Most business owners and managers don’t have a problem filling their time. The problem is what fills it.
Emails, phone calls, customer queries, meetings, admin and the endless stream of things somebody needs “just quickly” can consume an entire day. You can reach the end of a very busy week having worked incredibly hard and still feel like you haven’t moved the business forward.
That’s because activity and progress aren’t the same thing. Taking back control of your working week starts with learning where your time should actually go.
Urgent will always shout louder
The things demanding your attention aren’t necessarily the things that deserve it. A customer needs a response, a supplier wants an answer, somebody on the team has a problem and your inbox keeps filling up.
Meanwhile, the activities that could make the biggest difference quietly get pushed into next week. Your business plan, developing your team, reviewing your marketing, improving a system or looking properly at the numbers can all have a significant long-term impact, but they rarely feel urgent in the moment.
That’s where many business owners get caught: reacting all week to what is happening around them and spending very little time deliberately working on what matters most.
Stop letting everybody else write your diary
If there’s no plan for your time, something else will fill it — and usually that means other people’s priorities.
That’s why I’m a big believer in creating what we call a Default Diary: a template for how you would ideally spend your week, with time deliberately reserved for the activities that matter most to you and your business.
It won’t mean every week runs perfectly. But there’s a huge difference between starting the week with important work already in your diary and hoping you’ll somehow find time once everything else is done. Because when was the last time everything else was done? Exactly.
Ask a better question about your workload
Instead of asking, “How can I get everything done?”, try asking, “What actually needs to be done by me?”
As a business owner or manager, your time should increasingly be spent where you add the greatest value. Everything else needs examining. Can it be delegated? Automated? Could technology do the first 80%? Could somebody else handle it with the right system? Does it even need doing?
One simple way of looking at this is through the four Ds: do it, delegate it, defer it or dump it. If your default response to everything landing on your desk is “I’ll do it”, you’re reacting to your workload rather than managing your time.
Use technology to buy back your time
Delegation doesn’t always mean handing a task to another person. Technology can remove a surprising amount of repetitive work from your week. You can now teach your AI to do tasks that previously you or employees had to do, such as run automatically to a schedule and integrate with your email, calendar, CRM, etc.
AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot can help draft emails, summarise meeting notes, create first drafts, brainstorm ideas or turn rough notes into something more structured. Used well, they can turn a 30-minute task into a five or ten-minute one.
Otter.ai, plus the AI features built into Microsoft Teams and Zoom, can reduce the time spent writing up meetings. Zapier can connect the systems you already use and automate repetitive jobs such as moving information between apps, sending notifications or triggering follow-ups.
The point isn’t to use technology because it’s fashionable. Look at the tasks you repeat every week and ask where it could genuinely save time. AI shouldn’t replace your judgement or relationships, but it can remove lower-value work that gets in the way.
Protect time to work ON the business
Business owners and managers often know they should spend more time working on the business rather than constantly working in it, but operational demands keep winning. The mistake is believing things will eventually quieten down and they’ll finally have the time.
For most businesses, that day never comes. You have to create the space deliberately.
That might mean two hours on Wednesday morning for strategy, an hour each week reviewing your numbers, regular one-to-ones with key team members or protected time for marketing and business development. Even one call each week to an old customer can create opportunities that otherwise might never happen.
That’s the kind of activity a Default Diary is designed to protect: not urgent, easily postponed, but potentially very valuable over time.
Your diary should reflect your priorities
Open your diary and look back over the last two weeks. Imagine I knew nothing about your business and could only judge your priorities by how you spent your time.
Would I see time dedicated to growth, developing your people, finding customers and planning for the future? Or mostly meetings, emails, admin and firefighting?
Your diary often tells the truth about your priorities more reliably than your to-do list does. If the two don’t match, that’s probably where you need to start.
Take back control of your time
There will always be more things you could do than hours available to do them, so good time management isn’t about squeezing everything in. It’s about making deliberate choices about what deserves your time and protecting enough of it to do the work that genuinely moves the business forward.
The goal isn’t to get better at being busy. It’s to build a business that gives you more control over how you spend your time — and that starts with deciding what gets into your diary.
