Entrepreneurs are busy people with never enough time in their calendar.They have the demands of their growing companies and the responsibilities of their families to balance. Furthermore, the CEO must ensure they themselves remain healthy – mentally and physically – and don’t get burned out. If they do, everything suffers.
To make sure both their business and personal life runs smoothly, busy entrepreneurs need to do the near impossible – find more hours in the day.Let’s take a look at the top tips, secrets and strategies for maximizing an entrepreneur’s time and ensuring that he or she manages the calendar rather than the calendar managing them.
Calendar Rhythm
It’s important for entrepreneurs (and any professional) to establish a focused rhythm for managing their calendar. Meet regularly with your support team to review your calendar for the week, the month and the quarter. Having a rhythm and consistent planning ensures you are always forward looking and have as few surprises and unscheduled activities as possible.A rhythm not only helps you manage your professional time, but can also be used within your own family. Like a family financial budget, schedule time to review your family calendar on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to coordinate your busy schedules and plan for spending quality time together.
The “No” List
You can’t do everything, nor should you. If you develop a list of tasks you must say “no” to, it will help you refine what activities go (and do not go) into your calendar. For example, do you need to have a lunch meeting every day? Develop your “no” list and you’ll find that there’s less wasted time in your calendar each day and more time to say “yes” to other, more important priorities. A few tasks you might want to have on your “no list” – no lunch meetings, no casual meetings over 15 minutes, or no meetings on a specific day of the week that you want to use for strategic efforts. Remember, every time you say yes to something of low priority you’re taking time away from something of higher priority.
Move Big Rocks First
Prioritization is one the most important aspects to successfully managing your time – this is often referred to as the “big rock” principle. Imagine you have several large rocks (big priorities) and a container of sand (smaller priorities) that you want to fit into a bucket. If you put the sand in the bucket first, the big rocks will sit on top of the sand. The sand and rocks together cannot fit into the bucket. However, if you put the big rocks into a bucket first, then pour the sand in, the sand will settle around the rocks and everything can fit into one bucket. Discipline yourself to take care of higher priority issues first and then work on issues of lower priority. If you find that you’re agonizing over managing your time, think about how you can better prioritize your calendar.
Delegate Strategically
Delegation is a two-way process. It is about you, the executive, delegating to others, but it’s also about ensuring that the staff being delegated to are prepared to properly respond to and execute on those tasks you give them. If you find yourself drowning in email or taking phone calls, it’s time to hire an assistant to help filter your flood of incoming communications. This person can help you manage your calendar, protect your time so you can focus on strategic and forward thinking activities, and even filter your email and phone calls. You can only fit so many hours into a day and so many appointments into your calendar. Delegating responsibilities and tasks helps you get more done in the same amount of time. Develop a circle of trusted staff so you can delegate more. Remember, your job is to not just delegate, but also to groom and train staff to be able to take on more of the things that require your time today.
Automate Your Schedule
Technology can be a useful asset to help busy executives better manager their schedules. Inbound emails can be automatically routed, filtered and replied to. Google has a featured, “canned responses” template which helps you easily reply to emails with pre-written text. For conference calls, do you have the conference call number and password pre-programmed so that you can enter into your many conference calls quicker? What about using a tool like Asana or AT Task to manage your tasks? These little uses of technology take thinking out of simple tasks so you can focus on big ticket items and add more time to your busy calendar.
There really are only 24 hours in a day, but with some smart planning and commitment to staying focused, you can fit more – and more important items - into your day.