Time IS money.
You’ve heard the expression over and over again. But when you look at the lives of many of the world’s entrepreneurs, you get the distinct impression that they don’t take the idea particularly seriously. Many spend their days answering emails, responding to phone calls and mucking about on social media. They’re not doing the high-value stuff that they need to do to succeed.
Most bosses focus on their bottom line - the amount of money that they made this month compared to the month before. It is the KPI to rule over all others.
Entrepreneurs, however, don’t go into business just for the money. They do it for the lifestyle too. They want to make more cash so that they can free up time and spend it with their families.
Proper time management, therefore, is just as crucial to the spirit of being an entrepreneur as making money. It’s not always about becoming a millionaire; it’s also about achieving a sense of freedom in your life. You don’t want your work to chain you to your desk forever.
So how do entrepreneurs maximise their time? Let’s take a look at some of the top strategies you need to employ.
Deliberately Keep Your Emails Short
Some entrepreneurs feel a little awkward about writing short, terse emails. They worry that their staff or clients will take them the wrong way and expect a little more “fluff.” It’s polite!
Eventually, though, writing long sentences and prefacing everything with phrases like “it would be great if you could” gets on your nerves. You’re spending more time typing than doing all the high-value stuff that your company needs to move forward, and it is eating into your quality of life. An extra hour a day responding to emails is the equivalent to nearly an entire working day per week - time you could be spending adventuring or spending time with your family.
Get Somebody Else To Answer The Phone
Then there’s another problem for entrepreneurs: if you’re not replying to emails, you’re on the telephone to clients. It’s a massive time drag, especially since many of them are just making general enquiries.
A lot of people in business, therefore, use a phone answering service. These agencies take telephone calls throughout the day and out-of-hours, allowing you to be more selective in the conversations you have with customers. These services can answer questions and also dump people into different silos, depending on their needs. Some will need to get through to you at some point, but many won’t.
Never Wait For Anything
Entrepreneurs know that every second counts. For that reason, they do everything that they can to avoid waiting, whether it's for an appointment at the doctors’ or an Uber cab. These little pockets of time are an opportunity to fire off an email or make a new contact. It would be best if you didn’t waste them.
Make Maintenance Days “A Thing”
Even entrepreneurs have to have maintenance days from time to time, even if it is to organise their cleaning service. During the week, you’re so busy you don’t have time to breathe, let alone go on shopping trips, sort out your leaky faucet or get your boiler serviced.
For this reason, a lot of business leaders schedule maintenance days where they set aside time to do all their routine work in a single block. This tactic massively improves efficiency and helps you to focus on your tasks throughout the rest of the week.
Get Up Early
If you follow the lives of some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, you’ll find that they invariably wake up early and immediately spring into action.
The reason that they do this has to do with their body clock. Successful entrepreneurs get a sense early in their careers that if they crack on with work from the moment that they wake up, they can get more done and improve the quality of their output. Getting up early is a kind of superpower that takes advantage of the body’s natural rhythm in a way that starting at 9 am after a sugary breakfast just doesn’t.
There’s another massive benefit to getting up early: you don’t have to deal with interruptions. Nobody in their right mind is going to call the office at 6 am, giving you up to three hours to work quietly and diligently on a project, without interruptions.
Be Clear On What You DON’T Do
A lot of entrepreneurs are now creating what are being dubbed “no do” lists. These are essentially all of the things that you refuse to do and ALWAYS hand over to other people.
Things on your “no do” list could include:
- Cleaning the office
- Using social media during office hours
- Doing work that is the responsibility of other team members
Be Critical Of Meetings
Meetings are a part of business culture, but research suggests that a large chunk of them are utterly unnecessary. Companies waste vast amounts of time, collecting large numbers of people together for meetings that are often wholly unnecessary.
Meetings are a deceptively large time drain. If you have sixteen people in a session that lasts an hour, that’s sixteen hours you’ve lost - or two working days. If you have hour-long meetings every day, then you’re missing two days worth of wages five days a week. That’s going to eventually hurt your bottom line if your meetings are not productive.
Use Scheduling Tools
Bosses no longer need to keep their schedules or pay a secretary to do it for them. Smart companies now offer software that’ll do it all for you, with practically no input from you. People apply for free slots in your calendar and then book appointments with you. You then either accept or reject them - it’s as simple as that.
Many top executives find that they can save between three and four hours a week through this method - time that they can then spend doing other more valuable tasks, such as serving clients.
