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.

E-mail

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.

Make your own Lent

I’m not about to make you give up chocolate for forty days, but I will have you consider what else you can give up. Are there certain activities, both personal and professional, that are sucking up your free time? Are there certain clients or projects that have not been as profitable as you hope, and yet they are still monopolizing your time? Now is the time to make a list of these things and figure out how you can either eliminate or modify them so that you can be more efficient. To demonstrate, here are some of the things I have done:

• I stopped driving to the gym.
  Time saved: 45-90 minutes
  Years ago, I used to drive to a gym to work out. Now, I just run from my house and do strengthening exercises at home. This saves me about 45-90 minutes every time I work out if you consider how long it takes someone in California to drive to the gym, park, walk from the car to the gym, get inside the gym, wait for certain machines to become available, leave them gym after working out, and drive home again. That 45-90 minutes is definitely better spent elsewhere. Better yet, I now jog with an empty stroller to pick up my daughter and walk her home, so I get to exercise, run an errand, and save fuel costs all in one shot.
• I stopped watching TV.
  Time saved: 15 minutes per show for DVD,
  15 hours for cutting back
  I was actually down to one show a week from the 5-6 nights per week of TV I used to watch two years ago, but with the writer’s strike that has ended as well. If I still want to watch something with my husband, we pick up a TV series on DVD from Netflix. Watching TV on DVD, whether old shows that are on commercial DVDs or new shows that you record, allows you to save roughly 15-20 minutes per hour by eliminating the commercials. Watching your TV shows at a different time than they are aired also allows you greater flexibility in your weekly schedule.
• I gave up refined sugars.
  Time saved: 1-2 hours of productivity
  Not only do I feel better after eliminating refined sugars and reducing all other sugars, but my energy is greater with my steady blood sugar levels so I don’t feel like I need an afternoon nap every day. This makes my mid-morning and after-lunch periods a lot more productive. This same technique worked for Rob May over at Business Pundit and Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey as well.
• I dropped a bunch of feeds.
  Time saved: 2 hours per week
  I used to have about 40% more feeds in my reader, but a bunch of them were really just dead weight—they had slipped in quality and were really not a good value of my time. Dropping them means that I can focus on reading only the feeds that will help me and not the ones that are a waste of time.
• I cut out some web sites.
  Time saved: 5 hours per week
  Are you the kind of person who spends a few hours a week checking news- and hobby-related web sites? I found that these activities really did nothing for me, and if I could control the urge for about five minutes, it went away. This act of impulse control now gives me an extra five hours every week, at least. The added benefit is that not reading the kinds of things that make headlines on CNN has improved my mood, which also increases productivity. The exception to this rule is any industry-related news such as business or technology trends, which you should keep up on in order to remain competitive in your business.

Eliminate Inefficient Uses of your Time

To really overhaul how you use your time, you have to look at what you are doing now that is inefficient or leaves room for improvement. I would begin by recording everything that you do for the next week or two, including how much time each activity took you and what the results of that activity were. Once you have the data, look at your schedule to see which activities consume too much time or don’t bring in any returns for you. If problems in your schedule emerge from your data, try some of these solutions:

• Outsource.
  Outsourcing might be as complicated as hiring a bookkeeper if you are spending too much non-billable time on your books, or as easy as hiring a housekeeper to free you up for additional work time. My simple version of outsourcing is that I have been sending my daughter to play at a friend’s house during the day and letting her daddy put her to bed at night.
• Reduce distractions.
  Tim Ferriss, author of the The 4-Hour Workweek, strongly advocates checking your e-mail only twice a day. I haven’t quite made it there, but I am trying to turn off my e-mail and IM more often. I also stopped answering my phone when I’m focused on writing.
• Stay focused.
  The nice thing about working from home is working from home, but it’s also the bad thing. Besides e-mail, I can get distracted doing housework, playing with my dogs, or making overly involved breakfasts for myself. The trick is to stay focused on your task and "go to work" in the morning as if you have a job outside the home. According to Cameron Martel at Career Ramblings, staying on track when working from home includes dressing for work, setting regular work hours for yourself, making yourself a work space, and not finding other things to do around the house.

Stop Procrastinating

Procrastination is the fastest way to derail a project and get yourself into some bad habits. If procrastination becomes regular, across all projects, you will start missing all your deadlines and your customer satisfaction (and client referrals) will suffer. This is why it is important to stop procrastination in it’s tracks! Julie Morgensteign, author of Time Management from the Inside Out, explains that procrastination often happens for two reasons:

1. The task is too complex and overwhelming.
2. The person procrastinating hates what they are doing.

If complexity is your problem, try breaking up the task into component parts and tackling each of them one by one. (I find that making a detailed to-do list and talking to yourself, as outlined in Be Your Own CEO, also help with that kind of procrastination.) If you hate your current task and are trying to avoid it, see the section on outsourcing above.

The Bottom Line

Overall, I’m looking forward to my increased productivity in 2008. Don’t wait until January to start these changes though—many of them can be made starting today. Just ask yourself this question: Is there anything that I am doing today that is not helping me move forward in my business? If the answer is yes, do something about it!

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