11 Top Biz Owners Share Their Best Time Management Hacks

Before each month starts, plan what you want to achieve in advance, and then break those down into weekly to-dos. This saves you a lot of time because you spend less time on "busy work" and more time on work that will actually grow your business.

My favorite time management hack is.... drum roll please... planning ahead. I know, pivotal I'm sure. But it's honestly scary how few people do this. My business partner and I have monthly planning meetings and weekly mini-updates. We keep everything carefully (perhaps meticulously) scheduled inside TrelloForBusiness.com. If you want help getting started, I would totally recommend you try our free course - all about saving that precious time of yours - head to YourBizOnAutopilot.com to enroll. We got some great planning tips, tools, apps and systems all rolled into one inside that puppy.

My favourite time management hack is Prioritise! Always be clear on your goals. This could be a big goal, like get that e-book written or it might be something as simple as writing a blog post! The point is always know what it is you're trying to get done. And only work on the tasks you need to complete to get that thing done. If it's not helping you reach your current goal, put it at the bottom of the list. When you prioritise your tasks based on your goals, you actually finish stuff. Then you feel good about yourself and go on and finish more stuff! It's a feel-good cycle.

As a small business owner, it is essential to focus your time on what moves the needle forward the most in your business. Use your best, least distracted, most focused work time for the high leverage activities.

Making a weekly to-do list on Sunday nights. I brain dump everything I have to do for the week ahead - client work, my own projects, business ops tasks, etc - and then every night, I plan for the next day. I start by writing down my top 3 priorities for the day and then add some smaller tasks to the side. I've tried almost every planner out there and I'm currently loving my Panda Planner.

To focus on ONE main project per week instead of multi-tasking because being super FOCUSED saves time and keeps overwhelm from happening! Every 3 months I like to do a major brain dump of EVERYTHING I want to accomplish, and then I prioritize and prune everything I brain dumped by evaluating each item. Once I've got a newly pruned and prioritized list of projects/things I'd like to accomplish, I then schedule out one main thing to focus on (from that list) per week in my planner.

To have two "golden hours" a day where you actually focus on doing work and nothing else. Jim Edward's taught me this - it has been the one thing that has helped me be successful and focused on what matters!

I won't claim to be very good at time management (ha!) but I do use a few tricks to manage my time more effectively. The one that's probably made a big difference to me is learning to say "no." I have a tendency to get bogged down by so many tasks and have always been afraid to say no in the past, but I've had to use this skill a lot lately in order to get the things done that I need to. It's a nice one to have in your back pocket when you're feeling extremely overwhelmed.

A lot of self-evaluation makes for a productive schedule. One of the questions I love to ask is: "If I only had four hours this week to work on my business, what would absolutely have to get done?" I'm a big fan of weeding your routine to find the income-generating seeds and fruit.

Set up a Task Tracking worksheet to help you evaluate the stuff you do every week. The process let you see how long things really take so you know what you can honestly handle with your schedule.
Here's the simple steps to create your own Task Tracking worksheet:
1. List the top things you do every week for your business. Think of this like your master to-do list.
2. If the items have several steps, create a sub-list to give you a breakdown of your action items.
3. Now spend the next few days tracking yourself doing these tasks. Write down the time it actually takes from the start of your item until you can honestly cross that off your list.
4. Take notes about what really happened while you were tracking your steps. I find it helps to note if I had to come back to finish something the next day or if I needed to another step before this one.
5. Once you've timed out all the items on your master list, write out your top action items you need to work on that week to help you grow your business. Include the time it takes to do each item and include a priority number next to each item.
6. Now schedule those items into your planner starting with the highest priority item and block off the time it'll take to really and honestly get those things done.

Get up early! This is especially important if you have small kids. Get up two hours before they wake up, spend 30 minutes quiet time for yourself, and then focus on the one thing that will help move your blog or business forward that day.