How To Spend Your Time On Activities That Matter

There is a secret that all truly successful business owners – and executives – understand, and it’s this: Your time is the most valuable resource you have. Moe than that, it’s also the most finite.

You cannot make more time. What you’ve got, you’ve got, so use it wisely.

Here’s how you can stop spending time on activities that aren’t helping you to move the needle forwards in your business.

Step 1: Shift your mindset and accept what you’re worth

As business owners – particularly start-ups – we tend to want to do everything ourselves. In some cases, it’s a necessity. Often the entrepreneur is receptionist, HR, bookkeeper, sales, marketing and cleaning service during launch phase, simply because there aren’t enough employees in the start-up to cover everything.

The sooner you realise that your time is much better spent working on the business and in the most impactful roles though, the better of your business will be.

For example, time spent answering the phone is time that isn’t being used out on the road, seeing prospects and closing deals.

If you could spend another two hours a day out in the field and close two more deals a week than you currently are, what would that be worth?

If you do the numbers, you’ll find that it easily covers the additional salary of a full-time receptionist.

Key questions to consider:

1. Are you spending a significant amount of time on routine tasks that do not actively impact revenue coming into the business?
2. Could these tasks be performed by someone else?
3. Do you agree that as the owner or entrepreneur your ideas add value to the business, and you should be leveraging your skills for growth, and not operations?
4. What’s holding you back from recognising how value your time is, and that you should be careful how you send it?

Step 2: Know the value of your time

This is all about giving each hour of your day a monetary value. Once you know what an hour is worth, you will be far less likely to spend it on a routine task that someone else can do.

To determine what your time is worth, follow these six steps:

1. Spend the next one to three months tracking how you spend every hour of every day
2. Next, separate the hours into different categories: how much time is spent earning money (not to be confused with hours spent working)? How much time is spent getting to the office? What about on errands?
3. Now add up what you will earn after taxes in one full year.
4. Finally, divide your total earnings by the total amount pf hours you spend at work or getting to or from work.
5. That’s how much your time is worth.
6. But don’t stop there – what would happen if you doubled the amount of hours spent earning money? What would your total earnings in a year look like now? What if you tripled them?

The lesson:

Time is valuable to each and every one of us, whether you are a janitor or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It’s valuable because we can never get it back. How we spend that time however is a big determining factor in our success.

This is particularly true of entrepreneurs. Once you know what an hour is worth in monetary terms, and you work out which hours are your most valuable, the way you spend your time will shift dramatically.

Key questions to consider:

1. Have you factored in all the time you spend on work? This includes evenings and weekends.
2. Do you struggle to devote enough time to strategic tasks because you are always ‘busy’.
3. Do you put off doing more complicated tasks?

Step 3: Work ‘on’ the business instead of ‘in’ it

This is the single biggest shift that happens to entrepreneurs who are able to take their businesses to the next level.

It’s often referred to as learning to work ‘on’ the business instead of ‘in’ it, but in essence it’s the art of being able to step away from day-to-day operations and to focus on the strategic side of the business instead.

Business owners that work ‘in’ the business tend to be highly reactive. They are always putting out fires and trying to do too many things themselves. They often aren’t good delegators and tend to do too much themselves.

Business owners that work ‘on’ the business are different. They are proactive. They’re focused on the growth of the business and the strategic decisions that will lead to that growth. They also take the time to create processes that will systematize the business and that other can follow, freeing them from operational tasks, but ensuring the business is still run the way they want it to be run.

Key questions to consider:

1. Would you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur who works ‘in’ the business or ‘on’ the business?
2. Have you written down each process in the business so that others can follow your systems and processes without your active involvement?
3. What would you do with your time if you weren’t so operationally active in the business?
4. Do you believe you are currently making the best use of your time?

Step 4: Separate urgent tasks from important tasks

Key to being able to work on the business instead of in it is the ability to differentiate between urgent tasks and important tasks.

Even once the shift has happened, urgent tasks can be a time-eater.

Here’s how you can differentiate between the two.

• Urgent tasks require your immediate attention. They put you into reactive mode though, because they are usually the result of you reacting to something that has already happened. When we’re focused on ‘urgent’ tasks, we tend to be hurried, stressed, flustered and narrowly-focused. Ever had one of those incredibly busy days where not a single item got ticked off your to-do list? That was probably a day overwhelmed in urgent tasks.

• Important tasks tend to be related to values, goals and the long-term mission of the business. The problem is that while some important tasks are also urgent, most are not, and so they continually get shuffled down the list. These are tasks that could really help you move your business forward, and yet you never get to them.

The key to success is being able to minimise urgent tasks (unless they are also important) and to instead open up focused time for important tasks. There will always be urgent tasks and you won’t be able to ignore them all, so try and carve out time in each week (each day if possible) that allows you to also spend time on important tasks.

Key questions to consider:

1. Before you do a task, ask yourself if it’s urgent or important?
2. Are you keeping track of how much of each day is spent on each type of task?
3. Are your hours being eaten up by ‘urgent’ tasks?
4. Do you have key strategic tasks that keep being pushed out?
5. Do you finish many work days not having ticked a single item off your list because the day ran away from you?

Step 5: Block out focus time

There are many ways to do this and entrepreneurs around the world have shared their secrets:

• Block out the first 90 minutes of every day for important tasks
• Close your emails and put your phone on silent. Let your team know you are not to be disturbed
• Tackle the important tasks on your list first each day, before the day runs away from you
• Block time in your diary – whether that’s early or later in the day – for important tasks and stick to it as if it was a meeting with investors or your exco

The key is to actively set time aside for important tasks. It might take you a while to find a solution that really works for you, so track how successful each strategy is and tweak it. Just commit to finding a way to shift your focus on reactive tasks to proactive ones.

Key questions to consider:

1. When do you do your best work?
2. Where do you do your best work?
3. Where are you most focused and creative?
4. How can you make time in your diary to spend clear, focused time on important tasks?

Mistakes to avoid

Unfortunately, even though time management is so critical to personal and business success, there are many mistakes we make without even realising it.

Don’t pretend you’re in complete control of your time. No one has this level of control. By accepting that you could be doing better, you can start putting proper focus and awareness towards the problem. There will always be wasted hours in each day – how you limit them is key.

Don’t just wing it. Plan your day the night before. Don’t waste time in the morning doing it – or worse yet, plan to make a plan and then get sidestepped. End each day by making a list that plans your next day, particularly where and when you will be focusing on your most important tasks.

Don’t be too inflexible. Even though we are advocating spending as much time as possible on urgent tasks, no day will ever go completely as planned. If you aren’t flexible, you’ll become stressed and flustered, and you won’t be in the right mindset to handle important tasks anyway.

Don’t just wake up early. While many successful entrepreneurs are early birds, adding an hour or tow to your day in the early morning isn’t the secret to using your time well. The secret is figuring out when in the day you are most productive and using that time as wisely as possible.

Don’t burn the candle at both ends. While start-up require endless hours to get off the ground, at some point you need to rest and recharge. Over-working doesn’t make you more productive or successful – if anything, it can achieve the exact opposite. Great time management isn’t about not sleeping so that you have more hours in each day. It’s about using the hours you do have in the best way possible.