The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

This is a guest post by Zeke Camusio, founder of The Outsourcing Company.

Ideas are great. We all love ideas. Unfortunately ideas will only get you so far before actions need to take over. Taking action and getting things done, however, is not always as easy as we would expect. A lot of people struggle when it comes to completing even simple tasks. The reason? Poor time management. Here are some time management tips that will help you spend your time more effectively.

Do the Right Tasks
People feel good when they accomplish tasks. For that reason, most people start their days checking their email, making a worthless phone call or running an errand they could live without. They’re still accomplishing tasks, so they feel good. The problem is that these aren’t always the right tasks to be completing.

You may have heard of the 80/20 rule. It states that 20 percent of what we do accounts for 80 percent of our results. On any given day there are two or three things that you do that will make a huge difference in your life. Everything else is secondary.

For this reason you should do the important tasks first. When you’re done with them, then you can get to taking care of the little things. Don’t put off important tasks for irrelevant ones, and don’t sweat it if you never have enough time to do everything you want to do. Nobody does. Just do the one or two things (the 20 percent) that will put you closer to your goal and nothing else will matter. If you can get to the point where you can leave things undone—because you are taking care of more important things—you’ll have won one of the most critical time management battles.

Break Down Big Projects Into Smaller Tasks
One reason why so many people procrastinate is because of the level of difficulty associated with certain tasks. Here’s a trick to overcoming this obstacle: break big tasks down into smaller ones. For example, let’s say you want to start a company. When you break that down you realize you need to talk to people in your industry, get funding, hire employees, set up an office and find vendors. Now let’s take finding vendors and let’s break it down into smaller tasks. You need to go online and search for vendors, look in the Yellow Pages, call them and arrange interviews, prepare a list of questions to make and arrange interviews. Now, that doesn’t feel quite as daunting. Anybody can look in the Yellow Pages and make a few phone calls. You may feel like you’re moving forward slowly, but you’ll be moving forward nonetheless.

Reserve a Block of Time to Get Things Done and Avoid Interruptions
Decide how long you are going to spend on a task and don’t stop until you are done. Also, don’t take phone calls and don’t check your email during this time. Go to a quiet place and work until your task is completed. If you get tired or start to lose focus, stand up, stretch and walk around for a couple of minutes and then get back to work, but don’t do anything else.

Group Similar Tasks Together
Let’s say you need to send five emails, call five people and run five errands. The most effective way to do this is to make the five phone calls all at once, send the five emails all at once and run the five errands all at once. Twenty-five percent of the time you spend on a task is wasted by setting everything up, so the less time you spend setting things up, the better.

Discipline Yourself
One of the harder things that I’ve had to do is limit myself to checking email just twice a day. I love checking my email! It’s easy, doesn’t take a lot of work, and I have fun doing it. But it used to waste a lot of my time. The temptation (to check my email all the time) is still there, but now I fight it. It takes time to change a bad habit, but you need to do it unless you want to keep spending the rest of your days working hard but not getting anywhere.

Start Now!
Never tell yourself that you’ll start something tomorrow. Too many of us lack the will power to follow through. How many people say they’ll start a diet “next Monday?” How many people say they’ll start their own companies “some day?” Why not start today. Take the first step, regardless of how small it is. “Tomorrow” may never happen.

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur. His sixth endeavor, The Outsourcing Company, is an Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, Colo. and New York. Zeke writes an entrepreneurship and Internet marketing blog called Let’s Do It! Check it out at www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog.