Time Management Strategies for Business Owners: Chaos to Control

For many years my approach to time management was to simply work harder for longer. Start early when I could enjoy quiet time, and finish later, to catch up. Work and life balance simply didn’t exist.

The turning point came when I:

At this point one of the key, (& hardest), time management strategies was deciding what I needed to do less of and/or stop doing, to free up time for what was important – including family.

In this post, I outline an overarching time management strategy – a framework to free up time.

Too often when looking at time management strategies the focus is on techniques without first reflecting on:

This step is critical to gain clarity on where to focus:

These key functions are your High Payoff Activities.

Low Payoff Activities are all the other tasks you and the team perform on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

They are often necessary for the smooth functioning of the business, but they don’t bring in the $!

Low Payoff Activities could include:

Identifying and making decisions about Low Payoff Activities is an essential  element of effective time management strategies.

From personal experience, I can attest to how our perception of how we use our time & how long it takes to complete tasks can be wildly inaccurate.

Undertaking a time audit can be a very sobering experience and provide valuable insights.

For example, once in a leadership role, I estimated I was spending about 45% of my time on High Payoff Activities – A time audit revealed this to just 11%!

I was working long hours – but the audit revealed I getting caught up in an enormous number of Low Payoff Activities.

To free up time for High Payoff Activities, the next step in your time management strategy is to decide how to manage everything else that needs to be done – this can involve:

Bear in mind you can’t create more time – you can only control how you use your time.

The genius of the brothers who originally established McDonalds was not in the food, but the system they created for its production.

Systems boost productivity while reducing mental effort. They free up time to focus on what is important.

If you have processes that are cumbersome, time consuming, or require a lot of mental energy, this is signal you need a better system:

Next consider:

Effective systems are a critical part of any time management strategy.

Task batching similar types of work is a powerful way to free up time and mental energy.

For example, this could include time blocking for:

For example, in a previous business, one time management strategy I employed was to allocate 2 hours on Tuesday morning to create, and schedule, a weeks social media posts.

During the 2 hours I was social media/creative mode. This approach worked far better than creating posts for the different channels each day.

Again the genius of the founders of McDonald’s was to build a system that allowed production, & to large extent managing outlets, to be delegated to younger lower cost employees.

For this to occur, they needed, bullet proof systems, training, and delegation of authority.

Delegation is powerful time management strategy – but effective delegation requires training and accountability.

Micro-managing and/or centralising control are sure-fire ways to erode time available for High Payoff Activities.

Ask yourself. “Do I trust my employees?” If yes, then train and delegate. (If no, you have an issue that needs to be addressed!)

Another option for delegation is outsourcing – for example, bookkeeping, social media, recruitment etc.

Stopping unproductive can significantly free up time for important tasks. But is often one of the hardest to do, particularly for business leaders.

It involves eliminating unproductive tasks and prioritising essential activities.

When you have completed your “Time Audit” review your task list and ask:

For example, at one point, in a busy leadership role I made the decision to only read and action emails from customers or my direct manager. While I occasionally missed something, the world didn’t fall apart and it freed up an enormous amount of time.

In business there are many tasks, if left undone, the world doesn’t fall apart.