Tips From The Masters – Ace Personal Productivity as an Entrepreneur

by Aditi Mohata · Published May 9, 2018 · Updated January 3, 2019

All successful entrepreneurs have one thing in common – they know how to use their time to the optimum. Entrepreneurship may seem like a life of freedom but that freedom comes at a price. Being able to manage your time and add value to the time spent is one of the biggest challenges for an entrepreneur. The self-motivation and discipline, crucial for a fruitful journey of entrepreneurship, is not possible to achieve if you do not ace personal productivity.

Here are 9 tips to master personal productivity as an entrepreneur, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Elon Musk

He multitasks, a lot!

Founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk is known to work like a machine for hours every week. He handles his priority emails first thing in the morning, and he has made email his preferred mode of communication for better management of time.

Removing himself from real-time communication helps him move about his schedule a lot more smoothly.

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Zuckerberg is known to remove the things that take up time and add no value to this goals, from the picture. One of the popular examples is that his closet contains only grey t-shirts and hoodies to eliminate the need to invest unnecessary minutes every morning on clothing choices.

He sets defined and measurable goals for himself and his business. He even goes ahead and shares these personal and business goals on his Facebook page to give himself a level of accountability.

Benjamin Hardy

The number one writer on Medium.com since 2015, Benjamin writes in his journal and meditates on a regular basis to stay productive with this work. According to him, productivity is not about doing a lot, but about doing the right things and moving in the right direction.

Meditation and maintaining a journal provides him with a sense of stillness to focus on his priorities and making the work he does, count.

Rob Hill

The biggest distraction for the founder of The Stag Company was his phone. He realized that he would check his smartphone every 15 minutes on an average. This made him make a switch from his modern smartphone to an old basic handset with no access to the internet or unlimited apps. Once he did this, his productivity went sky-rocketing.

Jack Dorsey

This brain behind Twitter and Square, works extreme hours to run two profitable businesses. He works 18 hours a day, with a mastered morning routine. The first thing that he does after waking up in the wee hours is meditation and a quick workout, following which, he gets his caffeine kick and gets to work.

He manages his 18-hours work-days by theming his week and allocating specific areas of work to 5 specific days. He takes a Saturday off and prepares for the oncoming week on Sundays.

Tim Fung

CEO and founder of Airtasker, Tim Fung’s favoured productivity hack is binary thinking. He thinks that for a business, especially a startup, being periodically binary with your decision-making process increases productivity.

He gets the relevant data, makes a decision based on that data, and commits to the decision for a set period of time. He does not believe in re-assessing his decision every single day. This ensures that every action and decision moves in the same direction, increasing the chances of a better output.

Laura Barlett

Founder of House of Coco, Laura believes in writing a to-do list the night before, which ensures that no time is wasted procrastinating and she does not go through her day being directionless.

With a to-do list done the night before, you wake up the next day with a clarity and a purpose and you can stay self-motivated by ticking off one task at a time off your checklist.

Haddy Folivi

Founder of Clarity Media, Haddy schedules her work in sync with her body clock. He allocates specific timelines to her tasks at hand, with 30 minutes in the morning to attend to phone calls, leaving her rest of the day distraction-free. She does most of her work that requires high-concentration during the time of the day when she is the most focused. Around the time when she feels she does not feel as active, she completes the tasks that do not require too much attention and are not too taxing.

Neil Patel

A New York Times best-selling author and co-founder of Hello Bar and Crazy Egg, Neil was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

Neil works while he travels as he is always on the move. He makes sure he is connected when in Uber and during a flight to maximize his time and productivity.