Get More Done: Our Top 4 Time Management Tips for Growing Your Online Coaching Business

You’ve created big, exciting goals, started gaining client momentum, are growing your team, and you’re beginning to see your business move to the next level.

The problem now is finding the time to manage your business, team, clients, and everything in life that make it worth living — like loved ones, hobbies, and healthy habits.

Time is one of the most precious resources an online coach has. Using it most effectively will help you reach more people, grow your business, and have more time doing what you love. But many business owners struggle with learning how to improve time management skills. 

Here’s what you need to know about juggling your schedule and team as an online coach and some time management tips to help you make the most of your time. 

Time management is less about getting more done and more about getting the most important things done.

Why is Time Management Important?

A successful business means you’re juggling an increasing number of responsibilities. Time management lets you take control of your time and gives you the freedom to spend your energy where it counts. And time management is essential to managing your online coaching business, ensuring you get to everything critical without burning out.

The bigger your business grows, the more precious your time and energy become. Learning to improve your time management skills now gets you out of survival mode and will help you grow your online coaching business sustainably into the future. 

Time management is critical not because you get more done but because what you get done is more productive for your overall goals.

The problem with many articles offering time management tips is that they concentrate on how to get more done in less time. But that will only leave you feeling burned out as you try to focus harder (in a world of distractions) and squeeze more work in(to a limited amount of time). 

When running a successful online coaching business, you’ll know you’re starting to master building effective time management skills for business owners when you can to take more work off your plate. This newfound time and energy frees you to grow your business, invest in your personal life, and spend the most time on what aligns with your goals in life. 

Time management is critical not because you get more done but because what you get done is more productive for your overall goals. 

4 of our Favorite Tips for Time Management 

The right steps will help you management your time for the success of your business. Here are some of our top time management tips for small business owners to help you find more time in your day:

1. Take stock of your current schedule

Knowing what can be improved without a solid dose of realism is challenging. While you may think that you know where you are spending too much time (and you might!), tracking your time and energy will help you understand where you are productive, where you spend too much time, and where you might be able to delete wasted time entirely. 

We cover several ways to track your time in our review of the three best time management tools for pros and their teams. You can:

• set up an Excel worksheet, 
• write it down manually, 
• or even use tools like Toggl Track or RescueTime to log your daily schedule quickly. 

Clockwise browser plug-in is also a great option as it integrates directly with your calendar to help you get more insights into your day.

So, what’s next once you decide on the tool you’ll use to track time?

1. We suggest you track your schedule for a week to get a sense of where you spend most of your time. 
2. Include your personal time and professional time — log in the hours you spent at your child’s soccer game and the hours you went through emails. 

It might be tempting to fudge numbers, but honesty is essential. You’ll probably find that you rarely have a “typical” week. From getting ready for a work event to caring for a sick child at home, most of us have something unusual pop up each week.

2. Eliminate, automate, and delegate your tasks

Once you’ve tracked your time for a week, go through each activity to see where you’re spending the most time and whether you could use that time more effectively. 

For each activity, decide:

• Could this be eliminated?
• If not eliminated, could this be automated with software?
• If it can’t be automated but doesn’t need you specifically, could it be delegated?

It’s vital to follow this line of questioning to ensure you’re not automating something that can be eliminated or wasting someone else’s time by delegating what could be automated.

One of the most vital aspects of time management is ensuring you spend your time where it counts. Practicing focused work is ineffective if you can eliminate, automate, or delegate your tasks. For example, you could delegate your email to an online assistant so you don’t waste hours of your week fielding client questions or concerns and trying to find methods to reach the mythical Inbox Zero. 

If you find that you don’t spend your time where you think you should, you’re not alone: over 85% of top business coaches we surveyed in our benchmarking study said they spend less than half their time delivering coaching services. Analyzing your tasks will help you spend more time with paying clients and less time on busy work.

The more your business grows, the more aggressively you need to set boundaries in your service business and cut activities on your schedule. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself taking on way too many tasks. 

For example, you may find that social media takes up too much of your time and takes away from more essential parts of your business. Although you may have loved using social media in the past, it is likely time to reflect on the return you’re actually getting from your social media marketing efforts compared to the time investment. Use the three questions earlier to analyze it from a practical angle. Social media is likely not something to eliminate, but you automate some of it or delegate it to a social media manager? Focus on keeping essential tasks and eliminate, automate, and delegate the rest.

3. Practice Active Procrastination

If a task survives your elimination, automation, and delegation, it deserves your attention. That doesn’t mean that it needs it right away, though. You might find that active procrastination is a more effective use of your time and a valuable time management skill for small business owners. 

Procrastination is not necessarily a sign of failure. Active procrastination will give you the fire to focus and get your work done quickly. The right kind of procrastination takes advantage of Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time you give yourself to complete it. It was a concept developed in a humorous essay written in 1955, but it continues to impact time management today. For example, many companies that have moved to 4-day workweeks find that their workers improved their productivity. Limiting the time you give yourself for a task will help you be more effective and focused on getting it done faster.

Active procrastination will give you the fire to focus and get your work done quickly.

One critical aspect of productive procrastination is urgency. Procrastinating in creating and executing a social media strategy, for example, is ineffective because it can be put off indefinitely. It probably won’t happen. On the other hand, waiting before a deadline to put together the first chapter of your book that a publisher has accepted will help light a fire in you. You’ll probably find that you get it done in less time than if you started earlier. Researchers call it active procrastination and it takes advantage of eustress — or healthy stress — to get your work done.

If you have the chance to get ahead of work or spend time doing something you enjoy, such as spending time with loved ones, going outdoors, or enjoying a hobby, don’t beat yourself up if you choose to put off work. It could actually help your time management in the long run.

4. Use block scheduling and slush time for focused work

When you’ve eliminated everything from your tasks that don’t need to be there and have real deadlines driving your schedule, block scheduling is a valuable way to get focused work done to make the most of your time.

Multitasking is the default for most online business owners. Feeling overwhelmed with responsibility and worried they might miss something important, many constantly switch tasks and do a little bit of everything all the time. This will kill your productivity: research shows that switching between tasks hurts productivity by as much as 40%. 

Instead, use blocks of your time to stay on a single task. For example, you might set aside a block of time each week to write out everything you’ll post on social media or a couple of hours to research and outline a talk you’ll give in the upcoming week.

Multitasking is the default for most online business owners. This will kill your productivity: research shows that switching between tasks hurts productivity by as much as 40%.

‍Block scheduling enables you to focus on a single task without worrying about the rest of your schedule. You won’t worry about missing emails, for example, if you block off a specific time in your day to answer them. You’ll be more effective and less stressed knowing that every important activity is accounted for.

‍Start your week by blocking out specific times for deep, focused work. You might want to put it on a shared calendar with your employees so that they know that time is accounted for and will be less likely to interrupt. Google’s Calendar and Browser plug-ins like Clockwise allow you to set or automate focus time on your calendar that’s visible to your team, on your family calendar and even changes your status on Slack throughout the work day.

If we’re being honest, business ownership requires Guinness Book of World Record contortionist levels of flexibility! While you might have the perfect schedule to begin your week, emergencies and distractions will arise. Some days you might ruin your own productivity plans to be when watching one episode of your favorite show (StartUp maybe? Or House Of The Dragon?) turns into an accidental binge-watching marathon. Ok, perhaps it wasn’t exactly an accident. 

Plus, some activities are hard to anticipate how much time they will take. When you create “slush blocks” in your calendar, you won’t derail your schedule when you have to stray from it.

When you create “slush blocks” in your calendar, you won’t derail your schedule when you have to stray from it.

Slush blocks are time built into your calendar that you can sacrifice if things don’t go as planned. If designing a course or program takes longer than anticipated or coaching your team member who needs help with a particularly challenging client situation, use the slush time without completely derailing your schedule.  

So, how can you apply slush time to your industry?

• The amount you should dedicate to slush time depends on the nature and size of your business. For example, if you’re still in the early startup stages, where you meet with clients or you’re coaching new team members frequently, you’ll need more time to account for longer meetings upfront.
• If your industry or business needs more margin and flexibility, you might want to set aside an hour or two a day for your slush time. 
• Keep track of your slush time when you’re new to scheduling and adjust it as needed as people and processes mature and everyone finds their rhythms.

Block scheduling with slush time will help you use your time effectively, harness your focus to work faster, and lower your stress. 

Block scheduling with slush time will help you use your time effectively, harness your focus to work faster, and lower your stress. 

Use Time More Effectively With Insight + The Right Coaching Platform

Time management is less about getting more done and more about getting the most important things done. The goal of actively managing your time is to spend more of it on the things that excite you and less on the activities that don’t return the energy you put into them in the form of financial growth, team growth or business scale. 

The more your business grows, the more essential these tips for managing time become because, who are we kidding, there will always be more to get done than it feels like there’s time for. Effective time management can eliminate waste and reduce stress so you’re freed up to realize your and your business’s real potential. 

Effective time management can eliminate waste and reduce stress so you’re freed up to realize your and your business’s real potential.

When it comes to managing your time, your team and your business, the right tools can help you get a grasp on where you and your team are wasting time. 

And the right coaching software can help you apply your newfound time management insights to your team and business operations. Start simplifying and automating your biggest time-wasting activities to free you and your team up to do what you do best. Profi’s coaching software is one of the best ways to streamline team scheduling, eliminate multiple tools, and create courses on autopilot. Book a Demo with one of our Product Coaches today to see how you can get more time back to spend where it counts!