Time Management is one of the most important issues people face in today’s world.
18 Time Management Hacks Used by Successful Entrepreneurs is a collection of tips for success.
1. Get rid of trash
In “The Ultimate Guide to Time Management,” Tony Robbins, a life and business coach and best-selling author, told his devoted followers to value their time like they value their money: as a valuable resource that must be protected by avoiding waste.
He suggested finding new uses for time-management dead zones to turn lost time into useful time. Think about this: if you want to read but don’t have time, you could listen to podcasts on the way to work or read on the train. If you want to listen to a lot of podcasts but don’t have time, you can listen to them while you work out.
2. Think about the “5”
People who are successful are usually very good at figuring out which tasks are the most important. Five jobs is a number that comes up a lot. An story in Investment News says that Warren Buffett, the investing genius behind Berkshire Hathaway, was asked by his pilot for job advice.
In order to get 25 things done in the next year, Buffett told the pilot to write them down. Then he told him to circle the five most important goals, cross out the twenty others, and forget about them.
3. Find your daily knockouts
Entrepreneur Marcus Lemonis, who stars on CNBC’s “The Profit,” also does five things at once. But, unlike Buffett, those jobs aren’t going to happen in a year. He counts on a daily “knockout list” of five tasks that tells him what he has to do every single day. The next morning, not the night before, he writes the list down and vows to do those five things in the next 24 hours, no matter what.
4. Plan for empty time
Two of the wealthiest people in the world say that your calendar should have a lot of empty room. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett talked about how to be successful and handle your time in an interview in 2017.
Gates said he now thinks it’s important to include free time in your daily planner, even though he admitted to being too busy. If you keep track of your time and fight the urge to fill every free moment with something, you’ll be able to change your plans as the day and week go on and things come up. There’s something even more important: you can use those breaks to focus on your hobbies every day, which is something that people with busy lives often forget to do.
Basically, Buffett said, “I can buy anything I want, but I can’t buy more time.”
5. Go on vacation
For ambitious people who are always trying to get ahead, taking time off might seem counterintuitive. But a lot of study and the advice of some of the world’s most successful people show that taking breaks from work can help people be more productive.
Project: Time Off did a study not long ago that showed more than half of all American workers forget to take some vacation days every year. The study found that states where people take the most vacations have less stress at work, more productivity, and a stronger economy generally.
Many of the world’s most successful people agree with the study’s results and say that vacations, when they are physically away from work and not connected to it, help them focus, handle their time better, and get more done. CNBC says that Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and John Donahoe, former CEO of eBay, all think that trips are a way to waste time.
6. Take breaks at set times
Please don’t think that staying connected to your work throughout the workday will make you more productive. Tina Willis, who runs the small law company Tina Willis Law in Orlando, Florida, says that getting away is the best way to be yourself while you’re working.
“If I’m not in court or attending a deposition or a hearing, I take a midmorning break each day to go for a run or exercise, which helps me stay on track mentally throughout the day,” he said.
That is, I work in the morning, go for a run, and then go back to work. I can concentrate better at work when I run, so I make the most of my time.
7. Put social media away
Willis finds that social media can be both helpful for work and a waste of time. She says that going after it instead of letting it come to you is the key.
“To prevent myself from wasting time,” he said, “I started by deleting any time-wasting apps from my phone, such as Facebook, and turning off notifications for anything that wasn’t essential to my work and life.”
By turning off the constant updates from shopping sites, social networks, and news apps, Willis can get the most out of her technology without letting it bother her or distract her during the day. People who can’t control their urges to use drugs should use an app called Cold Turkey to stop them and limit their access.
8. Split up your day
People who are successful often plan their days and weeks ahead of time, but they also tend to think about the present moment. Elon Musk is the same. Visionary businessman Elon Musk is known to work 100-hour weeks at both SpaceX and Tesla. 85 hours is a short week. You have to keep track of that much time, and Musk does it by splitting his day into five-minute chunks.
Because Musk breaks his day up into small chunks, he can focus on just one thing at a time. There are only 300-second blocks for everything, even food. This keeps Musk from getting too focused on the big picture and instead lets him focus on the most important things that need to be done right now.
9. Get up early
People who are successful have written a lot of pieces about how to be successful, but almost none of them tell people to sleep in. A 2017 story in USA Today confirmed what many Apple fans already knew: Tim Cook, the CEO of the company, wakes up at 3:45 a.m.
Some people, even morning people, probably think that time is crazy, but the piece says that a lot of successful people get up early because not all times are the same. Early risers get to start their day while the rest of the world is still sleeping. This gives them rare and valuable time to themselves, when their minds aren’t already full of the contacts and requests that will be coming their way when the lazy people get up.
10. Write it down
Having to deal with multiple devices that send you messages, emails, calls, and alerts all day can make your workflow and goals feel broken, scattered, and random, which doesn’t help you manage your time well. Tracy Anderson, a fitness artist and trainer to the stars, keeps her crazy-busy life in check by making a visual list of her problems, challenges, goals, and plans. Different people do this in different ways. For her, it’s a simple notebook that she called her “brain dump” in an interview with CNBC.
Plan your day.
Jenny Blake, a former career coach and job strategist at Google, said that mind maps help her organize the different parts of her work and life by bringing them together visually. Mind maps use spokes to connect a main idea to other ideas or tasks that are connected to it. This way, she can see a picture of a day, year, or decade in the past while planning the best way to reach her near and far-off goals.
11. Take care of your first hour of the day
She also runs Real Life E Time Coaching & Speaking and is the founder and CEO of that company. Elizabeth Grace Saunders is a time-management teacher, speaker, and best-selling author of three books on the subject.
She thinks that the first hour after you wake up is the most important of the day and that you should protect it at all costs.
“I find that it helps immensely to not have meetings to start my day,” he said. “I use the first hour to get myself in order by doing things like finishing my daily plan, organizing my emails, and other quick tasks.” Going into the rest of the day with this clear head and strong will is great. I’m ready for my meetings, and I know which bigger jobs are the most important for today.
12. Set aside days for projects
Saunders says that you can help yourself by taking a day off from the busy work that you need to do every day in order to get things done.
“I have one day a week where I don’t have coaching calls,” she added. The best day for me is Wednesday. I also put up a statement that said “away from email” on those days. I can work on projects and go to business or networking meetings on those days, which would be hard to do on other days. Now is the time to work on my business, not in it.
13. Get your Monday done early
Saunders has come up with a unique and useful way to deal with the problem of unfinished tasks that keep piling up and taking over the next few days.
Give flaws to others
Author and Ph.D. holder Richard Gutkowski has written two books called Debt is a Four-Letter Word — But it Need Not Be! that teach young people how to be responsible with their money. He ran into problems with social media and other new technologies that he needed to use to reach the millennials his books are meant to help while he was trying to get his books released.
“Being well into senior age,” he added, “I faced overwhelming learning curves, upkeep, maintenance time and other demands — and I lacked passion for it.”
He didn’t try to handle the job himself; instead, he hired a college student who knew the technology and the audience. This was an easy and relatively cheap answer.
“She develops content for and maintains all applicable social media outlets, produces my newsletter and ghostwrites a weekly blog post based on topics in my books,” he told me. “In five hours weekly she does what was taking me days and days and days.”
“I taper down my planned work from Monday to Friday,” she shared. “By Friday, I have fewer new planned activities, so I have space to wrap up what spilled over from earlier in the week.”
14. Learn how to say “no”
The Financial Times says that “no is the new yes.” Naturally, good people want to help others when they can. But when you agree to do something that someone else could do, you give up some of your time for free. You end up busy, with less time, and you waste the time you do have less well the more you say yes.
Inc. says that Warren Buffett reportedly said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”
15. Not doing many things at once
For a long time, people put the word “multitasking” on their resumes to get hired. They were different from the other candidates because they could do more than one thing at once. This must have made them gods of time management. Not really. Entrepreneur and a lot of scientific evidence say that people were made to focus on the job at hand. Most of the time, multitasking doesn’t work, and it’s probably bad for you. Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of Atlassian, put it up for Inc. by saying, “Do one thing at a time.” Do one thing at a time!”
16. Separate into groups
Indra Nooyi has one of the busiest routines in the world as CEO of PepsiCo. One thing that helps her succeed is making clear boundaries between her work and personal goals, duties, and chores. In a 2017 interview with Fortune, Nooyi said that she makes a list of chores, in her case 50 to 60, with one column for work and one for personal things. It doesn’t matter how big or small the job is; if she doesn’t finish it, it moves to the right column on the next day’s list.
17. Take care of your mail
Kevin Kruse talked to 200 of the world’s most successful people for his book 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Managing Their Time. A steady pattern quickly became clear. A piece Kruse wrote for Forbes said that all of them carefully handled their email instead of “reacting” to new messages like most people do.
Even though everyone has their own unique way of doing things, many successful people treat emails like any other task: they need to be planned, handled, and finished as soon as possible.
18. Emails should be shorter.
Forbes says that Kruse also said that many business leaders set aside a few hours a day, usually three, to check and answer their emails. So, they won’t have to deal with a steady stream of texts all day long. He also noticed that successful people tend to write short emails.
Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, writes letters that are short—no more than three sentences. Kruse also told Forbes that many successful people seem to have one last email habit in common: they never sign up for any lists or newsletters that they don’t need.
Bottom Line
You can learn a lot about how successful people handle their time by looking at the things they do every day. Even though successful people in different fields and walks of life have different morning habits, they all seem to share one thing.
Some people pray, others read. Some people read the news, check their email, or spend time with their pets. What they do is less important than the fact that they do the same thing every morning when they wake up. All of them say that their morning routines help them set the tone for the day and see what their top goals are.
