READ PART ONE: Effective time management for small business owners
Eliminate the time wasters
Armed with information about how you spend your time, you’ll be better able to eliminate unnecessary time wasters. Some common time wasters are:
- Monitoring social media
- Responding to emails
- Fielding telephone calls
- Drop-in visitors and sales people
- Meetings that go on longer than necessary.
Jumping between tasks and reading and answering emails as they come in during the day can reduce your productivity. Set aside time to check and answer emails rather than letting these distract you from the task at hand.
Ask your staff to field telephone calls or take a message if you need uninterrupted time to focus on a task. Train staff not to allow sales people in to see you without an appointment to avoid wasting your time listening to a sales pitch for punnets of strawberries, office flowers or equipment you’re not thinking of buying.
There are a number of other ways to eliminate or manage time wasters at work. Don’t have pop-up messages from social media accounts running while you’re trying to get work done. Appoint a staff member to monitor certain business functions with daily or weekly reports, rather than spending hours a week doing this task yourself.
Run meetings to a tight timetable. Draw up an agenda and allow only a couple of minutes (yes, literally a minute or two) for each item on the agenda to avoid meetings becoming a social gathering and wasting the productive time of all those present.
Delegate appropriate tasks
Have a close look at your current workload and see if there are suitable tasks you could delegate to others. Can you delegate some simple accounting functions, such as managing petty cash and reconciliations, or general correspondence, sales and marketing tasks, product development, quality control, and more? Small businesses owners are generally notorious for their reluctance to delegate in the belief that they do the job better. But delegation can free up your valuable time so you can focus on growing your business rather than spending all your time focusing on the day-to-day running of your business.
Draw up a list of tasks you could delegate and responsible staff who could take them over. Most employees want to develop in their jobs and would value the opportunity to have added responsibility or the chance to learn new skills. Try not to fall into the trap of only delegating the jobs you don’t really like doing – you want to free up as much time as possible to allow you to work more strategically and effectively and have time for that work–life balance.