At nine in the morning you sit down to work out next season’s prices. Ten minutes in, someone on your team asks what discount to give an order, then a customer calls, then a supplier sends a message.
At two in the afternoon the price file is still open and not a single line has moved. You worked all day, but you never spent more than ten minutes in a row on one thing.
The problem isn’t a shortage of time
A small business owner rarely runs out of time. Their day gets chopped into pieces by messages and calls. Daily work, like answering those messages and calls, fits into ten-minute pieces, but work like pricing or next season’s plan needs an hour of continuous thought and doesn’t fit into them.
So that work falls further behind every day, and every time you tell yourself the problem is that you don’t have time.
Why working more doesn’t fix it
The first fix that comes to mind is to come in earlier or stay later. John Pencavel, an economist at Stanford University, studied the hours and output of workers at a munitions factory during World War I. Once the workers went past about 50 hours a week, each extra hour produced far less than the hours before it, and someone working 70 hours produced roughly as much as someone working 55.
Those workers did manual work and you do thinking work, so their numbers don’t transfer exactly to yours. But the hours you add to your day get chopped up by the same messages and calls, and the important work still doesn’t move.
Answer messages at set times
Most of the messages that arrive in the middle of your work can wait an hour. Instead of opening each one the moment it comes in, sit down two or three times a day, say at eleven and at three, and answer them all together.
Tell your team those times too. Once they know they’ll get their answer at eleven, they save up their questions and only interrupt you for things that are genuinely urgent.
Keep one uninterrupted hour for the important work
Every day, set aside one fixed hour, ideally in the morning before the messages start, only for work that only you can do, like pricing, winning a big customer or planning next season. During that hour put your phone on silent and tell your team to call you only for something genuinely urgent.
If you find they still call you constantly even during that hour, it means your team is waiting on your approval for a lot of decisions. Time management won’t fix that. You need to hand those decisions over to them through delegation.
And if you can’t tell exactly where in your business your time is getting chopped up, in a free diagnostic session we will find it together.