Are you feeling overwhelmed by the demands of running your business? Do you wish you could find more time for yourself without sacrificing your company’s success?
In his book Buy Back Your Time, entrepreneur Dan Martell offers a solution. He presents strategies for reclaiming your time and energy while still growing your business. The book covers time analysis, efficiency improvements, and effective planning techniques.
Read on for an overview of Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time, and discover how you can take control of your schedule and achieve both personal and professional success.
Overview of Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time
Running a successful business requires a lot of time and effort, but it doesn’t have to take over your life. Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time argues that you can run a profitable business and make time for the things you love without having to work yourself to the bone. You must simply buy back your time: Hire others to take over some of your work, and then invest your reclaimed time in activities that replenish your energy and advance your business. Martell shares practical strategies for managing your time better, including how to identify the value of a task, improve the efficiency of your company, and create optimized schedules that help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
Martell is a veteran entrepreneur and founder of the SaaS Academy, a coaching program for B2B SaaS founders. He started, grew, and sold three tech businesses within a decade. Martell also became Canada’s number one angel investor in 2012, investing in over 50 start-up companies. His own successful work-life balance lends credence to his time management approach: He’s a dedicated Ironman athlete, philanthropist, and father of two.
We’ll first explain how poor time management prevents many entrepreneurs from growing their business without sacrificing their personal lives and well-being. We’ll then discuss how to reclaim your time in three parts:
- In Part 1, we’ll look at how to analyze how you spend your time and free yourself from low-value and energy-draining tasks.
- In Part 2, we’ll discuss ways to run your business more efficiently and save time at work.
- In Part 3, we’ll explore how to make the most of your reclaimed time by creating weekly and yearly plans.
Why Entrepreneurs Should Reclaim Their Time
Martell argues that many entrepreneurs struggle to make time for what matters to them because of a misconception: They believe that the more time and effort they put into their business, the more profitable it becomes. As a result, they end up using their time and energy indiscriminately without considering whether a task is really worth doing. In the end, they find themselves overwhelmed with minor tasks and unable to fit in what truly matters to them, which takes a toll on their physical and mental well-being.
Martell writes that, if you manage your time this way, you’ll eventually become so overwhelmed that you can’t grow your business any more. However, your company doesn’t have to take over your life as it grows. In fact, Martell says success should bring you more freedom and time to devote to the things you care about. By effectively using your resources to free up more time and carefully choosing how you spend it, you can have a balanced life and grow your business at the same time.
According to Martell, the first step to achieving a better work-life balance is freeing up your schedule. Let’s discuss how to do this in more detail.
Part 1: Free Up Your Schedule
According to Martell, you probably spend a lot of time doing unproductive tasks. Because of this, he first advises you to cleanse your daily schedule by removing tasks that are low-value, energy-draining, or both. You can do so in three steps: 1) Analyze how you spend your time, 2) delegate lower-value tasks, and 3) hire people to handle higher-value tasks.
Step 1: Analyze How You Spend Your Time
Martell writes that the first step to reclaiming your time is to understand how you currently spend it. This helps you identify which activities are draining your time and why, so you’ll know what changes you need to make. To get a clear picture of your time use, he recommends the following process:
Record everything you do over a two-week period. Every 15 minutes, stop and write down the task you’re doing to get an accurate understanding of where your time goes.
Determine how much each task is worth. Martell recommends you figure out how valuable tasks are by labeling them with one to four dollar signs. You can decide what each dollar value stands for—for example, one dollar sign might signify tasks worth $20 an hour, while four dollar signs might signify tasks worth $100+ an hour. By scoring each task based on its value, you’ll learn which ones to prioritize.
Reflect on how each task affects your energy. Identify whether a task replenishes or drains your energy by highlighting each task in a different color. For example, handling technical difficulties at your work might drain your energy, while participating in a professional seminar might replenish it.
Organize activities into one of four groups based on how valuable and energizing they are:
- Group A: Energizing tasks that have high financial value—for example, brainstorming new business ideas or meeting with potential investors or clients.
- Group B: Energizing tasks that have low financial value—for example, practicing personal hobbies or attending social events.
- Group C: Draining tasks that have low financial value—for example, running small errands or dealing with unnecessary paperwork.
- Group D: Draining tasks that have high financial value—for example, paying business taxes or handling difficult employees.
Step 2: Eliminate Low-Value and Energy-Draining (Group C) Tasks
Martell writes that, once you understand all of the tasks that occupy your time, you should start eliminating low-value and energy-draining (Group C) tasks. These are tasks you’ve assigned the fewest dollar signs and marked as energy-draining, and they’re usually the easiest to eliminate. Martell suggests four options for freeing yourself from these tasks:
Option 1: Eliminate the task. Think about whether completing the task accomplishes anything of value. If not, there’s no reason for the task to exist, and you can stop doing it.
Option 2: Delegate the task. Sometimes other people are better equipped to do a task than you are. If so, assign the task to them—they’ll enjoy it and perform it better than you can.
Option 3: Hire someone to do the task. Martell recommends you be willing to outsource any task for which you can pay one-fourth of your hourly rate to get someone else to do. For example, if you make $60 per hour, you should be willing to pay someone $15 to take over a Group C task.
Option 4: Consider creative ways to outsource the task. For example, you could hire interns, outsource globally, or offer overtime to current employees.
Hire a Personal Assistant
You can prevent energy-draining, low-value tasks from ever coming across your table by hiring a personal assistant. Martell writes that a personal assistant is a critical hire for entrepreneurs—they can handle a plethora of time-consuming tasks you would otherwise have to take time to delegate individually. More importantly, they can screen incoming requests for your time and attention, flagging anything that’s necessary for you to handle and taking care of the rest themselves.
Martell recommends you hand over control of two things to your assistant:
- Your calendar: Specify your work and home hours, when you’re available for meetings, and the time slots you dedicate to focus work.
- Your inbox: Ideally, you should only see emails that your assistant has pre-checked. Develop a system of folders and labels that filters emails according to your preferences.
Step 3: Eliminate Important But Unenjoyable (Group D) Tasks
Martell writes that, once you’ve eliminated lower-value tasks, the next step to freeing up your schedule is to transfer tasks that are high-value but drain your energy. These tasks might include marketing your product or onboarding new hires. Because these tasks are more important, you’ll need to hire someone with the right skills and qualifications to do the job effectively. Hiring the right person will free up your time and grow your business, but hiring the wrong person can be costly. So how do you ensure you find the right person for the job?
First, Martell recommends you define the specific requirements and responsibilities of the position. This way, you can hire people who excel at the core tasks of the position and avoid getting distracted and hiring someone who has other appealing but less relevant qualities.
Next, look for candidates who have the skills and traits you’re looking for. Martell suggests you have candidates upload a short video answering several basic questions. This can help reveal their personalities, communication skills, and ability to follow directions. You can also use profile assessments or personality tests to gain insights about a candidate’s traits and how they might perform in workplace scenarios.
Once you’ve filtered the field down to your top choices, assign your candidates a paid test project that reflects the real work they’d do if hired. Martell recommends you give minimal instructions: This will provide candidates with an opportunity to showcase their problem-solving skills and work style.
Finally, when you’ve found the right person, shift your effort toward convincing them to join your company. Highlight the opportunities and growth your organization offers and clearly communicate how the position aligns with their career goals.
Part 2: Reclaim Time at Work
Now that you’ve delegated tasks that drain your energy, let’s discuss how to reclaim your time at work by running your business more efficiently. We’ll discuss how to recognize harmful habits that cost you time and energy, empower employees to handle tasks independently, and create time-saving operating manuals for training employees.
Confront Time-Wasting Habits
Martell writes that entrepreneurs should first tackle habits that may be sapping your time and energy. He argues that many entrepreneurs become so used to chaos and stressful situations that they feel anxious during periods of calm. As a result, they unconsciously seek out or even create problems.
Consider whether you’ve developed any time-wasting behaviors that create and perpetuate chaos within your business, such as:
Procrastination: You hold off on making big decisions, stalling the progress and development of your business.
Haste: You make decisions too quickly, often prioritizing the quickest, cheapest, or simplest options. Without taking the time to reflect on your decisions and the reasons for their failure, you often end up repeating the same errors.
Wearing all hats: You have a tendency to micromanage while failing to adequately train or empower others to develop and learn. If you fall into this category, you might find yourself doing tasks you’ve hired other people to do.
Saving instead of investing: You save money instead of using it to make smart investments—for instance, you hoard funds instead of using them on time-saving tools, technologies, or services to increase your company’s operational efficiency and productivity. Martell argues that this is a shortsighted strategy that can lead to missed opportunities that could potentially offer high returns and catalyze company growth.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms: You resort to vices as a reward for success or an escape from failure or pain. This behavior can drain productive hours, affecting your overall energy and productivity.
Martell suggests you identify and confront these habits by taking time to list your last 10 major decisions and evaluating whether they were constructive or destructive. This can reveal recurring habits that are taking away your time and energy.
Empower Your Employees
Martell also suggests you reclaim time at work by controlling your urge to micromanage a task when it’s someone else’s job to handle it. You might feel the need to oversee tasks that others are responsible for to ensure they’re done properly. However, Martell argues that this behavior takes your time away from more valuable tasks.
Martell writes that, if someone can handle a task competently to about 80% of your standard, you should entrust them with it. He suggests several ways to empower your employees to excel in their responsibilities:
1. Give your team an allowance. Set an appropriate budget for your team to use autonomously when issues arise. This not only allows the team to take charge, learn, and grow, but it also resolves problems efficiently without your intervention.
2. Define success. Forsimple tasks, clearly state what “done” looks like—for example, “The bug in the code has been identified and corrected, and the updated code runs smoothly without causing the previous error.” For larger tasks, Martell recommends you outline three things: 1) what should be achieved, 2) how the team members involved should feel about it, and 3) what the completion of the task accomplishes or enables.
3. Use the 1:3:1 Rule. Before an employee seeks your help, ask them to first pinpoint the problem, come up with three solutions, and suggest one they believe will work best. This boosts your team’s critical thinking, fosters responsibility, and encourages innovation.
4. Give employees more autonomy. When you tell employees what to do and then check their work, they experience little growth and take little initiative. Instead, Martell recommends you simply tell employees what needs to be accomplished and let them decide the best way to accomplish it. This gives your team members—who are closer to the problem and possibly more informed about it—space and motivation to address the issues creatively, thus elevating their capabilities.
Use Operating Manuals to Train Employees Efficiently
Martell writes that you can also save time when running your business by creating operating manuals for all of your company’s processes. These manuals allow you to take a hands-off approach to training your employees, saving you time while maintaining quality standards.
Martell suggests you create operating manuals using the following steps:
1. Create training videos for the task you want others to do. Record yourself doing the task three separate times while verbally explaining your actions. By making several recordings for your trainee to watch, you can cover any variations in how the task might be done.
2. Create step-by-step instructions. Write a simple bulleted list of key steps for each task. This ensures employees are clear on everything that needs to be accomplished. For instance, if you’re training an employee to handle customer complaints, your list might include greeting the customer courteously, asking about the issue, apologizing for the inconvenience, solving the problem, and following up with the customer to confirm their issue has been resolved.
3. Specify how often the task should be done. Define when and how often each task should be completed.
4. Create a checklist of essential tasks. Include every must-do action for each task. This ensures consistency in quality and approach.
Martell writes that once you’ve created operating manuals for various elements, you should have new hires read them and watch all related training videos.
Part 3: Optimize Your Time With Schedules
Once you’ve reclaimed time by freeing your schedule and making your business more efficient, the final step is to use your reclaimed time on high-value activities you excel at and feel energized doing. To do so, Martell recommends you create a weekly and yearly schedule. He argues that creating schedules ensures you have time for the most important things in your life. When you have everything important prescheduled, he adds, you can more easily agree to new opportunities and spontaneous activities.
Create a Weekly Schedule
Martell suggests you create a weekly schedule designed to optimize your productivity. A weekly schedule allows you to:
- Remove time-wasting gaps in your schedule.
- Allocate tasks according to your fluctuating energy levels throughout the day.
- Avoid spending more time than you wanted on a single task.
- Discover opportunities to accomplish more than one thing (like listening to a podcast while driving).
To make a weekly schedule, Martell suggests you:
1. Schedule your most important tasks, both work-related and personal. Research suggests that people perform better on tasks they enjoy, so the most productive way to spend your time is by doing high-value and energizing (Group A) tasks. However, you should also leave room for lower-value but still energizing (Group B) tasks—like hobbies or social activities—because they recharge your energy.
2. Arrange your tasks based on when you’re most productive. For example, do tasks that require the most concentration when you have the best energy and focus.
3. Group similar tasks. For example, if you’re a writer, it might be more efficient to edit all of your work in one go. This eliminates the time spent transitioning between tasks—your mind is already in the right mode for the task, allowing you to accomplish it faster and to a higher standard.
Create Your Annual Plan
Martell writes that, to make the most of your time and achieve your life goals, you should define what you want in life and design an annual plan to help you achieve it. An annual plan allows you to plot the best path toward your dream life.
First, Martell recommends you visualize your dream life in as much detail as possible. Don’t limit yourself to what you think is realistic. The bigger the dream, the more it’ll inspire you and give you the push needed to achieve it. Martell suggests you outline three specific areas of your dream life:
- People: Who are the most important people working with you and supporting you in reaching your dream?
- Professional: What’s the one business you’re devoting yourself to? According to Martell, the most successful entrepreneurs focus all their energy on one business first. Once you’re clear on that, you can imagine ways of expanding your business, whether you’re introducing new products or tapping into new markets.
- Lifestyle: What does your home and personal life look like? What hobbies or community activities are you involved in?
Next, break down your dream into actionable steps. Identify the milestones you’ll need to reach on the way to your ultimate goal. Then jot down some key strategies for achieving each milestone. Martell recommends you rank each strategy based on how beneficial it would be, how easy it is to enact, and how confident you are that it’ll succeed.
For instance, if opening a successful restaurant is your dream, your milestones could involve professional training in restaurant management, gaining experience in a renowned restaurant, preparing a business plan, finding funding, and then finally launching your restaurant.
Then, schedule your year: Begin by slotting in significant events and important strategies for achieving your goals. Martell also recommends grouping similar events —for instance, you might decide to spend a month attending networking events and industry luncheons. Don’t forget to give yourself regular breaks so you can stay energetic and focused all year round. Lastly, add in everyday tasks such as personal obligations and recurring job duties.
To make sure you can successfully carry out your annual plan, consider the time, money, and energy that each event will demand. If you’re not confident that your plan will make your year fantastic, edit it some more. Once you’ve created your plan, stay committed to it but leave room for unexpected opportunities. Having an annual plan allows you to be in control and enjoy life while pursuing your goals.
