🕐 Read Time 5 Minutes

Effective time management is a great way to enhance your business’s productivity, profits, and overall success. Time is money (so they say) and learning how to manage this powerful resource will serve you personally and professionally. 

As a small business owner, your team, money, and time need to be completely optimized — especially in those lean, scrappy years. Small leaks in your budget or wasted minutes of your employee’s time can cost you greatly. 90% of employees have admitted to wasting time on the clock and 20% of adults admit to being chronic procrastinators (not very encouraging statistics for small business owners). 

Ensuring that all of your resources are being maximized to their full potential is an essential part of managing your business well. Time management also helps you adapt to the ever-changing business environment, allowing you to keep up with new challenges and embrace new opportunities.

We want to share some of our favorite time management hacks that help keep our business (and personal lives) running smoothly and efficiently. 

4 Time Management Tips for Business Owners

Here are our top four actionable time management tips for small business owners: 

1. Utilize the 10-minute timer. 

2. Set crystal clear deadlines. 

3. Find valuable time management tools. 

4. Remove distractions. 

These can be implemented in your business, shared with your employees, or even used at home with your children. 

1. Utilize the 10-minute timer. 

This hack is definitely one of our favorites because it’s so easy to implement and can be utilized in many different areas of life. Start by creating a list of things that only take ten minutes to accomplish, such as replying to an email, drafting an invoice, writing a review for another business, responding to comments on your business's social media page, or re-engaging with a past client. Or if you’re at home, emptying the dishwasher, vacuuming the kitchen, folding a load of laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. 

Then, whenever you have a short period between meetings or scheduled events, grab your list and knock out a task! Having this list handy helps you immediately know what you can do and can help prevent you from grabbing your phone and mindlessly scrolling for ten minutes. 

2. Set crystal clear deadlines. 

I’m sure you don’t regularly get in your car and start driving without a destination in mind. Similar to knowing where you’re driving your car, you should always know where you’re headed in your business. 

Setting specific goals with relevant, realistic deadlines can help you boost your productivity and manage your time. Having a mix of short, medium, and long-term goals can help you stay focused and help your team optimize business productivity. Consider these different goals: 

• Long-term goals: These are things you’d like to achieve within the next year — such as increasing the number of clients you serve, increasing your monthly profit by 10%, increasing website traffic, or expanding your services. 

• Medium-term goals: These are tasks you’d like to achieve this month such as posting on social media eight times, emailing past clients to check in, or hiring a marketing agency to help you increase your search engine rankings. 

• Short-term- goals: These are tasks that you’d like to accomplish this week. Once you have this list created, you and your team can break down the tasks and assign them to specific days. 

Having a long-term vision of where you’d like to go will help clarify what you should be doing in the next hour, day, week, month, and year. Share your big goals with your employees and ask them about their own goals and dreams. Oftentimes we feel stagnant when we don’t know where we’re heading on a larger scale. 

3. Find valuable time management tools. 

Having the right resources and processes in place can drastically help increase your productivity and efficiency. These are just a few of the many valuable tools to help you and your team stay on track. 

• Calendly: Ditch emailing back and forth to schedule time with someone and send them a link instead! You can set recurring available times and update your availability as needed each week. You can also create different types of meetings — further enhancing your productivity. If you just need a quick chat with someone, send them a link for a 15-minute virtual coffee meeting or if you need a longer, more formal meeting, send the link for a 60-minute meeting. 

• Todoist: This application helps you create to-do lists, prioritize your tasks, and schedule your to-dos. It’s also great for teams because you can easily share projects and deadlines. 

• Toggl: This app makes it easy to track your and your employee's time, giving you valuable insight into everyone’s workflow. Tracking can be broken down into different projects so you can see exactly how long a particular task or project is taking. 

• A stellar project management software. There are many incredible project management and team collaboration software such as Notion, Trello, Airtable, Asana, etc. They all come with various pricing, features, and ease of use.

The important part is that you choose one and actually implement it to its full potential in order to optimize your and your team's productivity. 

• Embrace automation. We are all about automation because truthfully, it makes our lives easier and frees up our brain space for more detailed, creative thinking. You can automate emails, social media posts, and reminders to keep your workflow moving swiftly. 

4. Remove distractions. 

You can have all the right tools, processes, and deadlines in place and still find it difficult to manage your time if you fail to eliminate distractions. These pesky little time-wasters can derail all your best intentions so it’s important to find out what your biggest distractions are and how you can work to eliminate them (or at least manage them). 

Try these tips to help you and your team remove distractions: 

• Tune out the noise. Turning off notifications during a focused work period can help eliminate unwanted distractions. You can set up “do not disturb” or specific notifications so that you’re not getting non-urgent emails, text messages, social media updates, or phone calls during an intense work session. 

Set up specific times to check your phone and email and reply during those times only. Also, be mindful of when you’re communicating with your employees so you’re not disrupting their workflow. 

• Create space. Your environment can have a huge impact on your productivity. If your desk, office, or even email is cluttered, you can become easily distracted. Take some time to clear your inbox, organize your workspace, and create a space that fosters creativity and productivity. 

• Give yourself a break. We all need a brain break throughout the day. Setting up an intentional period where you take a walk, brew a cup of coffee, play a game on your phone, or simply meditate can help boost your productivity. The key is to make sure this break is intentional, scheduled, and managed well. Put it in your calendar and set a time limit so you’re maximizing your time. 

Learn More Small Business Hacks with Financial Fitness Coaching

Time management hacks are just one of the many aspects of entrepreneurship that we enjoy talking about. Cash flow management, budgeting, delegating… the team at Financial Fitness Coaching is ready and excited to help you conquer it all! 

There are four main ways for small business owners to work with us, an intensive strategy deep dive session, our path to profitability signature course, our group coaching program, or our 1:1 highly customized, regular financial coaching. To see how we can help you and your business, send us an email at info@financialfitnesscoaching.com or simply schedule a free 20-minute Discovery Call on our calendar.