Want to mow your lawn as quickly as possible and with the least hassle?
Follow our top tips on the best mowers, mowing practices, and little-known hacks to speed up your mowing duties and finish the job faster.
✅Key Takeaways:
The 10 efficient lawn mowing tips are:
Clear your lawn before you begin
Use a mulching mower
Increase your mowing frequency
Keep your mower blades sharpened
Practice efficient turning
Reduce your mower’s weight
Use a self-propelled mower
Mow in a spiral
Ditch the cord
Use an outdoor plug socket
Table of Contents
📝 10 Tips For Efficient Lawn Mowing
Here are our top 10 tips for mowing your lawn as quickly and efficiently as possible.
🚿 Tip 1: Clear Your Lawn Before You Begin
Time saved: 5-15 minutes
Nothing will slow down your mowing duties more than the constant interruptions of garden obstacles.
To mow as efficiently as possible, you want to keep the mower running consistently from start to finish, without having to stop to move things out of your path.
Before you start mowing, clear your lawn of any garden furniture, play equipment, stones, leaves, and any other debris that could damage your mower or hinder your progress.
Spending a couple of minutes clearing your lawn beforehand will prove much more efficient than stopping your mower every few minutes to move obstacles out of your path.
You could save up to 15 minutes by planning ahead and eliminating anything that will slow you down before you begin mowing.
♻️ Tip 2: Use A Mulching Mower
Time saved: 10-20 minutes
One of the most time-consuming aspects of mowing a lawn is emptying the lawn clippings from the mower’s collection box.
Ditching the grass box isn’t an option on most mowers, since you’d only have to rake or sweep the clippings off your lawn post-mow – another time-consuming task.
But there is a way to eliminate the need for grass collection and raking up the grass clippings at the end: use a mulching mower.
Mulching mowers have a special attachment that cuts grass blades up small, distributing them evenly onto your lawn as you mow.
These mulched clippings offer a source of beneficial nutrients to the growing grass on your lawn, acting as a natural fertilizer – ideal for a healthy lawn.
With a mulching mower, you can shave 10-20 minutes (depending on your lawn size) off your overall mowing time.
You don’t have to empty a grass box or rake up the clippings, so there are no interruptions while you mow, and cleanup is much faster. The deposited mulch will quickly decompose, helping to keep your grass healthy and green.
On the market for a new mower? Our guide to the best mulching mowers should help you to find what you’re looking for.
🗓 Tip 3: Mow Frequently
Time saved: 10-20 minutes
If you’re trying to speed up your mowing practice, you probably won’t want to mow your lawn more frequently than you already do.
But mowing frequently helps you to save up to 20 minutes of time per mow because you’ll have shorter grass that’s easier to manage.
If you let your lawn grow too long between cuts, you’ll have to mow twice: once with a higher mowing height, and again with a lower height. (Why not start with the lower cutting height? Because cutting more than one-third off grass plants in a single mow can stress the grass and cause yellow or brown tips).
Make sure to mow at least once a week during the spring and the summer months, when grass grows fastest. You’ll be able to whizz around your lawn without the extra resistance and arm ache of mowing rough, long grass.
✂️ Tip 4: Keep Your Mower Blades Sharpened
Time saved: 5-10 minutes
Dull mower blades are less efficient in cutting grass. They’ll tear your grass blades and may miss spots, so you have to take the same path again.
Spending just a couple of minutes sharpening your mower’s blades in early spring will help you to mow faster and more efficiently throughout the mowing season.
The sharp blade will cut grass cleanly and quickly, so you can walk at a faster pace behind your mower without having to stop and scrutinize your lawn as you pass.
Using a freshly sharpened mower blade should help you to save up to 10 minutes per mow, depending on your lawn size.
Check out our article on blade sharpening for mowers for step-by-step guidance on how to sharpen your mower’s blade.
🏁 Tip 5: Practice Efficient Turning
Time saved: 5-10 minutes
Think that the only way to turn a mower is to make a wide turn at the end of each lap? You’re adding unnecessary time (and effort!) onto your mowing job.
The fastest and most efficient way to turn a mower is to do the on-the-spot pivot:
Stop the mower at the end of a lap.
Push down on the handle to lift the front of the mower deck so that the front two wheels are raised.
Pivot on the spot to quickly change direction, then line up the mower for the next lap.
Like any good dance move, you should quickly get the hang of the on-the-spot pivot. Turning faster at the end of every lap means you can focus on covering ground quickly and spend less time doing a 10-point turn with a bulky lawn mower.
Depending on how many times you have to turn your lawn mower, you could save up to 10 minutes by adopting this efficient turning technique.
🏋🏻♂️ Tip 6: Reduce Your Mower’s Weight
Time saved: Up to 5 minutes
Mowing a small garden? Our top time and energy-saving tip for you is to reduce your mower’s weight.
Lightweight, compact mowers make it quicker and easier to mow small lawns because they don’t carry any excess bulk and heaviness.
Pushing, turning, and emptying a lightweight mower requires minimal effort. You won’t waste time trying to maneuver a bulky mower into tight spots, turn sharp corners, or push the mower up hills.
Nowadays, you can easily find electric mowers that weigh as little as 6-8 kilograms. Look for a mower that weighs less than 10 kilograms if you want to reduce the pushing power required when mowing.
You can save around 5 minutes by mowing a small lawn with a lightweight mower that’s easy to push.
🚀 Tip 7: Use A Self-Propelled Mower
Time saved: Up to 30 minutes
Got a big garden that takes upwards of 30 minutes to cut? You need a self-propelled lawn mower.
Self-propelled mowers have a motor that drives their wheels forward. Using a self-propelled mower can help you to mow your lawn faster because you’re not restricted by the resistance of pushing the mower yourself. You simply walk behind the mower and change direction when necessary.
The best self-propelled lawn mowers have a variable speed setting that lets you adjust the mower’s forward speed. You can set the speed to a fast walking pace, allowing you to mow faster and more efficiently than with a conventional push mower.
Mowing with a self-propelled mower can cut up to 30 minutes off your mowing duties, depending on your lawn size and the self-propulsion speed.
🟢 Tip 8: Mow In A Spiral
Time saved: 5-15 minutes
You might think that to mow your lawn properly, you should mow in laps, with a turn after each lap. But turning your mower after each lap is the second most time-consuming part of the lawn mowing sequence (after emptying the grass box).
So, it makes sense that eliminating the need to turn your mower at all will speed up your mowing time significantly.
Try the spiral mowing pattern:
Mow around the perimeter of your lawn.
Continue to mow in circles, spiraling towards the centre of your lawn with every circle.
Stop once the circle is too tight to turn your mower, and finish the centre of the spiral with a few back-and-forth mows.
Mowing in a spiral will help you to shave 5-15 minutes off the job, depending on your lawn and mower size.
However, this mowing pattern is only really effective if you have a medium or large lawn that’s a pretty conventional shape (square, as opposed to long and thin).
🔋 Tip 9: Ditch The Cord
Time saved: 5-10 minutes
One final time-saving mowing tip for small-to-medium lawns is to ditch the cord and buy a battery-powered lawn mower.
A cordless mower will limit the time you spend mowing because you won’t have to constantly navigate around a cord. You’ll be free to mow in any direction without having to constantly look over your shoulder or stop to move the cable to the other side of the mower.
You can also mow as far from your home as necessary without the extra time and hassle of plugging the mower into an extension lead, so setup is quicker and easier.
You can save 5-10 minutes just by being able to mow freely, with no restrictions or interruptions.
Just make sure to remember to charge the batteries before you get started!
🔌 Tip 10: Invest In An Outdoor Plug Socket
Time saved: 5 minutes
Prefer corded electric mowers for their affordability? You can save time setting up this type of mower by installing an outdoor plug socket.
Outdoor plug sockets are safe and practical to use for any outdoor equipment that uses a power lead. Rather than having to trail the cable through your window or across your home and out of your back door, you can simply plug your mower into an outdoor socket and get started straight away.
This will give you some extra mowing room too, because you won’t use up a valuable section of the cord by trailing it through an indoor space.
We recommend the BG Electrical WP22-01 Double Weatherproof Outdoor Switched Power Socket for UK gardens. It has the most positive customer reviews on Amazon, two sockets to run two electrical items at once, and a weatherproof cover to prevent dust and rain damage (even when something is plugged in).
🏁 Final Word
Hopefully, you’ve learned a few new things about the most efficient way to mow your lawn.
But if you hate lawn mowing to the point where even the thought of mowing quickly makes you want to have a toddler tantrum, you might want to abandon the chore of mowing the lawn altogether in favour of an autonomous solution.
Robot mowers are a bit like robot vacuums, except they mow your lawn instead of vacuuming your floor (obviously). They mow independently to their own schedule, so you won’t have to worry about physically pushing a mower ever again.
Check out our reviews of the best robot lawn mowers to see which best-selling robotic mowers we recommend today.