I have written about being busy versus being productive. In my mind the way to make sure that your time is productive instead of being busy is to plan.
Do you plan out your year, with a budget, projection or cash flow? Do you set your goals and measurable and then back into the activities to ensure that you can meet and exceed your measurable?
So do you plan your time? Do you plan out your year? What about every quarter especially the next one? DO you have a monthly plan? How about a weekly plan? Do you have a daily plan?
In our office we back into a number of targets to ensure that we hit certain measurables. Such as CPE. We need to ensure we hit our 120 hours of CPE every three years. This has never been an issue we typically exceed the goal, especially because these events assist in other goals. We fill our calendar with the standard events we hit every year (ICPAS Accounting and Finance Show, UofI Tax School combined are 4 days or 32 CPE for the year). We also have other standard sources that we add to our calendar, we get CPE but they are more network related events.
We also add the standing client meetings; we have clients on weekly, monthly and quarterly retainers with scheduled meetings.
We then have our networking (that don’t provide CPE) events that we know approximately when they are scheduled. We add those. These include Center of Influence events.
During tax season we need to continue meeting with scheduled clients so we have a delicate balancing act with meeting the expectations of all clients here.
So we plan out the year, the quarters, the months, the weeks and the days. How do you plan your time? For help give us a call.