Respecting Time
New entrepreneurs often feel like they are drowning in lack of time. No quality of life, no time for family and friends. No time to stay healthy and on top of outside the office interests (socializing with family, home projects). Seasoned entrepreneurs learn that time is your friend and you can find lots of it. You need to know how to control time and use it efficiently so it works in your favor.
Managing time effectively is one of the most important things you can do. You would naturally think that the more time you apply to the success of your business, the more likely it will become successful. This is a fallacy as it would say that if you and your competitor could spend 24 hours per day on your respective businesses, you would be at best tied. So how you use time becomes the important factor, not how much time you spend. Time is not something everyone uses equally well, in fact, most people are very poor at spending their time in truly productive ways.
This section is really about understanding some key aspects of how to be a leader so time is used effectively. How to use the team around you to get important things done. Unless you are a one-person company (or acting like one (not a good thing)), you should be able to maintain quality of life and still build a successful business. This section explores time from a variety of perspectives, hopefully providing some insight into how time can be a friend.
Managing Time
How does a business leader get the most out of the work day? Not an easily answered question, but busy business people seem to be increasingly running out of time. With a work day that is so easily interrupted by email, phone calls, meetings and ad-hoc tasks that come up, combined with the ever faster pace the world around us seems to be moving, it's a wonder the entrepreneur survives even a few months starting a new business. How to find time for vacation is one of the last things achieved, yet often overwork and the stress it creates is cited as one of the major reasons people give up pursuing their business ideas (or fail trying). At the very least, they fail to enjoy any of the rewards as there is no time to do so.
There are many places you can go for formalized time management workshops -- this is not one of them. Instead, a list of some common sense approaches to getting the most out of available time is presented, hopefully a few of them can be applied now to your situation, and others perhaps in the future.
- Keep a formal schedule -- there is no prize for trying to keep everything in your head. Like the restaurant waiter who does not write things down when they take a large table order -- don't create worry around you that you'll forget important events or deliverables. There are many devices out there that can be used to track a formal time schedule, use them. Failing that, a written calendar or agenda book, although technologically ancient, is often still the best.
- Block private time periods -- block at least 3 2-hour time slots each week so that you always have some time on your calendar where you can fairly reliably be at your desk completing tasks. This can reduce the feeling of stress created from many deliverables and no obvious time to work on them beyond late at night. If you are trying to balance work and personal life items (or school), get the school items done first as they are hardest to do when tired.
- Create rhythm with other people -- stop being ad-hoc in the way you touch base with your team (and customers or partners). Be deliberate and consistent with time in the way you do. This way, they come to expect to hear from you at certain times that you control (and not others!). They will save their needs and requests for those times. This will reduce the number of interruptions that occur. If they do reach out at a different time, it probably is important, and you should treat it as such. Tell them what times you are available (or on-line) and only respond during those times even if you are on line at other times.
- Be directive with communication -- don't assume things are getting done. End emails with a summary of what actions you expect people to be taking. End meetings and conference calls with a review of the key points and the takeaways (and a reminder of the next follow up event). People look for leadership, act like an orchestra conductor. Enjoy the in-tune music, you'll have more time to listen to it.
- Always have an agenda -- one of the biggest time wasters is meetings without purpose. The agenda does not always have to be formal, written down, handed out in advance, but that's better. Review the agenda as the meeting starts, make sure it stays on topic and the agenda is fully covered. Don't let endless (and useless) conversation go on (but let people be heard). As a leader, you should be the last one heard from on key topics -- summarize any decisions and direct the next steps. Time spent in meetings will be more beneficial to everyone.
- Take notes -- there is still no prize for trying to keep everything in your head. In fact, taking notes is an essential part of creating a proper record of your business. Innovators need these records to prove ownership of their innovation. There are many tools for taking notes, find the ones that work for you. A paper notebook still tends to be the best, most portable and hard to fake (date your pages). If you need to be on-line with your notes, invest in good typing skills. Without notes, you spend valuable time trying to remember what was last talked about, people with better memories may take advantage of you.
- Say no -- don't hesitate to say no to requests for your time. If it's one of your leadership team, you should already have a pre-planned time slot available. Use it and stick to it. If it's a hot item that can't wait, make a judgment call, but ask for a summary of the issue in advance before you take the interruption. Force people to think through their problems before they come to you to solve them all.
- Start on-time -- everyone around you should understand the importance of time. It is up to everyone to keep things on time. Don't get trapped in a culture where things start when they do, they should start when they are supposed to. If attendance is not complete, offer punishment -- start humorous at first (e.g. have the late comers sing a song or read a poem), graduate to performance reviews if they are persistently late. The bigger challenges occur near end of day -- if the morning is off schedule, you can be sure the rest of the day will be which cuts into the time you need to lead.
- Hire an exec assistant -- if your business can afford it, hire someone to keep you and the leadership team organized and on-time. Many successful leaders would be less successful without a quality exec assistant making sure things get done. Empower them, make them your right hand resource (you can have more than one resource in your right hand).
The points above talk directly about how you manage your business, not just your watch. How the senior team follows your lead and how everyone picks up better time management habits over time. The more you set a positive example, the more people follow your lead. If you are late and use the "I'm the CEO" excuse (or let others do it for you), then others start being late using their positions of authority as an excuse. Before you know it, you spend 15 minutes in each meeting waiting for everyone to show up and another 15 minutes organizing what the meeting is about. The challenge falls to the CEO, the leader of the business, to set the example and to make sure everyone gets the message -- let's not run out of time while trying to achieve our goals of excellence.
Tracking Time
Knowing how long things take is actually very important. The primary benefit is to improve your ability to predict how long the next activities or projects will take. In product development, like sales, forecasting completion of new deliverables is almost as important as raising money. If the predictions are off by even a few days, it tends to create a cascading set of changes all over the organization (e.g. marketing activities are delayed, partner communication is set back, customers are annoyed, etc).
Using formalized time tracking systems is not for everyone. They are very tedious for the most part and often people end up fabricating their input because they either do not have the patience to enter it properly or have not actually kept detailed records to input it accurately. Nonetheless, in certain areas of the company, it is of paramount importance to implement formalized time tracking -- typically product development (e.g. for grant applications, product planning) and consulting services if you offer them.
Regardless of whether you formalize time tracking, it is always beneficial to at least review how long key projects took, perhaps in a post-mortem debriefing, so that you carry that knowledge forward for the next project of similar scope. Forecast accuracy breeds increased confidence in the ability of the business to run faster -- faster than the competition.