If you’re a busy founder and have a ton going on and you feel like you’re completely overwhelmed, I’ve got a great strategy for you.

When we start working with founders, one of the first things we do is look at time management— how to free up some time to get more important things done.

There are many different strategies for this, but I’m going to talk about two of them today.

We have a training called The Billionaire Productivity Planner, which is essentially how billionaires manage their time.

For the first strategy, we make a list of everything in the business that is either not working, broken, could be improved, or frustrations, and we break it down into categories called Impact Areas.

First, make a list of categories such as marketing, sales, cold outreach, customer support, customer success, etc. All things pertaining to your business, basically.

Then within each one of those categories, we list as many of the things we can see that need to be fixed or are needed, or that are broken or not working.

At the end of this, we should have a list of all these things that we need to work on in the business.

These are things that have a big impact on the business, too. It’s not like putting out fires. This is a proactive kind of list that we can always come back to, that we can work on together as a team.

We schedule time every week to work on this Impact Area list. Every week, an hour or sometimes more depending on how much stuff is going on, we put it in the calendar and block it out for the impact area list.

And that’s where we work on the specific areas that need help.

In our accelerator, we have workshops and training that show founders how to do specific things. If you don’t have that, that’s fine, you can still get stuff done.

You just need to spend more time working on those impact areas, and focusing on solving the problems in your business that really will have a big impact on growth.

If you don’t know what to focus on, it usually means that you don’t know what your customers want, or you’re so involved in putting out fires that you’re blinded to what the market wants or needs.

That’s not a good position to be in.

However, at the very least you can make a list of all the things that you should be working on within each one of those impact areas.

Every week, you can bring in the team members that need to be involved with that specific meeting.

Let’s say you want to have two meetings, or even three meetings a week. Each meeting covers three topics (for example: sales, customer development, customer success) then you invite the team members that need to be involved with that specific time slot.

You only have people that are important to that specific impact area. You aren’t going to have your team members that are involved in manufacture come to a meeting about customer development, for instance.

Then you assign “to-do’s” every week. I open up the list for the impact area, and I look at what we talked about last time, who had what assignments, and then follow up with each one.

I can tell you that by simply adding an hour or two to your week and dedicating those to your impact areas, it will have a huge impact on what you get done.

Also, how much progress you make in scaling and growth. Instead of putting out fires 99% of the time, at least you have some time where you’re being proactive in fixing things before they become a problem, or fixing things that have been a problem for a very long time.

Remember, you don’t need to do all this yourself! If you have a team, delegate some of the items on your list.

If you don’t have a team, just look at what is the number one thing that you need to be working on and just work on it for an hour. The great thing about this is you can have impact areas for pretty much any part of your business.

Right now, just one to two hours a week is fine. But at the end of a month, two months, you’re going to have made so much more progress on the things that matter.

I promise you; you’re going to see a huge impact in your growth and in your product.

Hopefully, that’s helpful for you!

Until next time!