5 Time Management Tricks For Small Business Owners

Making sure employees are working efficiently throughout the day is important for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but it’s crucial for small businesses (SMBs). Whether you feel you’re managing your time well or not, you probably know that time management can make or break your success.

Unfortunately, time management is sometimes a balancing act for SMB owners. For small businesses to grow and thrive, employers need to make sure team members are making the most of their working hours so they get everything done while still keeping labor costs under control. On the other hand, business owners should be taking care of high-level work and driving the business forward instead of being caught in the weeds with routine, low-priority tasks.

There’s no perfect SMB time management hack because the world simply doesn’t work that way. But we’ll still do our best to help optimize your team’s working hours by putting forward these five fantastic time management strategies that are perfect for small businesses.

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Time management hacks that are ideal for small businesses

Not all time management strategies make sense for SMBs — they may be overly complicated, difficult to implement on a smaller scale, or just downright confusing.

That’s why we’ve curated the following selection of five ideas that work for small business owners, managers, and team members and can be implemented right away.

1. Use technology that’s specifically designed for small businesses

If you want to master small business time management, you first need to streamline how you run your operations. That means minimizing the time you spend on work, especially manual tasks you may dedicate hours to each week but could take mere minutes with the right tool.

Remember, we’re not living in the days of yore without any technology. Some platforms like Homebase are specifically designed for small business owners and managers like you to quickly and effortlessly take care of your more time-consuming, burdensome administrative tasks.

Here’s a just selection of the kind of work platforms like Homebase can help small business owners with:

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2. Try out prioritization techniques

Poor task prioritization and lackluster time management skills often go hand in hand. It’s only logical — small business owners should dedicate their attention to pressing issues that affect their operations the most. It’s also just downright bad business sense to spend a ton of time on unimportant tasks each day that could otherwise be delegated or batched.

If you have trouble figuring out what your highest priority tasks should be, there are several prioritization techniques you can try:

When it comes to excelling at task prioritization, it’s also helpful to use a dedicated small business management platform like Homebase. We’ve got features like:

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3. Master task batching

Task batching is a popular productivity strategy that extends far beyond the world of small business operations. However, it’s a great way for SMB owners, managers, and team members to reduce the time they spend on tasks and work more efficiently.

Basically, task batching involves grouping similar tasks into one time period. This saves time because it avoids people having to switch between different kinds of work — which can be both ineffective and taxing physically and mentally.

For example, let’s say you’re a cafe employee. You have to open the coffee shop every morning at 8am, but you arrive at 7am to clean and prepare the space for customers. You have to get through the following tasks:

If we’re using task batching logic, it would be much more efficient to do all the cleaning tasks first (all the sweeping, mopping, window cleaning, and dishwasher unloading) and then move on to inventory and restocking tasks. That’s ultimately more productive than mopping a couple of rooms, refilling your coffee, and going back to clean some windows, for example.

4. Implement time blocking

While this time management tip is especially relevant to small business owners who struggle to get through their to-do list every day or week, it can be useful to anyone who is trying to bring a little more organization into their lives and better optimize their time. 

If you’re not familiar, time blocking is a technique where you divide your day into chunks dedicated to certain tasks. That means you’re not just aimlessly trying to get through a list of tasks on a checklist or in an agenda — you have dedicated time slots throughout the day, so you know when you’ll get things done.

Here’s an example of how a time-blocked schedule might look for the owner of a small retail shop. Let’s say they arrive at 9am:

5. Master delegation and outsourcing

Excellent time management is about recognizing what tasks you shouldn’t or can’t do just as much as it is about getting things done thoroughly but in as little time as possible. If you want great time management skills, you need to excel at delegation and outsourcing. But those abilities don’t come naturally to everyone, so here’s one way you can get better at assigning work to other people:

Homebase’s tools are designed to save time

Working efficiently can be the difference between a small business that’s successful and thriving and a small business that’s overpaying on labor and contending with stressed-out managers and employees who don’t have time to get through their to-do lists. That’s why great time management isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a downright necessity.

Luckily, it’s not hard for SMB owners to take their time management practices up a notch and bring a little more order into their lives. It can be as simple as trying out a new prioritization strategy, optimizing how you batch your tasks, blocking your time, or delegating work more effectively.

And, of course, no matter what strategies you apply to manage your time better, implementing an affordable, small business team management tool like Homebase is a must. Our wide range of streamlined, easy-to-use tools means you can spend minutes rather than hours on tasks like scheduling, time tracking, payroll, team communication, and human resources each week. Not to mention, you can try out many of our features for free.