Catering isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, where you spend your day lazily preparing food in your posh catering equipment, followed by service to fat nobles.  As a caterer or restaurant owner, your days are hectic and packed to the gills with things that need to get done – but never seem to get done.

You’ve probably invested in time management books, read articles, blogs and even watched shows on time management.  Unfortunately most of those didn’t apply to your business, right?  You need catering tips on time management, not time management tips on how to garden while cooking.

Throw out everything you’ve learned about time management in the past and stick with what is going to work for your business.

Before you can even begin to manage time, you must learn what time is. A dictionary defines time as “the point or period at which things occur.” Put simply, time is when stuff happens.

There are two types of time: clock time and real time. In clock time, there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. All time passes equally. When someone turns 50, they are exactly 50 years old, no more or no less.

In real time, all time is relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you’re doing. Two hours at the department of motor vehicles can feel like 12 years. And yet our 12-year-old children seem to have grown up in only two hours.

The reason why most tips don’t work is because they’re designed to help you manage clock time, but the problem for you is that in the catering business, when you’re knee dip in soup and chafing dishes, clock time is irrelevant.  You don’t live in clock time, you live in real time.  This is the world in which time flies by you faster than you can say “plate up”.

Real time exists within, it’s mental and you create it.  Anything you create, you can manage.  As an entrepreneur, you are often interrupted while trying to get through your day but you still get to decide on how your day is spent.  Practice the following tips and you can become a master of your own time while juggling rolls, servers and catering events.

1. Carry a schedule with you to record your thoughts, conversations, and activities during your normal operations.  This shows you how much you can get done during your day and where you’re losing time to other things.  Once you can see where your time is going you can restructure your day to minimize recurring interruptions and be proactive in managing your time.

2. If an activity is important to the success of your catering business, liking marketing, then it should have time assigned to it.  If you work by to-do lists they’ll just keep getting longer to the point that they are unworkable.  Create blocks of time for the priority projects around catering events and put up barriers to interruptions.  Schedule a start and end time, and have the discipline to keep your appointments.

3. Make a plan to spend at least 50% of your time engaged in thoughts, activities and conversations that produce results.  If something doesn’t produce results – or anything for that matter – it’s a waste of your time.

4. This might sound strange, but you need to schedule time for interruptions.  Plan time for being pulled away or putting out fired.  For example, setting up a time block for “office hours and administration” is another way of blocking out time for “planned interruptions”.

5. Take a block of time each morning to plan your day.  The time will flow better and you won’t be as frantic trying to keep up with things or remember what you need to do next to get a planned event under way.  The most important time in your day is the time you schedule to schedule time.  Worry about the catering equipment later.

6. Take a few minutes before every interaction and decide what result you want to attain.  This is especially true for sales calls and client meetings when you’re booking catering events.  Once the interaction is done, take 5 minutes to review and determine if the result was what you wanted.

7. When you absolutely cannot be interrupted, don’t be afraid to close out the world with a “do not disturb” sign.

8. When the phone rings and the email goes off, ignore it.  Practice letting it go to voicemail, and ignoring your email when the notify goes off.  Disconnect instant messaging. Don’t instantly give people your attention unless it’s absolutely crucial in your business to offer an immediate human response. Instead, schedule a time to answer email and return phone calls.

9. Block out regular distractions like social media unless you’re using those tools to connect with customers and promote catering specials (on a planned schedule of course)

10. Remember that is impossible for you to get everything done all at once, so it’s pointless to stress over it and try to schedule everything in right now.