5 Time Management Tips for Business Owners
Develop these skills and ease your path to success
When you’re a business owner, how you manage your time is critical for different reasons. First, you are contributing value to your company and helping generate revenue in your activities. You’re directly impacting your businesses’ profitability.
At the same time, you’re also setting an example for the people around you. You’re dictating your company culture in many ways by your own actions, including the ways you manage your time.
Your goal as a business owner should be focusing on the tasks that are most important within your business, and in order to do that, you have to strategize when it comes to time management. Consider the following tips for time management if you’re juggling a business.
1. Create a Prioritized List
You can’t do everything in a day, week, or even a month. What you can do is set up prioritized to-do lists. You can make a daily prioritized to-do list and also think a little farther out to the coming weeks. Start with the highest-value activities first, the ones that are most-time sensitive, and the ones that require the most focus on your part.
If you have to deal with an unexpected situation, you know you can take on your most high-priority tasks and maybe leave the others for later. You’re giving yourself some flexibility when you prioritize what needs to be done.
2. Log Your Time
There are a lot of different methods you can utilize to manage your time more effectively, but the foundation of many of these is having a clear understanding of where you’re spending the most time and where you can make changes. Spend several weeks where you log the time you’re spending on different tasks throughout your day.
Cut out the unnecessary ones, and set time limits for yourself on others. For example, you could use the Pomodoro time management technique. With this, you spend 25 minutes focus solely on one task. You then take a five-minute break and move to the next.
3. Stop Multitasking
As a business owner and entrepreneur, you may feel like your day is filled with multitasking. You may think it’s the best way to get a lot done, but in reality, your performance is likely suffering.
If you are multitasking, you’re more likely to be sloppy in your work or make mistakes that need to be fixed later, which ultimately means you’re wasting time. Stop multitasking and instead focus on small, manageable tasks. Get one task done before you do the next.
4. Outsource Unnecessary Tasks
It’s natural when you own a business to want to hang on to control in most areas, but you have to learn to delegate. Start with the tasks that you spend time on each day but that you don’t have to be the one doing. For example, maybe you outsource bookkeeping or social media management. Perhaps you hire a virtual assistant to go through your emails and help you prioritize how to respond to those if you don’t have an onsite employee who can do the work.
5. Business Owner: Use Technology
Finally, there is a wealth of software at your disposal that can help you manage your own time, and also communicate and delegate more efficiently. Take advantage of it, as well as automation whenever possible.
For example, if you start using task management software, you may be more inclined to delegate because you can see what’s going on, who’s doing what, and how everyone is progressing on tasks and projects. If you tend to be overloaded with appointments, then utilize Opustime, an online appointment and client management software. Using the technology available to you will help tremendously.
Business owners can feel like they’re pulled in many directions, and they often are. However, just as you have a plan for your business, create a strategy and plan for your time and how you spend it every day.
About the Author:
Marla DiCarlo is an accomplished business consultant with more than 28 years of professional accounting experience. As co-owner and CEO of Raincatcher, she helps business owners learn how to sell a business so they can get paid the maximum value for their company.
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