Time management tips for business owners
Running a business (no matter its size) is complicated. Between chasing leads. You hardly have any time left to breathe when managing workers, administration, and the other dozens of activities you need to handle.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about being busy. That’s the life of a successful entrepreneur. You’ll always have a pretty packed schedule, or at least until you hire other people to do the heavy lifting for you. It would be great for your business if your time is well-managed, so you can be as productive as possible in the time you have.
This article presents the most effective time management tips for business owners. Hopefully, you can use them to help your company thrive even through the most hectic periods.
Create a day-by-day schedule
Planning your working days is essential to effective time management – whether you’re trying to grow a start-up or running a corporation. Creating a schedule allows you to structure your time and plan to prioritize activities and prevent stress.
A proper schedule structure is the backbone of a well-planned work week. You can download a template and fill the days with tasks you need to complete. This is a good strategy for both you and your team, as it gives equal weight to each day and prevents your schedule from getting cluttered.
Dive into deep work
Deep work is a technique that implies training your attention to ignore distractions and focusing on tasks. To adopt it, you must be able to carve out time when no other activities (staff meetings, product presentations, corporate events) require your attention to be able to concentrate on the issue at hand.
Schedule deep work in your weekly program, and support your intentions to commit to it by blocking all interruptions or distractions that may bother you. Hang a Do Not Disturb sign on your office door and use email and message auto-reply to help you apply the time-management strategy.
Create a to-do list to prioritise work
A classic time management strategy implies creating a to-do list of the things you want and need to complete by the end of each workday. It’s wise to organise the activities according to their priority. The most important and urgent tasks should be placed at the top of the list, and the postponable ones at the bottom. However, it’s best to keep the to-do list as short as possible because a long one would only make you feel overwhelmed and stressed out. After all, you have too much to do. Time management specialists recommend keeping a daily to-do list down to a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 6 activities.
Use a template that allows you to check the tasks you completed to keep track of what you accomplish and what you need to postpone for the next day.
Use the time-blocking strategy
Time blocking is another popular time management method that many entrepreneurs use. It’s a practice that requires you to chunk out your tasks into dedicated time sections. This technique is the opposite of multitasking, where you split your attention across multiple tasks simultaneously. Time-management experts think that when you focus on an activity at a time, you dedicate your attention to getting it done more effectively.
Schedule the times of the day when you want to time-block your activities so you have the hours available. It doesn’t mean that you need to assign these tasks to the first things on your to-do list. However, if you’re a morning person, you may prefer to handle them before noon.
Hire a virtual assistant
Working with a virtual assistance provider allows you to delegate tasks to a specialist who has the knowledge and availability to complete them better than you. Virtual assistants are dedicated, talented experts who work remotely with entrepreneurs to help them free their agenda to focus on the activities that require their attention.
Collaborating with a professional virtual assistance company helps you grow your business. Whether you’re a business manager or start-up founder, you can hire a VA to help you enjoy a better work-life balance.
Identify distractors
Everyone is prone to getting side-tracked from achieving goals, primarily due to the digital distractions from modern life. It’s quite challenging to stay focused, don’t you think? More and more things claim your attention too often and prevent you from completing your tasks. You may have too many internet pages open that catch your attention and drift you off your business program. Or maybe your phone is continually flashing and buzzing from the several messages you receive.
Try to spot the distractors that repeatedly capture your attention, so you can take steps to eliminate them. Set your phone on silent while you work, close the internet tabs you don’t need to get work done, and put on your headphones if there is too much noise in the office. You can listen to a playlist of hours of utter silence in your headphones that muffle the disturbing noises from around you.
Over time these habits become automatic, and you’ll no longer have to force them upon you.
Take time to recharge
Time management specialists agree that productivity requires both hard work and rest. If your job requires working long hours daily, rest periods are essential. Charles Darwin, for example, napped every afternoon and took outdoor walks during the day to recharge his batteries. Relaxing and alleviating stress are effective time-management strategies.
Manage the time you spend at the office. Take a five-minute break for every hour spent working in front of a computer. Little and often breaks are the best when you want to maintain your performance because they make you feel refreshed.
Add periods of deliberate rest to your daily schedule to give you time to reflect on your goals, allow your brain to make connections between the things you observed during the day, and form new ideas. It’s OK to take your foot off the gas from time to time because it enables you to accomplish great things.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the above tips can help you better manage your precious work time. Are you ready to give them a try?