I have been pondering my goals for this year in the past few weeks, and I have come up with one common thread: Less. How is less a goal, you might ask? Well, I think if I can retrain my habits to keep less in mind, I can actually get more of the things that are meaningful in life, and therefore make my life and my world a better place. So over the next month or so, I will be creating a series of posts that focus on the various ways in which I can aim for less in 2008.
Part 1: Wasting Less Time
When I think of time management, I don’t think of scheduling every minute of my day. Instead, I think of eliminating the things in your daily activities that don’t hold meaning and making room for the things that are important to you. Eliminating time wasters will make you a better and more productive entrepreneur. I’ve processed through my own life and the stories I’ve heard from colleagues, and identified some time wasters that I do during the day. Some of these may be funny to you, but I’m trying to be as honest as possible in order to help you identify and eliminate the time wasters in your own life.
Phone Calls
I once had this guy call me who went off for nearly 45 minutes—and I swear he did it without a single breath. As the conversation was really only good for the laugh I had retelling the story to a friend of mine, I found myself wishing I could have redone that hour of my life and let the voicemail pick up the second time around. Don’t get sucked into that trap. Your time is precious and you don’t have enough extra to be wasting with useless people or telemarker sales calls.
Action items: Keep important phone calls on task and schedule them to not interrupt your work flow. If you work alone, don’t pick up the phone for a number you don’t recognize; let it go to voicemail. Learn the art of ending a conversation better than I can, and get off the phone when you get stuck talking to a blowhard.
Personal Tasks
When you work from home, like many of my readers do, you can easily get caught up in personal tasks that suck up your work day. Don’t. Save your cleaning, shopping, decorating, laundry, childcare and other personal tasks for non-work hours. Those dishes will still be there in 2 hours when you call it quits for the day, so don’t use them as a reason to procrastinate on a project.
Action item: Set regular work hours, and use those hours only for work-related activities.
Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) says that you can triple your productivity by eliminating your e-mail overload. If elimination isn’t possible, perhaps you can take advice from Scoble on how to process all of it better. The connection between these two is that e-mail is a horrible time waster, and the only way to gain back that time is to tame the e-mail beast without hurting your business.
Action items: Become an e-mail ninja. Don’t send e-mail first thing in the morning. Schedule times to check email throughout the day, but not every 5 seconds when you are trying to procrastinate. If you need to write a long explanation, maybe it’s faster to pick up the phone and do it verbally.
Craigslist
Now, there are many reasons to use Craigslist: I have used this site to find new homes for my daughter’s outgrown toys, hire an artist, and look for freelance writing jobs. But if you can spend an hour laughing at the "Best Of" or half a day in one of the forums, then you’ve really lost sight of the big picture.
Action item: If you must use Craigslist, just find what you are looking for, and get out.
Bargain Hunting
I always laugh when I see someone go to purchase a new piece of office equipment, such as a scanner, and they go to 10 different stores to try to find the lowest price. In the amount of time you spent trying to save $5, you could have been spending 4 more hours working. I love a good deal just as much as the next guy, but not if it’s going to suck up my entire day.
Action item: Use tools such as Google Product Search, PriceWatch, or PriceGrabber to know what prices are before you buy, even if you are just going into the store. Many brick and mortar retails also have online versions with in-store pickup so you can compare pricing before you get into your car.
Daydreaming
I’ll confess: I actually spent an hour today looking at housing for a place we may not be living in for another 6-12 months. While daydreaming is nice, it’s not very productive.
Action item: Table that daydreaming until the day when you are actually able to put your plan into action. If you must do it anyway, use a timer to keep it short or you may spend all day playing on the internet.
Learning
I have heard from many entrepreneurs in the initial start-up phase that the learning curve is very steep. The real question is, are you really learning anything? I’m sure you can easily spend a few hours on a tangent surfing the web for affiliate marketing on the internet, but will that help you or your business in any sort of way? If not, don’t do it.
Action item: Delegate tasks when you can: Hire a bookkeeper instead of teaching yourself accounting, for example. If you need to educate yourself in a topic, find one or two sources that can be a regular source of information in that particular subject matter and use that to get answers instead of spending hours searching Google.
Blogs
Robert Scoble reads hundreds of blog feeds every day, and I think he’s nuts. I’m with Rob May when he says that you just don’t need all of that information—it isn’t really making your life any better anyway.
Action item: Look at your list of RSS feeds. Which ones have really helped you in your business, and which ones just produce a lot of fluff pieces? Use your RSS program to sort the ones that are regular must-reads or just eliminate the non-useful feeds out of your program.
The All-Encompassing Question
There are some valuable time wasters, such as when I take a shower to clear my head when I find myself mentally stuck. The trick is knowing whether or not that activity is hurting you or helping you. If you find yourself wasting time at any point in the day, just ask yourself: Is this activity going to add value or meaning to my life? If the answer is no, don’t do it.
Photo by FABIOLA MEDEIROS.
Fri, Jan 11, 2008
Less