Time, a commodity that’s running short

I have always been told to get my hands on the commodity that is vanishing quickly and you’ll make lots of money. “Strike oil and you’ll be rich, it’s running out and prices will only go up.” Well that advice isn’t doing many people favours right now as the price of oil has gone down as there is too much on the market, putting people out of business and out of work.

There is maybe a finite commodity that really is clearly ­running out, one that we all have in limited amounts but how much we are unsure – our time. Our value of this depleting commodity is not something we can see on a stock exchange but varies in the minds of people depending how they look at it.

Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, says "poor people value their money more than their time, rich people value their time more than their money". I can only derive from the successful people I have known that they have impeccable time management skills and set the standard for everyone else around them.

This is what I remember when I think of recent phenomena such as Uber, which took an age-old taxi business and made it global, or how Timothy Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which remained a New York Times best-seller for four years, or how Google dominated the internet space. They all sell the same thing, time. Uber doesn't sell you a better ride than other taxi companies but it saves you the perceived time that you might be waiting on a street corner to hitch a ride.

Allegedly the reason Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck sweater with blue jeans and New Balance trainers was because it removed one more decision from his day, thus saving time and mental fatigue. This is the level that successful people go to in order to maximise time. However, the biggest fault that I can see of most budding entrepreneurs is their lack of time management and most importantly their lack of time value.

By nature entrepreneurs are open-minded and interested as a group of people. Despite these being the very attributes that make them suitable for entrepreneurship, it is also why I see so many wanting to be involved in everything and helping everyone that asks. It’s a nice trait, but they won’t become like Steve Jobs until they take their time seriously.

Through observing others as well as a healthy amount of self-reflection, here are my hacks for how to save time as an entrepreneur starting out.

I’ll start with the most important of all, delegation.

The biggest common mistake of entrepreneurs that I see, especially among youngsters, is thinking that they can save money by doing things themselves. Well they’re probably right, you could save money doing it yourself but you’ve just valued money over time and that’s where you’ve made a mistake. Secondly but equally important is the ability to say no. The reason people want to meet you and want your advice and opinions is because you have something of value. If you spend it on other people rather than on yourself then you won’t make a success out of your business. You have to be the one in charge of your time, not someone else.

Identify and cut out the non-essential activities in your day. What is core to making you money and what isn’t?

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once said: “I really want to clear my life so I can make as few decisions as possible on everything except how to best serve my ­community.”

Apportion your time sparingly. Of course we have to allocate time to various things to make a business work, which could include networking, sales, motivating staff or reviewing your finances. The key is to know when we have done enough and move on. Do you really still need to be at this networking event or are you now just burning valuable time?

And lastly one area I feel is the biggest waste of time for most people is how we manage meetings. The frequency and duration are both too much and people are meeting for the sake of it without structure and purpose.

One of the best business minds I worked with would always give me the same answer when I asked to meet him: “What’s the agenda?” It put an immediate focus on the importance of meeting and added structure to the discussion. As Timothy Ferriss also pointed out in his book, it then gives you the chance to see if meeting is worth your time and if it isn’t then you can reply to the agenda with the answers to the agenda.

Paris Norriss is an entrepreneur and partner in Coba Education, which provides educators to schools and institutes

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