Charles Darwin once said, “A man who dares to waste one hour has not discovered the value of life.” All of us understand how precious time is, but the rest depends on how we apply this in our daily lives. Those who know how to use time reasonably enjoy success while others find themselves caught in a knit of struggles.

Talking about entrepreneurship, every minute of your day counts when you begin your ambitious journey as a business owner. Being a small business owner, you have places to go and heights to scale. Not to discourage you in any way, but it is easier said than done. To make your voyage worthwhile, you need consistent hard work. Besides, you also need effective time management and planning skills to convert your small business into a colossal success. This blog underlines some critical time management techniques that small business owners should follow.  You know time and tide wait for none, so why not stay one step ahead of time?

Five Time Management Strategies for Small Business Owners

1. Recognize your Time Wasters

Do you ever make an effort to sit and introspect about how you spend your day? You should do that often and try to identify the areas or tasks where you end up losing a lot of time. This is the basic technique of time management. It helps you understand what consumes most of your time without offering any productivity. For instance, you may be spending a lot of time promoting your business on social media. Or you may lose a lot of time commuting for different meetings or writing emails for collaboration. But the returns on your investment of time could be low and not worth your time. There are various time wasters in an entrepreneur’s day, and they need to be identified and plugged out.

Once you identify your time wasters, you can then organize your time more smartly. If there are inevitable distractions that are your real time-wasters, you can block them out. Besides, if some business functioning regions make you lose a lot of time, you can assign those operations to others. In this way, you will have more time on your hands to cater to the most critical pieces of work.

2. Delegate Tasks

After realising that you should not be doing all tasks by yourself, it is time to delegate authority. In simple terms, you have to divide the essential responsibilities among your team members. In running a business, you have to trust your team members. There is no alternative to it, and delegating will become indispensable at some point in time. So, why not begin with it from an early stage itself. To make fair use of your time, you should not be doing everything on your own. You have to conserve your energy and time for areas that require fine leadership skills coming from you.

For instance, yes, social media has become a powerhouse for branding your business, but other people in your team can take care of it. You do not have to regularly disrupt your schedule to think of a creative post for social media every few hours. You can delegate this work to a creative team member who can think out of the box and create engaging posts. Your hiring should already include the criteria of delegation. You should hire people who possess variable skills.

3. Track your time

How will someone quantify his time management skills? How will someone know if he is using the time on his hands to good effect? This can be possible when you track every minute of your day. When you start doing that, you can analyze how productive the sections of your day turn out to be. When you track your time, you can get worth out of each minute of your day. But the question is, how can one track his time? Thanks to technology, doing so is easier than ever before. You can track your time using time tracking software or timer applications.

To substantiate, according to some statistics on time tracking, the economy of the US loses a whopping 50 million hours in productivity each day because of unrecorded work activities. This is why time tracking is crucial for you as well as your employees. If you do not track your time, the costs of not tracking time can keep scaling.

4. Integrate the Pomodoro Technique

Devised in the 1980s, it is still one of the best ways to master time management. Francesco Cirillo developed it, and it can help millennials organize time with great efficiency. What is the Pomodoro technique but and how to use it?

It is a way of organizing time so that the work is divided into slots of 25 minutes. Small breaks intervene in these slots. So, work never seems like a burden, and there are regular breaks to vent out fatigue and stress related to work. This makes it one of the most beautiful techniques for thoughtfully managing time and productivity and applying this technique to your business operations.

Using this method, you will not feel exhausted and not witness a decline in your productivity. It will make you keep going strongly toward your ultimate goals. There are various Pomodoro timer applications available for making handsome use of this time management strategy.

5. Shake hands with technology

Are you catching up with the pace of digitalization and artificial intelligence? The world is changing at a swift pace because of the advent of technological innovations. Entrepreneurs and workers cannot depend on technology to perform almost half of their tasks and save them extra time. One of the best time management techniques in the 21st century would be to automate wherever possible.

There are innumerable ways in which you can integrate automation into your work. To name a few of them.

• You can take interviews via video conferencing.
•  You can attend some of the meetings via telecommuting.
•  You can enhance the customer experience by using chatbots.
• The internal communication of the organization can be improved through business communication platforms.
• You can organize virtual training sessions for new employees.

Hence, technology is making business owners more successful by being onboard as reliable team members. Automation is the way forward, and you must get onto this path as soon as possible. The initial investment may seem a tad too high, but it is worth the expenditure for sure! It is time you switch to digital innovation in business with immediate effect! The initial investment may seem a tad too high, but it is worth the expenditure for sure.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, for all entrepreneurs, time is one of the most significant assets. Besides, small business owners need to stay one step ahead of time to thrive in the competitive world. It will not be wrong to say that managing his time is a crucial attribute of his competitiveness.

The above strategies for managing time are tried and tested across industries. With their practice, you will be able to witness an immediate positivity in your personality. This positivity will be based on the central idea of generating the maximum work efficiency from your share of time. These strategies promise no unrealistic claims, but they are based on science and facts. Your small business will only have massive gains to make with their application.