If there’s anything most people can relate to in today’s world, it’s losing track of time. However, when it comes to small business owners, this common affliction can not only be frustrating, it can be detrimental to a company’s success. Having so many responsibilities in a day may leave you feeling as though you can never find extra minutes to spare. However, there are methods for overcoming this problem, and the solution is time management. Here are a few helpful techniques for optimizing your time, in order to make the most of your working hours to achieve greater business success.

To get the best idea of where you’re losing time, you should commit to a full day’s worth of time logging. Write down everything you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep to determine where all of your time is currently going on an average work day. Listing all of these tasks may seem tedious at first, but this activity can give you the greatest indication of your daily behavior, and where you can potentially find the biggest time-wasters. Once you’ve logged your day, consider how much time you spent on each task or activity, and begin to cut down on some of the lesser important tasks. Activities such as scrolling through your social media feeds, taking too many breaks or lingering on phone calls can all inhibit your productivity. Thus, you need to start organizing your time in a way that’s the most effective for your company’s bottom line.

Once you’ve begun to minimize your normal time-wasting activities, it’s essential to improve your time management by relying on some simple yet effective tools. For instance, you can try the 80/20 rule, which states that you can get 80 percent of your desired results from the best 20 percent of your efforts. Therefore, you should spend your time managing this 20 percent, factoring in the most necessary and important of your responsibilities in this shorter time frame and achieving stellar results from committing to that strategy. Or, you can implement the Pomodoro technique, which encourages setting a timer for purely work in a pre-determined portion of an hour, and after completing that time fully focused on work, taking a five minute break as a reward. Any of these options can guarantee greater results once you set your mind (and your planner) to them.

Perfecting your work-life balance through time management can be the ultimate solution to many of your daily setbacks. Consider these opportunities to afford yourself more time in the day, and enjoy a more successful, productive business as a result.