If there is one constant in the life of an entrepreneur, it’s that time is the enemy. For every idea that you want to mock up, there are ten that need to be placed in the filing cabinet. For every meeting that you arrange, hours worth of brick and mortar productivity time is lost forever.

The question becomes, how do you squeeze the most out of the limited time that you have?

Time Flies

What are you good at?

Unless absolutely necessary, half of your time should be doing things that you’re good at. The other half should be spent becoming good at new things. The point is that if you have never written a line of code in your life, you might be better off delegating the task to someone whose better suited for it. Sure, given enough time you could do everything yourself but isn’t that why you have a team?

What are you thinking about?

Many, many problems that crop up can be solved on the go. When you’re running errands, sitting in a waiting room or otherwise wasting precious cycles take that time to work out the details of problems that don’t require you to be in the office. A good writer will tell you that you should always carry a notebook around to collect stray thoughts. A good entrepreneur knows that the same thing applies to us.

How often do you breathe?

Every once in a while you need to take some time to do something completely unrelated to the startup. You can only run for so long while you’re holding your breath; you can only think for so long while you refuse to take a break. Even something as simple as a walk or a nap can give your mind time to connect the loose ends.

How often do you reuse resources?

Do you have templates of business plans sitting around from old projects? Do you have general purpose code that can be reused? Do have old ideas that can be rolled into your latest project? There is no reason to waste perfectly good resources. There is something to be learned from almost everything you’ve ever put together. Don’t assume that just because one project failed, all the work you put into it isn’t worth keeping around. A lot of time is wasted basically reinventing the wheel, hoping to get it better.

Slow Burn

The best way to avoid burnout as an entrepreneur is to learn to take your projects in manageable chunks. If you look at everything from three inches away your work will look much to large to do anything with, instead take a look at your projects from a few thousand feet up. You might find that by changing your perspective just a little bit, everything becomes a little more manageable.

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