Mastering Time Management: 5 Key Hacks for Trade Business Owners

You’re hunched forward in your office-chair. 

The white glow of spreadsheets in your eyes. Papers, notepads, scribbled post-it notes spread out all over your desk. Sunshine spearing in through the window. Cabinets overflowing with papers. Invoices, quotes, accounts, documents, numbers, orbiting you. 

You’ve got the whole afternoon to knuckle down, focus, and work through it. 

You crack your knuckles, clear your throat, and pick up your biro. It’s time to get stuck in. 

Four hours pass. 

Now you’re yawning. It’s starting to get dark outside. You turn on the desk light, stretch your neck.

Guess what?

You haven’t done shit. 

Instead of closing off your accounts, you watched State of Origin highlights.

Instead of finalising your quotes, you fixed yourself a BLT.

This might be a familiar scenario for tradies - but it shouldn’t be. 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good you are on the tools - money is made or lost in the office. 

And as your business grows, so does your administrative burden.

What so many tradies don’t realise, is that almost all of these problems circle back to the importance of mastering processes around time management. 

So what is it exactly?

Time management is the art of becoming more organised and productive with your time.

Learning to manage your time properly will reduce your daily stress, create more free time, and boost your productivity.

There’s plenty of books, classes, workshops, podcasts, and seminars on time management delivered by the most famous self-help gurus in the world. 

Time management has become even more crucial in recent years because of the chaotic, fast-paced modern world we live in, and the number of different tasks we’re now required to juggle at once. 

Especially as tradies, and business owners. You’ve got to be organised on the tools, and off them. 

If you don’t know how to manage your time, you’ll never be able to take your trade business to the next level.

That’s why this article reveals FIVE hacks to ensure you manage your time effectively. 

Here we go. 

1. Set Goals

Goal-setting is used by pro athletes, successful business people and high-performers in every walk of life. 

They give you long-term vision and short term motivation. 

When you know where you're going, you can figure out exactly what needs to be done to get there.

Without proper goal-setting, you'll waste your time, get side-tracked on all sorts of shit, and feel overwhelmed. 

Setting goals sounds tedious and time-consuming to some people. But a little time and effort invested now saves a massive amount of time, effort and frustration in the future. 

Check out our e-book on “future setting” if you want a more detailed process for setting goals. 

2. Straighten up your priorities

Prioritising what needs to be done is super important. 

Most people have some version of a “to-do” list. The problem with most of these lists is they’re just a collection of things that need to get done. There’s no real structure or purpose to the list and, because of this, your work will be just as unstructured. 

Basically, you’ll struggle to get shit done.

To-Do Lists should be prioritised. Your most important tasks should be at the top of the list, and the least important tasks at the bottom. Rank their importance and work on them accordingly. 

A prioritised To-Do List is usually one of the first productivity breakthroughs people make before they start hitting new levels of success. 

3. Handle interruptions like a boss

Most tradies get very little uninterrupted time to work on their most important tasks. 

There are phone calls, paperwork, questions from staff, and a whole bunch of situations that appear out of nowhere. Some do need to be dealt with right away - but others just need to be managed. 

Maintain focus. Stay in control of your time. Everyday interruptions can be a barrier to your productivity, and therefore to your own success. 

Think about yesterday, or last week, and all the times you were interrupted. They may have been phone calls, emails, conversations, mates stopping by the office, or anything else that unexpectedly demanded your attention. 

Don’t let it take you out of the zone. 

Get on top of it.

4. Stop wasting time

Unfortunately, “I’ll get to it later” is the downfall of so many good tradies.

After too many “laters” the work piles up so high that your mountain of work seems impossible to climb. 

The best way to beat procrastination is first to recognise it, and then figure out 

WHY you do it.

Many high-performers procrastinate from time to time. It’s perfectly common, and normal.

But when it gets REALLY bad, it can stop you from moving forward and hitting your targets. 

This can disrupt your career, and your life. 

Once you understand why it happens (are you afraid of failure?) you can take steps to better manage your time and productivity. 

5. Get your schedule on-point

Good time management often comes down to effective scheduling. When you know what your goals and priorities are, you can create a powerful schedule that keeps you on track.

This will greatly reduce your stress levels.

Effective scheduling comes down to systematically setting aside periods of “boom time” and “flex time” - boom time is when you’re balls to the wall, and “flex time” describes the flexible periods in your day designed to reduce your stress, create more time, and capitalise on situations you couldn’t plan for - like on-site upsells. 

By creating a powerful schedule that reflects your priorities and supports your personal goals, you’ve got a winning combination: One that will allow you to control your time and keep your life in balance.

For a detailed rundown of how you can create a really powerful schedule, you should check out our article on dynamic scheduling.

You can implement all five of these time management systems overnight - if you’re really committed to making changes to become more organised and productive.

By taking ownership of your time management, you can skyrocket your productivity and set yourself up for massive business and personal growth. 

Don’t waste time banging your head against the desk, trying to figure out what you should be doing - implement these five steps and master your time management today!