Time management is a keystone for managing a small business. Without creating and implementing time management processes, all the to-do’s for small business owners can quickly become overwhelming. But I know how costly time can be for small business owners. After all, you’re juggling quite a few plates at once. That’s why I created a quick-read blog post on the top five time management hacks to maximize your productivity. And these tips go far beyond your small business operations. You can use the below ideas in your day-to-day tasks — from managing a household of kids to fine-tuning your work-life balance to being present at the moment. So, let’s get to it!
5 Time Management Hacks to Maximize Your Productivity
1. Time Block Your Work Hours
Over the past decades, time-blocking has become how small business owners are maximizing their time. Throw in a worldwide pandemic where business operations and home life lines were blurred overnight, and time blocking became essential. And while various forms of time blocking have been used for decades, the release of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World has taken the world by storm. But what exactly is time blocking? It’s a time management process of dividing your workday hours into blocks of various projects.
So why is this so important? As Cal details in Deep Work, it’s a proven way to ensure you’re maximizing every minute of your day. It can be very easy to say that you’ll dedicate 5 minutes for checking social posts on your business page and go down the rabbit hole for the next 25 minutes. Or when you’re responding quickly to a customer email at 8am, it’s almost a given that you’ll be continually checking your email again at 8:20am, 8:30am, 9am, 10am, and beyond. And each time you’re checking to see if that particular email was answered, you’re also getting sucked into other emails on a dozen other topics and tasks. The problem with all this context switching is affecting us more than we know. One study found that it takes 23 minutes to refocus after a context switch. Another found that people rarely spent more than 20 minutes on one task before losing focus. Combine these stats and that means that a small business owner is losing over one-third of each workday to context switching. Add this up over the course of a month for an average full-time small business owner, and that means that they could be losing over 55 hours.
So, how do you get started with time-blocking? Check out Deep Work for the full breakdown, but I’d like to add a secondary approach. Grab your favorite notebook and open to a clean page. Using a pencil, add a column for each day you’d like to track. You’ll want to ensure there’s enough horizontal space to write the time and a brief description of each task. Next, add the day of the week to the top of each column. On the left side of each column, add your work hours in one-hour increments (i.e. 9am-5pm) on every other line. Next, add your most-pressing tasks, meetings, and other agenda items to your time block calendar. Trace a rectangle around each time block so they stand apart. Now you can start to fill in your other times on your calendar. If time allows, plan for a quick 15-minute context shift between deep concentration and high-level tasks to give your brain time to switch. If you’re unsure which projects need to be completed, use the side or bottom of your time block planner to bullet list what you need to complete this week. As you ease into this practice, you may need to adjust times for projects and that’s okay. By using a pencil, you’re allowing yourself the flexibility to shift tasks as you need to in real-time. And the more you practice this, the more accurately you’ll know how much time you’ll need to allow for your work projects.
2. Organize Your Most-Requested Information for Faster Access
On an average basis, do you find yourself shuffling paperwork to find certain login credentials? Every few weeks, are you searching your browser bookmarks for your supplier’s website URL? Save all your most-requested pieces of information to a Trello board and shave hours every week. This is one of my favorite time management hacks because of its simplicity. In today’s world, it’s incredibly easy to have a batch of saved Slack conversations, starred emails, binders, loose papers, and sticky notes covering our desks. But when it comes down to it, who hasn’t been lost in the shuffle wondering, “Now where did I save that?”
Enter Trello. Trello is one of my favorite tools. If you would like some help getting started, get in touch with me. I’d love to give you a tour and help you out. I am not affiliated with Trello in any way. I’m just a user. Trello is the visual tool that empowers you and your small business team to manage any type of project, workflow, or task tracking. I recommend starting with a Kanban template (i.e. to-do, doing, done) and building one new column for each project type. Do you need to order inventory? Add a column for each vendor. Do you offer three types of services? Add a column for each service. Do you manage your own website, marketing, or sales? You’ve got it; you’ll want to add a space to include cards for each type of information. And my number one must-have board? Add a “Project Resources” tab and keep it on your far left. This is where you’ll add your login credentials, business licenses, branding guide, and all other absolutely essential pieces of information you reference often.
3. Limit Your Meeting Availability to Encourage Deep Work
While this one might seem counterintuitive, hear me out on this one. By limiting your availability to meet with employees, vendors, and other teammates, you’ll be giving yourself the gift of extra time to focus on deep-concentration projects and giving your team the gift of undivided attention during your meetings.
As mentioned in number 1 above, our concentration is short-lived. In fact, because of our notifications-on-all-the-time mentality (more on that in number 4) and our Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) culture, more than half of US workers are feeling moderately or severely burned out, the same levels as seen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As the average small business owner and chances are that they’ll be agreeing that feeling “on” all the time is causing emotional exhaustion along with reduced accomplishments and loss of professional identity. Unfortunately, it’s a major workforce problem that will have ripple effects for the years to come.
So how do you protect yourself and your small business from feeling burnt out? One way is to reduce your meeting availability. By setting clearly defined boundaries around the times you can meet and by time-blocking your deep concentration projects (you are doing that from number 1, right?), you’ll be creating a customizable schedule that works for you. Don’t forget that all your projects for your small business are important, and by limiting meeting time, you’re increasing the time you can allow for delving into those projects.
4. Turn Off (Almost All) Your Notifications
Along with number 3, you’ll want to turn off (almost all) your push notifications to keep your mind focused on the task at hand. Why is this so important? Studies have found that by checking just one notification for a project while in the middle of another project, you’re losing 23 minutes of productivity. And with the average US worker checking their phone upward of 600 times in a typical eight-hour workday, it’s not unreasonable to say that keeping notifications turned on could be one of our biggest time management blunders. Add those minutes up throughout one day, one week, or a month and you’ll notice a boost in your productivity, all by simply turning off most of your notifications.
So which push notifications do you turn off, and which do you keep on? You’ll want to consider which notifications it’s essential for you to continue using for your business’s day-to-day operations. And by essential, I’m not talking about marketing emergencies or social media comments. Instead, think about which tasks need to grab your attention in real time.
Four Essential Push Notifications to Keep On During Business Hours
- Emails for time-sensitive projects
- Security alerts
- Severe weather warnings
- Family calls|
Are you still trying to figure out your other notifications pulling at your attention? Try this creative exercise — grab a paper pad, pen, cell phone, and work computer. Use one sheet on your pad to list out all the apps and websites that you have notifications for. If you’re not positive about which notifications you have, you can check your phone or computer settings or wait for the notifications to roll in and jot them down as you go along over the next day or two. On your next page, add two columns: Essential and Non-Essential. Add items to your columns, paying close attention that your Essential column is no more than 2-3 notifications. Remember, the fewer essential notifications, the better…which brings us to number 5.
5. Batch Your Projects
Do you remember earlier in this blog how much time can be wasted from context switching? That’s why batching projects is so important for boosting your effectiveness for small business management. Whether it’s processing payroll, cold calling prospective leads, or planning for your next month’s social media posts, batching tasks helps keep your mind focused while executing many like items.
As you use time-blocking methods, you’ll find a method that works best with your work rhythms. But in the meantime, here are a few recommendations to get you started:
Recommended Batched Project Goals
- Day-to-day operations: As you grow your small business, you’ll start to get a handle on which tasks need to be handled at specific times and the length of time. I’d suggest keeping tabs on which tasks you’re managing daily and adjusting time blocks accordingly. If one of your operations tasks is checking your website, you may want to offload this task to a professional website designer to manage your site, update plugins, perform backups, and maximize site security. I can help with that.
- Emails: Email is one of those tasks that can become a big-time zap on small business productivity. Knowing this, I recommend setting aside 2-3 dedicated times each day to check and reply to emails. Depending on how many emails you need to set aside time for, I’d suggest anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes per time block. And if possible, try not to check email between those times and instead focus on your other small business tasks in your time block planner.
- Finances and Accounting: Depending if you have employees or contractors? Or are you managing your small business as a sole proprietor? Likely, you’ll have different deadlines. But as a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend balancing the books weekly and doing a full analysis at the end of each month, each quarter (for quarterly tax estimates), and year (for yearly tax filing). Find more pro financial tips in this recent blog post.
- Sales and marketing: Plan a quarter-hour at a time for your sales and marketing plan to maximize your time. For social media marketing, plan content (posts, stories, reels, etc.), plan a month out at a time and get them scheduled before the start of the month. My favorite schedulers are HootSuite, PlannThat, and HubSpot.
