1. Prioritize

Any successful person will tell you, one of the fundamental keys to success in business and as a matter of fact in anything, is learning to establish priorities and living by them.

A priority is the principal thing on which one places his or her primary focus. It is the thing we consider to be of highest value and worth, first among all others.

This means ranking everything in order of importance. Determing which is most important and then focusing your time, attention and energy there -this will help increase productivity.

Essentially, your success boils down to the issue of how efficiently and effectively you use your time. Learning to establish priorities, or to put first things first, is critical key to effective time management.

2. Don't Start Your Day With Email

Oops! I know right? Who doesn't start their day with email? that's the first thing everybody opens first right? Oops! I know right? Who doesn't start their day with email? that's the first thing everybody opens first right?

And I know all of us, including me, are guilty of this attrocity!!

But you know the power of email is that it has the ability to drive and take control of your entire morning if not your entire day.

You suddenly find yourself spending a large portion of your time reading and responding to email, which is not a bad thing, but remember - PRIORITIZE.

You need to develop a culture of scheduling your tasks every morning and email should have its own slot or slots.

3. Keep It All Mobile And Schedule Time To Catch Up

As a small business owner, one of the things you quickly discover is that you are required to be in many places at different times. So your desk doesn't always have you all the time but you must be on top of things and you cannot wait until you get back to your desk to catch up and keep all the moving parts oiled.

Your mobile device, therefore, is going to be with you all the times and you are going to try to use it as your central hub for everything.

Make sure you have all the necessary Apps installed and organised to keep you always connected to your office all the time.

Thanks to the world of smart devices, you can even beat the stress of travelling for business with this nifty car desk that helps you be organized.

The RoadMaster Car Auto Desk offers you, as a small business traveller, a way to get organized and be productive while on the road.

To increase productivity, a quality auto desk in your car can make a big difference in your work performance while in the field.

4.Stop having Everlasting Meetings

Meetings can be the biggest waste of time ever. The purpose of meetings is usually to get feedback and to give direction on key issues of the business.

My background is software development and during the development cycle of a project, we would have what is called a "SCRUM Meeting".

Scrum is a management and control process that cuts through complexity to focus on building software that meets business needs. Anyway, our focus in these meetings was to basically answer 3 questions: What I did yesterday, what I will do today, what impedes me; and we'd have these meetings for 15 minutes while standing up.

One way to speed up a meeting is to do it standing up. People seem to magically get their point across quickly when they are not lounging around a boardroom table.

5. Use Your Free Or Wait Time Appropriately

When you are offsite, and you will be, you'll generally find yourself with a lot of wait time:

* Waiting to meet a prospect or client

* standing in line for coffee