Business Coaching: The CEO’s Solution to Time Management

You were just going to check your emails before bed. Then, you noticed a client enquiry. Now it’s 4am and you’re up to your elbows in spreadsheets.

Sound familiar?

Time management is a challenge for everyone, especially business owners. A study by Harvard Business Review found that CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours per week!

We thinking that business coaching is unusually helpful for CEOs in this situation.

The Importance of Time Management

Effective time management enables you to pursue your goals, while ensuring that there’s time (and energy) remaining for other important aspects of your life.

When starting a business, many of our clients find they have to fill multiple roles (marketing, HR, customer service…) to get things off the ground. They then become used to that level of involvement and find it difficult to narrow down their responsibilities.

They often become trapped in an endless cycle of fire-fighting and reactive thinking and this leaves them with no time or energy to plan ahead.

Why Traditional Time Management Advice Doesn’t Always Work

There are many time management strategies out there that promise to boost your productivity. Unfortunately, they aren’t always effective for CEOs.

It’s likely that you’ve read many blog posts, social media posts, watched TED talks or read entire books on time management. But the real question is: have they resulted in sustainable long-term behaviour change?

For these tools to be practically useful, you may also need an external person to:

• Put in place accountability and tracking systems
• Help you debug implementation problems
• Help you clarify your values and priorities
• Repeatedly guide you back on track and remind you what’s important
• Support you and believe in you when you lack self-confidence
• Point out blind spots and limiting beliefs that are difficult to see from the inside

The Uniqueness of Business Coaching for Time Management

By posing tough but necessary questions about your vision and where you want to be, a business coach can help you identify what it is you really want to achieve.

Once you find a goal you have a deep, emotional connection to, it’s far easier to make the necessary behavioural changes.

As our client Marie-Laure Preynat, (Director at Easy Gourmet) put it “Coaching doesn’t just help you understand more about your business but it also helps you understand yourself as an individual, where you are in your life and where you want to be. Without having those things in mind you can’t be as productive day to day.”

Business Coaching Strategies for Time Management

Here are just some of the practical strategies a coach can use to help you manage your time.

• Time Audits: One problem we often see is that people aren’t honest with themselves about how they spend their time. A coach can help you perform time audits to identify the real problems
• Task Prioritisation: By helping you to achieve clarity about your short and long term goals, coaching can help you identify which of the “urgent” tasks streaming onto your desk will actually bring you closer to your goals
• Discovering and Challenging Your Limiting Beliefs: Limiting beliefs are things you regard as absolute truth that are holding you back. For example: “nobody can do this job as well as I can”
• Implementing Time Management Strategies: A coach can help you implement time management strategies in an effective way. For example, we often get our clients to use time-blocking but rather than simply blocking out time for work, we make sure they’re scheduling everything (including family time and relaxation)
• Delegation and Hiring Support: A coach can help create systems that enable you to relinquish control safe in the knowledge that you have a capable team who are able to spot and solve problems themselves

Benefits of Business Coaching

A client of ours, Richard Pollack, Director at Paintslick Ltd, used to find himself working up to 80 hours a week, often until 4am. Working with our coaches enabled him to revise that punishing schedule and rethink where he, as a leader, could provide the most value.

As Richard explains: “I now think through my day and if I feel myself getting sucked into the operations I can stop and think: hang on, how can I delegate more and think more strategically about this?”

We also helped Serena Cook, founder of Deliciously Sorted. As well as being regularly drawn into operational matters, Serena was still handling admin and accounting tasks.

Through 1-to-1 coaching, we worked with Serena to define her vision and focus on the bigger picture. We also helped her to delegate all but the highest level, most valuable tasks.

This enabled her to reduce her ops and project management hours to 10 a week, giving her time to pursue other projects.

Time Management Tips from a Business Coach

Here are 3 quick wins that Kooks, one of our coaches at The Business Growth Agency, recommends for any business owner looking to improve their time management.

1. Assess Where you Are and Where You Want to Be

Ask yourself whether you see yourself being busier or less busy in 5 years. Then, ask yourself how not acting today would impact your relationship with your loved ones, as well as what the consequences will be for your overall happiness.

Next, visualise where you’d like to be in 5 years. Don’t just think about business, include every aspect of your life (family, hobbies, holidays, etc).

2. Read Atomic Habits and Internalise the Importance of Habits and Rituals

Habits and rituals are incredibly useful when it comes to time management as they mean you’re not always having to consciously decide how to spend your time.

Using habits as the basis for time management means good choices become automatic. We recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits as a practical guide that covers everything you need to know about habit formation.

3. Limiting Digital Distractions

Everyone believes that the email they just sent is urgent. They’re almost always wrong. Protect your focus by turning off notifications and committing to only checking your inbox at set times.

Master Your Time With a Coach’s Support

Business leaders face a raft of time management challenges that traditional methods can’t always solve.

Working with a business coach puts the focus on self-mastery; helping you to discover clear and meaningful goals; and to adopt the mindsets you need to achieve them – as well as giving you an external source of advice and support.

To discover if business coaching could be the key to effectively managing your time, book a free 45-minute call with one of our coaches.