5 Simple Steps for Successful Time Management for Entrepreneurs

Being busy is natural when you lead a business. The question is, are you busy doing the right things? Sure, you’re hustling to build your brand, serve your customers, and grow your company, but a whole lot of other stuff competes for your time. Maybe even stuff that seems earth-shaking that only you can fix. But here’s the thing: When everything feels urgent, nothing truly important gets done—and that’s a fast track to burnout.

Now for some good news: You don’t need more hours in your day—you need a smarter way to use the ones you already have. With the right time management strategies, you’ll create the margin to work on your business instead of just in it—and still have time to go for a run, cheer at your kid’s school play, or finally take that vacation you keep rescheduling.

Don’t worry—we’re not suggesting you enroll in a fancy course on time management for entrepreneurs. But these five simple steps will help you take back control of your schedule and your life.

Step 1: Imagine What You Would Do With More Time

Before you dive in to the nuts and bolts of time management for business owners and other leaders, put on the brakes for just a minute. Take a second to imagine a workweek that’s under control—a week of strategy, margin and sanity.

To really get a picture of what that would look like, write down your answers to these four questions:

• What would you do if you had more time?
• What would having more time mean to you?
• What’s holding you back from having time to do those things?
• How would extra time change the way you make decisions?

Once you’ve thought this through, you’ll see more clearly what’s standing in your way—and be ready to build a plan to overcome it.

Step 2: Complete a Time Audit

Let’s be real—most of us lose hours every week to small time-suckers we don’t even notice. Here are some of the most common causes of lost productivity:

• Trying to multitask
• Fielding interruptions, like emails, chats, phone calls, texts and office drop-ins
• Doing other people’s work
• Focusing on the wrong priorities
• Dropping everything for emergencies that aren’t really emergencies

How much of your day is being stolen by distractions like these? The only way to know for sure is with a time audit.

How to Do a Time Audit

Grab a time tracker (a simple notebook works great) and divide each day into 15-minute blocks. For one full week, write down everything you do—answering texts and emails, leading meetings, having hallway conversations, even scrolling social media.

Pro tip: Keep your notebook with you everywhere you go and jot things down as they happen. The key is to log it in real time, not hours later when you’ve already forgotten half of it. Once you see what’s really happening every day, you can fix it.

Step 3: Discover Your Most Productive Time of Day

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule (also called the Pareto Principle)? It’s the idea that just 20% of your work generates 80% of your results. Said another way, when you focus 80% of your effort on the 20% of activities that matter most—both for your business and your personal health—you accomplish more and feel better doing it.

With that in mind, it’s time to take a look at your time audit.

How to Review Your Time Audit

Grab your highlighters and get ready to color your time audit to uncover your most productive time of day (and your least).

• Use one color to highlight where you were productive and in a good work flow.
• Use another color to highlight where you were interrupted, distracted or struggling with workflow.
• Use a third color to star the time blocks where you wish you were doing something else.

Now, look for patterns:

• Sweet spots: What were you doing when you felt in the zone? Was your work creative, tactical or planning-focused? Were you alone or with others?
• Struggles: Which necessary tasks did you avoid or struggle to complete? Is it because you don’t like them, you’re not good at them, or both?
• Energy flow: Did you tend to hit your stride in the morning, midday and evening? (For example, creative planning may feel easy Monday morning but drag on Wednesday afternoon.)
• Inefficiencies: Did you make six trips to Home Depot throughout the week when you could’ve grouped them into three? Are you checking your email constantly instead of batching tasks?

Once you complete Step 3, you’ll see not only when you’re at your best, but also whether the work you’re doing lines up with your role. The million-dollar question now is this: Are your minutes adding up the way you want them to? Don’t worry—as you carefully prioritize tasks, they will.

Step 4: Prioritize Tasks

Ever get to the end of an exhausting day and wonder what you even accomplished? Understatement, right? Plenty of activities can keep you up to your eyeballs in busywork and still not move you toward professional and personal growth. In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey showed us how to plot our tasks in a time management quadrant (also called an Eisenhower Matrix). Here’s how it works:

Everything you do, every task you complete, falls into one of these four categories:

1. Important and urgent
2. Important but not urgent
3. Not important but urgent
4. Not important and not urgent

How to Do Your Time Management Quadrant

To pinpoint your time suckers and the wins you want to repeat, plug the activities you logged during your time audit into the time management quadrant. Here’s what that could look like:

Important and urgent (things to do now or soon)

Examples: doing payroll, finding cover for a team member who called out, handling a family emergency

Important but not urgent (things to delay or plan)

Examples: going for a run, planning next quarter’s business goals, meeting with your CFO about your retained earnings targets, taking your spouse to dinner

Not important but urgent (things to delegate)

Examples: answering constant texts and emails, doing your bookkeeping, putting out fires someone else should handle

Not important and not urgent (things to drop or delete)

Examples: talking about last night’s game for 20 minutes at the coffee station, scrolling social media throughout the day, unwinding every night with hours of mindless TV

Now you’re ready to move to the fun part—reimagining your schedule.

Step 5: Create a Weekly Schedule

The saying goes: Tell your day where to go or you’ll wonder where it went. So now that you’re clear on the types of tasks filling your schedule, you’re ready to tell them where they really belong. In other words, it’s time to create a weekly schedule and plan your calendar strategically.

Pro tip: Before you create your new schedule, take a hard look at time wasters you need to cut for good. Also, go back to Step 1 and remember to build in time for what’s most important to you.

How to Build Your Weekly Schedule

Start with a fresh planner and block time for everything you want in your daily or weekly rhythm. Here’s what that means:

• Prioritize Quadrants 1 and 2. Focus most of your energy on important and urgent tasks (Quadrant 1) and important but not urgent tasks (Quadrant 2). That’s where productivity and quality of life skyrocket.
• Protect your nonnegotiables. Schedule important meetings, deadline-driven projects, and all the must-do activities that only you can do.
• Make space for what usually gets pushed aside. Block time to brainstorm your vision, plan, read a leadership book, enjoy a family movie night, or start your day with a walk and quiet time.
• Tame the derailers. Instead of letting emails, texts and calls interrupt you all day, give them a set block of time. Do the same with things like updating your schedule or having open-door time for team members to stop by with quick questions and ideas.

All this scheduling might feel weird at first. But stick with it because this is how you protect your priorities and create the kind of work-life balance that fuels both your business and your personal life.

Make Time Work for You

At the end of the day, time management isn’t about cramming more into your calendar—it’s about making room for what matters most.

Working your new plan faithfully is how you take control of your workweek. Don’t sweat it when distractions happen. That’s called life. Just handle interruptions as quickly as possible and move back to your list.

Keep your priorities, time audit and time management quadrant handy to help you see where you’ve been, what you never want to go back to, and where you’re going. When you set priorities, cut the distractions, and create a schedule that actually works for you, you’ll stop spinning your wheels and start moving your business forward with purpose.