SMART Time Investment for Business: 128 ways the best in business use their time

By Kate Christie

SMART Time Investment for Business provides 128 short, sharp, and practical productivity strategies that you can start implementing today for immediate results, punctuated with tips and anecdotes from leading business people from around the world who share how they use time to their advantage.

Your time is not limitless. Your time is a fin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Time Stylers
• Release date: Jan 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780992579258

Kate Christie

Kate Christie is the author of numerous novels from Bella Books and Second Growth Books, including Gay Pride & Prejudice, Solstice, Leaving L.A., and Beautiful Game. Currently she lives near Seattle with her wife, their three daughters, and the family dog. Read first chapters, blog posts about the joys—ahem—of parenting, and more at www.katejchristie.com.

Book preview

1

Don’t Waste Your Time

As a business owner, there are many ways you can lose time. You can:

squander it

waste it

kill it

blow it

fail to control it

spin it.

And then you can also:

procrastinate

sweat the small stuff

fail to prioritise

focus on the wrong tasks at the wrong time.

For the purposes of each strategy in this book, the above time-killing concepts are lumped together into the general expression a waste of time.

Bottom line – stop doing it.

2

Time Investment Versus Time Management

The great irony about time management is how much time we spend thinking about how we could, or should, be managing our time differently to get more done.

Was there ever a greater waste of time (1)? Probably not.

Happily, the concept of time management is one you can move away from right now, forever, because there is a better way.

Time management is an outdated concept.

Time is the one asset we all have exactly the same amount of, and which no-one can gain more of, no matter how clever, wealthy or stealthy they are. As such, the smart workaround is to learn how to think about, treat and utilise your time in such a way as to ensure that you use all of it well, all of the time.

Smart business owners think about their time differently because they can’t afford to do otherwise. Move away from a mindset of having to manage your time to a mindset of wanting to invest your time. Start thinking about your time the way you think about your money – as a precious, enormously valuable, and limited resource that needs to be consciously invested for the greatest possible return so that your wealth and success grow.

‘There’s three things that people need to know about business. The first is – time.’

Tim Dwyer, Managing Director of Shirlaws Australia; Partner of BoB (Business of Brand) Group; creator of the Growth Metrics Program

You need to consciously shift your focus – business owners who take the time to learn the skill of time investment will gain an enormous advantage over those who continue to think about time as something that just needs to be managed.

3

Choice

No business journey is mapped in a straight line from day one to fabulous success at day X. Your business journey will include bumps, potholes, road works, traffic jams, detours, flat tyres, accidents, lost or broken parts, setbacks and crashes. You can’t control many of these variables. However, you can control how to respond to them – always take the time to think through your options and choose how you will respond.

4

Productivity Versus Efficiency

Embrace a productivity rather than an efficiency mindset.

Efficiency means producing the same outcomes with less resources. Productivity, on the other hand, means producing more with the same resources.

With a focus on productivity, when you have the right people in the right roles investing their time on the right tasks at the right time, you can produce more, and better, products and services for your customers with relatively the same amount of