Tiger By The Tail Tool
Secret 92: Owner’s Default Calendar
Manage Your Time
I have a best friend Dean who moved down to Santa Clara, California, to work in the tech sector as Silicon Valley really took off. He excelled as a programmer, and began to get promotions until he became a manager and then a director of people. He spent his whole day answering questions and fixing problems. He told me, “I can’t even start my own work until three or four in the afternoon!”
“Welcome to management,” I said.
Managing your business has a cost: your time. For most entrepreneurs concerned with their team, their customers, and their suppliers and vendors, the attention you provide to these people eats up your time.
Business owners aren’t working sixty and seventy hours a week on their own projects. They are helping others for fifty of those hours, and trying to squeeze another ten or twenty for their own work in the early morning or late at night. For the average entrepreneur, the day starts to get away from them as soon as the first person shows up for work. Frustrated owners are always telling me there’s a lineup of people at their office door needing to ask questions. You’d think they were a country’s president or prime minister with a new agenda item scheduled every ten minutes.
So, starting right now, begin valuing your time as though you were the president of your own country. This means that no one sees you without an appointment. Staff can’t just barge in. Have someone guard your calendar and hold your time sacred. You are too busy running a country called Your Company to deal with every issue of every citizen who comes knocking at your door.
If you think that by making yourself freely available to staff, customers, and suppliers all day long, you are serving them effectively, you’re not. The path to success is not complete availability. It’s far more productive for you, your company, staff, and clients to be managing your time correctly.
Here’s how to get started on effective time self-management:
- Know the tasks and the severity of issues you need to weigh in on, and which ones you can allow your team to deal with.
- Set blocks of time in your calendar for personal work time. I recommend leaving the office and fulfilling this work time from a home office or a third space, such as a coffee shop where you can relax and concentrate.
- Lock your office door. It’s the most effective tool to get people to stop interrupting you. An owner once told me, “But they’ll keep knocking if they know I’m in there.” Trust me, people will only knock for about three minutes before their arm and brain tells them to stop. In any given hour, that leaves you fifty-seven minutes to still work quietly.
- Buy some good Bose, Beats, or other sound-canceling headphones. Having worked in the same direct space as my assistant, I found that headphones do two things: they signal that I’m focused and working, and they eliminate any noise (including other voices) that can distract me.
- Set office hours. It works for college professors and it will work for you too. Let staff know you’ll be available for questions and fifteen-minute meetings between 10 and 11:30 a.m. each day. Have them sign up on a board outside your office. It might sound crazy to restrict your time like this, but if people have to sign up in advance for a time slot, it ensures they’ll take your time more seriously.
- Have someone else control your calendar. No one is more effective at keeping strict rules about your time than someone who is assigned to the task. I break my calendar rules far more often than my assistant ever will. She knows and respects the value of my time much more than I do. She tells people “no” when they ask for five unscheduled minutes, but gladly books them on my calendar for a future date.
You cannot effectively build a company if you are a slave to the people in that company. No president could run a country effectively if every citizen, politician, and foreign dignitary had free access. Stop believing that being available to people is serving them.
If you value your time and see it as critically important to your role as a business leader, others will too. They will accept it because it makes sense, and they’ll respect you more for it. It will also empower them to be more efficient and responsible with their own time.
More Tools
Contact
Follow Me
Tiger By The Tail Tool
Download this tool now!
