5 Time Management Tips For All Company Owners

As a company owner, your time is precious. It may feel as though you need to work 24 hours a day on your company, but that leaves you with no free time at all.

So what can you do to regain control of your time and give yourself the free time you deserve?

1. Find your most productive hours

Most of us know whether we’re night owls or early birds. But this goes a bit deeper; because they’re just for when we’re most alert and awake.

You need to find out what time you’re most productive.

You might be surprised to find that you can work most effectively at 11am because you’re counting down the minutes until lunch. Or you might be most effective at 2am when all you have to do is sit and think about your business while trying to sleep.

Whatever your productive hours are, learn how to harness them and use them for your urgent and most important tasks, then balance the rest of your time around them.

Don’t forget the opposite is also true. If you have hours where you feel as though time is moving backwards and you get nothing done, save those for the tedious, repetitive admin tasks.

2. Always have a cunning plan

As Baldrick would say, “I have a cunning plan”, and never were truer words spoken by business owners.

Try and plan out your week, no matter how simple or complex you want it to be. This could be in a calendar app, or on a blank sheet of paper.

If you know when your deadlines are and whether you have any important tasks coming up, you’ll be able to plan your time effectively.

Start by planning your important tasks, then fit in the unimportant ones around them; just don’t forget to schedule breaks or have empty periods of time too. At the end of the day, you’re trying to run a business, not run yourself into the ground.

3. Use the people around you

If you have a team of people in your business, use them to their full potential. At the end of the day, you’re there to run the business and make sure it’s heading in the right direction, and you can’t do that if you’re working for the business.

Try and limit your work to “boss work” and delegate anything else that can be done by someone else.

4. Enter focus mode

You might have 20 things on your to-do list, but you can’t work on all of them simultaneously. You need to be able to focus on the important tasks and clear your mind of distractions.

If you spend half your time switching between less important tasks, they take twice the time they would if you only focused on one at a time.

So clear your mind and enter focus mode to quit multi-tasking and get the important things done.

5. Learn when to shut off

Your to-list has piled up, and you can’t see a way out, but you still need to make time for yourself.

If you don’t heed the warning, you can end up suffering from burnout, meaning you won’t be as effective when you are working on your business.

So although it feels counter-productive, take some me time during the day with five or 10-minute breaks and make sure you’re getting enough sleep at night, so you’re fully rested and recharged in the morning.

Honestly, your business will survive those 10 minutes without you.

• 28 Mar 2024 - Why Does Your Company Need A Contingency Plan?
• 25 Feb 2024 - March 4th updates - Registered email and lawful purpose statement
• 01 Feb 2024 - Setting Up A Limited Company? Here’s What You Need To Know
• 15 Jan 2024 - How Do You Know If Your Business Is Doing Well?
• 13 Dec 2023 - Making Your Company Dormant