Time Management for Business Owners: How to Stop Running Around Reactive

If you run a company, a department or a jobsite, you probably know this feeling. You run around all day, answer everything that comes at you, and then it is seven o'clock and the list you started with has barely moved. You were busy every minute. You just were not working on the right things.

I have taught a time and priority management class for many years to many different companies, and this is the number one complaint I hear from owners and managers. Phones, email, texts and being connected around the clock have made it worse. The good news is that it is a process problem, not a character flaw, and a process can be fixed. This episode covers the first half of the system: planning your time and managing your tasks.

Why is my day always reactive?

When I ask people what is going wrong, the same list comes back. Their calendar is reactive, so whoever walks in the door sets the agenda. Their task list is reactive, so something pops up and they drop what they were doing. They have no system that has ever really worked for them. They never schedule time to plan. And they hand their time away every time they say yes to a request without checking whether they have room.

Why do I do my best work at the last minute (and should I)?

Many people tell me they do their best work right before a deadline. I get it, but look at what that habit costs. Parkinson's Law says work expands to fill the time available. Give yourself four weeks to prepare for a meeting and it will take four weeks, and if you wait, the last-minute panic eats the time anyway.

The answer is to eat the elephant one bite at a time. When I am preparing to speak at a conference, I put 30 minutes to an hour on my calendar every week for several weeks beforehand. I practice, edit and look for new information, so I am ready instead of cramming. The same works for a quarterly review, a budget or a big presentation: break it into small blocks and put each block on the calendar.

How do I plan my day, week and month?

Ask yourself when you plan, and how often. I met a man in one of my classes who reviews his week every Friday before he goes home, then spends a few minutes on Sunday night or early Monday moving over whatever did not get done and looking at the next two weeks. Day after day he is ready. That is what planning looks like when it is a habit instead of a wish.

If you come from the building business, you already know this. A good builder or superintendent is always two, three or four weeks out, scheduling trades and ordering materials before they are needed. Your business deserves the same horizon. Look farther out than you do now, and take small steps to get ready for what is coming.

A few rules for the plan itself:

• Leave white space. If every 15 minutes is booked, the first real emergency crushes your whole day. Build in margin for eruptions.
• Let the plan drive you. A request is not an order. When a customer asked me to come look at something right now, I would check my calendar, explain who I was meeting, and offer a specific time later that day or the next. Respectful, honest, and I still kept my commitments.
• Get the world on your plan. Your boss, peers, suppliers and team all work better when they know your plan and your rhythm.
• Schedule important work for your best hours. Carey Nieuwhof's book At Your Best makes this point well. I am a morning person, so my thinking, planning and writing happen early. Find your best buckets of time and protect them.

What should actually be on my calendar?

My coaching is that your calendar should be the driver of your behavior, not a record of where you have been. That means more than meetings:

• Every recurring meeting, entered the moment you accept the invite. I have sat on a coaching call waiting for someone who never put it on their calendar.
• Blocks for email, phone calls and texts. Do not hope you will catch a few. Put an hour on the calendar, even if it is your lunch hour.
• Planning time: 30 quiet minutes to look at last week, this week, next week and your most important items for the next few days.
• Task time and project time for the things that have a due date weeks away.
• Thinking time. John Maxwell says thinking is the hardest thing we do. Once a month, sit somewhere quiet with a blank piece of paper and think about the last month, the last year, the last meeting. It is amazing what comes when you get quiet.

Schedule yourself, at the time of day you are strongest, and let the calendar lead.

How do I decide what the most important task is?

Early in my career as a chief operating officer, our CFO called me in and told me something that stung. I was running around checking boxes and finishing small, mostly unimportant tasks. He needed me to work at the COO level: COO tasks, COO calendar, COO planning. He was right. When I got stressed, I defaulted to easy wins like making copies and ordering supplies, because they felt like progress.

There are a handful of things in your position that only you can do, given your skill, experience and responsibility. Put those first. If a task will increase revenue, raise customer satisfaction, shorten cycle time, improve profitability or help cash flow, it belongs at or near the top of your list. Pick your top three or four every day, and have the discipline to finish. Great managers finish.

Here is the picture I use in class. Take a big glass jar and a few big rocks, some medium rocks, gravel and sand. Pour the sand in first and you will never fit the big rocks. Put the big rocks in first, then the medium ones, then the gravel, then pour the sand in last, and it all fits, because the sand fills the gaps. The sand is the social media, the pointless email and the drop-by chats. The big rocks are your real priorities. Do them first.

How do I stop dropping things and closing loops?

This is the origin of the habit I teach most. Years ago, when I was a builder, a homeowner who had just moved in stopped by the office and mentioned a possible plumbing leak under a vanity. I told her to log it with warranty and said I would call a plumber. A rough day happened, I forgot, and a week later she rolled down her window and asked me one question: why did you lie to me last week?

It hit me hard, because she was right. I never called anyone. That day I decided to become bulletproof. I bought a small spiral notepad, kept it in my pocket, and for years I wrote down everything anyone told me or that I thought of. Then each day I moved it all into my task list, and an item never left that list until it was complete. Nobody was ever going to call me a liar again.

The lesson is that sending the email or leaving the message does not close the loop. You own it until it is done. David Allen, in Getting Things Done, calls the unfinished items rattling around in your head open loops, and they are what wake you at two in the morning. Close them like this:

1. Write everything down. It is not real if it is not written, and remembering is not a process.
2. Give every incomplete a future date. If the vendor did not call back, put a reminder on Thursday to call again. Then your mind can let it go.
3. Use recurring reminders for monthly reports, standing meetings and deadlines.
4. Review daily. Whatever did not get done moves to a specific day, not into a pile.
5. Delegate what is repeatable. If a task is redundant and can be trained, someone else should do it, like a college intern or a part-time retired helper, so you can do the work only you can do.

Is it okay to say no to people?

Yes, and nobody may have told you that. Just because someone asks for your time does not mean the answer has to be yes. Say it with grace: not right now, but I can meet at 4:30, or I can come in at 7:30 tomorrow. If it is a true emergency, treat it like one, but know that not everything is. Stop telling yourself you will just work Saturday to catch up. And under-promise, then over-deliver.

What tools should I use?

Whatever works for you. Paper is fine if you are bulletproof, calm, leaving on time on Fridays and beating your competitors. If it is not working, try something else. I use OneNote with a folder for every client, and an AI note taker that records meetings and sends me a summary so I do not have to type notes. Others use Evernote, Asana or a day planner. My suggestion for a team: have each person pick a tool, try it for 30 days, and compare.