The Busy Woman’s Guide to Growing a Small Business: Productivity Hacks That Work

Running a small business is challenging enough - juggling it with family, a career, or other responsibilities can feel downright impossible. Finding time to grow a business while balancing life’s demands often feels like the biggest hurdle.

But the good news is that with smart productivity strategies, you can achieve a lot more in less time than you imagine. In this post, I’ll share my favourite proven hacks to help you stay focused, organised, and productive.

Time Blocking for Focused Work

Time blocking involves scheduling specific tasks during designated times in your calendar. The simplest way to use this technique is by following the steps below.

Identify the times when you are at your most productive (e.g., mornings, evenings).

• Allocate blocks of time for focused business tasks, such as marketing, client work or planning.
• Stick to these time slots as if they were non-negotiable meetings.
• I use my Google Calendar and colour code the times for different things. You could do this too, or you look at apps like Motion, Todoist or Clockify to help you plan and stick to your schedule.

Delegate and Automate

You don’t have to do everything yourself! When I was scaling my last business, there came a point where I simultaneously felt completely overwhelmed with work and also realised that I was the productivity bottleneck. These two things combined were truly holding the business back!

So, I decided that I needed to find ways to improve this, and I did. Some of my successes included the following:

Delegating - Hire a virtual assistant or freelancer to handle tasks like social media, bookkeeping, or admin work.

Automating - Use tools like Mailchimp for email marketing, Xero for bookkeeping, Canva for design templates, and Zapier to connect apps and automate repetitive processes.

Freeing up your time relieves overwhelm, and allows you to focus on high-value tasks that grow and scale your business.

Set Clear Priorities

Someone once said to me that ‘if all these tasks are your priorities, then you have no priorities’. And at that point, they were absolutely right. Not all tasks are created equal and prioritising too many things is prioritising nothing. I learned about the Eisenhower Matrix to help categorise tasks.

• Urgent and important: Do these first.
• Important but not urgent: Schedule these for later.
• Urgent but not important: Delegate these.
• Neither urgent nor important: Eliminate these.

This system helped me, and I am sure it can help you focus on what truly matters, not just what feels urgent.

Overcome Procrastination with the 2-Minute Rule

If your desk or workplace is a procrastination station, then you are not productive and this can hinder business development and growth. So, there’s a simple rule you can use. If a task takes less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately instead of postponing. For larger tasks, break them into smaller, actionable steps to make them feel more manageable.

Prioritise Self-Care

It may sound counterintuitive, but rest is critical for productivity. Tired and weary brain cells cannot think, do and achieve nearly as well as fresh and well rested ones!

Below are my 3 absolute minimums for my own self-care each week, and they are even more important since having Lupus. If I don’t do them, I get sick and can’t do anything at all. So if you can choose just 3 points of self-care areas each week, what are they?

• Regular exercise or movement. For me this is usually yoga, cycling or walking.
• Adequate sleep. A regular bedtime, no blue light and rediscovering how much I love books have helped me no end.
• Mindfulness or stress-relief activities. These days I love a nice bath or a guided meditation or podcast.

When you’re well-rested and healthy, you’ll work smarter, not harder.

Your key take-aways…

You don’t need more hours in the day to grow your business. However, you might find that you do need better systems and habits. By applying these productivity hacks, you’ll find yourself accomplishing more while feeling less overwhelmed. I hope they help!

Want to stay on top of your tasks?

Download our free Weekly Productivity Planner to organise your business goals and priorities effectively!