Time Management – What is the key difference between successful people and unsuccessful people?
Think about it, we all have 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.
It’s completely fair. It is an equal playing field.
So at the end of the day, what determines how successful we become is how we use our time.
So, Today, I am going to give you three simple strategies that will help you to manage your time better.
3 Effective Strategies for Time Management in Business
#1 Time block for Emails and Social Media
Understand this, when you get up in the morning, if the first thing that you do is to go and reach for your cell phone, and you’re checking your email, your messages, you are checking social media, that first hour every morning, that’s your most critical hour.
How you do in the morning dictates how well you do the rest of the day.
If right there you’re checking all these messages, and I know, I know what it is like, right?
In the morning, you wanna go reach out for that cell phone, right?
You want to see, oh, did I miss any messages from last night?
- What happened?
- What is going on?
- What’s my friend up to?
That first hour of every day, it’s very, very precious. You should think about how you can invest wisely.
For some, maybe you want to do something like reading in the morning, for some, maybe you want to do a little bit of exercise, you want to work out, you want to do a little bit of yoga, a little bit of stretching.
For some, you want to have a very nice breakfast with your family, it is connection time.
For some, maybe it’s time for you to set the goals and say, okay, what are some of the things that you want to accomplish that particular day?
What you don’t want is to jump into email mode. I always say your inbox is other people’s agenda.
Every single time you check your inbox, all these things just demand your attention.
That pulls you away, that distracts you.
You are not supposed to check your emails 10-20 times a day, and you are not supposed to check your social media 10-20, times a day either.
It’s very easy to screen suck all day and you’re just checking messages, checking messages repetitively, right?
And you check it every 10,20 minutes.
Do you need to do that?
One of the things that I do is block out the time for social media and I block out time for email.
That’s it. I have a start time and stop time, I have an end time.
I don’t go check social media 10,20 times a day because I’ve got other things to do, I’ve got more important things I have to accomplish.
So, block it. Block out a time and say,
“Okay, I’m gonna do it in the morning,
“Once in the morning.”
If you want to, I’m gonna do it once or twice in the evening and that is it.
In between, you work on important things.
You work on projects, you work on your business, you work on your career, whatever that you are working on.
That’s how you stay focused. You see, time management is a myth.
Because you cannot manage time. You and I, only have 24 hours a day.
You cannot make them go faster, you cannot make them go slower, and we cannot create more time.
All we could do is actually manage our priorities.
So when someone tells me, “Oh, I don’t have time,” what they’re actually saying is, “This is not that important for me. “It’s not my priority.”
That’s what they’re actually saying, “Well, I don’t have time to exercise.” What they actually mean is exercise is not that important to me.
That’s the truth.
So, time management is actually priority management.
And at the end of the day, priority management is actually self-management, how you manage yourself and how you manage your energy.
What do you invest your energy in? Into something, something that will contribute to your happiness, to your health, to your well-being, to your success, that’s the key.
#2 Know your magic number
You should know your magic number. The magic number is important for time management.
Let’s say you have a financial goal to make 10 Lakh a year, a seven-figure income.
And let’s say on average, you work 40 hours a week, and we have 52 weeks a year, let’s say you take two weeks off, 50 weeks a year.
So, 50 weeks times 40 hours, that’s 2000 hours.
So take your annual income goal of 1000000 (10 Lakh) let’s divide it by 2000 hours.
What do you get? You get 500 ₹ per hour.
So what it means is this, if your goal is to make 10 Lakh a year, it means that your hourly rate needs to be at least, at the very minimum, 500 ₹ an hour.
Now, here’s the key.
Look at everything that you do every single day and ask yourself this question –
“Is what I’m doing worth 500₹ an hour.”
Now, if what you’re doing now is not worth 500₹ an hour, that means for every single hour that you’re working, you need to be at least making 500₹ an hour.
That’s the very bare minimum of the value that you need to create for every hour that you put in.
If what you’re doing is not worth 500₹ an hour, then how the hell in the world ever, are you going to get to 10 Lakh, a year?
It’s cause and effect. Does that make sense?
And now let’s say your goal is to make a 1 Cr a year.
What does that mean?
It means at the very minimum, every single hour that you work, your hourly rate needs to be, at the very minimum, 5000 ₹ an hour.
The number is higher than that, because if you and I are honest, you know we’re not productive all the time.
All the time, not every single hour are we going to hit 5000 bucks per hour in terms of bringing value to the marketplace.
To make a 1 Cr a year, 5000 bucks per hour of value.
So think about that. You need to manage your time and make your worth important that for one hour time you can charge 5000 bucks per hour.
This leads to strategy number three.
#3 Avoid minimum wage activities
Let’s say the phone company overcharge you for 50₹ and you pick up the phone and you call them and you argue with them and you spend an hour on the phone arguing about that fifty rupees.
And at the end, fine, they adjust it and you save back 50 bucks.
Now, did you just save 50₹?
Not really, not if your goal is to make a 1 Cr a year. Because that phone call didn’t save you 50 bucks, that phone call just cost you 4950₹.
You need to look at it that way, every single minute that you have is an investment.
If you’re investing that time to spend with your family, that’s fine, you’re getting happiness, and you’re getting fulfillment back.
That’s a return. It’s incalculable, that’s fine. But if you’re talking about business activity, there has to be a return.
You’re spending this much time, you want this much in return back.
Money at the end of the day is incredibly simple, money is math.
You invest x, you get y back.
That’s an investor mentality.
The problem is when it comes to time, most people have the wasters mentality.
They waste time. Or spenders, they just spend time.
In the end I would like to share two important quotes –
“Time is more valuable than money, you can get more money but you can’t get more time.”
‘Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful people know how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.’
So choose wisely how you want to invest your time because, at the end of the day, your life is nothing more than a reflection of how well you invest your time.
