How Optimizing Your Time and Space Can Unlock New Dimensions For Growth

Disorganization can overwhelm many small-business owners, and they often don’t know how to overcome the problem, leading to a cluttered mind and substantially reduced productivity. To help potentially unlock new dimensions for profitability and long-term success, consider looking at your space and time management practices.

Understanding how to manage space and time more efficiently may help boost productivity and profitability. You may also reduce stress by applying the right strategies, which could make your office environment more comfortable too. 

Sharing these strategies with your employees or partners may also also promote team cohesiveness, which may help improve company culture and achieve business goals. 

The Essential Element of Time Management

Most time management advice provides standard strategies like “set a schedule and stick to it,” “get up earlier,” or “don’t multitask.” But that advice doesn’t help identify the time management techniques specific to your business needs or personality. Rather, these tips may leave you feeling judged and incompetent.  

“There might be a variety of reasons different people are struggling in this area, from the stress of wearing all the hats in business to family obligations like child or eldercare,” says productivity coach Trasetta Washington, CEO and founder of Profitable Productivity in Florida. She encourages her clients to give themselves grace and helps them take an approach to time management that’s tailored to their needs. She also stresses energy management: determining when you work best, when you’ll be most creative, and when you'll be unproductive.

It's essential that you maintain focus on your priorities. [...] Create your priorities and stick to them, and don't allow others' priorities to dictate your own.

—Trasetta Washington, CEO and founder, Profitable Productivity

Washington uses concepts related to chronotype to help her clients understand when they’re most productive. Chronotype is your body’s natural tendency to sleep and wake at certain times, making some early risers and others nocturnal. Your circadian rhythm, which also controls your sleep-wake cycle, can be used to train your body to wake up and sleep at certain times. Your chronotype is permanent, and that means your chronotype influences your energy levels and productivity, regardless of your circadian rhythm.

“If small-business owners don’t recognize, accept, and manage their energy levels, they won’t successfully manage their time,” says Washington. That means if you don’t have the energy to work well at 5:30 am or 10:30 pm, respect your mind and body and start your day later or finish it earlier.

“Plan your day around when you’re most energized and complete tasks when your mind is sharpest and most likely to complete them accurately and productively,” she says. 

When it comes to managing your calendar, Washington encourages customization. "Planning is personal," she says. Determining your business and personal priorities can help balance ambition with personal needs. The following tips can help you build your work schedule:

1. Schedule calendar planning for the same time each week.
2. Use a calendar that works for you, whether it's a paper planner or digital, and organize the time the way your brain processes information. (Use colored pencils or emojis, for example.)
3. Plan in blocks of time, but don't take on too much, because you'll get far less done than you want and may feel like you failed because you don't check everything off.
4. Don't plan events or tasks back-to-back – one unplanned event can undo your entire calendar. Leave gaps in your calendar for the unexpected.
5. Identify priority obligations (including personal ones) and projects and schedule those first. Complete other tasks in the planned gaps.
6. Collect all the things you'll need to complete those tasks – from phone numbers to paperwork – in one space so they're available when you get started.
7. Practice saying "no" to things that don't fit your priorities, and be alright with things falling by the wayside.

"It's essential that you maintain focus on your priorities," Washington says. "Create your priorities and stick to them, and don't allow others' priorities to dictate your own," she adds. That includes email, which she calls "the to-do list other people write for you." Build responding to email into your calendar, and only do it then.

Organized Workspaces Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity

Stephanie Shalofsky of The Organizing Zone in New York City also sees email organization as crucial to time management. But it's also a workspace management issue, because a cluttered email box is as distracting as a cluttered office or workspace. With her business, Shalofsky helps clients identify what is causing them to work in a cluttered workspace. "I'm really passionate about finding the right solutions for my clients, so they can take full advantage of the focus that comes with having an organized space," she explains.

Whether she's working virtually or in person, she collaborates with clients to organize their individual workspaces and office common areas so the spaces flow effectively. "I don't just go into offices and tell clients how their offices should organize themselves," she says. "I get input from them on how they work best to help them determine how to organize their space into the one they need so they can be most productive."

Shalofsky collaborates with her clients to complete their projects and to maintain an organized office space. "Even spending small chunks of time tackling specific organizational tasks, doing organizing in little blitzes is beneficial," she says. It's important to her that her clients make office organization a habit, which she says can take up to 66 days to form. 

When it comes to the projects she undertakes with each client, she uses a four-step process:

1. Assessing the space to establish specific goals the client wants to achieve. This provides her a clear understanding of what's going on in the space, what the client wants to fix and how to get it fixed to meet their needs.
2. Identifying the obstacles and challenges to office organization. She discusses what they've done in the past, what worked, and how a space must function for all who will use the area.
3. Creating a game plan to organize the workspace or office. Shalofsky works as a project manager to help her clients achieve their ideal office space. She helps establish steps to get there and creates a timeline that makes it possible.
4. Executing the project to achieve steady progress. She then provides a maintenance plan for keeping the workspace or office well-ordered.

Once you've organized your office, you can easily find the items you need to manage your calendar. That may help make you more productive, facilitates a smooth work process with your customers and colleagues, and perhaps make you more profitable.

But office organization requires a particular mindset – one you share across the office culture.

Creating a Culture of Organization

Like any change, particularly in an organization where more than one person works, mindsets may have to change first. You'll have to collaborate with your employees to get an office space that works for everyone. Lindsay Burr, CEO of The Yarborough Group based in Denver, CO and Washington, D.C., helps client organizations facilitate that cooperative mindset, so they can create their most productive office space.

"We look at the human side of the organization and work at creating high functioning teams," Burr says. "That includes looking at how organizing an office space might thwart the productivity and profitability of the company." 

She finds that it's often the inability of team members to agree on how to organize a workplace that creates challenges to getting it restructured. "We wouldn't go in and tell people how to organize the office," she explains. "We help them look at the human dynamics of why an office isn't functioning properly for everyone," she adds.

The Yarborough Group then helps work out conflicts and build the trust necessary to create an office space that is conducive to all those working in the office. 

“We ask leaders to get beyond ‘what’s always worked' and ask themselves, ‘What do workers now need?'” Burr continues.

“We also ask them to recognize that office organization doesn’t have to be the same across the company,” she says. “Your company can have different zones that work for the distinct personalities you have in the office,” she explains. Burr then helps clients set up these hybrid office cultures, so they work efficiently.

That means office productivity is more than a layout or floor plan; it’s the ability to communicate effectively, and Burr believes she must help with that first, so clients can discuss physical space and workflow requirements.

Before working with an organization’s leaders, she asks them for their goals are and what barriers they seem to have achieving them, as well as what the key issues are and why. "Often, people diagnose a symptom, but not a cause," she says. Once she gets to the core issues and determines it's possible to help them, Burr asks them to answer these essential questions:

1. What are we doing that we want to keep doing? 
2. What do we need to stop doing?
3. What are we excited about trying?
4. What are solutions we're thinking through, or what new things might we want to put in place?
5. What are we worried might happen if we make these changes? 

Burr says it's that last question that's most important to answer, because confronting any fears or obstacles in the way of change is the beginning of any cultural transformation. "Without addressing fears that anyone in the organization has about change, we can't make cultural change successfully," she says. 

In essence, what all three consultants lead clients through is a change management process focused on optimizing time and space management. Small-business organization leaders who want this change initiative to succeed should be prepared to do the work necessary to find and address the root causes of their disorganization. Applying the strategies above, particularly with the right professionals, could potentially unlock new dimensions for profitability and long-term success.

Photo: Getty Images