Controlling Time: An Impossible Feat? - An Expose of a Stressed Out Entrepreneur

“Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.” – Charles Richards

Time management is impossible. There I’ve said it. It’s not possible to control time because the clock will always tick. The seconds will always turn into minutes and the minutes into hours and so on. Hence I repeat; it is not possible to control time. So no matter how important you are or which part of the world you reside in, time remains the same for both of us; you and I both have 24 hours in a day. What differentiates us is how we spend those 24 hours.

How some people manage to turn into millionaires and others do not is not really a mystery. Time has been given to all equally. How productively we use it, is what’s worth pondering.

Do you use your time productively or have you been wasting it?

How does an entrepreneur figure out if he has been wasting time? How does he understand which activities are worth spending time on? Similarly, which activities constitute productive activities?

Productive activities are those that directly generate revenue and sales. If you’re engrossed in mundane tasks such as fetching office supplies, fixing computer issues, or even learning about the latest SEO updates, then unfortunately you’ve wasted all that time. This is because none of those tasks are directly involved in generating revenue. They’re all tasks that someone else could easily do for you as well and that too at a very inexpensive rate.

Productive activities include negotiating lucrative contracts, attending business lunches and meetings, talking to clients, performing services, etc. These activities not only generate sales, but are also responsible for increasing your clientele. Technical jargon aside, ANYTHING that either earns you money or is increasing your customers and clients is considered productive.

Doing something more is actually doing something less.

Basically, performing a certain task well does not turn that task into an important one. Similarly, exhausting yourself over a certain activity doesn’t make it important either. Entrepreneurs tend to rationalize the belief that spending time and effort over an unimportant, mundane task will make it important. This is where they go wrong. In order to manage time and become successful, entrepreneurs need to understand that expending time and energy into a mundane task is just going to waste their time AND money.

So what should be the next step?

The next step is planning. Strategizing and planning are two things that go hand in hand with time management. You, as an entrepreneur, need to prioritize your work. You need to know what the core activities of your business are. And once you’ve established all that, then you need to have a game plan. This is how you’re going to use every second of your work time efficiently and effectively.

 “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”- William Penn

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