10 Time Management Tips to Grow Your Small Business

As human beings, we’re not great at managing our time. It’s also one of the hardest parts of running a small business. Poor time management can have real life consequences for your company, your employees, and even your customers.  

Juggling multiple urgent deadlines makes it more difficult to know what tasks are important. It’s easier for you to drop the ball and, ultimately, lose business. Poor time management can result in: 

Luckily, you don’t have to build a perfect time management strategy from scratch. There are a number of simple techniques that can help you organize your day and tackle the most important work first.

Originally created in the 1980s to help businesses set and achieve their goals, it’s also a great way to organize your time. Instead of trying to accomplish every task that comes across your plate, prioritize tasks that help you accomplish your biggest goals. For a goal to be SMART, it has to meet these criteria:

Specific – Set goals that are specific and clear. Instead of “I want my customers to love my product,” narrow down your focus to, “I want to increase my customer satisfaction score (CSAT) from 85% to 95%.”

Measurable – Ensure that your goals can be measured. Qualitative data has its place but quantitative data is how you can track your progress. For our CSAT goal, tracking your progress as your score increases from 85% to 87% to 90% is exciting and helps you stay focused. 

Attainable – Make sure your goals are achievable and realistic. If your CSAT score is currently sitting at 60%, you’ll find it hard to raise it to 95%. Instead, examine the feedback you’re receiving from customers. Perhaps shipping is always late or your product arrives damaged. Improve delivery, which will ultimately help you with your customer satisfaction as well. 

Relevant – Make sure that your goal is relevant to your success. Perhaps you sell one-time products or services and don’t need repeat customers. Is increasing your CSAT score from 85% to 95% really going to make a difference to your revenue? 

Time based – Deadlines work. Otherwise, we push off larger projects in favor of easier to achieve small tasks that we can tick off our to-do list quickly, but don’t move our businesses towards greater success. CSAT scores can’t change overnight. You need time to come up with an action plan and for your work to come to fruition. Consider a 12 months deadline to increase your CSAT from 85% to 95%.

How do you manage your workload on a monthly or weekly basis? The Eisenhower matrix is a straightforward way to decide where to focus your daily energy. Go through your list of to-dos and sort them into these four categories: 

Important and urgent – Do these tasks right away. To improve your CSAT score, rectify the biggest problems first. If shipping delays are a frequent complaint, talk with your courier service or switch to another provider ASAP. 

Important but not urgent – Decide when to do these tasks. To improve customer satisfaction, go straight to the source – your customers. Sending a survey to all past customers is important but not urgent. Schedule time in the next week to create a survey and email it to your customer base. 

Urgent but not important – Delegate these tasks if possible. Answering individual customer complaints should be a priority but perhaps not for you as the business owner. Delegate this job to an employee who can help each customer while you work on a larger CSAT strategy. 

Not urgent and not important – Set these aside to do later. Some tasks are just not going to move the needle on your goals. Updating the copy on the thank you cards you put into each delivery box can add a personal touch, but it’s neither important nor urgent for now. If you have the time, you can work on that task in the future.

If the Eisenhower matrix doesn’t appeal to you, no worries, there are more options, like the ABCDE method, which is all about the consequences of your activities. This method asks you to prioritize based on the magnitude of the consequences if that task is done or not. These consequences can be both good and bad. 

Using the same example from SMART and the Eisenhower matrix, your ABCDE will look like this:

A activity – These tasks must be done because the consequences are big. Fixing shipping delays will directly impact your CSAT scores and the goals you set for the business. 

B activity – These are tasks that you should do because of milder consequences. Sending out a survey to better understand your customers needs will help you improve their customer experience. 

C activity – These tasks are nice-to-have with no consequences either way. For example, reading up on the latest customer satisfaction best practices. 

D activity – These tasks can be delegated, like answering customer support tickets. Someone else can do it faster and more effectively than you can. 

E activity – These tasks don’t matter in the long run. Instead of reviewing survey results daily, cross that off your to-do list and review survey results once a month.

Lastly, the four Ds might be more your style. It has the same prioritization goals as the ABCDE and Eisenhower Matrix but it lets you remove stuff from your to-do list earlier in your planning process. 

Do – Just do it. Start working on a task and focus all of your attention. Don’t look at your emails and don’t answer the phone. Aim to complete each task within 30 minutes before you move on to another task. Some work will take longer, but you’ll be more in the zone once you’re 30 minutes in and can continue until you complete the activity. 

Delete – Remove items from your list of tasks without mercy. Some things are not worth your time as a business owner. Delete and forget about them. If someone is asking you for something over email, respond letting them know that you can’t help them at this time. 

Defer – Throughout the day you’ll receive emails and messages asking for more of your attention. Don’t be distracted from your “Do” activities. Defer new tasks until later when you have time to focus on them, instead of getting distracted throughout the day. 

Delegate – Anything that is not on your Do or Defer list, can be delegated to someone else who can complete the work faster and cheaper than you can. 

Now that you’ve chosen a system that works for you, you’re on your way to a more efficient, and more successful, future. Here are ten best practices that will help you along the way. 

Effectively managing your time requires continuous work. When we’re busy it’s easy to drop our good habits and focus on every distraction in front of us. When this happens, go back to your favorite time management system, and map out your priorities so you can stay on track.