Lesson 8: Time Management

Time Management 101

Time is one of the most precious resources for a start-up founder. To become truly successful as an entrepreneur without totally exhausting yourself, you need to have good strategies to manage your time wisely.

We will provide you with 11 practical tips on how to be effective in your time management. These tips are not just generic time management techniques; they are specifically for founders of start-up companies. Some of these tips may even surprise you, but they have been tested by thousands of start-up founders and have proven to be useful.

1.     Don’t try to do everything yourself. Delegate early and often. 

2.     You can always be available, but you don’t need to work all the time. You can say you work 50 hours but be available 100 hours a week. 

3.     Don’t waste your time chasing people who don’t want to talk to you. Focus on your branding and make them come to you.

4.     Say “No” more often than “Yes.” (Read that one again.) You need to ignore or deflect distractions.

5.     Don’t let “feature creep” suck up all your time. Feature creep is the inability to say “no” to additional features in a product. This is why it is better to follow an MVP strategy (minimum viable products) and then iterate.

6.     Be straightforward and direct. Don’t waste time fussing around because you are not being direct with people. 

7.     Don’t schedule or attend too many meetings. In start-ups, you should focus on short and informal, yet frequent, “stand-up meetings” to keep up to speed on projects. Avoid long meetings.

8.     Keep track of your calendar. Set priorities for the day and for the week. You can also box your time. Work in intervals of 25 minutes with 5-minute breaks to stay fresh throughout the day. This interval may not work for everyone, so you can box your time the best way for yourself, but schedule breaks. 

9.     Get into the routine of always setting deadlines – for yourself and for your team. And if you miss a deadline, set a new deadline. Manage your time proactively.

10.  Use digital tools like Basecamp or Asana to manage the time on projects. As much as you can automate, do it.

11.  Focus on the right problems, not all problems. Many start-up companies have the wrong goals. In a lean start-up approach, it is recommended that you do hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases and validated learning. These will help you make the most of your time.

Time management is about rescuing your time, so you can focus on the most important things in your business. Remember, don’t try to do everything yourself. Your time is too valuable. Time is a precious resource for you, and you cannot ever get it back. What’s more, as an entrepreneur you already will be at a major loss for time. You simply won’t have enough time in the day to get everything done – and that’s okay.

In reality, you will not be able to do everything in you start-up and you really shouldn’t be doing it all. It’s why you will soon need to start thinking critically about building a team that brings the right match of skills, experience, and vision in alignment with your idea and product goals. As you build a team, and even before you do so, you must learn to prioritize tasks based on the relevance of importance to your most pressing objectives.

It will take you some time to get in the groove of managing your time effectively, and every time you bring someone else to your team you will have to train them on how to manage their time within your team. However, if you can learn how to manage your own time in a way that drives value, you will start off on the right foot and impart a healthy start-up culture of productivity and efficiency, which will ultimately lead to long term success for your company and you!

Here are some amazing TED Talks for you to review regarding time management. Take some time to review this content as time management is one of the most fundamental – and crucial – blocks for your development as a rising entrepreneur.

·       Forget Multi-tasking, Try Monotasking.

·       Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

·       As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify

·       How to Gain Control of Your Free Time

·       Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

·       How to Make Stress Your Friend

·       10 Top Time-Saving Tech Tips

·       How to Save the World (or at least Yourself) from Bad Meetings