I used to think that you can only do so much in 24 hours. I mean, it’s only 24 hours right? And you are sleeping for at least 5-6 hours out of them, so basically you only have around 18 hours per day to get shit done. And even this is optimistic as you need to account for showers, eating, driving etc, and a lot of other small things that take up your time during the day. So how do I get everything done? I learned to optimize my time to accomplish much more with the same 24 hours.
In this article I will try and outline a few of the things I learned over the years about how to get more done during the day. If you’re trying to build a business from scratch, and trying to be an entrepreneur, you should really know how to optimize your time to make the most of your day.
How to make more time to achieve more
Write down your goals and daily tasks
That’s the first thing you have to do, write down your long term goals, let’s say for 5 years from now, or even 10 years. I like to write down 10 years goals, 1 year goals and daily goals. But for this article let’s focus on the daily goals. When you have your daily tasks written down you know exactly what you need to do. It’s like a game plan from your day, so it’s basically already half done right? Sometimes just coming up with your tasks is time consuming. So get that out of the way quickly.
Delegate
So the principal of getting more time to get more done is pretty basic, if you have 5 tasks to do in your daily TODO list, and you know all of these will take you all day to finish, you basically know you can only do 5 tasks a day. Let’s assume for the article these are daily tasks that needs to be done every day.
So how do you get more done? Simple, you delegate. Now for most business owners this may sound like a no brainer, but it actually took me some time to get my head around this idea. When you first start out, especially if your business involves creative work, you feel like no one else will ever do a good enough job at what you know how to do. So you ” have ” to do these things yourself, hence, it takes most of the time of your day.
However, as I learned, almost every task can be broken to smaller, more simpler jobs that you can then give away to a team to complete, and free up some more time for yourself. So if you take these 5 daily tasks and you train one other person to do 2 or 3 of these instead of you, you basically bought more time for yourself during the same day. And if you multiple that by 5 days of the week, 30 days in a month, you just bought yourself a whole lot of extra time to accomplish much more in your life or business.
So don’t be afraid to delegate and use other people to help you save time. You be surprised that you can always find good people that will do a decent job at what you need.
Do several things at once
Another great thing I learned about optmizing my time that I actually picked up from Grant Cardone is the ability to do several things at once. YES, you can do several things at once. For example, I like to listen to audio books as much as I can. But obviously running my own company and having many things to do during the day, It’s impossible to just take a break and start listening for 20 minutes. So when do I find the time? I combine.
I own a very cute yellow lab that I love very much. I try to take care of my dog the best as I can, so obviously this includes taking her out for walks right? That’s like something you have to do every day. So I decided that while I walk my dog, I can listen to my audio books. Walking the dog twice a day ( or more ) every time for 15-20 minutes, gives me around 30-40 minutes of ” reading ” every day. How cool is that? Some times I even go so far as taking my baby girl for a morning walk with my dog together and listening to my audio books all at the same time.
And before you go and say ” But you need to be concentrated on your child ” I will say, you are right, I don’t always do that, but sometimes she just likes to walk in quiet so I can have 10 minutes to listen, and learn. Developing myself and my mind is very important to me and I try to pass that along to my daughter as well.
Get the hard stuff out of the way first
Another great tip on how to do more with your time is to always start your day with the most important tasks you have. The logic behind this is that in the morning we are the most efficient. So you have that sweet spot of a few hours after your wake up that you are at your peak. Use them to accomplish your most important or hard task of that day and then move on to the more easiest or the ones that don’t need as much effort or thinking.
You be surprised to learn how much easy it is to complete the difficult tasks just when you start your day and then your day will glide through.
Wake up early
This should be a no brainer. If you get up early, you can get more done. Easy at that. Now i’m not a morning person, at least I never used to be, but ever since my daughter was born, I started to wake up when she did, so it usually mean I wake up at around 6:00. Now I know it’s not that early. I know of a lot of entrepreneurs that get up at 5:00 or even sooner, but I found this is the best time for me as I also stay up late and work during the night. Every person is different, don’t try to stick to my schedule or someone else’s, but getting up early is key for sure.
Before my daughter was born I used to get up later, and it really bothered me. So that’s just another thing I do better now as a father. Which leads me to my next point…
Stay up late
You need around 6-8 hours of sleep. Less than that it’s not healthy for you, but more is just wasting time. If you have huge goals like I do, you need to spend every waking moment working on getting closer to your goals. So when everyone else is washed up at 19:00 after a full day of work, and are just kicking it on the couch and falling asleep, you can eat dinner with the family, put your little ones to bed and still have a good 2-4 hours of work done to do.
YES, that’s what it takes, i’m not giving advice here to the 9 to 5 employees, if you’re one of these, do what ever you want, but if you want to be a successful business person, you need to work, A LOT. Just ask my wife how many nights I stayed late in the living room working and falling asleep on the couch, it’s not pretty, and I never want to sleep without my wife, but sometimes you do what you have to do to get things done.
Get your surroundings on the same page
What I mean by that is that everyone around you, like your kids, wife and employees need to be on the same page of maximizing your time. I love my wife to death, she is the best partner I could have hoped for when it comes to letting me run my time as I need. Everyone around me knows that I like to work, and I need to work a lot. So don’t let anything distract you from your goals, people have a tendency to interrupt you with small, un-important things just because that’s how they are used to living their lives.
NOT ME. I let most of the things slide by me because I only want to focus on the most important things that will get me closer to my goals. So get the people around you on track and help you not waste your time on bullshit things.
Cut down on meetings and phone calls
Meetings are a waste of time, Phone calls as well. Don’t get me wrong, meeting with a potential clients or doing a sales call is not a waste of time obviously, but first of all, let’s assume you should not do the sales calls yourself, and you should only come to meetings that are important enough to disrupt your time.
I try to avoid phone calls as much as I can. Not because I don’t like to talk to people, but because I know calls can get long and waste an hour of my day and then it’s hard to get back to the rhythm of work. There’s nothing you can’t say or talk about over emails that you can’t do over the phone, whenever someone says to me let’s schedule a call to discuess about it, I say, just shoot me an email, it’s faster and easier.
Same with meetings, when someone says, let’s do a meeting, I say, for what? Write me an email with what you want to talk about, and I will respond. Most things can be agreed on in a quick back and fourth email thread and do not need a 20 minutes meeting.
There are a lot more small tricks and hacks I do during my day to save my time and optimize it, but I can honestly go on forever on this subject, maybe I should do a follow up post about it. I hope this helped you better understand how you can optimize your day and get more done with the time your have.
Remember, the most successful people in the world have the exact same time as you do, if Bill gate and Lebron James can get so many things done in 24 hours, so can you!