Entrepreneurs and small business owners face unique challenges with managing their businesses, family and personal lives and making time for themselves too. No matter what your situation is, effective time management skills are necessary to grow your business.

No matter who you are or what you do, you’ve got 24 hours in a day to accomplish what you need to get done, and that’s it. With so many demands on your time, you need to learn how to use time management to grow your business. `

1. Toss the To-Do List! Many people use to-do lists to organize what they need to get done, make sure they don’t forget anything, and to track their progress. If your list contains every single thing you need to get done in the run of a day, though, you’re probably never going to get through it all and you may not be getting the right things done.

A better way is to prioritize your main goals that are urgent and very important. You focus on those crucial tasks and get those done first. Then if you have time for some additional tasks when you’re done, you can tackle the small routine tasks. This way, instead of wasting valuable time doing menial tasks, you can focus on building your business.

2. Manage your Email – Email is both a God-send and a curse. I don’t think anyone will dispute the usefulness and time-savings of email, but the sheer volume of emails that we need to wade through each day is overwhelming. Chances are, if you’re getting 300 emails in a day, there are probably only 50 of them that you actually need to deal with. Email clients these days have many features that you can use to organize your messages, filter what you need and what you don’t, and even send automatic replies when appropriate. Taking some time to set up these controls can save a lot of time in the long run.

3. Delegate! There are many routine tasks that can be delegated to others. Even if your business is a one-man-show, consider hiring a virtual assistant (VA) to manage some of the day-to-day tasks so you can focus on marketing, networking and growing your business. Those 300 emails we spoke of? Your VA can filter them down to the 50 important ones for you and save you the trouble. There are countless tasks that can be outsourced very cheaply that will pay for themselves many times over in time savings.

Effective time management is not necessarily about being able to get more done; it is about controlling your schedule and getting more important things done. Work smarter – not harder!