Effective Time Management Tips From The Business Coach

Learn Time Management Skills From The Business Coach

4. As a business coach, I’ve learned that you need to make sure that you insert accountability into your life. It’s important that you have a business coach or business partner who holds you accountable. If you can achieve success without a business coach or partner in your life, then you are a better businessperson than Bill Gates (the co-founder of Microsoft). Everybody needs someone to keep them on track and hold them accountable for hitting deadlines, getting stuff done, and not letting emotions get in the way of the perpetual motion needed to achieve big time business success.

“Everyone needs a coach.”
-Bill Gates
(Co-founder of Microsoft giving a TED speech in April of 2013)

5. Set boundaries with your time. As a business coach, I have thousands of people who reach out to me each month, many of whom are very happy, though some are upset. I work with great customers in our core businesses who write super positive things about me and our brands on social media, then there are other people who hate me for standing up for my core beliefs, firing their wife, firing their son, driving a Hummer, etc. With all of this, it would be easy for me to get overwhelmed. It’s up to me to set up boundaries in my life for when I will check social media, check e-mail, answer my phone, etc. It’s up to me to decide when I will be involved in a business meeting and when I will not be. I have to set my own boundaries.

“We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn’t exist before.”
-Daniel Goleman
(Psychologist and bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence)

6. Set boundaries with the people with whom you choose to engage. People do not deserve your time simply because they request it. In fact, if you did have to say yes to every person who ever asked for a minute of your time, you would not ever become successful. Once you start to achieve any success at all, more and more people will begin reaching out to you and requesting moments of your time. As a business coach, I have had to become increasingly good at saying no to time-sucking, negative, reactive and pessimistic people or people I just do not like.

“But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”
-Tim Ferriss
(Best-selling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, venture capitalist and podcaster)

“By the time we got to 100 people, we hired all the people with the right skill sets and experiences, but not all of them were culture fits. And when we got to 100 people, I remember, I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning to go to the office.”
– Tony Hsieh
(CEO of Zappos, explaining that at his first successful business, LinkExchange, he began to hate the company and ultimately sold it because he couldn’t stand the people he had to work with every day)

To analyze objectively how good you are at managing your time effectively, take the Time Management Effectiveness Assessment at: www.Thrive15.com/Time-Management-Effectiveness-Assessment

33.3 – Learning How to Manage Your Distractions (Social Media, E-Mails, Text Messages, Missed Calls, etc.)

“Your e-mail, text message, and social media is your to-do list that you are allowing to be made by other people. Don’t let it control your life. Set boundaries or spend your day responding to random-ass updates of your cousin who was offended that you didn’t respond to the picture they tagged you in.”
-Clay Clark
(Founder of Thrive15.com and former U.S. Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year)

Having been self-employed for so long, I no longer struggle with saying no to things; however, I used to. Therefore, I am going to attempt to be empathetic while being very pragmatic as I lay out the rules you need to implement in your life to better manage your e-mail, your social media, your text messages and the constant distractions that people with less intentional life plans are using to try to slow you down.
“Social media wasn’t invented to make you better – it was invented to make the companies money. You are an employee of the company and you are the product that they sell. They have put you in a little hamster wheel and they throw little treats in now and then – but you’ve got to decide, what’s the impact you’re trying to make?”
-Seth Godin
(Bestselling author, entrepreneur and marketing expert)

1. Inform your team that you expect customer service and sales emails to be handled in real time and inboxes to always be at zero at the end of the workday.
2. Educate and inform your clients and your staff that henceforth, you are only going to be checking your email once each morning.

Fun Fact:
“You don’t really need science to know this, but technology makes it much easier to get distracted, whether that’s stepping away from an important project to check your smartphone, or flipping between multiple browser tabs without really focusing on any one. It has been proven that toggling between multiple tasks at once doesn’t actually work — in fact, you just wind up performing all your duties even worse… No, ‘Internet addiction’ isn’t just some BS term parents throw around to terrify youngsters who spend too much time playing Candy Crush. Spending too much time on the Internet can actually cause changes in the brain that mimic those caused by drug and alcohol dependence, according to a 2012 study.”

3. Quit responding to social media unless it pays you to do so. My wife and I live on land with a forest right behind our house, but I don’t feel a psychological urge to run into the woods and pick up a branch every time one falls from the hundreds of trees. However, I used to feel the need to respond to every social media update that I was somehow involved in. What a fruitless waste of time.

“Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships.”
-Naval Ravikant
(Founder of AngelList.com and venture capitalist)

4. Disconnect your social media from your cell phone updates. Every time someone writes about you, tags you, messages you or reaches out to you, you do not need to know. Constantly interrupting your train of thought with the random updates from potentially hundreds of thousands of people out there who have the ability to reach you at any time can cause you real psychological damage. Seriously. Harvard and other leading schools have done research on what happens when a person has to make too many decisions during a workday and their findings are not positive.

Fun Fact:
A report by Common Sense Media shows that teens spend a mind-boggling nine hours a day using media.