Running your own business often involves juggling a lot of different tasks and responsibilities each day. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by it all, some of the useful time management techniques for the self-employed outlined below can help you get back on track.
It’s easy to think that ditching the 9-to-5 routine allows you to work without any need to organise and manage your time. You’ve escaped clocking in, managers hovering over your shoulder, or getting in trouble if you take an extra five minutes at lunch. But you still need to meet deadlines for clients and customers, stay on top of your admin, and maintain a steady stream of new work enquiries.
The first step is to change your mindset. Finding the right processes for you to effectively manage your time and workload doesn’t mean that you’ve sacrificed your self-employed freedom. It actually enhances it by allowing a better work-life balance, minimises last-minute and out-of-hours client demands, and means you can protect and enjoy time off.
When I started working for myself around 15 years ago, I was occasionally reluctant, or even resistant, to embrace time management. It seemed counterintuitive to spend 30 minutes organising my workload when I was already busy with client work, and I should be able to keep track of everything as a responsible adult. Even as I witnessed more organised freelancers and self-employed friends achieving quicker success, and with less risk of procrastination, burnout, and last-minute panic.
Once I accepted the need for a little structure to guide my work, everything became a bit easier to manage. And those initial improvements in both my professional and personal life encouraged me to continue to evolve and improve the process. It doesn’t rule out the occasional problem or delay, but does allow me to cope with them much more effectively.
General time management techniques
- Make time to map out your tasks and priorities. Even five minutes of planning will improve your results.
- Embrace a regular routine that helps you build positive habits for work and your physical and mental health. It also reduces the need to rely on motivation each day.
- Be realistic about your objectives. No-one achieves 12 hours of focused work every day without fail, no matter what technique they use.
- Expect to continually evolve and adapt your techniques. It’s important to admit if a process just doesn’t work for you, or if you just didn’t commit to it.
- You don’t have to become a productivity and time management guru, or be constantly jumping onto the latest app to get results.
- Tracking and managing your time is not just about you. It also identifies clients who may be over-demanding and underpaying. Or when to delegate and outsource tasks.
- Minimise distractions by setting office hours with clients, muting your phone except for emergencies, and avoid checking emails or social media etc.
- Use a notepad or app to capture thoughts and ideas unrelated to the task at hand.
- Project management tools, time trackers and other software can be worth the investment, but only if you actively use them.
- Even if your time management is perfect, you should still factor in contingency time into deadlines as much as possible for external delays or problems.
The Pomodoro Technique
Probably the most well-known time management technique, using 25-minute work sessions followed by five-minute breaks. After four cycles, you get to take a longer 20 or 30-minute rest. If you complete a task within a work session, you should devote any remaining time to reviewing it.
If a work session is interrupted then either the other activity needs to be postponed, or the pomodoro needs to be abandoned.
It’s a simple and effective approach for many people, named for the Italian for tomato as it can be managed with a mechanical kitchen timer, pen and paper. But if you’re looking for something less manual, you can use pomofocus.io. You need to plan and prioritise your tasks for each day, and record what is achieved, allowing you to review the time spent before scheduling future tasks.
A related alternative is Flowtime, in which you set a time between 10-90 minutes. If you can still focus, you keep working for an additional ten minutes, but if you’ve stopped concentrating, you then take a break.
The Pomodoro technique and similar approaches are particularly helpful if you struggle with procrastination as it encourages you to just get started on larger projects with a smaller 25-minute block.
Time blocking, or time boxing
For this method, you break up every day into 30 or 60-minute blocks with a short buffer time in between. And you then estimate the time for each task you want to accomplish, whether it’s work, eating or exercising.
Categorising and batching tasks helps to make this more effective. For example, having set blocks for email or social media prevents you checking them constantly throughout each day.
Time boxing is a related approach which sets a fixed amount of time to complete as much as possible of a task, while Day Theming sets a particular type of task or project for each day of the week.
In addition to promoting deep work without distractions, Time Blocking is particularly effective as a way to counter perfectionism by setting strict time limits on a task or project in addition to deadlines. It can also highlight if you’re overcommitting to one client at the expense of others.
Kanban
A visual system for time management which focuses on the stages within a project, and moves tasks across columns as they’re completed. For example, you might have Ideas, To Do, In Progress and Completed as the four headings for your Kanban board. And using software, or a whiteboard with sticky notes, tasks can journey across as they’re tackled.
It’s great for providing a clear overview, which is especially helpful when you’re co-ordinating with collaborators and client teams. And many project management tools add useful prioritisation and time tracking tools to help highlight the order and schedule for projects, breaking out individual tasks and responsibilities.
The downside is that it needs careful management to avoid becoming a jumbled mess with no clear direction.
Getting Things Done
This time management technique focuses on capturing and organising your tasks to create lists and priorities.
The Getting Things Done method asks you to capture everything that springs to mind, clarify when the task is actionable and has steps you can follow, and organise them with labels and context. You should also set time to reflect and review your tasks, to check next steps, deadlines etc. And finally, you engage by working on your task list.
It helps with effective planning and setting priorities, but you can find yourself with an overwhelming list of tasks as a result.
Eat That Frog, the Pickle Jar Theory, and the Eisenhower Matrix
These are all different approaches to time management, with the same aim of helping you to prioritise the most important thing you need to achieve on a daily basis.
Eat That Frog asks you to set a clear goal, with a deadline and a list of the things you need to do to achieve it (your frogs). And then organise the list in order of priority, tackling the most important, difficult, or off-putting one first.
A different analogy is used for the Pickle Jar Theory, which represents your time for each day. You then fill it with rocks (the most important tasks), pebbles (which can be left for another day or delegated), and sand (disruptions and distractions). Your task list should start with the rocks and end with the sand if you have time available.
An alternative which doesn’t involve wildlife or empty food storage is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a 2x2 grid dividing tasks into four quadrants. These are Urgent and Improvement (Do), Important but Not Urgent (Schedule), Urgent but Not Important (Delegate), and Not Urgent and Not Important (Delete).
All of the above approaches can help a lot with prioritisation and decision-making, allowing you to focus on the tasks which have the most impact. By demoting the least important demands on your time, you’ll be less stressed and overwhelmed by a potentially endless list of things to do.
Productivity and Bullet Journals
A productivity journal is a record of your ideas, actions, and activities, with deadlines and a daily list of tasks to complete. Each day you can track the time taken, along with reflecting on your successes, the issues you’ve encountered, and whether you were able to overcome them.
Along with keeping everything in one place, writing everything down and clearing your mind will help to lower your stress levels. Keeping a record of your achievements and successes can also be helpful in managing imposter syndrome, or other times that you may be feeling down and lacking in self-confidence.
The Bullet Journal structures your plans with an index page, a Future log which can cover the next six months or longer, a Monthly log, and a Daily log, with two blank pages for each section.
You then add your tasks, events, and notes in a set format with a solid bullet point for tasks, a circle bullet for events, a dash bullet for notes, and an S to mark priorities.
Using journals can be time-consuming, but lots of stationery shops sell notebooks which are formatted for both techniques. And using a pen and paper to plan and track your time management can be a welcome break from screens, along with being portable and reliable if you’re travelling a lot. It also creates a permanent record which you can look back on in future years when you’re writing your mementos as a successful veteran freelancer or business owner.
Other techniques to consider:
- The 10-Minute Rule: If you’re putting off a particular task, just start for an initial 10-minute period. Once you’ve started, it will often feel a lot more manageable and less intimidating.
- The Seinfeld Method: Use a calendar to mark every day you work on a particular skill or activity, and don’t break the chain. This can work well for projects requiring regular activity such as blogging or building a social media profile, and to build good habits both professionally and personally, such as exercise.
- Pareto Analysis: This looks entirely at past activities to identify the 20% of activities that deliver 80% of results, so you can focus on them. And in the same way, highlighting the problems which are having the biggest impact.
- To-Don’t Lists: A simple list of distractions, bad habits and other things to avoid, allowing you to celebrate when you’ve succeeded in minimising issues, or identify things to delegate or outsource.
Ultimately, you may find one or more existing time management techniques helpful. Or you could end up developing your own individual approach. The important takeaway is that investing a little bit of effort into planning, tracking, and analysing how you spend your time will deliver better results for your work and personal life.
How IPSE can help you with useful time management techniques:
- Time management tips
- How to manage stress, avoid procrastination and tackle burnout
- Many of the best budgeting and invoicing tools include time tracking
- Save on technology, stationery and more via IPSE Rewards
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