Quick intro
What’s the problem?
I’m pretty sure this will remain a challenge throughout the life of a lot of entrepreneurs: How to use your time wisely? And how can you ensure that you continue allocating enough time to hang out with the people you love?
There is a jungle of tools, tips, coaches and tutorials on how one can overcome the ‘time challenge’ and how to get the most out of every 24 hours. However, what I’ve learned for me during the last couple of years is that there is a foundation which comes before all the tools and time management hacks, methods and approaches.
Own background
What’s my context/experience?
For me, thinking about how to best allocate my time was not a big thing during my first years at university. There might have been some intuition about when I should start studying for the next exam or how many hours per week I should spend working out, but in the end nothing was really planned or structured. I enjoyed my student life, had a lot of spare time and loved to spend it partying, traveling or just hanging out with friends. How to best allocate my time was just not a topic I wanted and needed to think about.
Then, when I was approaching the end of my bachelor’s my mindset shifted. The last year before graduation I was in a phase in which self-reflection, mindfulness and developing self-esteem were the main interests of mine. During this time period I spent my days completely different than during the previous time as a student. I went on long walks almost every day, had hour-long talks with friends and peers who were fascinated by similar topics, meditated and read a lot. But still, there was no need for me to think about my time. There was no stress or noticeable opportunity cost when living the life I lived.
Out of this state of mind, in which I lived a lot based on spontaneity, feelings, and calmness, I moved to Berlin to start my master’s. And the first time in my life I saw myself in an environment where hustling was common sense. The master’s program was packed with projects, tight deadlines and highly motivated colleagues. There was a time when I woke up turning on the laptop to troubleshoot code, spending the whole day at the university, heading home at 8 PM, stopping by a kiosk to get a caffeine drink and spending night hours on coding and troubleshooting again. I adapted to this lifestyle really quickly. I was even enjoying it. A new challenge, a new way of living. And still: I was just doing stuff, but not really taking time or effort to architect my time allocation. But after a few months I noticed that I wouldn’t be able to live the life I want if I just go with the flow. It was just too much I wanted to do. High performance in university, getting back to a state of mindfulness which I was missing, developing my friendships. Also, during that time I started to work on a side project that became more and more important to me. So how to combine and live in all those worlds I was living separately during the last years? And how to keep the balance?
My approach
How do I tackle it?
The situations I described in the paragraph above led to the realization of me wanting to allocate my time in a more focused way as I started to figure out how I want to live my life. Now, more than five years and a lot of time management experiments later, I established a time allocation system in my life which I feel suits my way of living. Also, it gives me the structure and confidence in my philosophy of work: to build my own business within a 40 hour week. And therefore, having enough time for the other important things in my life (beyond work). Saying ‘Yes’ to the life I want to live means saying ‘No’ to a lot of other opportunities. The goal of my time allocation system is to support you to spend your days on things that align with the vision you have for your life and to your personal values. Therefore, the foundation for the system is to know what your goals are in life. Also and probably even more important: what values you want to stand for and how you want the people you care about remember you.
I dedicate a few days every year to identify and reflect on those values and life goals. After formulating the life goals and values I can deeply identify myself with, at the beginning of each year, I work on defining my goals for the year. Doing so, I think big and also observe how I feel when carving them out. Besides the goals for my professional life, I equally focus on the goals I want to achieve related to family, health, friends, travel and other things that are important to me.
Having the list of yearly goals I derive the habits essential to achieve those goals. Those habits can be daily, weekly or even monthly habits from which I think will drive me towards achieving my business and personal goals for the year (can be, for example, publishing a blog post every week, working out daily or calling my parents every Sunday). That’s my foundation for the year. Beginning of each quarter I do a similar exercise by taking the yearly goals and breaking them down into goals for the next three months.
With the quarterly goals in mind, I sit down every beginning of the week to outline three main goals I want to achieve the week ahead.
As a last step in the framework the weekly goals get transferred into tasks that I put in my calendar. I allocate those tasks into timeboxes, having specific start and end times to ensure that I put in the hours to achieve my weekly goals. Besides the tasks for the week, I create recurring timeboxes in my calendar for the habits I want to develop or stay consistent in. Again, this is not always work-related, but can also be tasks or habits related to other areas in life. It’s crucial to me that I have all areas of my life (family, friends, health, sports etc.) represented in my time allocation system.
(I will write some dedicated blog posts on the systems I use to define the goals, values and habits and my personal timeboxing approach.)
It’s easy to go with the flow and invest your time in the things that drive you or your startup. And I think life consists of phases in which you may spend more time in a specific area, for example hustling on your business idea, and deprioritizing other areas. However, in my personal experience it requires a lot of discipline to rebalance your priorities again. Therefore, saying ‘No’ is important in the process of allocating your time wisely. I use my time allocation system to know when to say ‘No’ and to ensure that I don’t lose track of all the important things and values that define my purpose in life.
Tools I use for my time allocation system
Links and Tipps
Notion Calendar
My go-to calendar I use for timeboxing and all other calendar stuff.
Notion
The knowledge base in which I structure and formulate my goals and habits.
Inspiration I used for this article
Books, Podcasts, Articles, Quotes
- Ali Abdaal on how to timebox your ‘perfect week’.
- James Clear provides inspiration on how you can view the time slots in your calendar.
Related Articles
Community Space
Your comments, ideas, feedback
- What's your biggest challenge when it comes to structuring your day and prioritizing tasks as an entrepreneur?
- How do you balance your entrepreneurial pursuits with other important areas of your life, such as family, friends, and personal interests?
- How do you approach goal setting and break down large goals into smaller, more manageable tasks?
- What are some of your favorite resources (books, articles, podcasts, etc.) on time management and productivity for entrepreneurs?
- ...
Join the discussion below. Or write me an email to fabiano@40hourentrepreneur.com