If you want to grow your business, it’s important to understand how to leverage time management to achieve your business goals.
If you’re a small business owner or solopreneur, you probably work IN your business almost every day. But how do you find time to work ON your business, so you can achieve your goals and grow your business? The answer lies in managing your time effectively.
How to leverage time management to achieve your business goals
Once you’ve set a goal to grow your business, you’ll need to find or create time to actually work toward your goal. Today, I’m sharing 3 helpful tips on how to leverage time management to achieve your business goals.
Audit your current time commitments and make space in your schedule
The first step in how to leverage time management to achieve your business goals is to audit your current time commitments, both personally and professionally.
Gaining a clear understanding of the daily, weekly, and monthly demands on your time will help you determine how much time you have available to dedicate to your business goals.
This doesn’t have to be a long, in-depth process. Simply look back at your calendar to get an idea of what your time commitments have been like recently. Then, look ahead in your calendar to see what’s coming up.
Next, identify any commitments or tasks that you can delegate or eliminate. This will help free up additional time to work ON your business.
Finally, identify days when you could set aside time to work toward your business goals. This step is a lot easier if you have a goal plan and an estimate of how long each task will take.
Strategically set aside time blocks to work on your business goals
The next step in how to leverage time management to achieve your business goals is to strategically identify and earmark blocks of time to spend on the tasks that will move you closer to your goals.
If you already have a basic time management system in place, you can include this step as part of your regular daily or weekly planning/scheduling session.
When identifying blocks of time to work toward your business goals, there are a number of factors to consider:
- How much time and energy does each task or group of tasks require?
- Where, in your schedule, is there space available to work on tasks?
- When, during your workday, do you typically feel the most energized (i.e., morning, evening, etc.)?
- Do any of the tasks require real-time assistance or input from someone else, either in-person or virtually?
- When, during your workday, are you least likely to be interrupted?
A quick analysis using the questions above will help you further develop the skill of strategic scheduling. The more you practice this process, the more intuitive it will become.
It goes without saying, but there will rarely be an instance where you’ll able to satisfy all of the above criteria for scheduling a task. It’s more about finding a time block that makes the most sense overall, rather than trying to find one that checks all of the boxes.
Create a system to manage interruptions
Another tip for how to leverage time management to achieve your business goals is to expect interruptions to occur, and plan for them in advance.
I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: You’re doing deep work on an important step to achieving a goal. The phone rings, an email comes in, someone knocks at the door. You stop what you’re doing to address the interruption. The next thing you know, two hours have passed, and you still haven’t gotten back to that deep work.
Instead, you took care of the issue that came up, got distracted by other things, and did “easy” stuff after that interruption. As a small business owner or solopreneur, that loss of time, concentration, and focus isn’t helping your bottom line.
Interruptions are going to happen, but you can leverage time management to mitigate their impact, while keeping your work on-track.
Time management strategies to manage interruptions
If there is a life-or-death situation, or a catastrophic failure of business systems, products, or services, then, yes, you probably need to stop what you’re doing to address the issue.
For everything else, try these strategies:
Cleanup blocks: Chunks of time ranging from 15-60 minutes. Strategically scheduled throughout the day/week to provide opportunities to address interruptions that come up, so you don’t feel obligated to stop what you’re doing and handle them immediately.
Backup blocks: Chunks of time ranging from 30 minutes to 2+ hours. Designed to provide a failsafe time slot to finish up important work that takes longer than anticipated, isn’t completed due to an urgent issue, etc.
Scheduled check-ins: Designated times for checking in with team, family, clients, etc. Set expectations and boundaries with others, stating that you are available at specific times to check in and address anything that isn’t extremely urgent/catastrophic (you may decide it’s okay to interrupt for those). Advise them that they should not interrupt you otherwise.
Remove sources of interruption: This seems too obvious to mention, but I decided to include it anyway. Close your email software, put your phone in airplane mode or in another room, or relocate temporarily to an alternative workspace (library, etc.) to distance yourself from potential interruptions and distractions.
How to leverage time management to achieve your business goals: Conclusion
Small business owners and solopreneurs often have their hands full just with keeping the business running. As a business owner, if you don’t intentionally leverage time management to achieve your business goals, you risk stagnation and miss out on business growth.
There are so many ways that effective time management can help you grow your business. I shared these 3 today:
- Audit your current time commitments and make space in your schedule
- Strategically set aside time blocks to work on your business goals
- Create a system to manage interruptions
I hope you found this post helpful. If managing your time effectively in your business is a struggle for you, let’s talk!