​Are you feeling overwhelmed and are getting nowhere? Are you looking at the email inbox, the pile of paper on your desk and the list of calls to return and wondering, where did it all go wrong? You are not alone as an SME owner / manager / leader.

Time always has and always will be that most precious of commodities and never more so than today with the 24 hour news cycle, social media and the constant thought at the back of your mind that everyone else has a work-life balance, why can’t I have that also? Not all of the below steps will work for everyone but hopefully some of them will help you and your business.

1. Never envisioning or thinking about tomorrow.
This is very common and it is one of the main reasons most people have a problem with time management. Great businessmen and women and those who created extraordinary results in life are typically visionaries. They see things further into the future rather than just seeing things as they are now.

When you think about how you are going to go through tomorrow, you will better equip yourself with what’s coming. You will literally able to see what needs to get done and what you need to accomplish. More importantly, when you envision or think about the coming days, you will feel more motivated because you are envisioning yourself creating the future you want and moving one step closer toward your dreams.

2. Not planning ahead.
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

There seems to be some truth in this saying. The majority of the people plan their working days, but they never really plan their weekends or their off days. Yes, you may say that on your off days you just want to be “off” and doing nothing. However, if you do not plan for your weekend, you will just waste your weekend thinking about what to do.

A lot of people wake up late on the weekend. They spend most of their time thinking about what to do, what to eat and where to go. You don’t have to plan every minute or every hour for your weekend. What I’m suggesting is that you can plan for 3 to 5 activities that you want to do during your weekend. For example, you can plan to go jogging in the morning, shopping in the afternoon and have dinner with friends at night. You will at least fill your weekend time with some meaningful and productive activities.

3. Starting their day late.
If you study the success stories of all the great people out there, almost all of them started their days early. None of them started their days late. The man behind Starbucks, Howard Schultz, gets up at 4:30 a.m. almost every day. Richard Branson wakes up around 5:45 a.m. to do his daily exercise. Apple CEO, Tim Cook started his day at 4:30 a.m. and Procter & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley wakes up around 5:00–5:30 a.m and is at his desk by 6:30 a.m. or 7:00 a.m. at the latest.

Can you see it now? Great people share one thing in common: they all wake up early to do their most important task and they exercise before they get to the office. If you start your day late, you will feel rushed throughout the whole day. Just like if you start your day late, you eat your breakfast hastily or even skip your breakfast; you may get stuck in a traffic jam and arrive late; everyone will push you on your work, and your boss may scold you for being late. Can you imagine how stressful the day will be?

4. Focusing on doing the wrong thing.
Never ever forget your goals and your targets. Many people have difficulty in managing their time because they focus on doing the wrong thing. If you want to be productive, you must make sure you are working on things that really matter and things that will move you toward your goals and targets.

For example, when things get out of hand, people will focus on the problem and start blaming each other. The right thing to do is to focus on the outcomes and the solutions available to you. Just like if you are in sales, don’t forget that your main purpose is to sell and not to call or meet clients for the sake of calling them and meeting them.

5. Getting distracted along the way.
One of the most popular time-management problems with most people is that they get distracted along the way. A very simple example is that when you are trying to do your work on your computer, and then suddenly you get a notification from Facebook saying your friend commented on one of your posts, so what did you do? You quickly turn to Facebook and check out what’s going on.

This is a very common thing that happens to most people. We get distracted when some other things seem more “interesting” to us. As long as you focus on your targets and always keep your goals in your mind, it will shield you from distractions.

6. Going through each day without aims, targets and goals.
Do you know what you need to get done by tomorrow, by end of this week and by end of this month? Most people never really have a goal or a target. That is why most of them go through life without passion and motivation. Successful people always have a clear indication of the outcome that they want; that is why they are able to move forward toward the future they desire.

If you don’t have a goal, how can you tell if you have reached it? How can you know whether or not you are on track or are producing the result you want when you don’t know what exactly you want? Today, if you go to work without energy, with no passion, and you go to work for the sake of salary and for the sake of working, you better stop reading right now and take time to think about the future you want. This is when you are absolutely clear with what you want to accomplish in your life that you will be able to come up with the right things to do and manage your time properly.
7. Not having a to-do list.
Some people said that to-do lists are useless, because what good is a to-do list if you aren’t marking off items? Let’s make one thing clear: having a to-do list is always much better than not having one. The reason is that the list helps you understand what you need to get done. When you know what you need to do, you will be well-prepared.

Sometimes we may get so busy and forget what we need to get done, and this is where our to-do list can come to help. First it prepares us for what is coming and next; it reminds us of what we need to do. It is all right if you did not follow through with your to-do list in the first few days; what you want is to make it into a habit, and then you will see how effective it can be. The main key to make your to-do list works for you is to make completing tasks into a habit.

8. No rest and all work.
This is going to be controversial and subjective. Do you think that you are working a lot today or do you think that you are too free and not getting much done? This is a very subjective question and it all depends on how much you can take. If you are a workaholic, you may feel that you don’t have enough time no matter how much you have actually put into work. On the other hand, if you are not a workaholic, you may feel that you have done so much and you just want to get some rest.

The point here is that you need to find the balance between resting and working. And this is totally subjective base on each individual’s ability. Some people can work till late at night and still feel motivated to do more, while some people can’t take it after 6 p.m. When you feel motivated and want to get more done, do so. When you feel tired, get some rest. After all, success is a journey and not a destination. You need to rest in order to get more done.

9. Being too free and not moving forward.
Sometimes you will feel that you are too free or you wasted too much time on unnecessary activities and you are not moving forward at all. This is the time when you need to think about your goals and what need to get done. This is why you need a to-do list too. You don’t really need to worry about committing to doing too many tasks or too few tasks; just like what you have learned above, you want to turn getting things done into a habit so that you will know how much work you can take each day.

Most people will fall into this category of too free and not moving forward instead of the other way around. You should be able to tell if you are moving forward by tracking your results from time to time. If you are not moving forward, it is time for you to think whether you are not doing the right thing, or whether or not you do enough.

10. Being a perfectionist.
Always adopt the mindset of “ready, fire and aim” instead of “ready, aim and fire” approach. Always remember that no one is perfect in this world. We learn the most from our mistakes, not from our successes. Therefore, just go ahead and do it. Just like what Richard Branson has to say:
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes—then learn how to do it later!”

You don’t have to understand every detail to start. You can start right away and figure the rest of the details which you don’t know. As long as you are always in motion and moving, you will have an edge over people who are always thinking but are not doing anything. Yes, you need to spend time planning and thinking about your strategies, but more importantly, you need to take action and act right away.

It is election time in Northern Ireland and there seems to be a trend for everyone to have a manifesto. These make interesting reading and the majority have a common theme, “government must do this or that.” This makes for disappointing analysis of the state of business in Northern Ireland when we seem to be reliant on Government to move forward. It is worse when these requests are not even costed, with no detail on how or where we find the money.

Before we look at where business can move forward and grow, there is a need for government to listen and create the environment for business to succeed. This should be looked at individually, in partnerships and industry wide with a focus on long term growth plans as a way of aligning public and private resources. Creating social partnership activity in Northern Ireland is vital and government can facilitate all private sector businesses, unions and third sector working in partnership to deliver an industrial / business strategy that will benefit everyone. Supporting and nurturing some of the industry wide partnerships that have formed over the last few years can help establish a dialogue where the start-up and SME voice is heard just as readily as the large employer and the representative bodies.

So what can business do to lead growth in Northern Ireland?

Improving Productivity
Improving workplace productivity should be recognised as the key route to increasing pay and prosperity in Northern Ireland. Up to 90 per cent of the current workforce will still be in work in the next decade. For us to tackle the productivity and competitiveness deficit in the economy, there must be a greater focus by business on job design, use of technology and progression for those in work. Jeremy Anderson, Chair, Global Financial Services at KPMG say “If we are serious about raising productivity and creating better jobs the workplace matters.” We must as a business community develop the skills of those in employment, 4.3million people in employment have skills that are not fully utilised. Over the past decade of devolution there has been almost exclusive focus on whether schools, colleges and universities are producing the skills to meet business needs and the economy. This has a place but what about those working for us already?

Working practise innovation in comparison to technological innovation is not that common, yet when tested and implemented the results are world class, BAE SYSTEMS did this in their naval facilities in Glasgow gaining 17% productivity improvements. 

Business must also genuinely invest in leadership and management capability, if we are going to become a high performing business community (already lagging the rest of the UK by 25%) then we must make long term commitments to develop the skills of this key part of the business.

Earning and Learning
It is hard to overstate the importance of combining work and learning in helping to make the first step into a career. In general terms young people who combine work and learning are less likely to be NEET (not in education, employment or training) and earn more than those who don’t. In the higher education sector, combining work with studies, whether through problem based learning techniques or placement / sandwich years, leads to better degrees, higher wages and lower graduate unemployment. For employers, these models provide an effective way to grow new talent and address long-term skills needs.
Business in Northern Ireland must invest in the Apprenticeship Strategy that is being rolled out, get involved and support the implementation and creation of system that will create a career pathway from youth training at level 2 or equivalent to level 3 apprenticeships through to higher level apprenticeship pathway to level 8. Only 10% of employers use apprentices, in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Australia it is 3 to 4 times as many.
To achieve more apprenticeships we need to employers to get involved, real employer leadership of apprenticeships will develop the quantity and quality of those being trained. Employers must recognise the Government cannot create be-spoke apprenticeships but while government is willing to continue to fully fund the “off the job” element business should invest in the internal training.
Employers and Education
To create a workforce with the right skills and experience, far greater connectivity is needed between the education system and the world of work, at every level. This means business stepping up the engagement level with education to support lifelong learning opportunities for everyone. While 75% of businesses in Northern Ireland want 19-25 year olds to have work experience only 30% are offering work experience.

There are many challenges for business in providing work experience, not least time and resource. By work experience it is not 1 or 2 weeks on site making tea and siting in meetings. It can include support for programmes like Young Enterprise, job tasters, site visits, mock interviews, careers talks and skills competitions support. This kind of “work inspiration” should start as early as possible and as the young person gets closer to the labour market should more and more closely replicate and feel like real work. Gail Cartmail from Unite the Union summed it up as “Experience of work and good quality careers information have a vital role in preparing young people for work and tackling occupational segregation. Schools must play their role in challenging gender stereo types, working with employers and union learning reps to do so.”

In particular as our economy increases the need for level 4 or 5 qualified skills we must as business work with education to address the deficit in mid to higher level technical skills. As a result of this deficit we are creating barriers to business growth and economic success through lack of social mobility. Business engaging with our further education sector in Northern Ireland can impact this greatly, finding new and innovative pedagogical systems.

Success is NOT Jobs Created
While creating jobs is vital, that own its own is not a definition of success. Business must inform and lead with government on creating measures of success that link improved productivity with social mobility. What is needed is a wider basket of outcome measures holding business, education, government and others to account and leads to long term planning and investment that will provide generational benefits. What can we measure for success then is:

• Leadership and process improvement across all parts of the economy but especially in the SME community
• Digitisation of the business community, how are businesses embracing new applications and the opportunities they create
• Measuring demographic trends and skills trends
• Progression opportunities in the workplace
• Innovation application, how we use the world class research base in NI to add value to the wider economy
• Workplace practise development

Coupled to this we need business to find ways to benchmark performance both within and across sectors.

If we are to create a real recovery in the Northern Ireland economy, break the weak growth cycle we need business led growth, through our people, our processes, our embracing technology and a capacity and desire for change.