Do you feel like you’re always running out of time? Are you an entrepreneur struggling to juggle your countless responsibilities?
In Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell offers valuable insights on creating an effective entrepreneur’s schedule. He provides strategies for optimizing your weekly and yearly plans to maximize productivity and achieve your goals.
Read on to discover how you can transform your time management skills and take control of your entrepreneurial journey.
The Entrepreneur’s Schedule
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 an effective entrepreneur’s schedule 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.
