8 Time-Saving Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs
As business owners running things solo or with a small team, we get to (or have to!) manage a whole lot of different tasks each and every day.
Which is why saving yourself time, however and whenever you can is so important!
As a low “desk time” entrepreneur myself, I’ve found a few things that really help me cut down on the busy work in my business so I’m sharing my very best tips with you in this blog post! Because being busy is not a badge of honor 😘
1. Use Strategic Email Templates
Email is vital to any online (or honestly even off-line) business these days. But if you feel like you’re spending half your day composing emails, there’s a much better way!
Starting with a strategic template can save you tons of time - and more importantly, mental bandwidth as you communicate with your clients & customers. Whether it’s customer service emails or client onboarding, email templates can save you so much time!
Gmail, in particular, makes it super easy to save templates and easily reuse them whenever you need them. Simply write up your email template, then click the three vertical dots at the far right side of your email screen. From there you can “Save Draft As Template” or insert one of your previously saved drafts straight into your email!
When it comes to your email marketing newsletter, my go-to resource for email templates is my friend Liz Wilcox and her fantastic $9/month membership (affiliate link)
For sales emails, you can’t do better than Sandra Van Der Lee’s copy templates from her business Damn Copy (affiliate link)
And for emails to handle tricky client situations, I can’t recommend Meneske’s Crap Sandwich Customer Service Templates (affiliate link) highly enough!
2. Project Management Templates
Having a good system to manage all your different projects, both client and internal, is essential to avoiding overwhelm. But setting up your system can be very time-consuming, so I recommend once you’ve created a process you want to use again that you turn it into a template!
Here are a couple of examples of the types of tasks you could turn into templates for your Project Management System:
Publish a new podcast episode every week? Make your subtasks into a template!
Regularly publish new blog posts? Create a template for your subtasks!
Offer productized services? Create a template for your client workflow!
And if you’re a ClickUp (affiliate link) user, you can even set up some automation to attach those templates to save you even more time!
3. Batch Your Work
Task switching can be a real time-suck! So sticking to one task and batching similar work can really help you be more productive, and will likely feel a lot less draining to do as well.
Gather up all of your similar tasks, that involve the same system, process or client, and block out time to work on just that before moving on to other work. Opening and closing different systems can make you break focus, whereas if you get them all done at once, it’ll save you tons of time!
4. Scheduling Meetings and Appointments
If you’re a low-energy entrepreneur like me, calls and meetings take up a huge amount of available capacity. So take stock of the calls, meetings and appointments you NEED to take to keep your business running (and yes, you can reduce these if you want 😘) and try scheduling then only on certain days, like only Wednesdays and Thursdays.
This helps you clear your calendar on a few days of the week for more focused work, and to recover from all those calls! And once you’re on a roll with calls it’s often easier to keep going, so scheduling a few calls on the same day can often prove easier than one a day. But be careful to not overschedule yourself as you’ll likely get overwhelmed with too many back-to-back calls!
And while we’re talking about appointment setting, make sure you have an automated system set up to let people book in on your calendar (only on those set days though!) such as Calendly (affiliate link), Acuity or my favorite budget-friendly option TidyCal (affiliate link).
5. Automations
Pretty much any task that is recurring can be automated, and this is an AMAZING way to save time in your business. One automation might save you a few seconds, but that number can grow quite a bit over time.
Things like inputting data, connecting systems, giving & revoking access and even emailing templated messages can all be automated, freeing you up from all those admin tasks!
My favorite tools for automation are Pabbly Connect (affiliate link) which allows you to connect multiple systems together and Airtable (affiliate link) which lets you trigger actions - including sending emails! - from your databases.
6. Take Breaks Throughout the Day
This is a tough one, but it really does pay off! Taking a few short breaks throughout your workday can make the difference between fighting through fatigue at the end of the day or wrapping up your day with energy to spare.
If this doesn’t come naturally for you, try setting a timer to remind yourself to stretch your legs and take breaks.
7. Get Rid of Interruptions
As a multi-passionate, it can be really easy for me to get distracted if I’m not careful. So try your best to set yourself up for success, especially if you’re heading into some deep-focus work.
Try closing out any unneeded browser tabs (or hide them) and shut off your phone notifications. It’s incredible how much more productive you can be when you aren’t constantly distracted by your phone going off!
8. Figure Out When You Are Most Productive
If you find your energy lagging at certain times of the day, it might be that you’re working against your body’s natural rhythms.
Most people are more productive at a specific part of the day, whether you’re a morning person, or maybe you get your second burst of energy in the mid-afternoon. Knowing when you are most productive can help you tackle your biggest or most important tasks during that timeframe.
