Six strategies for entrepreneurs: how to get time on your side: (and off your back).

The dream: a well organized home office, with busy phone, fax and modem feeding us a steady stream of fascinating work that we attack with boundless energy - no commute, corporate costumes, irrelevant meetings, endless approval lists, or fear of downsizing.

The reality: piles of books, magazines, and unfiled papers everywhere, family and friends who now expect to interrupt us for as long as they want in the middle of the workday, a chorus of home and yard chores trying to lure us from our business tasks, and traitorous doubts about whether we'll be able to cover next month's bills (let alone save for retirement).

Managing time well always has been a major challenge for people working outside the structure and constant demands of the typical business office - and that's more true than ever in these days of accelerated living on all fronts.

But take heart: Here are six time-management strategies of proven effectiveness that are especially valuable for entrepreneurs, telecommuters and others working in non-traditional contexts.

1. Become a master delegator. Just because you're working for yourself doesn't mean you have to do everything yourself. On the contrary, before you undertake any job, make it a habit to ask yourself: Can this be delegated?

Can a subcontractor - instead of you personally - handle part of a contract? Can the final proposal be typed up by a word-processing service? Would your children (or your neighbors' children) like to earn pocket money putting the labels on all those envelopes for your mass mailing?

And, don't forget that if you delegate personal chores, you can invest the time you save on cultivating your business. One entrepreneur I know has her dry-cleaner also do her ironing and mending. Another has delegated to his cleaning person the task of washing and chopping vegetables for a big bowl of salad that lasts most of the week.

A sign on the desk of a hugely successful business owner reads, "I never do anyone else's work." The ability to delegate well frequently divides superstars from average achievers.

2. Focus on the "vital few" instead of the "trivial many." Do you know the difference between someone who's efficient and someone who's effective?

The efficient person does things right - that is, without wasted time or effort. The effective person does the right things - the ones that move her or him toward valued goals. And excellence can be defined as doing the right things right.

Every day, scores of "urgent trivialities" clamor for attention. It's all too easy to spend our time on such matters - even handling them with great efficiency - while neglecting what we truly care about.

If you're an entrepreneur or home-based worker, with a more flexible schedule and no one around to notice how you spend your time, you may feel especially susceptible to the lure of lower priorities.

Selecting your highest priorities in advance, preferably every day, is a great way to help divert the flood of trivia that threatens to wash away your time. Sit down with your daily to-do list early in the morning (or the night before) and mark your top six to nine priorities in red. As you check your list throughout the day, seeing your high priorities jump out at you in red will be a potent reminder of which activities deserve your attention.

With practice, you can learn to rank your six to nine highest priorities in a minute or less. The payoff on that minute is tremendous.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you learn to set priorities, or when you get stuck:

* Which task will give my business the greatest return on my time?

* What will happen if I don't do this task today? Who will know and who will care?

* Which task will move me farthest toward one of my long-range goals?

* Which task is most closely aligned with my highest values?

* Which task will I feel best to be rid of?

3. Set specific goals and monitor your progress. Laurence. J. Peter, Ph.D., author of "The Peter Principle" and its several sequels, has said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."

Goal setting will help you know where you're going in all areas of life. To work best, goals need to be written down in measurable terms, with quantities and time-frames. "Increase client base by at least 25 percent over the next year" will be more effective than "Find new clients."

Each week, schedule activities that relate to your goals onto your daily calendar or to-do lists. Mark some goal-related activities among every day's top priorities.

Also helpful are simple charts that tell you at a glance how far you've advanced toward your goals. Visual aids solve the principal problem most people have with goal setting: imparting goals with top-of-mind awareness and having an easy way to monitor progress. Many former organizational communicators who once developed such visual aids - barometer or speedometer charts updated in each issue of the house newsletter, for example - never think to do the same for themselves.

Management guru Tom Peters says, "What gets measured gets done." Successful medium- and large-sized businesses set and monitor goals continuously; successful entrepreneurs do, too.

4. Plan your work and work your plan. Imagine that you've bought a gorgeous ocean-view lot, and you're finally going to build your dream home. Would you turn the construction contractor loose with a map to the site, a truckload of materials, and a blank check? Wouldn't you hire an architect and have detailed plans and cost estimates drawn up before you even hired the builder?

Strangely enough, many people launch out as entrepreneurs with the equivalent of only raw land, a bunch of materials, and some capital, expecting to build a viable business. On rare occasions, this works. But the odds are not good.

You may be forced to do a written plan to get the financing you need; if not, producing a plan is still time well invested. Your plan will contain business objectives from which you'll derive your long- and medium-range goals, and from your goals you'll derive your daily high-priority tasks.

An excellent strategy is to review your plan about once a month, setting goals to work toward during the upcoming four weeks. Then, during a 45-minute to one-hour planning session at the start of each week, you can break the goals down into individual tasks and actions and schedule those onto specific days. A major yearly planning and goal-setting session would fall logically at the end of your fiscal year.

Numerous books are available that will tell you how to prepare a business plan. You also can seek help from your accountant and lawyer, from local small-business development centers, or from a consultant.

Realize and accept that your actual business will never match your plan exactly. Reality always intervenes and demands changes. But it's still true that "Failing to plan is planning to fail."

5. Create fun as part of your regular workday. When you leave typical work places behind, you also leave your team of coworkers and all the conversation, humor, moral support and plain human company they provided. By contrast, working on your own can seem lonely, cheerless and not very stimulating.

Many people find that a good way to counteract this is to incorporate elements of play into the day's most difficult tasks. This also helps to minimize potential conflicts between your rebellious inner child and your inner parent/supervisor, which conserves enormous emotional energy and therefore time. And injecting fun into your work often allows you to sidestep buried doubts and fears that can cause you to procrastinate.

Some ideas: Try doing a difficult task to music; make it into a game with different actions worth different numbers of moves forward; give yourself a prize for every hour's work you put in; challenge yourself to do it faster than ever before. The possibilities are endless; use your imagination.

6. Remember that balance is crucial. It's true: People in business for themselves frequently work longer hours than they did when they worked for someone else. And their work isn't regularly broken up by visiting coworkers, group lunches and parties, formal and informal meetings, and so on.

This means entrepreneurs need to be especially careful to balance periods of high task- and goal-orientation with periods of goal-less activity and play.

In other words, the more time you devote to pursuing specific goals - especially long-range goals where the satisfactions are deferred - the more you need to allow yourself time to laugh, daydream, ride a bike, take a hike, play with a kitten or the kids, and enjoy other activities that have nothing to do with schedules and deadlines and investing in the future of your business.

Otherwise, you risk serious burnout, depression, or substance abuse, which may lead to long periods of low or no productivity seemingly beyond your control. "Pushing yourself to rest is as important as pushing yourself to work" concluded one chronic-fatigue syndrome sufferer after he recovered.

There you have them: six ways to help you get time off your back and on your side, so you can start to merge the entrepreneurial dream with the reality. Good luck!

Ann Reeves is a writer, speaker and workshop leader in the field of time management and personal productivity based in Ojai, Calif.