If you’re like most busy business owners, at the end of your day, you’ll look at the clock and say, “What the…where did all the time go?”

Or have you ever gotten to the end of the week, and you look back, and you wonder what exactly did you accomplish?

Often times the big stuff, the most important things that you should be working on to build the business, never even get started because your day gets out of control.  Distractions or emergencies or interruptions conspire against you and your agenda.

And that can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of wanting to do important things but never really getting to them. It becomes a self-perpetuating treadmill that causes weeks and months to go by before you realize it.

But you don’t want that. You can bring about some certainty for yourself and your team. You can reduce the stress level that comes with continually not meeting your goals, and get some satisfaction from making concrete steps toward your most important goals by becoming effective, not just efficient at doing lots of (mostly unimportant) work. That’s what the self-management system of time blocking can do for you. It focuses you on being effective, not just efficient.

We all become experts at doing high volumes of work – being “busy” business owners.  We might get very good at doing lots of things right, but that’s not the same as doing the right things. That’s what effectiveness is, and doing the right things often means focusing on the larger projects that change or transform the business.  It’s working on your business instead of in your business.

How do you focus on those most important things? You need to create space in your daily work flow to get into a state of focus, and you can use your calendar is your most powerful tool.  But, you must respect your calendar. If you respect your calendar, you can create the time and focus that you need to move long-term priorities forward one step at a time.

Much like you experienced in high school, the idea is to run your calendar just like you went to classes on a schedule. In high school, if you’re in a chemistry class, when the bell rings, the learning starts, and 50 minutes later, the bell rings again, and everyone leaves. It doesn’t matter how much chemistry you learned out of the whole semester’s material. All that matters is, time’s up. Everyone leaves.  That’s a time blocking system you can adapt to your daily routine.

Applying the same principle to your calendar, you can set aside specific amounts of time to focus solely on the most important things by making an appointment with yourself, and treating it with the same respect you would give an appointment with a sales prospect, or a customer, or a meeting with your team.

Decide when you will set aside a block of an hour with the specific purpose of focusing on one of your long-term projects.  Then set up a recurring appointment – the same day and time each week – with a reminder or alert.  Get your team on board by letting them know what you are trying to accomplish so they will not allow you to be interrupted.  Turn off your email and put your smart phone across the room so you have to get out of your chair to get it.

Having the discipline to stop what you are doing and focus on the purpose of your time block, respecting your calendar, is a habit that will take a couple of months of effort before it becomes more automatic and less difficult for you.  The reminders will become a trigger once you have conditioned yourself.

By selecting those blocks of time, putting them into your calendar so that they’re always there, you always know that there’s a space that you can create to focus on the most important things, and become effective, not just efficient.