5 Time Management Tips For Entrepreneurs — Save your Startup from Failing

Becoming an entrepreneur is an unexpected endeavor. You have to work 16 hours or even more a day without expecting a guaranteed revenue in return—it’s indeed scary.

Maybe that’s why 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year. This alone data is sufficient enough to kill your entrepreneur dreams, but let’s look from a different way—

If 90% of startup businesses failed in 2021, it means 10% succeeded also, and you have to learn what those successful entrepreneurs have done, right?

Since, at TrackOlap, we work with numerous startups, we took the liberty to find out what successful entrepreneurs are doing right to grow their business? And, the answer has been very simple—

They have managed their time better!

Yep, because it doesn’t matter how many hours you and your teamwork daily—what matters is how much you have achieved in that time. You can work 16 hours or 8 hours a day, but you can't succeed if you don’t utilize every second properly.

Unfortunately, not many entrepreneurs know to manage their own and their teams’ time to gain maximum results in less time. Therefore, today, we are going to teach the importance of Remote Team Management so you can save your startup business from failing.

5 Time Management Strategies for Startups That Never Fails

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” — Bill Gates.

Bill Gates has pretty much summed up everything about time management in this quote. Mostly, entrepreneurs are so focused on planning and strategizing that they know what they want to achieve in the next ten years, but they have no clue what they want to achieve today. And that’s the biggest reason behind startup failure.

Entrepreneurs, it’s good to think ahead of time, but you can’t ignore the present in anticipation of the future. The time management strategies for startups should be well balanced where the present and future needs should be catered properly.

Confused?

Well, let us share the result-driven time management tips for entrepreneurs that can make you a successful business leader:

Track your Time

The most vital time management strategy for startups is to track their time. Why?

Well, if you don’t track your and your team’s time, you won’t know where you are going wrong and which segment needs improvement? When you track every minute, you’ll know:
How much time you daily spend on which activities?
How much time your employees spend working?
Are you meeting your regular business goals?
What your employees are working on?

How many deadlines have you missed? Etc.

Unfortunately, only 17% of people track their own time, which is a shame because Time Tracking Software is the first step towards effective time management. Additionally, nowadays, you can easily use time tracking apps and gain a clear perspective about your time.

With our tracking solution, you can ghostly track your own and your team’s time and draw conclusive results. You can generate multiple time tracking reports with one click and ensure to maintain high-level productivity and efficiency in your business.

Schedule your Team’s Time

Startups have a scarcity of resources—it’s a piece of common knowledge. But, successful entrepreneurs don’t let resource scarcity affect them because they plan to achieve maximum results under limited resources.

And, scheduling and managing your team is the first step in it. When you monitor your team’s time, you’ll know which employees are more productive and which needs to be put under strict scheduling.

“The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.” — Timothy Ferriss.

Now, measuring your team’s time doesn’t mean that you ask them after every ten minutes—what are you doing? No, this will simply waste your and their time. So, what to do?

You need to preset realistic deadlines for your employees while assigning them tasks so you can measure whether they have to meet the given timeline or not. Like, through our task allotment feature, entrepreneurs can assign tasks individually to each team member along with a timeframe to complete them. They can constantly monitor the employee’s performance, and whenever they find an employee running behind schedule, they can send him or her a reminder alert to know work status.

When your team is completing work on time, you can easily gain the desired outcome—in spite of your limited resources, and that’s the most important time management tip for entrepreneurs.

Communication Time Mapping

With the scheduling optimization tools, you can set the perfect schedule for your team, but you have to also ensure that they can meet their schedule. How?

If you unnecessarily conduct long meetings or virtual conferences, you are wasting your employees' time there. Therefore, you need to track meeting time also so you can reduce time spending on meetings.

Averagely, senior management spends 23 hours a week conducting meetings, which can be easily reduced with effective communication. Thus, you should try to find a way to improve communication level in your organization, such as:

Use Dual System - When you have to share any information with your team, you can send a message to them instead of hosting a meeting. This will save your team lots of time because they can quickly reply back to your message. Through the dual communication system, you can reduce the number of meetings in your organization.

Centralized Platform - When you can broadcast a message to your entire team with one click, you can save a lot of time.

Meeting Calendar - You should prepare a meeting calendar for a month or even a year in advance so that your employees can complete their work accordingly. If you send a meeting notification before an hour, this will disturb your employees' entire schedule and put them behind.

Overall, if you reduce the number of meetings with quick and effective communication, you can sync your employees with time.

Block Distractions

Apart from managing your time, you have to also pinpoint where you are wasting your time. There are plenty of different types of distractions present in your office that can slow you down as an entrepreneur as well as your employees.

Imagine you opened your social media account for a minute in your lunch break, and then you start scrolling down and start checking out your friends' feed. And, suddenly, when you look at the clock and found that you have wasted 30 minutes on lazy social media browsing—when you could have replied to some work-related emails in that timeframe.

Now, you might regret it for a minute, but man is a creature of habits, so you might probably do the same thing again. Therefore, when you get an application usage report at the end of a day, you can check how much time you have wasted on social media, gaming, or other non-work related apps and websites. This report can work as an eye-opener for you.

Similarly, your employees can be using non-work-related applications during working hours, which you can also track with the application usage report. Even you can block certain distracting apps and websites to keep yourself, and your team fully focused.

Set a Break Time

If you are working straight 8 hours, you’ll start to feel tired after a few hours. And when your brain is tired, your productivity will go down with it. Therefore, you have to give yourself a break after some time so that you can refresh your mind and work with better productivity. The same goes for your employees; you need to make sure that your employees take frequent breaks.

However, taking a break doesn’t mean that your employees should take a break after every half hour—it will be called slacking rather than a refreshing mind. Thus, you should use Employee Monitoring Software where you can fix break time for your employees, or they can press the “break button” when they go on break to maintain a proper record.

When you receive an automatic break record of your employees, you’ll know whether they have taken genuine breaks or unnecessary ones.

Use your Time Smartly

If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you have to use your time smartly. When you use your time perfectly, you can make sure that your employees also use their time correctly. Now, time is money—which you need to use smartly; otherwise, your business won’t grow.

With a time tracking solution, you can easily utilize your time effectively, so if you want a custom time tracking system to meet your startup needs, contact the TrackOlap team today!