When I left the Big Four to start my own accounting firm, I thought time management would get easier. After all, I'd have control over my schedule, my clients and my priorities. But I quickly realized that autonomy brings a new kind of challenge: When everything feels important, how do you decide what truly matters?
This is a question I grappled with for months as I struggled to strike the balance between work and life. If you're like me, when you are passionate about what you are doing, it consumes your thoughts and it's hard to scale back and prioritize.
For small firm leaders, time management isn't just about being efficient — it's about being strategic. Every hour spent in the nitty gritty details is an hour not spent building your firm's future. While we may want to have a hand in everything, our real job is to develop and drive the vision for our employees and clients. Through my experience, I've found that managing time effectively as a small firm owner requires three things: identifying high-impact tasks, creating boundaries around your energy and designing systems that reduce mental load.
1. Focus on high-impact work, not high-volume work
In large firms, success is often measured by utilization rates or chargeable hours. That mindset can follow you into your practice, leading you to fill every gap in your calendar with seemingly "productive" work. However, activity doesn't always equal progress.
When I started my firm, I found myself spending hours in the data and trying to intimately get to know everything going on at my firm. In the moment, these tasks felt important. But in reality, they didn't actually move the business forward. Through reflection, I had to redefine what high-impact work meant for me.
High-impact work usually falls into three categories:
- Client strategy and advisory: Anything that strengthens client relationships or creates new value.
- Business growth: Activities that attract new clients or improve internal efficiency.
- Team development: Training, delegation and process-building that free up future time.
If a task doesn't fall into one of those buckets — or directly support one — it's a candidate for delegation, automation or elimination.
Now, high-impact work looks different from person to person and firm to firm. It's important to take a pulse on your own unique situation to see how you can bring the best value to your firm. I personally like to evaluate my strengths, weaknesses and passions to figure out my highest impact contributions.
Let's say you are an outgoing person who loves building connections with others. Your time might be best served strengthening client relationships, networking and boosting team morale. If you are an analytical person who prefers to stay behind the scenes, you might contribute through process-building or improving internal efficiencies.
No matter what your passions and strengths are, it's crucial to identify high-impact work where you will make the biggest difference.
2. Protect your energy like a business asset
While burnout can come from working long hours, it's often the result of spending too much time on low-value tasks that drain your energy.
In the big firm world, your schedule is often dictated for you. In a smaller firm, the opposite is true: you are responsible for setting boundaries. As exciting as this may be, this introduces a different set of complications. For me, in the early days of running my firm, I was drained at the end of the day and struggled to complete my daily task list. Over time, I realized that I had enough hours in the day; I just didn't know how to properly use them. Then, I started time-blocking, and it revolutionized my daily workflow.
Before you start time-blocking, it's important to self-reflect on your energy levels and how you gain/use energy. In my experience, time-blocking only works if you're honest about your own energy patterns. For instance, I know I'm an extroverted morning person who gets a lot of energy talking to people. As such, I reserve mornings for interactive work like client advisory projects or tax planning, and I save my afternoons for administrative work.
Just as importantly, I build in recovery time. Whether it's a midday walk with my dog, a snack break with coworkers or cooking/baking something delicious for my family — protecting my focus and mental energy has been the single most effective way to sustain productivity and creativity over the long term.
3. Design systems that reduce decision fatigue
One of the most underestimated drains on small firm leaders is decision fatigue. Every day, you're deciding which clients to prioritize, which emails to answer, which fires to put out. Without systems in place, that constant decision-making becomes overwhelming, and we often sacrifice the quality of our decisions and relationships.
I started implementing simple "default systems" that make recurring decisions automatic:
- Standardize client onboarding and deliverables so every new engagement follows the same process.
- Automate reminders and follow-ups using your practice management software.
- Batch similar work (like reviewing tax returns or responding to client inquiries) to minimize task-switching.
These systems free up mental bandwidth for the decisions that actually require judgment and leadership. One bonus is that it frees up energy and mental space to spend time with family, friends and loved ones. When you aren't needing to make a million decisions each day, you are a better colleague, leader and loved one.
4. Delegate relentlessly (even if you think you can do it faster)
Delegation is one of the hardest transitions for small firm owners. Early on, I'd often think, "It'll take longer to explain than to just do it myself." But that mindset keeps you trapped at capacity.
Delegation isn't just about assigning tasks — it's about building capability. Every time you teach a process or empower someone else to own a result, you buy back future hours. Think of it as investing ti me today to gain exponential returns tomorrow.
5. Redefine success beyond "busy"
When you're used to the high-intensity culture of public accounting, slowing down can feel uncomfortable. But success in a small firm isn't about how many hours you work — it's about how intentionally you use them.
We often subscribe to the mindset that we need to hit a certain number of hours each week, or we correlate the number of the hours we clocked with how hard we worked. This mindset can be toxic and, as small firm leaders, we need to transform our practices beyond the metric of billable hours. These changes don't just apply to firm leaders. They should be implemented top-down across the entire firm.
As a small firm leader, your most valuable contributions are vision, strategy and relationships. If you're constantly reacting to emails, reviewing every deliverable and saying yes to every opportunity, you're leaving no space for those high-impact contributions to grow. Additionally, you are normalizing being "busy" for the sake of being busy to your employees and clients. When you let go of the reins and redefine what success means, it will have a trickle-down effect across your life and your entire firm.
The real mark of time mastery is not a packed schedule — it's a purposeful one.
Final thoughts
Running a small accounting firm has taught me that effective time management isn't about squeezing more into your day; it's about making room for what matters most. The clearer you are on your high-impact priorities, the easier it becomes to say no to everything else.
Because at the end of the day, time management isn't just a productivity skill — it's a leadership skill. And the way you manage your time sets the tone for your entire firm.
