Introduction

This week is shaping up to be a very busy week for me. From camping with the family, to traveling to Brisbane for meetings, finishing off a new business plan, coaching my son’s football team and finally travelling to Los Angeles for, you guessed it, more meetings. If that wasn’t enough, after listening to this post by @jerrybanfield, I’ve committed myself to posting 1 Steemit blog per day!

Admittedly, this is a busier week than most but it is still doable whilst fitting in other aspects of my life such as meditation and training for a marathon in October. The only reason this is possible, or more importantly sustainable, is because I am ruthless with protecting my time.

In the spirit of sharing what I’ve learnt and following on from my last post I figured this would be a good time to write about what I do to protect one of my most precious resources, my time.

There are many aspects to this, many methods and many tools to help us do it. However, I’ve tried to focus here on the 5 main ways I’ve managed to protect my time.

1. Plan and Prioritise Your Time

This assumes you have already committed yourself to goal setting (a topic I will likely cover at a later point). Once you know what your 5-year, 1-year, quarterly, monthly, weekly and yes, daily goals are, you need to decide how you will prioritise your time in order to achieve those goals.

Having researched this in depth, I have found Stephen Covey’s ‘Time Matrix’ to be the best guide for this. This is covered at length in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Stephen Covey’s Time Matrix. Also known as the Eisenhower Box.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” Dwight Eisenhower

As a rule, I try to stay in Quadrant II as much as possible. I aim for 50% Quadrant II, 30% Quadrant I (shit always comes up!), 10% Quadrant III and 10% Quadrant IV (I am human after all!).

Another aspect I’ve adopted is the concept of The One Thing. The basic premise here is that if you could only complete One Thing today to move you closer to your goals, what would it be? Once you’ve ascertained what that is, you do that until it is completed before you do anything else.

This is covered by Gary Keller in his book, The One Thing

I strive to ensure that my mornings are always free, so that I have time to complete my One Thing before getting distracted by email and meetings etc. By all means, create a broader To-Do list. Just make sure that The One Thing is at the top of that list and that you complete that task before moving onto the next one.

2. Obtain Calendar Anorexia

I aim to have Calendar Anorexia. A phrase coined by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is The Way.

Remember, be ruthless with your time. It is one of your most precious resources. Keep your calendar free for you. Make sure your calendar is populated mostly with Quadrant II activities that will help you achieve your goals.

We all play many roles in life. For example, I play the role of Husband, Father, Brother, Son, Friend, Colleague, Entrepreneur, Boss etc. etc. My goals are spread across these various roles. Therefore, for example, I place as much importance on coaching my son’s football team as I do on closing the next business deal. Each one of these is classed as a Quadrant II task as it relates to me. Therefore, when it comes to my calendar, my Son’s training sessions and game days are as locked in my calendar and precious as any important business task.

Establish what balance you need/want in life and place the necessary importance on them. Let other things slip such as meeting that ‘friend’ you kind of like for drinks, or that company that wants to discuss ‘possible synergies’. If they are not key to you achieving your goals, drop them and move on. Trust me, you will be better off for doing so.

3. Delegate As Much As You Can

Don’t do anything that someone else can do better and that you can afford not to do. This could include sales prospecting, lead generation, software programming, general admin tasks, coffee runs, lawn mowing, house cleaning etc.

Again, focus on what is important and key to achieving your goals. Delegate everything else to someone else where possible. For those things that are not possible to delegate, let some of them slip. Your world won’t collapse, trust me. Having longer grass in the back garden is a small price to pay for having closed another deal or spending precious time with my family, in my opinion.

In my current company I have 7 people who report directly to me. Their roles cover various aspects of the business, including managing other employees. I now have it set up that anyone from; a board member, to shareholder, to other employee, to customer, to any other external party, MUST engage with one of those 7 people before reaching me. This acts as a great filter because 9 times out of 10 those 7 people are far better equipped to deal with the issue than I would be! This leaves me to focus on the larger aspects and long- term direction of the business.

As another example, our family subscribes to My Food Bag 3 nights per week even though my wife and I both love to cook. The reason being, it’s impossible to cook nice, healthy food every night with everything else going on, especially with 2 young kids! It’s nice to have someone else do the food planning and ingredient preparation for you sometimes.

P.S. I’m still holding out hope that my 9-year-old son will start cutting the grass soon. It’s time to see a return on that investment!

4. Get Assistance.

When I started my current company I made the mistake of assuming that the need for an assistant was less of a priority than filling roles such software engineers or UX designers. In fact it wasn't until our third year that I realised I was looking at this completely the wrong way. I realised that, in the absence of an assistant, the person doing those lower priority tasks was me!

Finally, along came Debbie and it’s fair to say that 2 years on, I can’t imagine how I ever got by without her. Of my 7 direct reports she is by far my best filter and main protector of my time. Even when it comes to managing the other 6 managers ;)

Bear in mind this only works if you fully embrace it. This requires a great deal of trust and personality fit. Debbie sits in on every board and shareholder meeting, she controls my email and social media (work wise) and even liaises with my wife on social events. She basically knows, almost everything I know. That takes trust let me tell you. However, in doing that she now knows how I think and therefore can make a lot of the less critical decisions on my behalf. This takes time to get to that level but it is well worth the investment. It’s now at a stage where I sometimes ask her what I should be doing 

Now, I realise that not everyone can afford the luxury of a full time assistant. However, there are other ways such as contracting virtual assistants for specific tasks or tools and services that could automate some tasks for you are all a step in the right direction.

Tim Ferriss covers this well in his book The 4-Hour Work Week

Again, focus on the important and get assistance for everything else if you can.

5. Avoid the email trap!

Constantly checking and sending emails is a great way to appear busy. However, I’m not convinced that this actually helps you achieve your most important goals. I’ll re-phrase, I’m absolutely f**king certain it won’t help!!!

Stop constantly checking and sending emails, period. Instead, allocate time slots in the day to do this and do so with efficiency. Now, of course, I have Debbie to do this for me, but prior to that, I used the method below which got me down from reading hundreds of emails per day to less than 10. Yes, less than 10.

First, only check emails twice per day. 12pm and 4pm works best for me but choose what works best for you. This ensures you can complete your most important tasks before the inevitable email distractions. Checking emails at night is just a good way of ensuring no sleep!

When checking your email try following these rules:

• Remember, email is meant to be exactly that, e-lectronic MAIL. It is not meant to be a real time communication tool. If you require such a conversation then trying talking to the person face to face, calling them by phone or using a chat program such as Slack to communicate.
• If it would take you more than 5 minutes to respond to an email then follow the steps above.
• When you open your email browser, hit the ‘from’ tab. Then comb through the senders. Select anyone who isn’t in your ‘important’ category and move them into an archive folder or better yet, the trash folder.
• Next, select the ‘subject’ or ‘ conversation’ tab and rinse and repeat.
• Next, look for emails that have you on Cc and quickly scan to see if you need to be aware of that topic and then, rinse and repeat.
• This should cull about 90% of your emails in minutes, allowing you to focus on the important ones. Don’t worry, if by chance you accidently archive an important email, the person that sent it to you will likely re-send it with an ‘important’ tag or they will call you.

Things will not fall apart on you if you do this. In fact quite the opposite will happen and you will have saved yourself precious time and will power to carry out more important tasks.

As far as social media at work goes, my view is unless you are in advertising or marketing, social media shouldn’t feature in your work day. Allocate a time for that outside of work (or lunchtime) and switch off all notifications.

I personally have no notifications on my phone or desktop. I have no direct office line number and I never answer my mobile phone if I don’t recognise the number. I don’t even check voicemail. If it’s important they will follow my answer phone instruction and text me. Again, so far, my world hasn’t collapsed into ruin since doing this.

As a useful exercise you might want to try using Rescue Time. This tool will tell you exactly how much time you spend on certain websites and applications. The results are usually very sobering!

Conclusion

Your time belongs to you. It is the most precious commodity in my opinion. You never get it back. (Some people reading this post might think “I will never get that time back” Sorry, I’ve got nothing for you if that’s the case! )

You may choose to give your time to work, friends, TV or whatever but ultimately it is your time and you should choose how to use it.

Focus on what is important to you to achieve your goals and let go of the little things. It’s working for me so far.
I hope this was helpful. Again, there are many aspects and methods to this but I’ve tried to focus on the main things to keep the post as succinct as possible.

I would certainly appreciate your thoughts on this subject. Perhaps you have some better solutions that I have not covered here. If so, please share them. I’m learning like everyone else. None of us are as clever as all of us combined.

Take care,

Alan

Alan Brannigan
Husband, Father, CEO, Entrepreneur, Tech-Geek, Crypto Enthusiast, Believer in Freedom and Liberty

Email: [email protected]
Steemit - @nalabra