As I’ve gotten into the flow of owning my business, I’ve realized how
careful I need to be with my time. My days disappear into the wind so
easily it’s scary.
Gone are the days of saying yes to every meeting that crosses my desk.
Now I weigh opportunities based on time commitment and potential value.
It’s wild to me how differently I approach scheduling today—there
are so many people and things that want my time now.
Before owning a business, I felt good about my time blocking skills.
I’d been using a planner for years and have
Trello boards
for every occasion. There’s a reason I lead our operations.
When I
reviewed my year at the end of 2023,
I thought I was pretty good at time management. I am, don't get me
wrong, but wow is it a lot harder owning a business.
Navigating the crunch of this new life while stubbornly holding onto my
hobbies and social life has taught me hard lessons about managing my
time and what I can accomplish in a day.
For those of you who are just as greedy, who don’t want to let go of
everything else in chasing a single goal, who want better control of
your life: there are ways of making your time work better for you.
Learn from the battle I've been waging for the past few months.
It's tough , but if you can get clear on your priorities then you
have a chance. Be deliberate in your schedule and in prioritizing
your personal needs and you'll be better protected from the urge to
overwork.
Designing
Your Ideal Life
Before you can start to block time in your calendar, you owe it to
yourself to figure out why you want that time in the first place.
For me, I block time so I can see friends, go for long walks to
clear my head, doodle, or read. I block time for my hobbies and
loved ones, and for my favorite activities.
I do it because they matter to me. Having time with my
loved ones brings me joy and makes my life better. It also gives me
the chance to indulge in great conversations which inspire me when I
get back to work. Making time for my hobbies recharges me and lets me
see the world from different angles than usual.
In order to maintain those hobbies, I deliberately
learned to build habits
around them to make them semi-permanent parts of my life.
If I were to strip those from my routine, I would be less as a person.
Less happy. Less fulfilled. Less creative. And those are key pieces of
myself I want to encourage.
So when I consider my calendar, I make sure I have time for those
people and hobbies because they fuel me.
Your challenge is to figure out the same things for yourself. What
brings you joy? What activities inspire you? What helps you clear your
head and get creative about ideas that improve your business?
When you’re not inspired, your professional life suffers. Same with
when you’re drained, depressed, burnt out, or just plain bored.
Feeling any of those ways is a sign your routine isn’t working for
you.
Take five minutes. Write down a list of activities and people you
enjoy. There’s no limit to how many things you write down—whatever
comes to mind is perfect. Then repeat this exercise with
things that feel like they make your life much worse.
Once you have those lists, read them so you remember what you wrote.
The Challenge of Finding
Balance
It’s cliche, but living a good life is really the goal.
To pursue a good life, first narrow down the list you’ve just written
into your absolute favorite things. The ones you can’t or don’t want
to live without. These will be your highest priorities.
Next, narrow down your list of dislikes to the worst, most
miserable parts of your life. We're talking draining activities on the
level of spending a day stuck in customs or at the DMV. We're talking
10-hour layover levels of misery.
As you go through your calendar, notice how often these each show
up. How often are you doing something you absolutely despise? And, how
often do you make time for what you love?
Chances are that balance is uneven in favor of the worse and tedious tasks.
Business ownership means doing a lot of tasks and taking on a lot of
responsibilities that are essential but also kind of miserable. Some
of this can’t be avoided. That’s okay.
But notice what can. If you have a lot of phone calls you don’t need,
cut them. Turn them into emails. Get used to refusing those calls, or
deflecting them to other forms of communication that work better for
you. If you have an assistant, or employees, teach them to screen your
calls.
Do the same for meetings, obligations, and tasks that plain suck. You
don’t have time for that. You want to be building a great business and
spending time with great people. You want to be living.
Life is too short to spend all your time on monotony. And life is full
of monotonous tasks that love to eat up your day.
When you start trimming down those tasks, you’ll notice gaps in your
schedule. Use those to add more of what you love. Plan coffee with a
friend. Take a loved one out for dinner. Go for a walk. Read a book you’ve
been putting off. Flirt. Socialize. Have fun.
Minimize
Your Obligations
You’ve got to learn to say no to what fills your schedule before you
find the room for everything you want to be doing instead.
Sales people want your time. Your employees want your guidance. Your
customers, assuming you have them, want your attention.
Your modern lifestyle will do everything it can to pack your day with
nonsense. Traffic will eat away at you. Social media will rob your
evenings. Entertainment will level you out and make you feel like you
did something even when you didn’t.
You have to learn to say no.
Now, some of those things are important. You can’t avoid it all. Your
employees, in most cases, actually do need and deserve guidance.
Sometimes you’ll want to hear a sales pitch because it’s relevant.
Entertainment is healthy in moderation.
The key is to cut out everything else. If it’s not making you happy,
and it’s not helping to move your life forward, it has to go.
Move closer to work and reduce your commute if you can. Learn to put
your phone down, or
install an app that will block you
from your 300th X (Twitter) thread at a certain time of day so you can
focus on what you wanted to do instead.
It’s hard. Our lives are full of things battling for our attention,
and many of them are really, really good at winning that fight. Even
worse, they’re endless time sinks.
It sounds tough, but be relentless. Give your lifestyle, and your
time, the same intensity you put towards your business.
You've Got to Make a
Change
Sometimes it’s time to unplug.
Hopefully by this point you’re getting the idea. Even better if you
already know a few areas of your life that can get trimmed down or
cut entirely.
Your life is yours for the taking. That’s the moral here. In a world
where time is fleeting, where there’s always another obligation, you
have to fight for yourself. You have to safeguard your time intensely
and without fail.
If you want to learn to play the piano, block time for it. Put it in
your calendar. 30 minutes, piano, every night. Twice a week. Whatever
fits and gives you the time and flexibility to focus on that hobby.
Want to go out? Go out. But don’t just think about it. Put that into
your calendar, and refuse to schedule anything else during that time.
From 7-11p every Friday night, you will be unbothered by work to
instead cut loose on the dance floor with your friends.
The magic of this approach is, once you’re used to it, you’ll feel
much more recharged and ready to run your business. It's easier to make
hard choices when you're feeling fresh instead of worn out.
Recharging with hobbies, with good company, is an amazing remedy to
burnout.
You owe it to yourself and your business to protect yourself from
burnout. It will wreak havoc on your professional life. It could make
your business fail. When you’re burnt out, you can’t come through for
your peers, your employees, your business, or yourself.
Next time you see an hour-long meeting and think to yourself, “hey,
maybe that could be an email,” I hope you remember this article.
Most of all, I hope you get some much-needed time to yourself.