5 Time Management Hacks for Entrepreneurs

One of our previous articles highlighted 5 Things That You Need To Be An Entrepreneur. It could have listed dozens if not scores of other useful things entrepreneurs need to have in order to be successful. Today it’s time to tackle one many people would rather not deal with at all: Time management. If you’re cringing right now, it’s probably a sign you need to keep reading. There are only 24 hours in a day, so here are 5 time management hacks to get the most out them:

1. Don’t Shortchange Yourself

Don’t try to squeeze more out of your day by giving up sleep, nutrition, or exercise because you’ll end up doing more harm to your time management than good. Peak performance on a daily basis for the entrepreneur can’t happen if your body isn’t in tip-top shape, which means getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, keeping yourself hydrated, and exercising on a regular basis. Shortchanging your health will only serve to cancel out all the other time management hacks on this list. 

2. Know Your Baseline

If your time management skills aren’t what they need to be, it’s worth doing an assessment so you know what you’re dealing with. MindTools has a handy online survey you can use: How Good is Your Time Management? You’ll find out if you just need a few tweaks or a major overhaul.

3. Prioritization Counts

When you’re sitting there looking at the list of things you need to do, how choose where to start? Your project management software can’t do this for you – you have to decide. This can be a major hang-up for many entrepreneurs. There are many ways to do this, which means you might end up trying several methods before you find the one that’s going to work for you. You can try author Stephen Covey’s (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) Time Management Grid, which is actually a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix. For several more ways to prioritize, check out this article on the process.st blog.

4. Distraction Elimination

To get serious amounts of work done, you have to first establish some “sacred” blocks of time devoted solely to that. Some people make it an entire day while others carve out chunks of time on a daily basis. But it’s only going to work if you eliminate distractions, which means fully “unplugging” from social media, phones, email, and the Internet as a whole. It may also mean finding the right physical place as well – probably not the office.

5. Manage Your Workflow

Once you have the time and space to focus in on plowing through your tasks, you still need to actively manage your working time to get optimal results. One way to do this is optimize short breaks that boost productivity and keep you focused. Try Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique, which has you working in 25-minute chunks punctuated with five-minute breaks.

Any entrepreneur can seriously up their game with these five time management hacks. You’ll turbo-boost your own productivity, and your business will reap the benefits.