Stop Pretending You Don't Have Enough Time

What if I told you that you had twice as many hours available today?

As Founders, we always complain about "not having enough time." There are a million things to get done, but only one of us to do it. If only we had more hours! What if we did?

I'm not talking about bending space and time here. I'm talking about re-configuring how we use our time in order to create the effect of having more hours. I've done it, and it was life changing, and I'm constantly shocked that more Founders aren't militant about how they use their time.

We all have enough hours to do everything we want, but how we use those hours is often our problem.

How I Found 8 More Hours Per Day

About 20 years ago I was working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week... for about 15 years straight. In my mind, I had maximized my output. I had put every possible hour toward work, so it was clear that the only way I could achieve what I did was by exhausting every possible hour. Sound familiar?

But I really wasn't sure where my time was going. So I ran a simple experiment that changed my life. I started recording my time in 15 minute increments every day for 2 weeks. Nothing crazy, just chronicling when I was in meetings, responding to messages, writing — whatever. Like all of us, I had assumed that report was going to be jam packed with output.

When I finished, I crunched the numbers and had a bit of a "holy shit moment." It turned out that while yes, I was clocking all of the hours, an inordinate amount of my time wasn't really tied to output. It was tied to "being busy." Stuff like sitting in meetings that could have been over in 5 minutes, jumping into every issue for fear it was "critical," or just going down some weird rabbit hole online.

My work was getting done, but the sheer amount of hours that was oozing out of the cracks while I was doing it was staggering.

The Power of Constraints

Around this time, I had another life event — the birth of my daughter, Summer. Soon after she was born, my wife calls me at work at 6PM and asks me what time I'm coming home. This may sound perfectly reasonable (to a reasonable person) but at that point 6PM was when a Founder eats "first dinner" (second dinner comes at 9PM via Jimmy Johns).

I realized in that moment, that I no longer had all of these hours. I had to compress my time. I had to get more done in fewer hours. So the next day I went into work, and you know what? I got the same amount of work done in fewer hours. That's when the light bulb went off.

"What if instead of focusing on how many hours I can put in, I focus on how much I can compress my output into as few hours as possible?" What started as a real constraint (being home in time for dinner) turned into a total passion for efficiency. I became obsessed with being able to do things in shorter and shorter periods of time. What's crazy is that it didn't make things harder (it made them easier) because I was forcing focus.

Time Compression, Expanded

Then I started to think "Well, if compressing time has this much of an impact on me, what would happen if we applied the same rigor to the rest of our organization?"
Now, before you misread this, I need to warn you. I'm not talking about making people work "harder" or "more." It's actually the opposite. This is about optimizing focus and output as a way to get time back.

We started making meetings shorter and shorter, or removing them altogether. Where we used to have standing one hour meetings we now had meetings that sometimes lasted 5 minutes. Instead of creating long timelines of weeks and months, we broke up projects into smaller chunks that never spread past "What can we get done by Friday?"

This wholesale concentration of focus had massive multiplying effects, not just for me, but for my team. Over the months and years that followed, we found ourselves working less. Our company now runs on a 9-6 schedule and I can't remember the last time we required anyone to work late or on a weekend. And we're getting more done now than ever before.

What About that Extra Time?

Here’s the best part: the time you save doesn’t have to be dumped back into more work. That’s optional. The whole point of reclaiming time is that you get to choose what to do with it.

Want to knock out another big project? Great. Want to spend that time with your family, or, I don’t know, finally take a nap? Even better. Compressing time isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking control and deciding what you want that extra time to look like. But more importantly, it's a realization that the time does exist, but our allocation of how we use it is rarely maximized. The best way to get more hours in the day is to stop wasting the ones you already have.

In Case You Missed It

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Plan for Bad Times, Budget in Good Times It's not all sunshine during the good times, and not all doom and gloom during the bad times. So, what's the secret to achieving longevity in the ever-shifting landscape of entrepreneurship?

What Problems Just Go Away With Time? Running a Startup can be chaotic. But is it true that problems will go away with time? Truth is: some do, some don't.