How to Make the Most of Your Time—Figuratively AND Literally

I want to talk with you about how to maximize your time. Now, I don’t mean time-management techniques or hacks or anything like that. What I mean is taking a step back and really deciding what the best use of your time is.

Regardless if you’re in a business, regardless if you’re a full-time investor or a part-time investor, there’s really a lot of day-to-day stuff that we can get sidetracked in. And I’m guilty of this myself, in the nuance of things that needs to be done.

Emails never stop. Phone calls never stop. Voice messages, text. This needs to be filled out, this needs to be signed, this needs to be reviewed. All of these things need to be done at some point.

But what are the most important high-value items that you should be spending, if you could, 70 percent of your time on? Finding what those are and being able to reference that, I think is very important.

To give you an example, in our business, the best use of my time is interfacing and talking with investors, educating them, seeing where they’re coming from, understanding what their needs are. And then also sourcing product, sourcing deals, making relationships with sellers and buyers, and then doing due diligence on these deals, placing offers, buying, etc. So that for me, based on my skillset, is the best use of my time.

Now, for your business, it may be completely different. You may have something that is the high-value time spent for you.

And really, the best time to do this is in the morning or the first part of your day. Let’s call it the first third or the first half of your day, when you’re freshest and you’re most productive.

In the past, I’ve kind of pushed some of my high-value items off to later in the day—and that’s a mistake. Really, the first part of your day should be focused on high-value, high-output items, and then the rest into more admin type of stuff (if you don’t have someone to help you with that).

There’s always going to be things that are pressing, right? Everything seems to be pressing. But it’s not. Not everything is of the same importance or the same value.

And that took me a long time to figure out. But I’ll say that again, not everything has equal value with regards to its urgency or the need for it to get done.

Yes, at some point, you may need to file your taxes. But that deal sitting in front of you may be more important for you to do the due diligence, bid it, get that deal, and secure it. And then this weekend, do your taxes.

So, however that works for you, I think it’s a very important thing to kind of take a step back now and then and look at ourselves personally. Take a step back and look at our businesses and say, “What does that look like for me? What’s the best time I can spend for the most high-dollar and high-lifetime-value items?”

What do you think about this strategy? Are you going to try it?

Weigh in with a comment below.