Time management tips for small business owners

CEO, manager, HR, receptionist… Having your own business often means wearing many hats. When there aren’t enough hours in the day, try these time management tips to make multitasking easier.

Plan your week ahead

Planning your week is the key to good time management – whether you’re a one-person business working from home, or a growing start-up. Creating a schedule for your week allows you to plan ahead and structure your time so that you can prioritise and re-prioritise tasks – all while cutting down on your stress levels, to boot.

Deadlines and urgent jobs should define how you organise tasks across your week. For example, if you’ve got a big deliverable on Thursday, make the days leading up to it production days, and leave non-urgent but important tasks like admin and meetings for Friday. Be ready to reorganise your schedule if priorities suddenly change, too. Think of it as a ‘Plan A’ or a work in progress rather than something set in stone.

1. Group tasks by project or type

One of the most effective time management strategies when it comes to planning your week is to group tasks. It can be helpful to arrange similar or related activities together on a single day, so that you’re not hopping from one thing to another, and can focus on the specific goals you need to achieve. 

For example, you might dedicate a whole day to working on marketing tasks like social media and writing your newsletter, as the tasks will relate to each other and you can apply your creative flow to several things at once. Keep in mind this time management approach works for methodical jobs too. You might spend an afternoon doing invoices, which will be quicker in a batch because the same steps are repeated and you’ll get faster as you go along.

2. Create a day-by-day schedule

A proper structure is the backbone of a planned week, and there are lots of ready-made templates available online which you can download and fill in to itemise your days. These can work for individuals or whole teams. A good template should give equal weight to each day, and have enough space to write a few words about each task or target – not too much though, or it just becomes cluttered.

If you’re a one-person business and you like to plan on paper, you could start using a Notebook to keep track of your week and make sure your schedule is always at hand.

3. Plan for distraction

It’s not realistic to plan productivity and focus for every hour of every day, so don’t set yourself up to fail. The best time management systems are all about balance! Instead, expect to be distracted, disrupted and confronted by unexpected challenges and opportunities. When you’re planning for the week ahead, add ‘interruption time’ – a proportion of the day when you don’t expect to spend every moment getting work done.

So although your office hours might be 9 til 5 with an hour for lunch, you can realistically deduct an hour from the total. Don’t think of that as wasted time, however – what feels like a frustrating delay will help you refresh your mind and might even be the moment inspiration strikes.

4. Dive into deep work

The idea of deep work is that you’re consciously focusing on your task and training your attention away from distractions. To achieve that, you need to be able to carve out time when you’ll be free of meetings and other commitments, able to focus fully on one task.

Put time for deep work into your weekly schedule, and support your intentions by blocking this time off from distractions and interruptions. A ‘do not disturb’ sign and an email auto-reply are a good start to apply this time management strategy.

Organise your day’s work

What does a typical work day look like for small business owners? A common answer is that there is no typical day – various and exciting activities are a hallmark of life as an entrepreneur. That doesn’t mean you can’t organise your time, however. A daily plan is valuable even if it changes, as it can help you keep track of priorities, deadlines and your progress on longer-term goals. As with your weekly approach, the trick is to have a fluid schedule that can flex and adapt to new things, rather than a rigid timetable.

Here are a few more time management tips to help you plan how to spend your day.

1. Keep priorities in check with a to-do list

A time management classic, the to-do is a list of the things you want or need to get done within your day, organised according to priority. The most urgent and important things should be at the top, and less important or postponable things towards the bottom. But keep in mind, a long to-do list will just cause you unnecessary stress. Some experts recommend keeping a daily to-do list down to 6 items, and others advise as few as 3.

To keep track of what you accomplish during the day, use a checklist and tick off what you’ve completed as you go along. You can even make your very own tailor-made to-do list in your MOO Notebook.

2. Target your efforts with time-blocking

Time blocking is a time management technique that many small business owners find useful. It’s the practice of chunking out your work into dedicated sections of time – the opposite of multitasking, where attention is spread inefficiently across multiple activities at once. The idea is that by focusing on one thing at a time, you can dedicate attention and energy to each task and get it done more quickly and to a higher standard.

To time-block your day, you need to schedule the hours you have available and assign them to items in your to-do list. For effective time management, you won’t necessarily do the most important thing on the list first thing in the morning. Instead, you should assign your top task to the part of the day when you know you’ll be most productive. If you’re a morning person, that could be first thing. If you’re a night-owl, late afternoon might be when you really hit your stride.

If you tend to feel sleepy after lunch – most of us do –, spend that time doing necessary but low-effort things like paperwork or timesheets.

3. Separate daily and weekly planning

This is a good habit to start effective time management. It’s important to know the difference between a daily and weekly schedule, as each one is valuable to your business in its own way. Your daily schedule will include ‘business as usual’ goals like answering emails and phone calls, attending daily team stand-ups and other routine tasks. They take up time during your day and need to be accounted for, but you don’t need to put them on a weekly planner.

Your weekly schedule gives you a wider view of your work life and allows you to manage tasks across the week. What happens in your daily schedule can impact the weekly one – for example if you need to roll a task over from one day to another because it took longer than planned to achieve.

3 productivity tips for good time management

We’ve all had those days where we look up at 4pm and say ‘where did the time go? I’ve got deadlines approaching!’ To keep those moments to a minimum, here are some ways to establish good time management.

1. Recognise your distractors

We’re all prone to getting side-tracked from our goals, and thanks to the digital distractions of modern life, staying focused is more challenging than ever. Notice the things that claim your attention most often. It could be having too many interesting browser tabs open on your screen, so that you drift off-task and start reading a blog or news story. Or it may be that your phone is taking your mind off work by flashing or vibrating each time you get a message in a group chat.

Once you’ve spotted the things that are repeatedly stealing your attention, you can take steps to eliminate them until you accomplish your task. Throw your phone in a drawer, close every tab except the one you need for your work task, or put on headphones if you’re tempted to spend time chatting. Over time, good habits like these will become automatic.

2. Be wary of trying to do too much at once

If the things cutting your productivity down are less to do with losing focus and more to do with interruption, you might be spreading yourself too thin. It’s common for people heading up growing businesses to have a lot of competing demands on their time. Being busy is good, but it’s important to be aware that you could reach a point where you’re tiring yourself out but not achieving the results to justify it.

Remind yourself to notice the difference between being stressed and busy and being highly productive. A good time management system should help you relieve stress and make things more…manageable. Look at what you achieved as well as how hard you’ve worked, and make sure you’re getting the positive outcomes you deserve for your effort. Managing a small business can be incredibly stressful. Resolving to work smarter rather than harder can also make you feel more in control and is better for your mental health.

3. Take time to recharge

On a similar note, it’s true that productivity requires rest as well as hard work. If your schedule involves a few hours work and several periods of rest, you’re in company with some of the greatest achievers in history. Charles Darwin, for example, required an afternoon nap and took leisurely walks outdoors during a work day. It proved an effective time management technique!

Manage your time spent in front of a screen – you should be taking a screen break of five or ten minutes every hour, according to the UK Government’s Health and Safety Executive. Little and often is the best way to take breaks, as this will help you feel more refreshed. Some periods of deliberate rest during your work schedule will give you the time and space to reflect on your goals, develop ideas and allow your brain to make new connections between things you’ve learned or observed. Don’t be afraid to take your foot off the gas – you could accomplish great things on a day when you thought you were chilling out doing nothing.

How to boost your efficiency

What is efficiency?

Isn’t efficiency the same thing as productivity? In fact, they’re very different, and can even work against each other at times. To put it simply:

• Productivity is about the volume of work you produce, and efficiency is about the quality of that work. So if your company makes cookies, your productivity is the number of items you can bake in a day.
• Efficiency is how delicious they are when your customer bites into them, how much energy it took to bake them, or how much you had to spend on ingredients to get great results.

It probably goes without saying that productivity and efficiency are both essential for any business, and they can have a strong impact on one another. The idea of productive efficiency is used in some businesses, meaning that the two things are measured at once. In these scenarios the managers are measuring the total number of products completed in a given time, and deducting inefficient products from that total. So if some products fall below a certain quality threshold, they’re not counted.

This is easiest to understand in a manufacturing situation, where a business has physical products that can pass or fail. But it can apply on a small scale too, including companies that provide services rather than products. The key to measuring efficiency this way is to define a quality standard that you want to stick to, whether it’s customer satisfaction, timely delivery or reviews and ratings. If your units of work (be it projects, products or something else) don’t meet the standard, they’re ignored.

How can I be more efficient?

Improving efficiency is a strategic job that often means slowing down and taking a step back from your work. If you’re interested in making efficiency your superpower, start looking at the way you’re doing things and seeing where you can make improvements to your methods, habits and behaviours to get better results.

One example that applies to entrepreneurs in all walks of life is sleep. Getting a solid 8 or 9 hours sleep every night can improve your concentration, motivation, mood and ability to learn. If you’re a one-person business, prioritising sleep is a way of optimising your most valuable resource – yourself. You can make your brain more efficient by giving it enough sleep, so that the quality of the work you do is high, it takes fewer hours, and you have more time for your passion projects.

From a time management perspective, your goals will be to achieve the best quality work you can within your deadlines – and with any luck, upping your productivity at the same time. Here are some ways you can boost efficiency in a small business:

1. Avoid multitasking

It might feel necessary, but resist the urge to hop between multiple activities during the working day as much as possible. It takes time to refocus on a task when you switch to and from it, so try to chunk work into organised blocks as much as you can. Time-blocking wins again!

2. Optimise your environment

Make sure your workspace is geared for focus by minimising distractions, noise and stress. Have your workstation – or workstations – set up for comfortable, sustainable posture and freedom of movement. Organise people, tools and materials physically in your workspace so that it’s easy to get tasks done without rearranging everything and everyone. It’s all about saving time and effort.   

3. Delegate tasks to others

If you manage a team, use them wisely. Chances are, you don’t actually need to be in every single meeting! Be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses as well as theirs, so you can assign tasks that take up too much of your time to someone who can do them faster. This applies to specialism and experience too. If you have a statistics whiz on your team, they’re the person who should be tackling your website analytics, not the business owner whose time is better spent on leadership strategy or creative development. Assigning the right people to the right jobs is key to employee productivity. If you work alone, consider hiring a freelancer or partnering with someone who could help lighten your workload and bring new skills to the table.

4. Use technology to automate

Automating routine tasks will do wonders for your work life. Using chatbots to answer customer service queries, or employing software to handle bookings and sales, is a great time-saver for busy humans.

Hopefully our time management tips will help you to make the most of your precious work hours. Ready to make your weekly schedule? Treat yourself to a beautiful new Notebook for all your creative projects and daily to-dos.