5 Ways to Leverage Your Time (Like Great Entrepreneurs Do) From proper focus to productive partnerships, make the most of your working hours.
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Have you ever said, "I wish I had more time" or, "I just don't have time to do all the things I want to do"? I'm sure we have all felt that way when the pressure's on, but here's the thing: Time is not linear when you're in business. Complaining about time is about as pointless as complaining about gravity; it's a universal constant. The one thing you have in common with Elon Musk and Richard Branson is that you get 24 hours in a day.
With that said, the world's most successful entrepreneurs seem super-human in their ability to achieve a lot in a small window of time. They are masters of leveraging time to its full capacity. Here are five ways you can better leverage yours.
Related: 15 Time-Management Tips for Achieving Your Goals
1. Having a solid team
When you have 10 people on a team, you have 70 hours a day going into the operations of your business. You personally might not have time to make sales calls, follow up with clients and do admin, but someone else will. Better still, when teams form well, there's a mystical added level of productivity that happens. A team of 10 people can often do 15 times more than any one person acting alone. The team you have today has taken you this far, and in order to achieve more, you must look at building and developing your team to harness the time of others towards the vision of your business.
2. Digital assets
Software, media and content transcends time and space the moment you put it online. If you record a podcast and it takes up three hours, but 300 people listen to it, your time has been leveraged 100 times over. Have you ever done business with someone because you got to know about them from videos, books or blogs? These assets are created once and then go to work day in, day out. The same is true for software and data. Often, a piece of software or the right data can make you and your team more efficient by a few hours a week.
3. Productive partnerships
Image a person who spent five years developing a product forges a partnership with someone who has spent five years building a following. The person with the following runs a campaign to their followers and launches the valuable product. Both parties achieve their goals by leveraging the time of the other. Someone woke up today with a resource your business needs, so rather than trying to create it yourself, go out and partner with them and save time.
4. Adopting best practices
Avoiding trial and error is possibly the biggest time-saving hack there is. It takes years to discover a strategy, technology or method and only a few days to learn and apply it. It took hundreds of years for the first "lighter than air" flight, and within 75 years, rockets were sending people to the moon. As soon as you build on top of best practices, you leverage the time of other great thinkers.
Related: Time Management Is Really Life Management
5. Knowing where to focus
Have you considered that the things you spend your time on could possibly be fairly irrelevant to your long-term success? Recently, a billionaire spoke at one of our Dent events, and his main message was to spend more time deciding on what to be focused on. All that time on social media, responding to emails or attending certain events might be irrelevant to your ultimate goal of successfully exiting your business or making a record profit.
Focus on leveraging time in these five ways and you'll still be busy, but you'll be achieving more than ever towards the goals that matter to you. Having seen more than 3,000 of my clients follow this guidance, I have witnessed the speed at which their businesses take off and rapidly reach their original vision.
