The best way to start a business when you 'don’t have the time'
Career expert and Growth Lab CEO Ramit Sethi says you don't need 50 hours a week to start a business. You need a little amount of time each week to spend on it. Following is a transcript of the video.
The time excuse kind of drives me nuts. The classic response to this is “Hey, Mark Zuckerberg has time to do it.” But you're not Mark Zuckerberg.
What I can tell you is that when you break it down and think about time, let me first say that time is the most politically correct excuse that we use. I don’t have time.
What is your friend going to say? “Actually Ramit, you do have time. You watch four episodes of Vanderpump Rules every Tuesday morning, you do this, you go out to 25 restaurants, you watch Netflix.” No. Because it's very politically incorrect to say “Actually, you're lying to me and to yourself.” So we say it because we know we can get away with it.
Couple of thoughts on time management. Number one: we have a lot of students who have successfully started businesses, and I'm talking $10,000, $100,000, seven figures, on five hours a week to start. That’s it.
Starting a business, finding the time, is about knowing what you should focus on, and also knowing what you don't need to focus on. So we get a lot of people who are like “I gotta be on Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, a million different things.” No you don't. What you need to do is find out you have a profitable idea, and you need to sell something and generate your first revenue. That’s number one.
Number two. Really think about where you are spending your time. What I do is I put it in my calendar. So I have writing time. Every week I need to write, otherwise, if I don't put it on my calendar, it just gets away from me. So I block it off and it becomes a non-negotiable.
I guarantee you right now if you said “hey, I don’t need 50 hours to start a business every week I just need five.” Block it off on your calendar.
Maybe it’s Monday morning, maybe it’s Wednesday night, and it’s Saturday for three hours. All of a sudden your calendar's going to flow around those blocks, instead of you flowing around whatever life throws at you.