CPAmerica International's Blog

SVG digital clock example (23:59:59). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Guest Blogger: Brett Owens.

Getting through your “to do” list faster isn’t what time management is actually about – at least not anymore. After all, this is the digital era, baby! 

You’ve got a handheld supercomputer sitting in your pocket, a non-stop barrage of interruptions and more expected of you than would have been expected of three accounting professionals a mere 20 years ago.

Rather than managing our existing allocation of time as if it were finite, we need to find ways to make our share of time larger, preferably by a multiple or more. Forget the modest notion of merely getting things done; we need to do better, and we can if we employ some “radical” strategies.

Intensely Focus on the Single Most Important Item

What you really need to do is to look at everything on your list, pick the single most important thing, then work on it, uninterrupted, until it’s completed.

The uninterrupted part is the toughest, by far. While it’s very easy and tempting to check your email, answer the phone, respond to an instant message or click over to a website, if you can eliminate the interruptions, you’ll boost your productivity significantly and be able to work the same or even fewer hours.

No, you’re not squeezing 30 hours into a 24-hour day. Instead, you’re making sure two things happen. First, you’re working on the single most important task at hand—not the most urgent task or the easiest one – but the most important one. Don’t mistake this for putting out the biggest fire; emergencies are one thing; getting your most important task done is another. Most of the time – if you even have the time – we plow down our “to do” lists without seriously questioning whether it makes a difference if we even do most of the items on it.

The sad truth is this: it doesn’t matter. First, the 80/20 principle tells us that 80% of our results will come from 20% of our input. By picking the single most important task to work on, we’re making sure that this action falls within the critical 20%.

Second, by focusing 100% of our energies on this item, we’ll accomplish it much faster than we would have if we had allowed ourselves to be distracted by interruptions, or worse, tried to multi-task and complete two or three items at once.

Interruptions are the real killer. It’s amazing how fast you can get something done, if that’s all you do.

Automate Everything – and I Mean Everything

Everything that’s being done manually in your office or when you work remotely needs to be given a good hard look. We are halfway through 2012. At long last, software is actually starting to work!

The dirty secret few software industry providers want you to know is that adoption rates – and I’m talking about adoption rates on anything – are actually pretty dismal. I believe that’s the case because most business software has traditionally been quite complex, requiring a lot of adoption, training and wrangling on the part of the user. The result? We ultimately opt for a simple solution like Word, Excel and perhaps QuickBooks to manage a practice.

If you’ve written off software for years – and trust me, you’re not alone – now is actually a good time to take a look around. Here are a few key business processes that you can easily automate to help expand your available productive time:

Accounting – A good alternative to QuickBooks desktop is the new online version. With QuickBooks Online, you can log into your clients’ accounts directly without the need to send files back and forth. Read the rest of this entry »