One of the biggest drawbacks entrepreneurs have is their inability to manage their time and multi-task between their projects, work and entertainment. We already covered the drawbacks of social networks and other distractions that keep us from moving ourselves forward to that next level but what about our attitude and work ethics? Are we actually wasting time on a day to day basis or are we as productive as we can be?
Think about your day and how you spend the majority of it, then ask yourself how much of your time you spend on working your day job, working your project and then dealing with distractions. Being honest with yourself here is very important as no one else is questioning your work ethic but yourself therefore making you face some though answers. Ultimately if you are spending more time on distractions than your projects, you are only hurting your own chances of making it. So why do we waste so much time?
Ultimately it is because either we don’t care, we don’t believe or we didn’t make it yet and choose to amuse ourselves with something else that brings instant gratification. It is so hard to work on something for a while without actually seeing results that our minds tend to get bored of working without results, which is also why many businesses fail within their first year. People’s expectations are not accurate and therefore quickly find amusement elsewhere.
To put it in a different perspective, what if you could put a dollar amount on time? For each and every second you could give that face value of $1. With 86,400 seconds in a day you would essentially have $86,400 at your expense. At the end of the day it would deplete and start all over rather than accumulate. Now how valuable is time to you?
So how do you get away from wasting time?
Well you first must realize what you want to accomplish then think of your life and its true opportunity cost as motivation. You must rethink what you are passing up as a measure of working on something else. Think about the distractions that come your way like family, friends, fun and activities; now think of which really bring you no value and eliminate them and add more of that time to the other relevant time takers.
When you think of your short and long term goals, you must realize that it is ultimately a choice of priorities but I promise you that many successful entrepreneurs will tell you that great sacrifices are often made of time, not money.
