5 Books on Time Management for Small Business Owners

Time is money and that’s why you need to manage yours. Here are 5 books on time management for small business owners. They’ll help you with everything from outsourcing to avoiding being overwhelmed. 

Time Management Systems

Getting Things Done

If you’re a small business owner who’s looking to establish some order, the system presented in Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, may be a good idea.

The book outlines a great time management system for sole proprietors or people with very small staffs. It’s a simple and straightforward way to collect things you need to do and organize them. Perhaps best of all is the fact that it’s concise and you only need some tools you probably already have like a filing system, a calendar and a inbox to get started.

The management system includes a number of steps from capturing the information you need, to categorizing and determining what the significance of that information is, and finally getting organized before acting on the information you’ve collected.

The Now Habit

The book, The Now Habit:  a Strategic Program for  Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt Free, by Neil Fiore involves a lot of self-help tips that can help you manage your time more effectively and be more productive.

It suggests some pretty modest but useful ideas on how to track your time. That makes it good for those business owners who just plow ahead without any real strategy and hope working harder and not necessarily smarter will solve all their problems.

It’s good for both small business owners and managers.   

The 4-Hour Workweek

Another great time management system is laid out in The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape from 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich Timothy Ferriss.

It emphasizes telecommuting and outsourcing and gives you the template for each to get the most from these tools. If you’re a small business owner that sells primarily on the Internet, or a sole proprietor who works there, you’ll find some solid ideas to make more of your time in this book.

Eat The Frog

If you’re the kind of business owner that’s always putting things off, you should take a look at Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy. This book teaches you a great method for identifying those tasks that you like the least and getting them done. Tracy even outlines how to keep technology from overwhelming you. He also gives you a simple formula to help get the important things done first and save time.

The 7 Minute Life

The 7 Minute Solution: Time Strategies to Prioritize, Organize & Simplify Your Life at Work & at Home. by Allyson Lewis, is great for small business owners who have a problem planning their day. The book challenges you to spend only seven minutes in the morning and seven minutes in the evening putting a business game plan together.

It includes a series of worksheets you can use and is great for business owners who don’t know what their future goals are.

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This article, "5 Books on Time Management for Small Business Owners" was first published on Small Business Trends