There are lots of sites and communities revolving around time saving hacks. Tips and tricks to finding an extra 30 minutes or an hour a day. Which is great – there’s so much you can achieve in that extra 30 minutes. More often than not, 30 minutes a day is all you need to get started on doing what you love.

A lot of the time, though, this misses the forest for the trees. Yes, saving time and doing things more efficiently is great. But before we even get to that point, what’s more important is focus.

So many of us are really busy, but because we’re putting time and energy into things that don’t matter. And by “don’t matter”, I mean “things that don’t get you to where you want to be”.

When I was starting Thousand True Fans, my immediate goal was getting clients as soon as possible. Which meant doing as many sales calls as I could. And so I focused on that, with nothing else. Yes, there’s benefit in attending networking events. There’s benefit to writing blog posts. But those things don’t bring me signifiantly closer to my immediate goal. So I didn’t do any of that.

No matter what you’re working on, there are probably a thousand different action steps you can take – all of which provide some sort of value. But not all of them will take you towards your immeidate goal at the same rate, and the returns diminish really quickly.

The key to saving and finding time, then, is by focusing on the things that get you towards where you want to be the most quickly – and do nothing other than that.

If you manage to maintain that laser focus well, you probably won’t need to search for tips to save bits of time throughout your day.

What are you spending your time on now, that you don’t have to be doing? What tasks can you take out of your life so that you can maintain laser focus on where you want to be?

Photo: Time Please by Rishabh Mathur