Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

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Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 5:57PM

Pretty excited because we haven't had a guest post here in a while. So with out further adieu please enjoy this post by Eliza. Eliza Morgan is a full time blogger. She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.

New small business owners and entrepreneurs usually have one thing in common—their funds are low. Launching a small business on a tight budget typically forces owners to do all of the leg-work commonly completed by extra hires; this means sometimes an owner is stuck playing several different roles, including administrative assistant, accountant and marketing head. But answering phone calls, responding to e-mails and monitoring social media sites for marketing purposes is not only tedious but it distracts you from more important tasks—such as your actual job. Thus it's important that as a new business owner you learn how to effectively manage your time so that you don't get caught up doing things that are less important. To learn some new tricks that may be able to help you out, continue reading below.

Create To-Do Lists. By far one of the easiest ways to manage your time is to create a daily to-do list in a planner or on a large calendar and place it somewhere extremely visible, such as on your desk or on a nearby wall. This way, you will know what's coming in advance, can work around it, and will never be surprised about meetings with clients or investors for example. Cross out the list/items on your calendar as you complete them—you'll get a sense of accomplishment and feel extremely productive.

Make Strict "Meeting" Times. To manage your time even more effectively however you can try to schedule meetings (with clients, investors, or staff) to fall only on certain days of the week. This is suggested because sometimes owners will get into their "work zone" only to be disrupted to attend a meeting (and it's hard to get back in that mind frame once concentration is broken). But scheduling meetings on every Tuesday or Thursday for example means that you can be more productive on all other days since you can work ferociously without any distractions or disruptions.

Clean Your Workspace. You would be surprised to know how much valuable time is lost due to messy work stations and desks—too much clutter is not only distracting in itself (there's tons of little things that your bored idle hands can play with) but it's also easy to lose focus and waste time looking for important forms and documents that are lost underneath a pile of junk. So file properly, avoid eating at your desk to prevent spillage on techware and papers, and keep your area clutter free.

Hire Interns. Lastly, if you live in a college town, hire an intern. There are tons of eager college students who will work for free in exchange for real-world experience, class credit, and may be letter of recommendation or two. Where you choose to place them is up to you, but you can definitely use an intern to relieve you of less important duties such as your social media department. Besides, most college kids are a wiz at social media and networking sites anyway and will probably be able to optimize it far more than you can. You can even assign them to do small administrative tasks such as filing, answering phones and responding to emails so that you can preoccupy your time with more important matters. If you would like to hire someone more experienced to do the job, you can also consider outsourcing. You'll need to pay for their services, but at a reduced cost.

Nunzio Bruno |

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Reader Comments (5)

I think one of the critical techniques of time management for you as a small business owner is commit with your to do lists. It often becomes hard to work according to your tot do lists. Sometime it is so easy to shift the use of your times to things that unimportant and unrelated with your achievement.

Commitment is necessary to maintain your concentration and keep you focus to what really important to you. You will face much things in your day and the temptation to leave your to do list will be hard. Of course this does not mean that you should be rigid with your to do lists. Commitment means you should stick what you will do but stay paying much attention to the things that also critical to your goal achievement.

December 28, 2011 |

Rohman

Thanks for the comment and you are right. Commitment is so important because if you aren't taking ownership in what you are putting on those lists then why even bother.

December 31, 2011 |

Nunzio Bruno

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