At times, if you own a small business, it can feel like you’re racing against time, which is why time management for a small business owner is so important. Without efficient time management, you’ll struggle to juggle overseeing operations, handling finances, putting out fires, and managing customers.
However, time management isn’t about squeezing more tasks into your already busy day. It’s about developing an effective work-life balance where you can use the hours allotted to your workday to achieve your business goals while still making time for yourself and your family. But we know that time management can be difficult to wrap one’s head around.
That’s why our team at Bizfund shares time management tips for small business owners today. These tips will help you protect your energy, improve your productivity, reduce your stress, and set realistic daily goals rather than aspirational ones.
The Real Cost of Poor Time Management for a Small Business Owner
If the only issue with poor time management was that it creates unnecessarily busy days, it wouldn’t be too much of an issue. However, this is not the case. In reality, poor time management has a direct and negative impact on your business performance. When you don’t manage your time well, you delay important tasks in favor of urgent but low-value tasks.
When this happens, you miss opportunities, provide inconsistent customer experiences, and growth is slower. In addition, if you’re consistently mismanaging your time, it can affect your cash flow, business reputation, and even your team’s morale.
Not to mention the personal cost is tremendous. Often, poorly managed time results in exhausting long hours in the office with no clear boundaries, causing fatigue and reduced focus. When this exhaustion sets in, it affects your decision-making at work and at home, leading to costly mistakes. For all these reasons, better time management is a must.
The Time Management Tips to Follow
Here’s a closer look at simple time management tips for small business owners we trust:
Audit Your Time First
One of the best time management tips is to audit your time. If you audit your time, you’ll actually learn where most of your time goes while running your business. When auditing your time, try to start with something simple.
You don’t want to feel overwhelmed, so it’s best to try auditing things on a week-to-week basis. Just try to track every little thing relating to your work, including major time-consuming tasks like meetings, operations, admin, sales, and problem-solving. You can write everything out by hand or use online time-tracking tools or software.
After a few months of auditing your time, you’ll see patterns develop. You can analyze these patterns to establish ways to better manage your time. You’ll know what is necessary and what can be removed from your schedule, and this awareness should help you build a better foundation for better decisions.
Prioritize Frameworks
If there’s one thing small businesses forget to do when managing their time, it’s establishing and prioritizing frameworks. Frameworks help you recognize which tasks require your attention and how much. They help you realize that not all tasks are created equal, so they don’t need an equal amount of your time day to day.
With frameworks, you can learn to prioritize work based on impact rather than urgency. A simple approach to this is identifying your top three priorities each day. These tasks should directly support long-term growth, customer satisfaction, and revenue. If you complete tasks that fall into these categories first, you’re ensuring progress even when your day becomes unpredictable.
Another helpful framework is to group similar simple tasks together. For instance, you could group responding to emails, filing, and making phone calls together. These simple tasks are easy to do and can be done at the beginning or end of the day, helping you manage your time better.
Invest In Tools That Save Time
Sometimes, time management involves learning to embrace time management tools. With the right tools, you can significantly reduce manual work and mental load. It might be difficult to adopt more tools because of the learning curve, but most of the time, the time savings often outweigh the short-term adjustment for your business.
Some project management platforms that can help you keep your tasks organized and visible include tools like Trello, Asana, and ClickUp. With these, you can track work, deadlines, and your responsibilities. This helps tremendously with time management.
You can also use accounting and invoicing tools to save time on the administrative end. A few platforms worth looking at include Xero, QuickBooks, and Wave for expense tracking, reporting, automated invoicing, and reducing manual data entry.
Yet, that’s not all. There are also scheduling tools that help you reduce wasted time from inefficient back-and-forth communication. These tools include Acuity Scheduling and Calendly. You don’t have to use all these tools, but even picking up one or two will help you manage your time better. Just make sure they integrate well with your workflow and actually solve specific problems. You don’t want tools just for the sake of them.
Consider Delegation and Outsourcing
As a business owner, you likely already know that delegation is difficult. It might not be a shift you want, but it might be what you need to better manage your time. If you delegate more, you free up your time to focus on more important tasks in your company.
You should also look into outsourcing administrative work, customer support, bookkeeping, and certain marketing activities. You can use platforms like Fiverr and Upwork to hand off recurring tasks, and payroll tools like Wagepoint can help reduce the amount of time you spend managing contractors and payments.
Protect Your Time
Perhaps the most important tip we can give you is to learn to protect your time. Protecting your time is just as important as, if not more important than, time planning. This is because if you don’t set boundaries on your time, your schedule is likely to collapse sooner rather than later under constant interruptions.
So make sure you set clear work hours and communicate expectations to clients and your team. You should also try to build in buffer time to your schedule so you can handle unexpected issues before they derail your day.
You also need to learn when to say no. Unfortunately, not every opportunity aligns with your small business’s goals. If you’re more choosy with what you say yes to, you save time and can invest energy in what matters most.
Investing in Growth with Bizfund
It’s true that managing tasks is important, but long-term success also depends on your willingness and ability to invest time in growth. Usually, this means investing time in planning, improving systems, and making strategic financial decisions.
So try to spend time exploring growth opportunities and learning all you can about your available financing options. At Bizfund, our team supports Canadian small businesses. We offer financing solutions that are designed to improve your cash flow and support sustainable growth.
Key Takeaways
The time crunch for small business owners is real, especially considering many owners wear several hats sometimes simultaneously. On any given day, you may act as your business’s bookkeeper, marketer, manager, or even customer support team. This can be exasperating and exhausting, even though it’s rewarding to be a part of your dream.
If this constant pull on your attention is becoming overwhelming and making it difficult to focus on high-value work, it may be time to look into time management as a small business owner.We hope the tips we shared in this blog have given you ideas for managing your time better. We also hope that you choose to invest some of your time into growing your business through responsible lending when the time comes. If you need a merchant cash advance, you can apply with our team at Bizfund here.
