10 Time Management Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs

If you’re a business owner, then you know by now that the entrepreneur life requires you to wear many hats.

And while this may be great experience at first, it simply isn’t sustainable if you truly want to grow.

As your business scales, so do the tasks & responsibilities. You’ll quickly begin to understand the value of time, and how just 1 or 2 hours a day can either propel you forward, or keep you stuck.

This is why effective time management is truly one of the most important skills an entrepreneur can learn. As an online business manager, my job is to help busy entrepreneurs free up time & space in their business. I coach them on how to organize their daily tasks and optimize their time.

So today, I’m sharing my top 10 time management tips for business owners like you, in hopes that this helps you breathe a little space into your day, create a better work-life balance, and ultimately grow your business.

But first, let’s talk about why time management is so important.

Why is time management important?

Effective time management is about increasing productivity and maximizing efficiency. When you’re able to reach optimal productivity, that means that your business becomes more profitable. We all strive to find the optimal point of dollars earned per hour of work, which is a strategy I help clients with daily. And when we have the right time management skills, we’re able to reach that optimal point.

Time management also helps you create a better work life balance, so that not only can you grow your business, but you can also have ample time for self-care, relaxation, and other interests outside of work.

Even the most passionate of us all can’t be focusing on work 24/7. Being intentional with our time helps us turn off the switch the end of the day and be present in other areas of life. It helps us make room for the things that recharge our batteries, because nobody can perform at their best when they’re running on an empty tank.

How do successful entrepreneurs spend their time?

Do you ever look at entrepreneurs and wonder what a typical day in their life looks like? How on earth do they do it all? A thriving business, beautiful instagram posts, consistent marketing emails, thousands of followers – and not to mention being a mother, having time for travel, or having any sort of social life. They all must be exhausted…right?

Surprisingly, no.

While some entrepreneurs certainly take the path of high-stress and long hours, the most successful of them have actually mastered the fine art of work life balance.

According to Entrepreneur.com, most successful entrepreneurs have these daily habits in common:

They have a consistent morning routine
They prioritize self care
They disengage completely in the evenings
They take breaks – on average 17 minutes of break time for every 52 minutes of work.

So please don’t fall victim to the idea that being a business owner = long days and sleepless nights. With the right time management skills and the right mindset, you too can have a thriving business AND a peaceful, balanced lifestyle.

Common time management mistakes

Before we get to time management skills, it’s important to be aware of common mistakes so you can avoid them when certain situations arise. As you grow your business, there will be temptations to make these mistakes because they all have a short-term gain. But ultimately, these types of habits leave business owners drained, burnt out, and stuck.

Here are a few of the most common mistakes I see in my work as an OBM:

Lack of planning: If you’re only looking at what’s right in front of you, you’ll constantly feel like you’re drowning in tasks. Planning your month, week and day will give you direction, help you stay consistent, and prevent overworking.
Working endlessly without a break: Have you ever spent hours fine tuning a project without even knowing? You look up at the clock, and suddenly the whole day has gotten away from you? When we don’t stop to take a break, we can quickly drain ourselves and spend unnecessary amounts of time on tasks.
Lack of flexibility: While it’s important to schedule & plan your day, it’s equally as important to be flexible with your time. When urgent or unexpected situations arise, the ability to shift your priorities around is key. For example, let’s say you had planned to work on a project on Tuesday, but a potential client wants to meet at that time. It’s probably a better idea to take the potential client call and be able to shift your project work to accommodate.
Inability to manage distractions: In the age of the pandemic and working from home, distractions are all around us – chatting with your partner about dinner plans, switching the laundry when you hear the cycle finish, answering a text when we hear our phone vibrate. Human beings aren’t great at focusing on more than one thing at a time, so these seemingly little things can quickly derail your productivity.
Lack of boundaries: One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start their business is saying yes to every opportunity that comes their way. Especially when you aren’t at the income level that you’d like to be at, it can be extremely difficult to turn down work, even if it means you’ll be working late nights and working on things that don’t align with you. Without boundaries, we’ll quickly become burnt out and the quality of our work will begin to suffer.
Decision fatigue is the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse. Entrepreneurs who are making a thousand decisions a day are actually doing themselves a disservice. Trusting and empowering people to make decisions for the good of the business will not only give you peace of mind, but it will also empower your team and build morale.

10 Time Management Tips to Start Implementing Now

Here are my top 10 tips to improve your time management skills as an entrepreneur:

Batch your tasks: Task batching is a planning process that groups similar tasks together. For example, if you need to send weekly reports to clients, schedule a block in your calendar and knock them all out at once, instead of doing 1 report a day. Data shows that this method increases productivity because humans are better at focusing on one thing for a long period of time than we are at switching tasks.
Evaluate: Every task we do should be working towards a specific goal. But the only way to know if your tasks are getting you closer to your goal is to evaluate them. For example: perhaps your goal is to sign 20 new clients, so you decide to spend 30 minutes a day on sales emails. 90 days from now, you can set a calendar reminder to evaluate your 30 minutes/day and whether or not it produced the desired result. Maybe you haven’t made as much progress as you’d like, so you can add time or fine tune your approach. Maybe you brought in more than 20 clients, in which case you can actually reduce the time you spend on sales and allocate that time elsewhere.
Plan it out (with a color coded planner!): There are many different components to running a business: marketing, sales, operations, admin, and billing just to name a few. Planning batches of time to spend on each of these things (and sticking to it) will help us feel calm and in control. Using different colors for different areas of your business is a great way to organize your calendar and get a quick view of what projects you’ll be working on in a given week.
Automate it: There are SO many automation tools available to entrepreneurs. Platforms like Dubsado for client management and Buffer for social media scheduling can shave off hours of time in your week. Check out my latest guide: “Tools to Help Your Business Thrive” for the ultimate list of automation & business tools!
Break down larger initiatives into smaller milestones: Big projects or initiatives can be daunting, but if you break them down into bite sized pieces and create deadlines for those smaller milestones, it’s a lot more manageable.
Schedule your self care: Meetings and projects shouldn’t be the only thing on your weekly calendar. As an entrepreneur, if you don’t schedule time for self care, it will get away from you. Make sure you block off time for breaks, exercise, lunch, and time with loved ones.
Set a timer: Timers are one of the simplest and most effective tools we can use to make sure we’re being efficient with our time. Especially when you’re doing any type of creative work (creating a course, writing your newsletter, working on a presentation, etc.) we can easily get caught in the loop of fine-tuning. Timers help us let go of perfecting and move on to other priorities.
Identify your post productive times of the day: If you have more energy in the evenings, there’s no reason you shouldn’t use that to your advantage. Studies have shown that night owls really shouldn’t work in the mornings if they want to be most productive. So if you hate mornings, don’t fight it – embrace it and design your work day to suit you.
Invest time in building systems: While systems and processes may not sound like something you want to prioritize, it’s one of the most transformational things you can do for your business. If you read my latest blog post on systems & processes, you know that investing time and energy into systems can save you time, create more efficiency, and bring you peace of mind.
Hire support: The last and perhaps most important tip for time management is to get support where you need it. As I like to say, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. You deserve to feel supported in your business, and you don’t have to do it all by yourself. In fact, you’ll get closer to where you want to be when you let go of tasks and projects that don’t need your constant attention. So don’t be afraid to outsource and invest in partnerships that will bring you peace of mind.