The phone never stops ringing, reminders for events long forgotten pop up, and you realise you may have double-booked a meeting with your financial advisor and your potential new client. In the throes of figuring out your next steps, you find yourself wondering if all of this stress could have been avoided. With better time management skills, you would have had some peace of mind and a more efficient schedule.
Why Time Management Is a Make-or-Break Skill for Business Owners
Time management for small business owners is vital. You’re responsible for scheduling meetings, meeting deadlines, and the day-to-day management of operations. As the business owner, you’re the salesperson, the accounting department, the human resources department, and a plethora of different roles. These contribute to the unique time challenges faced by small business owners. But what is time management? Time management is the ability to adequately and strategically organize the time required to do daily tasks.
Completing all large-scale goals every day would be an impossible ask, but you can take daily steps to further those goals. This skillset is one of the best tools to help small business owners save time and increase their business’s efficiency. Being practical about time management will help boost productivity, eliminate stress, and prevent burnout. Let’s talk about how to manage time effectively as a small business owner and time management tips for small business owners working alone.
The 3 Biggest Time Drains (and How to Avoid Them)
Bad time management leads to time drains. Understanding what takes up unnecessary amounts of time and how to avoid this pattern can lead to better habits and more efficient business operations. If you are able to identify your biggest time drains, you can utilize small business productivity tips to help remedy them. There are three major time drains small business owners fall victim to: Context switching and multitasking, unstructured meetings, and reactive communications.
Context-switching & Multitasking
While it may not seem like it when you’re in the moment, context-switching and multitasking are two of the biggest time drains you can fall victim to. Spreading yourself across many tasks at a time and rapidly switching between them actually takes more time than devoting yourself to and completing them sequentially. We become less productive when multitasking, which leads to a larger loss of time that could be better spent doing other business operations.
Unstructured Meetings
No one likes sitting in a meeting that could’ve been an email. What’s worse is sitting in a meeting that you’re not entirely sure why you’re having. They take up time, are open-ended, and rarely lead to clear, concise results or goal accomplishment. To save yourself from this second time drain, avoid having unstructured meetings. Address anything that wasn’t covered or completed in the last meeting, know what this meeting’s talking points are, and what goal you intend to accomplish by having a meeting. Now, this isn’t to say all unstructured meetings are bad. If you’re working in a creative industry, they can be quite productive for ideation and brainstorming, though you should still schedule set start and end times to ensure it’s not just an open-ended ordeal that stays unproductive.
Reactive Communication (emails, DMs, etc.)
Sometimes we get an email or message that causes us to jump to reply. If we’re busy or handling other tasks, our replies may not be beneficial or productive. Reactive communication is the third biggest time drain because of this. If you find yourself reacting to messages quickly and often, odds are your communication is not effective or efficient. Reactive communication often lacks detail and clarity, and can lead to errors in business operations. Avoid doing this by setting a time to respond to messages and emails with your full attention and appropriate responses. Sometimes something urgent will come through, and fire will need to be put out. In this case, focus your attention on the crisis and address it as needed. Otherwise, it can wait until your email’s allocated time.
There are many ways to focus on time-saving for business. Batch processing is one quick technique that can help you minimize time drain. Any activities that are similar enough and can be done together are called batches. Answering emails and returning phone calls? A batch. Brainstorming and strategy planning? A batch. Focus on what tasks can be grouped together and allocate time accordingly. We will discuss this a little bit later, but setting digital boundaries like designated times where you do and don’t check your phone can also help avoid time drain, doomscrolling, and distractions.
Proven Time Management Strategies That Work
Time management doesn’t have to be confusing. There are different time blocking techniques for entrepreneurs and business owners that have been proven effective and can be implemented into your business operations. These techniques can help set a daily routine for small business owners and lower the amount of time drain they experience.
Time Blocking
Organize your schedule according to different blocks of time where you are focused on one thing. If it helps, think of it as a high school or college class schedule. For example, from 8 to 10 a.m., you focus your attention on the scheduled meetings. Then, from 11 to 1, focus on high-focus tasks that require your undivided attention. Then schedule a designated break, like lunch, where you don’t allow yourself to focus on work. Each time block scheduling is unique to the individual and can be adjusted according to the workload. Just be sure it’s not all work and you’ve allocated some time to dedicated breaks as well.
Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix is a very simple but effective tool to organize a daily schedule template for a small business owner. It sets up four quadrants to delegate, do now, delete, or schedule for later. To set it up, draw a chart with four sections. On the top left column, write “Urgent,” and on the top right, write “Not Urgent.” On the left-hand side of the chart, in row one, write “Important” and in row two write “Not Important.” From here, we can determine what’s important and in what order tasks need to be completed in the daily routine for business owners.
Quadrant 1, the top left box, is Do Now. These tasks are important and urgent and should take priority. Tackle time immediately.
Quadrant 2, the top right box, is Schedule for Later. Any tasks that are important but not urgent belong here.
Quadrant 3, the lower left box, is Delegate. These tasks are urgent but perhaps not the most important. They usually need to be done, but don’t affect the long-term goals you have.
Quadrant 4, the lower right box, is Delete. These tasks do not fit in the other three quadrants and should be considered unimportant and not urgent. If you find yourself hesitating to remove these tasks from the to-do lists, find the quadrant they could be assigned to.
80/20 Rule or The Pareto Principle
The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a time management technique that encourages you to focus more of your attention on the tasks that make the biggest impact in your business. It states that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort. Identify the 20% of tasks that drive 80% of your results, and focus your daily energy and effort on those high-impact activities.
Delegation and Automation
If you can delegate these tasks to other employees, outsource them, or find ways to automate them, you will find yourself saving time and becoming more efficient.
Set “CEO Time” Weekly to Work On the Business, Not In It
It can be very easy to fall into the mentality and habit of seeing the business from one angle. You’re in it. You’re wearing all the hats and doing different jobs to keep the business afloat. But setting aside time to remove yourself from inside the business to work on the business is beneficial. You can find things about the business you need to work on, as opposed to things you need to do to keep it running. This keeps you aware of the big picture items as opposed to the daily tasks and happenings.
Best Tools for Time Management and Productivity
Apart from strategies, what are the best time management tools for business owners? There are many different resources available to help automate and digitize tasks to help free up time for your other business operations. Keep in mind there is no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to the best resources for your business. Here’s our list of the best time management tools for small business owners.
Task Tracking:
- Asana
- Trello
Scheduling:
- Calendly
Automating Financial Tasks:
- QuickBooks
- Gusto
Reduce Meeting Times:
- Loom
How to Maintain Work-Life Balance Without Losing Control
Work-life balance is essential when learning how to avoid burnout as a small business owner. It may feel like you have to be “on” all day, every day. However, this isn’t healthy for you or the business. So what can you do? There are a few productivity hacks for overwhelmed small business owners that can help reduce stress and provide a better work-life balance.
To start off, set digital boundaries. Maybe this looks like taking weekends off, or not checking your email after 7 p.m. each day. Focus on having a set time in which you are in “work mode” and when you are in “relaxation mode.” This can be a hard adjustment, especially as a small business owner who is responsible for every aspect of the business, but taking time for yourself and setting these boundaries can only benefit you and the efficiency of the business in the long run.
Your physical well-being is just as, if not more so, important as setting digital boundaries. Prioritizing your sleep schedule, daily routines, and any non-negotiables is important. Maybe you attend a family dinner every Wednesday night or hit the gym for an hour five days a week. Whatever makes you feel fulfilled, do it. Don’t use work as an excuse to let life slip through the cracks. Aligning your time with both business and life values is essential for a healthy work-life balance.
How DeMar Consulting Group Helps Business Owners Save Time
If you’re unsure whether you’ve achieved a healthy work-life balance, set aside time each week to reflect on how you’re actually spending your time. It’s easy to assume you’re managing well, but tracking your schedule and analyzing where your hours go can reveal which areas of your life are taking over, and which ones need more attention. A good work-life balance for business owners isn’t impossible to achieve, but it does take some effort to maintain.
Our business strategy consultants will help identify your biggest time sinks and determine what kinds of outsourced operations will best work for your business. Schedule a free consultation today to see how implementing smarter systems for finance, operations, and planning, and mapping out a more productive workflow can free up more of your time so you can lead and grow your business.
