When running a business, your time is as much of a commercial asset as equipment and office space. If you don’t manage it effectively, you can’t run your business successfully, wasting time and potentially losing money in the process. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of time-management techniques you can use to make every hour that you’re working count. Here are just three of them.

Automate Where Possible

There’s a reason why the business industry has seen such an explosion of automated software platforms. It’s because they add immense value to entrepreneurs and small to medium business owners – people who require time management support to fulfill accounting and marketing functions, all the while growing their commercial enterprise. Automated platforms enable you to create marketing campaigns, run reports, generate invoices, and pay suppliers with just a few clicks of a button. They save a significant number of hours over a week and often produce more professional-looking content than someone untrained in the subjects could do themselves.

Schedule Everything

One of the fundamentals of time management is to have time allotted to everything. Knowing your schedule at the start of every day helps you stay on track and stops you from procrastinating. It also enables you to view whole weeks or even months at a time, so you can see where there are opportunities to streamline tasks or realign project timelines. Remember – schedule in time to do nothing. It doesn’t mean you won’t do anything during this allotted slot, but having “free” time each day allows you to pick up those things that crop up unexpectedly without it negatively impacting the rest of your time-tabling.

Attention Management

Have you ever looked at a long to-do list and not known where to start? It can be overwhelming and may even result in your putting all of it off until you feel more ready to handle it. Categorizing your list into tasks that need your attention soonest is a simple way of stripping it down into manageable, bite-sized chunks. The Eisenhower Urgent-Important matrix helps busy entrepreneurs work efficiently by adopting a do, plan, delegate, and eliminate approach. It identifies tasks that are both urgent and important (do), tasks that are not urgent but are important (plan), tasks that are urgent but not important (delegate), and tasks that are neither urgent nor important (eliminate).

Making small tweaks to your daily schedule changes the way you run your business for the good. Start small and notice the difference it makes.