According to research from The Alternative Board, the average small business owner spends almost 70% of their time on day-to-day tasks instead of long-term goals and strategy.
Does it sound familiar?
Do you need some time management strategies so you can spend less time on emails and more on growing your business? You might also like to use these techniques to avoid working seven days a week. Unsurprisingly, most ecommerce owners work over 50 hours a week trying to stay on top of it all.
What if you could reduce this number to 40 hours a week without impacting your business? All you need to do is implement some time-saving strategies to improve your work productivity. Here’s how you can do it.
The Importance of Time Management
As a business owner, you know that your time is precious. That’s why you need to know how to manage time effectively. Once you understand the principles of time management, you can start reaping the rewards, including:
- Increased productivity: When you manage your time effectively, you can focus on tasks that matter most to you and get them done more quickly and efficiently. It also frees up your time for other high-value items, such as scaling your business or optimising operations
- Reduced stress: Feeling like you’re in control of your time lowers stress levels. You stop worrying about whether you’re going to get everything done.
- Improved focus: When you have a plan and know what needs to be done, you can better focus on the task at hand. You’re not distracted by all the other things competing for your attention.
- Better decision-making: When you have time to think, you make better choices. You don’t feel rushed, and you can consider all your options.
The Impacts of Poor Time Management
Poor work productivity not only impacts your business, but it can cause problems in your personal life. Here are just some of the issues you may experience when you’re not in control of your time:
- Missed deadlines: When you don't manage your time effectively, there is a higher risk of missing deadlines. You might not have parcels ready for pick-up resulting in delays in deliveries and unhappy customers.
- Increased stress levels: Constantly playing catch-up on everything can increase stress levels. This can impact your physical and mental health.
- Subpar job quality: If you’re constantly feeling rushed, the quality of your work will be poor. Responses to customer enquiries may be unsatisfactory, or your marketing can result in poor performance.
- Trouble reaching goals: It becomes difficult to reach your goals when you’re not managing your time effectively. It can hold you back from scaling your business or achieving your revenue objectives.
- Burnout: Work-life balance is vital for every business owner. When your energy levels are depleted, it can significantly impact your productivity and put you further behind on essential tasks.
Where Ecommerce Owners Spend Their Time
Before learning time management skills, you must know where your hours are spent. More specifically, you need to know where it’s being wasted. The Alternative Board reports that emails are the biggest strain for business owners.
Take a moment to think about how many you open, read and respond to on a daily basis. Now ask yourself how important they are. Do these emails help you reach your long-term objectives? The answer is likely no.
But emails aren’t the only task where ecommerce business owners spend their time. Other duties include:
- Sales and marketing: These tasks could be anything from digital marketing activities, such as creating social media content, to engaging with other brands to promote your products.
- Customer service: Do you directly respond to enquiries, complaints, and feedback? While the personal touch might be nice, this can take a large chunk of time out of the day.
- Bookkeeping and accounting: It’s good for business owners to be across the finances. However, they don’t need to manage transactions, maintain records and prepare tax statements.
- Human resources: Many business owners are heavily involved in recruiting and training new staff members.
- Admin tasks: Administration tasks examples can be anything from managing appointments and reminders to constructing to-do lists containing even more admin duties.
- Product development: How much time do you spend developing or improving new products?
- Networking and partnerships: Networking at conferences or events is important for all small business owners.
10 Time Management Strategies for Ecommerce Owners
Implementing time-saving techniques doesn’t require a project plan. Once you know the tasks that are eating up your day, you can decide whether you need to do them. Perhaps it can be completed by someone else or managed effectively using some of the best time management apps available.
If you’re unsure where to start, use these time management techniques.
1. Start the Day with a Plan
It might seem obvious, but you will need a plan if you want to manage your time effectively. All the time management books will tell you the same thing, planning your day or making a to-do list of all the things that need to get completed will help keep you on track.
You don’t have to start with an organised list. Just get all the chores out of your head and onto a piece of paper, whiteboard or into a task management app. Consider updates to your ecommerce stores, fulfilment duties and ideas for new products. Once it’s on the page, you can move on to the next step.
2. Identify Your Priorities
Now that you have a list of tasks to complete, you should start prioritising by urgency. For example, what parcels do you need to get out the door today so they arrive on time or what customers are waiting for responses?
You can prioritise your tasks in multiple ways. One of the most effective is to label each one based on its importance. You can use low, medium and high. A high-importance item could be preparing for a sales event like Black Friday, whereas one rated low could be updating your Google Business listing.
3. Break Down Large Projects into Bite-Size Tasks
How often do you put off larger projects because you just don’t have the time to do them? An effective time management technique is to divide these initiatives into smaller manageable tasks.
For example, perhaps you have plans to attend a retail conference, which requires a lot of organisation. You need to prepare a stand, which means you need equipment and marketing materials. Everything you need to do should become a microtask that you need to complete in the lead-up to the event rather than trying to get it all done at once at the last minute.
4. Determine What You Can Delegate
As you look through your task list, you should also decide what you can delegate to other staff members or outsource to freelancers or other service offerings. There might even be a way to automate tedious tasks.
One idea is to automate some of your fulfilment duties. With Interparcel’s Rule Manager, you can set a series of conditions and rules for orders you import into Shipping Manager. It could be adding transit cover to expensive items or using the same courier provider when sending parcels to a specific country.
5. Use the Time Blocking Technique
By this point, you should have a plan for the day ahead. You should also know how long each task will take you. It might be displayed in task management software, or it could be second nature because you’ve completed it so many times before.
An excellent task management strategy is to use time blocking. For each chore, you allocate a specific amount of time to it. When it comes to your fulfilment duties, you might decide that you have two hours to complete it. As for responding to customer inquiries, it could be an hour. When time is up, or you've finished your task, you move on to the next item.
6. Don’t Multitask
If you consider yourself a multitasker, then you need to stop. You might believe this makes you more efficient, but it’s actually making you less productive as you’re spreading yourself too thin across multiple projects.
Switching between tasks regularly also takes a lot of mental energy. The reason you might feel exhausted at the end of the day is that your brain is constantly switching gears as you try to dedicate attention to a new task. You’re best to stick to one chore and see it to its completion before moving on.
7. Eliminate Distractions
When you’re trying to manage your time, it’s easy to get distracted. Your phone might be buzzing with social media notifications and emails from customers. Maybe your staff are asking you questions or thinking too far ahead about what you need to do.
It takes a lot of discipline to remove distractions during the workday. The best thing you can do is to put your phone in another room or lock yourself away while completing critical tasks. You can even block time-wasting websites on your computer so you’re not tempted to browse when you’re supposed to be working.
8. Conduct a Review at the End of the Day
When you’ve completed all your tasks or reached the end of the workday, take a moment to look back and assess how you went. Did you get everything done, or were their tasks that took longer than expected?
Maybe shopping around for the best shipping rate took longer than expected. Should you allocate more time to finish this tomorrow, or is there a better way? For example, did you know you can import orders from ecommerce platforms and marketplaces into Interparcel’s Shipping Manager? From here, you can browse through Australia’s largest selection of courier providers to find the rates that meet your budget. It will significantly reduce the time you spend searching for the best prices for parcel delivery.
9. Plan Ahead
After assessing your day, spend some time looking at the week and month ahead. Are there any high-value initiatives you need to prepare for? What about large projects that you should begin breaking down into smaller tasks?
The more you know about what’s coming down the pipeline, the better you can incorporate these duties into your time management plan. It will mean you’re more prepared for when these projects are due, and you won’t be as stressed leading up to the deadline.
10. Make the Most of Down Time
It can be tempting to sneak a peek at customer emails or respond to social media inquiries after the workday. You might think it won’t take long, but it always leads to doing other work outside of office hours. The next thing you know, it becomes a habit.
Your mind and body need time to switch off from work and reset. A Microsoft survey found that 62% of Australian employees suffer from burnout compared to the global average of 48%. The leading cause is trying to stay productive instead of taking time to recharge. So ensure you are fully rested before you show up to work the next day.
Start Maximising Your Work Productivity
Implementing these time management strategies doesn’t require any software or applications. You can start using them today so you can begin scaling your ecommerce business.
Although there are some software's that save time for you by automating the entire process. If you want to learn more about these softwares, you'll want to read our blog post '18 Incredible Apps to Help Business Owners Reclaim Their Time'.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Linked In
YouTube