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Ever get to the end of a day and felt completely frustrated that you got nothing achieved of note?

It’s a problem that everyone will experience at some point, either in our daily lives or in our business life. For small business owners in particular, this can be an easy trap to fall into. We tend to get so caught up putting out fires or rushing off on a tangent that sometimes we overlook the important stuff that we need to get done.

Here’s how to avoid it.

The first and last fifteen minutes of everyday are the most important. You need to schedule this time for yourself and no one else. If you don’t use a day planner, PDA, or diary then start, go out and buy one right now. A simple daily diary is the easiest to use if you want to stay away from electronic gadgets, and usually the easiest thing to grab and open up also. If you do use a diary and find it too cumbersome to carry around, get a smaller notebook and transfer your daily events to it. However, I tend to find that smaller diaries or notebooks can get misplaced easily.

The order of business is simple. At the start of everyday, over a coffee or whatever gets the heart started, grab your diary, or whatever you might be using and starting writing. List all of the tasks that you need to do for the day. Don’t worry too much about the order you write these tasks in, because once you are done you are going to rank their importance from 1 (being critical) to 3 (nice to do, but not really important). You can spread your ranking from 1 to 100 if you want, but my suggestion is to keep it simple and use just 3 rankings.

Depending on what sort of business you run, you may or may not have employees. If you do you will want to delegate some of these tasks out, so if that’s the case you should write who is doing this job for you next to the appropriate item. Of course it goes without saying that you need to tell your employee’s what is expected and it’s also a very good idea to teach them these same planning and organizing methods.

Throughout the course of your day you will be completing various tasks and checking them off of your list, no doubt you will also be adding to your list as things come up. It’s vital that when you do add items, you don’t rush off on a tangent and try to complete them immediately. Add them, rank them, delegate them and then focus on those priorities, the number 1’s.

Now let us move on to the end of the day. It’s time to sit down with your diary and a nice cold beer, wine or other beverage and analyze how we went for the day. You might find you have more unticked items than what you started with, you might find you have none; either way is fine as long we have been completing our tasks in order of importance.

Now here’s the fun part. Open up tomorrow’s page and transfer all of today’s unfinished tasks. You might find that many of those tasks that were important this morning are not important now, some you may not want to transfer at all. Write the appropriate entries down; rank them, delegate them, close your book and go do something fun! Tomorrow when you start again, a lot of your day’s planning will be already done…congratulations.

If we do it in a disciplined manner, planning and organizing does not need to take a lot of time, but the time we save will be immeasurable.