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Title: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy
ISBN: 1-932156-85-2
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press

Dan Kennedy is a successful speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. He has been a part of the #1 seminar tour in America for nine straight years, with speakers including; former U.S. Presidents Regan, Ford, and Bush, General Colin Powell, and many business leaders.

This is very extreme. If you implemented too many of the ideas in this book, it may not work out for you. Dan Kennedy can get away with it, because he is setting an example for many people seeking time management help. This is not to say that there are not any good techniques or ideas to be found from this material, it just means that there is a great deal from which to choose.

The basic premise is that you must determine a value for your time; you cannot manage your time without knowing what it is worth to you. The first step is to determine how much you need to have each year. Next, you determine how many working days there are, for you, within that year and divide by that. Lastly, you determine how many of your working hours are productive hours (read "billable") and divide each days amount by that number. Dan suggests that a good start is 1/3, but he states it is conservative (after reviewing topics of the 80/20 rule, I would say 1/5).

After determining a value for your time, you must be conscious of it at all times. You must make sure that other respect and value your time as well. Dan says that people who drain you of time are “Time-Vampires,” and you must teach them to handle your methods in a more productive manner. Do you have someone who always just needs a moment of your time? Are you interrupted by one-minute calls? Each time that this happens, you not only lose a minute, but you also spend a great deal of time (typically around 8 minutes) getting back into step. Get people to get all their interaction done at once, and better yet, write, fax, or email you, allowing you to respond at your leisure. Dan says that he never accepts unplanned incoming calls, does not have a cell phone, does not use e-mail, checks his faxes twice a day, and his mail once a week. Of course, he has a personal assistant that helps to facilitate these tasks.

Next, Dan focuses on the entrepreneurs who have staff helping to produce. He states that you cannot micro manage, and that you must accept when good enough is good enough. Many entrepreneurs get so wrapped up in menial tasks that their staff can handle, that they lose focus on the value of their time. One of the best ideas that Dan suggests is to “get lost.” Too often, entrepreneurs hand around the office checking out how things are going, making themselves available for questioning when, most of the time, the staff can, and do, handle it themselves when you are not available. This makes you less productive, and your staff.

Dan is really big into travel. He states that he used to travel, on average, 100 days a year. He says that he has significantly cut down the amount of travel he does, but it is still considerable. The biggest idea here is to plan accordingly. Do not travel to do just one thing… make a plan to get more things accomplished… if you can find something else productive to do, do it. Traveling is a great time to catch up on reading (be it trade publications, pleasure, self-improvement, education, etc).

The best ideas that I pulled from this reading go as follows:

- Be conscious of your time; do not let it just slip away
- Be punctual, and expect other to do the same
- Have goals, short, medium, and long-term, and make every tie to them
- Block the time for your workday
- Be aware that making a profit can mean losing money when you had the opportunity to make more

The favorite thing I have from the book is a quote, “Tigers starve last, in the jungle.”