One of the most universal challenges for business owners is that of time management.
Most business owners are spending less time than they would like working on their businesses (tasks like strategic planning, marketing and other leadership responsibilities) than they are working in their businesses (performing repetitive administrative or customer-oriented tasks that could be delegated to an employee). We have created a strategic guide to help you recapture the value of every minute and focus your energy where it belongs.
Business owners wear many hats, working both as visionary leader and frontline employee—and switching between the two roles at a moment’s notice. As your own boss, you’re in charge of managing how you spend every moment. The decision you make as to where to focus your time is critical to the health of your business.
At The Alternative Board® (TAB), we’ve become very aware of the difficulty business owners have in managing their time. We’ve heard anecdotal tales from both TAB Members and other business owners we’ve met throughout the years, and we wanted to more fully understand the challenges they face. TAB surveyed 323 business owners about their time management challenges.
The survey results were enlightening. They showed not only where business owners are struggling most, but also helped illuminate which specific activities they thought their time could be most valuably spent on. Along with the survey data, we have also collected time management tips from TAB Members and other business owners who routinely balance urgent everyday distractions with more important strategic work on their businesses. By combining real data on how small business owners are actually spending their time with insights gathered from TAB Members and other business owners who are facing the same challenges, we have created a strategic guide to help you recapture the value of every minute and focus your energy where it belongs.
One key theme illuminated in our survey is that most business owners are spending less time than they would like working on their businesses (tasks like strategic planning, marketing and other leadership responsibilities) than they are working in their businesses (performing repetitive administrative or customer oriented tasks that could be delegated to an employee).
While the latter tasks often feel the most urgent, it is the former strategic responsibilities that are most critical to a healthy, forward-moving organisation. Our survey found that there is a gap between how most business owners spend their time and how they believe they should be spending it.
While business owners think they should be working 41.7 hours a week on average, 63% reported working more than 50 hours per week. (The average was 49.4 hours of work per week.) It’s not just a matter of how much time they spend at work—business owners are largely unsatisfied with how they are spending their time. While 73% prefer working on strategic activities, only 32% of their time is actually spent on those tasks.
10 Tricks to Make the Most of Your Time will show you how to:
- Examine where you’re currently spending your time, and if it’s helping or hurting your company.
- Create a strategy for how to approach tasks and make your workday productive
- Use shortcuts to minimise the amount of time routine tasks take out of your day