As we age, life becomes more hectic. Careers grow in complexity, some choose to start families, others pursue higher education – or for many, a combination of these three.
In any case, multitasking is fundamental to a well-balanced life. Whether you’re a business executive or a student in college, mastering the art of multitasking can be an invaluable skill.
As a CEO, investor, and father, I’ve learned the importance of this first-hand and wanted to share my advice:
1) Build an amazing team
If you’ve read my other articles like How to Turnaround a Struggling Business, you know how much I stress this point. Surrounding yourself with great people is the number one thing you can do for yourself, both professionally and personally. It’s also one of the best tools for effective multitasking.
Across the businesses I own, operate, or invest in, there simply isn’t enough time in the day for me to be involved in every detail. Because of this, I depend on my team to navigate day-to-day operations and keep me updated on these areas.
Every week, I prioritize meeting with my directors so we can discuss a live list of action items. Through these meetings, I’m able to ask questions, get updates, and provide feedback. Without this direct feed of information, it would be impossible to have a pulse on everything, which is why having people I can trust and depend on is so valuable.
Now, most CEOs stop here. But I’ve learned that the truth you hear from management does not always align with the truth you hear from employees. That’s not to say management is doing a poor job, rather, they too are limited in their perspective because they do not work directly with clients or within certain areas of operation.
To combat this, I created bi-quarterly Team Trust meetings where I speak directly with the employees at each business. I talk more in-depth about this in How to Bring Out the Best in Your Team, but in short, these meetings give me a chance to connect one-on-one with the employees and see a perspective that I might not get otherwise.
It also gives me the opportunity to fix any concerns they may have, which builds stronger team morale. The more trust there is, the better we can depend on each other and reach our company’s goals. The point is, without a great team, you won’t accomplish much. As Robert Green writes, “As in warfare and most games of strategy, isolation often precedes defeat.”
2) Plan ahead
A successful schedule should be planned at least a day in advance. To master the art of multitasking, you need to schedule your tasks effectively.
For myself, I know I am most productive in the mornings and early afternoons. That means I will schedule my most important tasks for the start of the day. Meetings that aren’t as high in priority get pushed to the latter half of the day; that way, if any urgent last-minute requests come in, I’ve already completed the top priorities for the day.
This tip is a bit of a trial by fire. If you produce your best work in the evenings, schedule around that. It all depends on your lifestyle.
3) Use the 80/20 rule
A lot of people spend time being busy, not productive. The unfortunate reality is that many waste time tending to fires that are not conducive to their goals, whether it be from an unhappy marriage, an unfulfilling career, etc.
Effective multitasking requires that you are spending time on tasks that will give you the most return. In business, we call it the 80/20 rule. It states that “for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.”
At the beginning of 2022, I decided to apply this rule to my financial plans for the years. I focused on return on time (ROT) over everything. This is because I noticed there were many points in my day where I was going down the wrong rabbit hole; I started to question if I was really being productive or not.
My solution was to evaluate my assets and how much time I was spending on them. If the return wasn’t worth it, I shed it. So far, this strategy has proven effective; I’ve closed some businesses that weren’t fruitful and decided to use it as an opportunity to evaluate things differently.
For instance, I recently shed a rental car agency we were running in California. The business was making a return, but when I looked at it through the lenses of how much time it was taking and the liability – it simply wasn’t worth it. I thought to myself we could use that money instead to pay off a debt or create something better.
Even if you are not running multiple businesses, it’s still beneficial to look at your time, or mental bandwidth, as a bank. If you have $86,400 – a dollar for each second in the day – how do you want to spend it? When considered from this perspective, it seems a lot more unreasonable to waste a few hours (or $10,000) on things that do provide much in return.
