Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners

Time management is the management of the time spent, and progress made, on project tasks and activities. The goal of time management is to reduce the distractions which lower the number of tasks a business owner completes.

How can use time management strategies for business success?

The number one benefit of time management is more business, which means more income. Time management will allow you to be more focused on key tasks, be more organized, have less stress, and have more time for family, friends, and other hobbies. Follow these guidelines to get started!

Create a Project Plan
Plan Ahead
- Assign a time estimate to complete each task from your project plan
- Ensuring that you have enough time to deliver a high-quality product, or service, should always be a top priority.
Built in flexibility
- Avoid filling every hour of the day with tasks. Leave plenty of unscheduled time for flexibility.
Select a tool for planning your daily and weekly time. Example tools include organizers, day planners, software applications (with mobile apps), and spreadsheets.
Create a schedule and implement the 40/40/20 Time Management Rule: 40% on your product/service, 40% on selling and marketing, and 20% on internal operations.
- Daily schedule: Each day you will be working toward accomplishing a list of tasks. Don’t forget about ongoing business functions that are not directly related to a goal, like daily meetings and stand-ups
- Weekly schedule: List the tasks that need to be completed each day to create a five-day time management plan. List the tasks in priority order for each day. These tasks will give you the greatest return toward your goals.
- Monthly schedule: At the end of the third week of the month, assess your progress toward your monthly and quarterly goals. Ask yourself if you need to make adjustments to meet your monthly and quarterly goals.
- Yearly schedule: As you enter the last quarter of the year, use all of your weekly time management plans to start reviewing your overall progress toward your annual goals. Assess yourself and start identifying your quarterly and annual goals for the next year.

Tips to help you with time management

Checkout some other ways you can use to manager your time and your employees time more efficiently.

Automate parts of your business like automatically send emails, book meetings, remind yourself to email customers, etc.
Minimize distractions and limit access to time wasters. Use apps like Focus Booster or Rescue Time to help employees focus and concentrate to stay on task.

Utilize software such as Paymo and Toggl to track employee time usage, time spent on different types of work activities or projects and billable hours.
Set expectations for a reasonable amount of time to complete certain types of activities or tasks. Offer incentives for meeting or exceeding those expectations.
Schedule business activities and encourage employees to adhere to the daily or weekly schedule.
Schedule meetings. Make it clear that you expect participants to be on time, to stick closely to a meeting agenda and to wrap up at the appointed time.
Avoid multitasking. Recent psychological studies have shown that multi-tasking does not actually save time. In fact, the opposite is often true.
Take care of yourself. The care and attention you give yourself is an important investment of time. Scheduling time to relax, or do nothing, can help you rejuvenate both physically and mentally, enabling you to accomplish tasks more quickly and easily.
Say no. You’re the boss. If you have to decline a request in order to attend to what’s truly important and urgent, do not hesitate to do so.

Why is time management important?

“Time is money,” true? If your business runs out of money, you always have the opportunity to get more. Once time is past you can never get that time back nor can you add more hours to a day. Poor time management can cost you and your business tremendous amounts of money. Realize, however, that the better you manage your time the more money you can earn. With time management, business owners maximize how much they get done each working day. Having a written time management plan serves as a guide for working smarter instead of harder.

Pro Tip

Plan the night before. At the end of the day, take 15 minutes to clear your work space, update your daily task list - and cross of what you accomplished. Celebrate everything you have done, little victories matter! Then, put together a list of the next day’s most pressing tasks. It’s a great decompression technique, and you’ll feel better sitting down at a clean desk in the morning. The next morning, arrive a few minutes early and assemble your prioritized to-do list. This may prove to be the most productive part of your day.