How do you use your time more effectively when you are a busy entrepreneur?
The more projects and responsibilities you have, the more you try to organise your time better and accomplish as much as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Not to mention when you have a family and want to make time for your personal life too.
For me, it’s:
using AI for summarisation, research, and repetitive tasks,
delegating tasks,
using “waiting time” for work, for example while waiting at the doctor’s office or during public transport travel (usually on the train).
What hacks help you stay productive and efficient?
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I think the biggest productivity shift is being intentional about where your attention goes, not just managing your calendar.
A few things that help:
Batching similar tasks — switching contexts is one of the biggest hidden time drains.
Creating repeatable systems — templates, checklists, and automation save more time than trying to work faster.
Protecting deep work hours — the most valuable work usually requires uninterrupted thinking time.
Using AI as a thought partner — not just for execution, but to brainstorm, challenge assumptions, and summarize complex information quickly.
I’ve found that eliminating low-value decisions is just as important as optimizing the hours you work.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@stephanie_t0317 I need to secure point two and free – I am not good at it and I should do something about that.
One rule that has helped me is to separate “momentum work” from “thinking work.” Waiting time is great for small reversible tasks—capturing an idea, clearing a short queue, reading a brief—but I try not to spend it on decisions that create more follow-up. The deeper work gets a protected block and a deliberately small definition of done. Otherwise AI can make you faster at generating options while your calendar quietly fills with things to evaluate. The best productivity system for me is the one that leaves some unallocated space, because surprises are part of running a business.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@ariajinling I need to acquire more of your htinking because I sometimes catch myself to think too much about the things :D
@busmark_w_nika It is less a mindset than a small habit: when I notice myself circling a decision, I write down the next observable step and give it a short time limit. If I still lack the key information after that, I either ask someone or park it. Thinking is useful when it changes the next action; otherwise it is often just anxiety wearing a productive disguise.
For me, the easiest "hacks" would be these:
Creating a checklist of things I need to do that day and emphasizing the tasks I absolutely must complete
Tackling the must-do tasks in order of most important to least important or easiest to hardest if all of equal importance
Fully familiarizing myself with the tasks I need to complete to reduce the amount of questions I have to ask later on.
Carve out specific times in your schedule for each task, and other daily duty, family time included. Also, be disciplined with holding to these times but not too rigid. You are a human, not a robot.
Turn your phone on "Do not Disturb", drink a coffee, and keep yourself physically healthy. It's very easy to lack inspiration and motivation when you're in bad physical health (seriously).
Though most difficult for some people to hear, you will have to sacrifice sleep. Starting a business is extremely time consuming and keeps people up late when that is the only thing they are working on. It keeps people up even later if it's their side project that they wish to turn into their main project.
Just because I said you may lose sleep in your entrepreneurial endeavor does not mean that it is necessary, but it will generally be difficult. Often things happen on a slower timeline or you feel like you're on a treadmill and can't keep up. If you set daily goals, get organized, and reduce your distractions, you will be surprised at how much more you can get done. Stress less and plan more
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@reaganauthoryze I need to stick to your recommendation – lately, I have had a lot of stress.
So every morning I don't make a huge to do list. I just pick 3 tasks for the day, and I give each one a time block. Something like this:
Task 1: 30 minutes
Task 2: 2 hours
Task 3: 3 hours
The rule is simple. When I'm working on one task, that's literally the only thing that exists for me in that time. I don't think about the next task, I don't check social media, I don't scroll. I just stay on that one thing until the block ends or the task is finished, then I move to the next.
Why I do this:
Less decision making. I'm not trying to figure out what to do next every hour.
Less scrolling. Since there's no gap or in between time, I don't even get the urge to open Instagram or Twitter.
More real progress. Having a fixed time actually pushes me to finish instead of dragging the task the whole day.
I use this everyday while building hrefstack.com, it's my SEO growth automation tool. Honestly this is the only system that helped me actually ship stuff consistently as a solo founder, otherwise I get pulled in too many directions.
Anyone else do something like this? Or you prefer keeping your task list more flexible?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@arcelonbuilds Is it that you are doing the easiest tasks at the beginning?
Honestly, filling every waiting room and train ride with work isn’t efficiency. AI should remove work, not colonize the time it saves. We made that mistake with smartphones: a useful tool became something many of us can barely function without. The uncomfortable question is whether AI is becoming the same thing—but for thinking.
Has AI actually given you more free time, or has it simply increased how much you expect yourself to accomplish?
#BLN
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@marius_stoicescu For me it is the second case. When I know that something can do my work faster, I use that time for doing more :D
Great question, Nika!
I've learned that productivity isn't about squeezing more into the day. It's about reducing the number of decisions you have to make.
A few things that help me:
I automate anything I have to do more than twice.
I capture ideas immediately instead of trusting my memory.
I batch similar tasks together because context switching is surprisingly expensive. • And I protect uninterrupted deep work like it's a meeting with my most important client.
The biggest shift for me has been realizing that systems beat motivation almost every time.
I'm curious, what's one productivity habit you've tried that everyone recommends, but simply didn't work for you?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@md_khayruzzaman I think that I am a workaholic and I cannot reduce the number of tasks. If I ever had fewer tasks, I will create problems to solve them :D
The shift that matters most here is treating energy as the resource worth managing, more than time itself. 4 open hours mean nothing if you're depleted, and ninety focused minutes can outperform a whole scattered day. Noticing your own sharp versus foggy windows and protecting the sharp ones for the hardest work is a simple habit that compounds more than any new app. The waiting-time trick @busmark_w_nika mentioned works the same way, small structural changes beat willpower every time.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@alex_gidirim I once heard very interesting thought. We should take care not about our time management, but energy management :)
biggest time saver for me lately is not scrolling back through group chats to catch up. built a bot (huddle) that sits in slack/telegram and only replies when tagged, so i just say catch me up and get a quick summary instead of digging through 200 messages. small thing but adds up
Most answers to this question optimise execution, and execution is rarely where the time actually goes. Being thirty percent faster at the wrong project is worse than being slow at the right one, because speed on the wrong thing buys you sunk cost. You end up more committed to it, not less. So the leverage is not in the calendar. It is in how often you are willing to re-ask whether this is still the right thing to be doing at all. That question has no technique attached to it, it is just uncomfortable, and a productivity system is a very effective way of never having to ask it. The system feels like progress and it never once looks up. The version I have landed on is boring. Once a week, out loud, to another person: what am I doing this week that I would not start today if I were starting fresh? Saying it to someone else is the part that works, because you cannot quietly skip the answer.