12 Time Management Secrets From Billionaires (Some Will Shock You)

There are around 2,000 billionaires in the world.

And by definition, they’re some of the best at time management. They’re bombarded with thousands of emails. They have a thousand things they could do: meet with an employee, schedule a meeting, find a new marketing strategy, work on a product design, etc.

How do they choose what’s most important and still effectively build their wealth to $10,000 per day or more?

It’s not a “myth” that people succeed because they’re more productive.

• The female billionaire Sheryl Sandberg has stated in her books that she made sure to leave work at 5:30 every day because her children were a priority.
• Richard Branson has over 400 companies to run but he still has time to kite-surf because he puts his fitness as a priority.
• President Bush has a million things to do: foreign leaders to call, CIA briefings to read, voters to please, and so on. Yet he was able to still read 95 books in a year: more than most people ever read.
• Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell Soup, sent 20 handwritten thank you notes a day while running a Fortune 500 company.

I stumbled across a book called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs.

It has the longest title I’ve seen in a while. And I think it’ll help you uncover some secrets of time management.

Here are the top tips on billionaire productivity tips I know (which I learned from this book and all the other videos and podcasts I consumed):

1. Eliminate Meeting Time That Isn’t Useful

3 billionaires (Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey) were referenced in the book on reducing or eliminating meetings.

Mark Cuban said to never have a meeting unless you stand to make a lot of money from them.

His exact words were:

“Never do meetings unless someone is writing a check.”

Warren Buffett, consistently the world’s richest man this last decade, said in numerous interviews with him and Bill Gates that he never has meetings.

If you think about it, it makes sense. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, many meetings are an easy way to waste time. They have the potential to get tons of people together to small talk about irrelevant things not related to making the business more money. If you pay each person $30 an hour on average and ten people show up for a useless hour-long meeting, they have just taken $300 from you.

If you are an employee, Tim Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, has some great strategies for phasing out of meetings in a polite way in his book.

Jason Fried, a multi-millionaire, has said in his book Rework to only invite necessary people to a meeting. He also recommends setting an objective at the start and a timer for how long the meeting goes for. It’s all about not wasting people’s time. As the boss, you’re paying for that time.

Try Stand-Up Meetings With A Time Limit and Purpose

If you do have meetings, try having stand-up meetings. Billionaire Richard Branson has 10-minute stand-up meetings. He says this is because:

• It emphasizes real communication.
• It makes it quicker to get to business and seal a deal.
• It wastes less time.
• No one nods off.
• Decisions are made quicker.

“While some circumstances call for workshops and more elaborate presentations, it’s very rare that a meeting on a single topic should need to last more than 5-10 minutes.”

-Richard Branson

A 1999 study from the Journal of Applied Psychology found that sit-down meetings were 34% longer than stand-up meetings but produced no better decisions.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that stand-up meetings produced far better outcomes than sit-down meetings. In Social Psychological & Personality Science, they found that stand-up meetings led to better collaboration, more engagement, less possessiveness, and more problem-solving creativity. 

Try A Walking Meeting

Richard Branson said he prefers walking meetings for the reasons listed above. Also, seeing running waters from rivers or oceans makes him more creative.

According to the book, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey also had walking meetings.

2. Start the Day With Your #1 Most Important Task

Most people let the day lead them rather than the other way around. They start their day by opening their email inbox and letting low and medium priority tasks take over their day.

Nathan Blecharczyk, billionaire, and cofounder of Airbnb, says he fills his calendar from reverse.

He schedules things from the end of the day to the start so that he can focus on the real work in the morning. He makes sure to leave meetings for late in the day because they’re not as important.

You want to start your day with your #1 most important task and finish it first because otherwise, you get distracted with less important requests, tasks, and email.

3. Don’t Multitask

Billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes gave some short advice for the book:

Do one thing at once. Stop multitasking!

When I was young, I grew up with multitasking and could do it better than most people. I used to pride myself on the process.

Later on, I did some research on multitasking. Studies show that it decreases productivity, especially for the young people who have done it for longer. The American Psychological Association found that task switching can lead to a 40% decrease in productivity. 

4. Have Themed Days

The youngest billionaire in history and founder of Facebook and Asana, Dustin Moskovitz, said:

Have a themed day of the week where you don’t have meetings. He says it allows for no interruptions and focus on individual work.

At Asana, they have No Meeting Wednesday’s.

Billionaire Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square also has themed days. Jack, like Elon Musk, works 80 hour weeks, 40 at each company.

In a 2011 interview at Techonomy, Dorsey said he accomplishes this by having themed days and being very disciplined. 

Every day has a theme and he does the same things around that theme at each company on a specific day.

These themes let him deal with interruptions and distractions. If a task or request is not in theme with the day, he does not do it. It sets a cadence for the rest of the company to deliver and check their progress:

His Mondays are for management.

His Tuesdays are for product.

Wednesday’s are marketing and growth.

Thursdays are for developers and partnerships.

Friday’s are on culture and recruiting.

Saturday’s he takes off.

Sunday’s are for reflection, strategy, feedback, and getting ready for Monday.

5. Discipline Matters More Than Intelligence

The billionaire Andrew Mason, co-founder of Groupon and Detour, said that he’s met a lot of people who are smarter but less successful than him because they lack the discipline to do what they say they will: 

“I often meet people who seem smarter than me yet are less capable because they don’t have the self-discipline and/or self-confidence to introspect on their ability to do what they think they’re going to do and find ways to iteratively improve. Amazingly, it’s as simple as that. It’s kind of a sore spot for me because I can’t understand why people don’t take it more seriously.” -Andrew Mason

He says it’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. Being disciplined about forming great habits is a true key to success. 

I highly recommend you read The Power of Habit. It goes into great scientific detail, while staying easy to read, on how to effectively form great habits and break bad habits.

Andrew said that if he was playing a video game that replicates real life business and had 10 points to distribute into skills, he’d put 7 into discipline and 3 into intelligence.

Nothing into Ability Power, Attack Damage, or Mana, Andrew? I jest. Nerd joke.

The point is to improve your willpower because it matters more than pure IQ.

6. Recharge and Refresh Mid-Day To Keep Up Your Mental Agility

The youngest billionaire in Africa, Mohammed Dewji, says that mental fitness and a fresh mind are keys to success.

By 1pm, he has already worked 7 hours and it’s natural for him to feel drained and tired. He has a daily workout during his lunch hour to recharge and refresh.

This let’s him attack the 2nd half of his day as hard as he did the 1st half. He recommends finding what works best for you to stay invigorated and recharge. He acknowledges that people have different ways of doing it that work best.

There are hundreds of studies, articles, and books that prove how exercise is so beneficial to you in so many ways. Studies show that exercise increases your focus, energy, happiness, productivity, attractiveness, health, and longevity. Look at it as an investment rather than a time cost. 

Dustin Moskovitz, billionaire cofounder of Facebook, wrote a whole Medium post saying how he regretted not exercising and eating better because he would have achieved his success even faster, and without the arguments and health problems he had.

7.  Devote At Least 50% of Your Time to Building Great Products. Avoid Ego-Gratifying Activities.

Mark Pincus is the billionaire founder of Zynga, a video game app platform built on the back of the social network Facebook.

Mark says that if you want to build great products, you should spend at least 50% of your work time to building great products.

He says don’t accept speaking opportunities if they don’t benefit your users or company. 

The same goes for any ego-boosting activities that don’t contribute to the bottom line success of your company, such as going on talk shows. Good To Great is a book that outlines the downfalls of doing this. Lee Iacocca was a bad-ass entrepreneur who took Chrysler from near-bankruptcy to a full revival. But during the second half of his tenure, he started spending most of his time on talk shows, TV shows, and other ego-boosting events. Chrysler’s stock took a huge plunge.

8. Write It Down on Paper

In the book, Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis is quoted giving advice on writing things down.

He calls it his “million dollar lesson they don’t teach in business school.”

He recommends you write everything down in a notebook. Everything. This includes ideas, information about a new person you met, or interesting facts.

He says that if you write things down, you’re more likely to act on things. If you don’t, you forget.

Many successful people still write things down on paper ; this includes Brian Tracy, Napoleon Hill, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson.

Richard Branson has spent a great deal of time emphasizing the importance of writing everything down immediately so you do not forget, especially in his articles online and his books The Virgin Way and Business Stripped Bare.

He says this is so important because:

1. No one else does it.  They think they can remember everything in their head and they end up forgetting most of it. He is always the only one writing things down in a notebook.
2. You have proof if someone questions your memory later on.

Richard tells the story of a man he knew who had the most incredible memory but forgot something at the absolutely worse time: during an important business deal. I have heard almost the exact same story from people in real life back when I tried to rely on my memory for everything.

Write it down on paper because it burns it into your brain and subconscious more than typing it out does. Ever since I started writing everything down, I realized how much I forget on a daily basis by looking at my notes later.

Even the genius rapper Eminem said in a 60 Minutes Interview that he always wrote things down whenever he had an idea for a lyric.

Taylor Swift has admitted in many interviews that she immediately records a voice memo if she has a song idea on her iPhone.

9. Be Willing To Say Not To Requests

CEO of LinkedIn Jeff Weiner schedules “do nothing” time on his calendar. He schedules 90 minutes to 2 hours in total a day a day, broken into 30 to 90-minute blocks.

No one can disturb him during this time.

He developed this system after having no time to process anything. His schedule was always packed with back-to-back meetings.

He realized these breaks were absolutely necessary to do his job well.

Many millionaires I have come across have voiced similar realizations.

They’ve burned out after years overwork to the point of physical illness and had to finally give themselves free time.

This includes some of the most followed people on social media, like Cara DeLevingne, Alicia Keys, and Lady Gaga. These three have spoken publicly about it.

Cara suffered from skin and health issues from overwork. Her modeling agency shipped her to a hospital for a quick, unhealthy drug fix rather than tell her to rest.

10. Nail Exercise, Health, and Diet

This one is a common themes from millionaires, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tony Robbins. It’s basic but no one does it. Are you exercising rigorously on a daily basis?

Richard Branson runs a mult-billion dollar business, yet he still carves out time every day to exercise because it’s an obvious investment with a high return. See the video below for his explanation:

Basic fundamental habits are most easily looked over because they’re “too obvious.” Yet everyone is too lazy to actually do them consistently. If you don’t even have these squared away, don’t look any further. There is a hitch in your productivity process already.

Along with consistent exercise comes related habits worth considering:

• Staying fully hydrated
• Eating nutritious food

11. Simplify Your Calendar

Warren Buffett has said in many interviews that he keeps his calendar very simple. In the Charlie Rose interview below, he shows his actual calendar, which has only three to-do activities for the month.

Bill Gates was stunned when he learned about this from Warren. Before he met him, he was moreso at the whim of whoever wanted his time. Warren taught him that you are in charge of your time, not someone else. 

Bill still maps out every minute of his day to control his productivity, but is more thoughtful with what he chooses to put on there. As you can tell, there are different styles based on your preferences. But there are universal mindsets that you should still have.

Warren has an infinite amount of things he could do. But by focusing on an amount he can count with his fingers for the month, it clears out all the low-impact, distracting activities he should de-prioritize.

12. Make Sure Meetings and Activities Are As Efficient As Possible

Chett Holmes wrote a book that is famous in the sales world called The Ultimate Sales Machine. He worked with the billionaire Charlie Munger and numerous Fortune 500 CEO’s. In his book, he details the process for his meetings with Charlie.

If you didn’t have an agenda, purpose, presentation, and all the materials prepared for a meeting, it would get canceled. Why so strict? Because it prevents meetings from dragging on unnecessarily. Many hours every week are wasted because people don’t come with an agenda to a meeting and end up getting side-tracked with random conversation.

Charlie and his partner, Warren Buffett, are known for being strict when it comes to what they’ll do with every second of their time.

They’re not rude. They just know they can’t buy time and they don’t have much time left. They want to make sure it doesn’t go to waste. I bet that even when they were young, they had a similar level of strictness. You can get started now so you can save plenty of time by the time you’re their age.

Bonus Tip on Email Inbox Mastery

Sheryl Sandberg, billionaire COO of Facebook, says she answers emails as immediately as possible and with very short replies. She says done is better than perfect. Going back to re-read the email when you have more time or craft a better response is a huge time drain.

I Challenge You To Take Action Now with This Free Checklist

I want to challenge you to start doing one of these more right now. For me, I will start with less meetings and  work on the others.

Click the red box below and you can get a free visual checklist of these billionaire productivity techniques emailed to you. You can carry around the list around whenever you need it or post it on your wall.
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