■ · Operations
The owner's time: your scarcest resource
You can raise more money and hire more people. You can't get more hours. How an owner spends the week decides what the business becomes, and most owners don't actually know where their week goes. Small changes can win back hours every week.
Know where your time actually goes
Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive starts with time, not goals. His observation was that people are poor at remembering how they spent their time, and that effective executives record it, then cut and consolidate. Try it for one ordinary week: write down what you did, roughly every hour. Most owners are surprised by how much goes to small interruptions and work someone else could do.
Ask what only you can do
Drucker also asked leaders to focus on their contribution: what can I do that would make a real difference to results? For an owner, that's usually a short list. Setting direction, key client relationships, hiring, the big decisions, and building the systems that let others do the rest.
Protect blocks of focused time
Hard thinking doesn't happen in 10-minute gaps between emails. Block at least a few hours a week for work on the business: planning, your consulting engagement, reviewing numbers, writing procedures. Treat it like a client meeting you can't move.
Habits that protect the owner's time
- Batch small things. Answer email and approvals at set times instead of all day.
- Push decisions down. Use the case classes: Class I decisions shouldn't reach you.
- Fix the cause of repeat fires. If you solve the same problem twice, write a procedure so you never solve it a third time.
- Plan the week before it starts. Fifteen minutes on Friday or Sunday to choose the three things that matter most.
- Say no to good things. Every yes to a small request is a no to something on your one-page plan.
Audit your week like a consultant would
Hand your time log to your inner consultant: "Dana spent 14 hours on admin and 1 hour on planning. What's wrong with this picture?"
Every hour you spend on $20-an-hour work costs the difference between that and your own rate. That's a real cost, even if no money changes hands.
Time drifts like everything else. One "quick favor" becomes a weekly habit. Re-run the audit every quarter.
"If firefighting is more than 20% of my week two weeks in a row, I find the cause and fix the system."
Go deeperCase file, step-by-step how-to, common mistakes and questions to work through
Case file: Where the week actually went
A fictional example
Victor owns a small chain of three dry cleaners. He works about 62 hours a week and feels like he's always behind. He's sure most of his time goes to "running the stores."
He logged one ordinary week, writing down what he did every hour. The results surprised him:
- 14 hours covering counter shifts when staff called out
- 11 hours on email, texts and small questions from staff
- 9 hours driving between stores, often for one quick issue
- 8 hours on bookkeeping and payroll
- 7 hours fixing problems: a broken machine, a lost garment, a customer complaint
- 6 hours with vendors and suppliers
- 5 hours on actual customers and growth
- 2 hours planning or improving anything
Only 7 of his 62 hours, about one in nine, went to work that only the owner could do. He marked 33 hours as work someone else could mostly do: counter coverage, bookkeeping and the stream of small questions.
He made three changes over two months. He promoted one employee at each store to shift lead, with authority to handle common questions and find their own call-out coverage. He hired a part-time bookkeeper. And he set "office hours" for staff questions twice a day instead of constant texts. He also moved store visits to a fixed route on two days a week.
Three months later, his week was down to 50 hours, and he had a protected half-day each week to work on the business. In that half-day, he finally negotiated a commercial uniform contract he'd been "meaning to get to" for two years.
How to audit and reclaim your time, step by step
- Log one normal week, roughly every hour. Don't change your behavior while you log.
- Group the hours into the categories on the time audit tool.
- Mark each block: only I can do this, someone else could do this, or nobody needs to do this.
- Pick the biggest "someone else" block and plan how to hand it off: a person, a procedure, a tool.
- Batch the small things into set times each day.
- Protect one block a week for planning and improvement, and treat it like a client meeting.
- Re-run the audit every quarter to catch time drifting back.
"To make sure I'm available when you really need me, I'm going to handle questions at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day. Save non-urgent questions for those times. If it's truly urgent, a customer or safety issue, call me right away."
Common mistakes and how to fix them
| Mistake | Fix |
|---|---|
| Guessing where your time goes | Log it for a week. Memory is a poor guide. |
| Holding on to tasks because "it's faster if I do it" | Faster today, slower forever. Spend the time to teach once. |
| Letting every question interrupt you | Batch questions and give people authority for routine decisions. |
| Filling freed-up time with more small tasks | Book the freed time for planning before something else takes it. |
Questions to work through
- What did you do this week that only you could have done?
- Which task do you keep because you enjoy it, not because it needs you?
- How many times were you interrupted yesterday? By what?
- What's the most valuable thing you'd do with five more hours a week?
- Who on your team is ready for more responsibility?