If you make your living by owning your own business (whatever market the business is in), you have probably said to yourself at some time or another “I need better time management skills!” Here are five steps to help you master time management:

1. Make friends with the list. The list is going to be your best friend. Every day, before you leave work (or put work away for the day) make a list of everything that you want to accomplish the next day.

2. Make a habit of writing everything down in a central location. We all love post-its, but think about investing in an inexpensive notebook. Keeping everything in one place will save you a lot of time later. If you prefer to categorize things, you can easily copy notes from this notebook into other places (a message center, a calendar, etc). Writing it down again will only reinforce it in your memory.

3. Develop a “two seconds now or two hours later” attitude with mundane tasks like filing. Do the tiny tasks (putting a file away, crossing items off of a list, etc) as soon as they arise. This will keep them from piling up.

4. Piles are the enemy. Whether it is a stack of information for a project you want to work on, a pile of messages you need to read, etc. Don’t get into the habit of letting the piles build up. Create a space for everything.

5. Label everything. The piles we talked about in step four? Create files or boxes for them and label the boxes. Labels will save you a ton of time later on when you are trying to find something. Why open three filing drawers and six boxes when you can simply stand back and scan a list of labels?

As you work, you will develop your own time management tricks, but these steps should help you get started.