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Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners


What is keeping you up at night? Are concerns around rising costs due to tariffs, the disruptive force of AI, or pressure to attract and retain talent causing you stress? When you own a business, you must be able to keep track of the changing macro-environment and make small pivots to ensure you are growing profits while taking care of the changing needs of various stakeholders. When faced with competing priorities, you need frameworks to help you evaluate which path you should take. The business schools and consulting experts will say you need foundational documents like a company mission, vision, and core values to inform your strategy, but how do you convert ambiguous documents into a practical strategy?


Smiling man in a suit on a geometric blue and white background. Text: "YOUR PATH," "SMALL BUSINESS TIPS," "TIME MANAGEMENT" in bold colors.

Your Path to Time Management

Your company's mission, vision, and core values are the compass that guides you when you are faced with multiple decisions and are not sure which direction you should go. Using these three foundational concepts can help you evaluate your to-do list and determine which tactics align most with your business aspirations. Business strategy is more about what you choose not to do than what you do. Staying committed to your values, knowing why your business exists, and working towards your long-term goals will give you confidence and certainty. 


Conduct a brain dump to identify key tasks.

As you start your day, list all your potential actions. Think as broadly as possible. Consider what you could do to attract more customers, develop your employees, expand partnerships with key partners, and implement other strategic initiatives that could help you grow your business. By emptying your mind and getting it all on paper, you will have clarity about all the possibilities in front of you. With this clarity, you can prioritize what actions you want to take to move towards your long-term goals. 


Set your priorities for key tasks.

Once you have made this list, you must begin evaluating how these potential actions align with your company's mission, vision, and core values. Analyzing these tasks against these foundational documents can help you determine their relative importance. Determining their relative importance will make it easier to prioritize what tasks you should do today versus those you should put off for tomorrow. Planning future tasks can be an effective tactic for reducing the stress and anxiety of a large to-do list. 


Determine the urgency of key tasks.

Now that you have evaluated the tasks based on relative importance, you can consider them based on urgency. If you determine a task is urgent and important, then you know that this task should be prioritized and completed as soon as possible. If you determine a task is urgent but unimportant, you should look for someone to whom you can delegate the task. The delegated task can go to employees, contractors, or vendors. When you identify that a task is not urgent, then you have an easy decision. You can either delete it from your to-do list or schedule to tackle it in the future. Correctly classifying tasks based on urgency and importance can help you with prioritization. 


Bring it all together.

As a small business owner, your most limited asset is time, which makes time management vital to business success. It is also the one thing you can never get back. Taking the time to prioritize your to-do list can help reduce the stress and anxiety of owning a business. Will you make mistakes? Of course you will, but that is part of the learning process. What is important is not that you are error-free, but that you learn from each experience. By documenting your potential actions, making decisions based on your foundational documents, and evaluating the impact of your decisions, you will learn, grow, and get better every day. Running a business is a journey. Enjoy the ride. 


If you have read this far, thank you for taking the time to review this blog. Running a small business is one of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do. If you would benefit from additional support and guidance running your small business, please email Executive Coach Dorian Cunion at dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com or book a session to learn more about our services.



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