To be a successful Christian entrepreneur, you must incorporate effective time management into your daily routines.

There is one critical component to building a profitable home business and we all have an equal amount of it.

And that component is TIME.

Ephesians 5:15 & 16 says: “Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil.” (NASV)

“Make the most of your time . . .” Very interesting command, wouldn’t you agree? Of course, we would need to look at this in context to find out what He means here “because the days are evil.”

But for the purposes of this post, let’s just focus in on “making the most of your time.”

Time, however, can often elude us.

A quick look at our emails sends us on a mission to solve a client’s problem. What is intended to be a quick check in on facebook ends up with an interesting blog post getting clicked on.

If you struggle with focusing and prioritizing your time,  here are some easy strategies to help you become more laser-focused with your time in building your home business.

Four Effective Time Management Tips to Help You Increase your Productivity:

1. Clearly write out (yes, on paper!) what you do that is the most valuable part of building your home business. Document at least five key things on this “A List.”

These are the things that will bring in more prospects and clients. If you truthfully don’t know what these are, go look at your most recent 20 new clients and reflect on how you got connected to that client. However you got them (and many of them will be through the same avenue), then be sure that is on your list to do more of.

2. List 10 low-value activities that take up a lot of your time. The key word here is “low-value.” Learn to delegate, minimize, and control the time these low value items take up, so you can focus on the high value ones.

For instance, if you spend an hour a week on twitter but have not gotten any business from your twitter activities, then that is a low-value activity. Be sure you are using social media systems to streamline your posting. I use Social Pilot which has made my social media time much more productive. There are others too, like Hootsuite, so check them all out to see what meets your needs the best.

3.  Carve out blocks of time of 45 to 90 minutes where you refuse any distraction, including the phone, so you can accomplish high value work from your “A list.” You might even find it helpful to set a timer.

After that concentrated time of work, take a 10-15 minute break. Go outside, breathe deeply, do some jumping jacks, enjoy a snack. Be proactive to rest your mind from the work you have been doing.

4. Put controls on your email. Don’t have your email set up as your home page. Set up specific times to check and deal with email. Email can be a great deceiver – making you think you are accomplishing something, while it is actually distracting you from your work.

The same guidelines can be used for facebook too.

I think email and facebook are my biggest time holes, largely because I can get notification of business through these venues – so I check them often. But is that really the best use of my time? It would be much better to batch time on email and facebook so I can stay focused on my “A” list.

If you had a bank account that credited your account with $86,400 every morning with no balance carried over to the next day each and every day, what would you do with that money?

Guess what? You do have such a bank. It is time.

Every morning you are credited with 86,400 seconds. Every night it rules off as “lost” whatever you didn’t use toward good purposes. It carries over no balances and allows no overdrafts. You can’t hoard it, save it, store it, loan it, or invest it.

You can only use it.

This is why it is so vital to learn effective time management in building your home business.

What safeguards have you built into your workday to help you be the most productive you can be while you fulfill your purpose in life?