7 Time Management Tips For Small Business Owners

7 Time Management Tips For Small Business Owners

Are you constantly battling against time? 

Well, you’re facing the cold hard reality of business.

You can lose money in your business and earn it back. But losing time? When the opportunity is slipping away because of poor time management...you’re not getting it back.

This is why it is absolutely essential to guard your time like the precious thing it is. 

Below you will find seven time management tips designed for business owners like you that can be implemented today.

1 – Time Logging

Before you start with anything else, you need to compile a log of how you spend your day. 

Grab a journal or a single piece of paper and write down everything you do from the moment you get up with how long it takes. Record a full day of what you do and how long it takes you. In order for this to be successful, you need to track every single you do. 

But it is vital you do not change the way you do things throughout the day. You want to measure what a typical day for you is truly like. Local business experts K.J. Concreting reveal the success they’ve gained from using this technique, noting “we thought we were being efficient with our time. We were always busy doing work. But turns out we were doing very repetitive tasks. We found an automation service and save hours every week now”.

2 – Identify Time Wasters

Once you have a complete list of how you spend your day, you will quickly see where your time is going. 

Go through your list and create a tally of what you spend your time on and categorize it. From this point, you want to create a general percentage of how much time you spend in each of these categories. 

Your goal is to find out where you are spending too much time. General categories can include meetings, Internet usage, breaks, phone calls and general errands.

3 – The Pomodoro Technique

The pomodoro technique is an innovative time management method that requires the individual to set a timer for 25 minute increments, while you focus on a singular task. 

You then give yourself a five-minute break before beginning the next task. This technique can be customized for your specific needs and time frames. For example, you could work in 60-minute segments as opposed to 25. 

The time logging task as mixed with the Pomodoro technique works great together.

4 – Apply The 80/20 Rule

One of the most effective ways to determine where you should be spending more time on is with the 80/20 rule. 

The theory is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your tasks.  As a small business owner, you want to ensure that every single day is mostly spent working on that 20% category that will give you the greatest results. 

Continue working in this one category to ensure that you are getting the most out of your time management. You can delegate your less impactful tasks to other employees or contractors.

5 – Delegation

As a small business owner, you must rely on other individuals to ensure that everything is done. 

But at the same time, you should not give tasks to employees who are neither trained nor prepared for that specific task. 

This is one of the biggest mistakes many small business owners make. While it is essential to hire the right individuals, it is up to you to ensure they are trained properly for the job.

6 – Avoid Micromanaging Your Employees

While we are on the subject of employees, once they are trained you should avoid micromanaging them and watching over every little thing they do. If you are not careful, monitoring your employees will take out a huge chunk of your time. 

You pay your employees to do their job. So let them. And assuming you’ve hired properly, they should be able to do the task as good — or even better — than you do. If they can’t, you might have made a mistake hiring them.

If necessary, you can set a personal office away from where your employees work.

The team over at Drink Driving Defence Melbourne, have increased their productivity and the overall morale of the team by doing this. Here’s some insight management have allowed us to share — “by allowing each of our solicitors the freedom to manage their own work — without having someone constantly checking up on them — they’ve become more productive overall. They started to take more pride in their work since it belongs more to them now”.

It is essential to understand that your job as a small business owner is quite different than that of your employees. 

A strategy that the HR team at Search It Local use is to install time tracking software on the company computers. After reaching out to the head of HR, Diego Varoli, he gives us this exclusive piece of advice, saying “when your employees know that you can check what they’re doing at any time, they’ll be less inclined to waste time on Facebook. They’ll automatically work harder. In fact, we rarely check up on them. Just having it installed is enough.”

7 – Shiny Object Syndrome

Finally, one of the most essential things to avoid as a small business owner is shiny object syndrome. 

Shiny objects appear in virtually every business. They will do their best to distract you from what you’re trying to achieve. New opportunities can be exciting and wonderful, however, be sure they do not get in the way of your present goals.

Create your plan, then execute on it.

Final Thoughts

Time is the most important asset anyone can own. 

As a business owner, your job is to create more time. This means delegate your tasks, create processes, optimise systems, and spend your time on strategy and higher-level tasks.