If there is one thing that every small business owner lacks, it is time. work within the business, and certainly doesn’t feel like you have enough time to have a life outside work.
Because of this, small business owners need to become experts at time management.
Knowing when to say no, when to delegate or when to just let someone else handle any number of other business aspects, is quite an art. You may feel like you are the only person who can handle a task, but it’s not true; understanding this can make the difference between being home for the family or never leaving the office.
Here are five tips to help master time management. Following all of these will get you much closer to managing your time far more effectively than ever before.
Hire when you can
Many small business owners find it incredibly tempting to do it all themselves.
However, you’ll never grow your business if you are the bottleneck and you also have to realize that your time literally is money. You must learn to recognize when it would be prudent to hire someone for a specialized role than to keep trying to do it yourself.
Are you passionate and very good at accounts? No? Hire a book keeper as soon as your business is able to afford it. What about administration or sales? Do the same.
Embrace the cloud for collaboration
The cloud if great for small businesses to collate and store their documents and files in one location where everyone can access, no matter where they are.
Applications like Google Docs allow business owners to collaborate in real time with employees, and there’s phone audio recorders for taking quick notes on the go.
There are hundreds of affordable and effective software tools out there that will help you save time and money in the long run. You can use the cloud for all sorts of business purposes; even using it as a cloud backup solution.
Enjoy the benefits of delegation
Delegation is another one of my favorite time management tips.
Business owners should be doing their best to delegating all their non-essential day to day tasks, to focus on the bigger picture.
To do this, you should take a hard look at what you are spending the most time doing every day and then measure that against business goals.
Not only does delegation let you focus on larger business issues, but it also empowers your employees by letting them take on tasks you would normally tackle.
Automate all the boring tasks
You should also consider automation when possible. Do you enjoy transcribing long meetings for reports? I doubt it.
Not exactly automation, but outsourcing low costs tasks, such as repetitive data entry tasks, is a great way to reduce time and effort.
Find yourself spending time every week adding clients to specific mailing lists or software databases? Look at using Zapier or one of the many other tools to automate this process.
There are a plethora of software products out there that can help automate all sorts of tasks within your business, saving you and your team precious time for more important work.
Look after your own health
We all know people are more productive when they are happy and healthy.
That could be going for a 30 minute run every morning, or taking time to do yoga classes, as well as meditation and mindfulness practice. I have a few apps on my phone to do this; there are plenty if you search your app store for meditation or relaxation.
It is very important to avoid and fight stress, by giving yourself time off every week, to relax and turn your brain off of business. This down time helps reset you for the week ahead. It is tempting to ignore this need, but it’s so powerful for you in the long term.
No matter your workplace, make sure you can regularly move and always stay hydrated. These two simple time management tips really help you stay on top of your health.
In Summary
By following these five time management tips, you are already starting to take control of your time management. Those five steps again, are;
- Hire when you can
- Automate all the boring tasks
- Embrace the cloud for collaboration
- Enjoy the benefits of delegation
- Look after your own health
