10 time traps killing your growth — and how to fix them 🛠️
Stop wasting time. Run smarter.
I’ve been there. Caught in cycles. Losing hours to stuff that doesn’t move the needle. Most founders have.
That’s why this one landed. Hayley Bruce spent years in the corporate world before launching her consultancy built around one goal: to help companies stop wasting time.
When she offered to share her playbook, I was all in. It’s sharp, practical, and brutally relevant to anyone building under pressure.
This post is for anyone juggling too much and still not getting to the real work. 👇🏻
Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt ⚡️ The UK’s top web hosting service
Smash the time traps
Time’s the one thing you can’t buy back. In a world of tighter budgets and rising costs, how you use it decides whether your business stalls or grows.
I’m not talking about saving a few seconds or minutes here and there through fewer clicks or the latest trendy organiser.
I’m talking about real long-lasting, meaningful time that becomes more valuable as you grow.
Here are 10 ways you can stop burning time, and start using it with intent:
1️⃣ Use the right KPIs and regularly review them
One of the easiest ways to waste time in business is to be actively working against your goals.
A fitting example of this is when companies are trying to become world leaders in customer service, but they are tracking their teams on call wait times, all whilst wondering why their complaint rates are higher than expected.
By using this KPI, they are actively encouraging their teams to be quick on the call, not to deliver the best outcome or service.
This is why reviewing your goals, and your lead indicators is vital, to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
2️⃣ Start tracking your risks
I cannot count how many rooms I have sat in where a risk is highlighted and someone says, “ah yes we spoke about that the other year, Dave looked into a solution.”
Where’s Dave? He left 6 months ago. Where’s his work? In his head.
The reality of business is we don’t have the money to fix everything that might pose a risk, we have to prioritise. But how can you effectively prioritise when you don’t have a view of all the risks out there?
And how much time are you wasting by routinely having risks re-highlighted like it's new information, and revisited every few years?
Creating a system where teams can actively highlight risks upwards, and propose costed solutions, means you and your teams have the information needed, and it can be picked back up easily when the time comes around.
3️⃣ If you have a team, get to know them
This might seem like an obvious one, but I’m not saying that you need to learn all about Mark's great aunt Shirley and her trip to the Maldives, but you can do that if you like!
What I’m talking about here is getting to know things about them that will help you save time and make them happier. Find out how they absorb information best, how they like to communicate, are they a blue-sky thinker or an Excel whiz?
Knowing about your team, how they operate, and what they know, means that when problems arise you can put the right person on the job. It also means that you won't waste several hours delivering detailed training in a classroom-type setting, if every person who works for you learns best by doing.
4️⃣ Start giving valuable feedback
How many times have you asked someone to complete a task for you, they’ve handed you the work back, you’ve looked through it, said thank you, then spent the next 5 hours redoing it all?
I know I’ve done this, but that doesn’t help anyone and is a complete waste of time, both for now and later.
Instead, feeding back the changes you would make and why (constructively!), means that in the future you save time and the person doing the work knows what you actually want, saving them time as well, and saving everyone a lot of frustration.
5️⃣ Ask for feedback… and listen
Feedback is invaluable, especially when we’re talking about saving time, but if you don’t listen to it, honestly, just stop asking.
Imagine building a new app, months of long hours and sleepless nights have gone into the development, you’ve invested your time and a lot of your money into trying to make this a success.
But when it goes to market, it turns out the yellow font and vibrant green background you were hell-bent on keeping really isn’t user-friendly at all, just like Sharon had mentioned at the start.
Two things have happened here, you’ve wasted your time and money, and Sharon, she won’t be giving feedback anytime soon either.
I wonder how many companies are wasting time reviewing feedback they will never listen to. If this is you, I would encourage you to start listening. If that’s not your bag, then honestly save some time and stop asking.
6️⃣ Spend the time to get to the root cause
Reacting and saving the day is sexy. Sitting down after and painstakingly getting to the root of why something happened in the first place isn’t. As a result, root cause analysis rarely gets the time it deserves.
But if an issue arises that takes time and money to resolve, and you don’t get to the bottom of why it happened and put in place the necessary solutions to stop it from happening again, you are wasting your time and your money.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. I’m a big fan of the ‘5 whys’ method: it encourages people to think more deeply and get closer to the actual cause. If you do find that you need something a bit more multifaceted, then the fish bone method might be more appropriate.
But even if you don’t use a fancy method, just spending time discussing it will start to get you moving in the right direction!
7️⃣ Please automate your routine tasks!
Automating everything is not plausible, but we all have those tasks that we dread each month because they always take longer than we would like! Why not explore if these could be automated with little to no extra cost, other than a bit of upfront time?
If your client reports always take hours, what can you do in Excel to speed them up Excel skills not up for the job? Google and the power of AI can do wonders now: take the time, explore what you need and how to implement it. Trust me, a bit of time now will pay dividends to future you.
8️⃣ Review your internal communications
Bad communication can be the undoing of a company, and getting it right is a fine balance. Too much communication is just off-putting, annoying, and will cause people to just delete what’s been sent without reading it, meaning everyone has wasted their time.
Too little, well, no one knows where they stand or what's going on, leading to confusion and the messages being spread by the rumour mill, leading to time-wasting mistakes.
The worst of them all is the ego-driven communication: a well-meaning CEO who wants to use internal comms as their weekly blog. Well… we have all read those.
If you want to avoid wasting time on internal comms that never get read but still push out key messages, try asking yourself these questions each time:
Do people need to know this and why?
Who needs to know this and why?
How would they best receive it and why?
And finally, do you need evidence that it has been read and understood, and if so, why?
9️⃣ Standardise your processes
This can often be translated into “create a standard operating procedure for everything.” That’s not what I’m telling you to do.
Having a standard for everything is not realistic and honestly not needed, but do you have tasks that are business critical and carried out regularly in your business? These are what I’m talking about.
Why leave your most critical tasks up to chance? You might know them like the back of your hand, but as your company expands and grows, you will initially find yourself having to spend significant time training someone in your way of doing things, and let’s be honest, sometimes just doing it yourself.
In the long term, when more and more people come on board, you will be unable to keep a firm grip on the day-to-day operations, and nor should you have to, but writing down how critical tasks need to be carried out enables you to ensure consistency as your company grows.
🔟 Spend time on training
Investing in training for your teams is so important, and this doesn’t need to mean breaking the bank. But I have seen countless examples where a problem has been caused that takes time and money to fix, that boils down to either training not being provided or it being rushed.
Training is often overlooked as something to rush through, or a nice to have, but not investing this time upfront, I promise you will waste more time in the long run.
And if you’ve implemented some of the other points in this piece, such as getting to know your people, standardising your critical processes, and giving valuable feedback, you will find that training your people also becomes much easier and more effective.
👤 About Hayley Bruce
Hayley Bruce is the founder of Tempus Solutions, a consultancy built on one sharp mission: to help companies stop wasting time. After more than a decade in operational management and project delivery across the utilities and retail sectors, Hayley saw first-hand how businesses burn hours on misaligned strategies and inefficient systems. In 2024, she left the corporate world to do something about it.
Her approach breaks the usual model. While most leaders spend 80% of their time on strategy and just 20% on execution, Hayley does the reverse, because delivery is where the real impact lives. Whether she’s mapping operational workflows or unblocking team bottlenecks, her focus is always on what works in practice, not just on paper. Outside work, you’ll find her camping, lifting weights, or with her dog curled up beside her on a Teams call.
More guest wisdom from Millennial Masters:
Your words are working against you – here’s how to fix that 🔑
The subconscious power of language and how to use it to your advantage
 | A guest post by
|