away, and Urgent/Non-important ones rechecked for timeliness.

Important items always take priority, with urgency the determining factor for the order in which they are checked. As new items arrive, they go into one of the quadrants. After the important items have been taken care of, one should be in a good position to address the others.

Each morning, the boxes get rechecked, with items added, shifted, or removed as necessary. Urgent/Important items receive first priority. Other people and situations will vie for that attention. Be ruthless; say no to the non-urgent requests and put them in the quadrant where they belong.

Pretty soon, you will be busy, but not hopelessly juggling deadlines and harming your business. Organization can be very rewarding.