FBC – 372 – Time management 101

Time management 101.

Don't you wish you had more time for yourself during the day?

Where does all that time go anyway? By the time you finish work, there are only a few hours left and next thing you know it's time to go to bed (and start the same cycle over and over again)

What if there was a way to get more time for yourself? In this episode, we are going to talk about one very unconventional way of looking at YOUR time that will be an eye-opener.

What are the things that are wasting too much of your valuable time and that stray you away from accomplishing your goals? How can you identify them and more importantly, how can you quantify them?

The answer is in this episode. I am going to reveal a trick that you have probably never heard or thought about before, that will help you find the biggest time wasters AND the one thing you need to do to fix it.

If you have ever wondered how the REAL digital nomads manage their time and work efficiently, this episode is for you.

Time management starts with identifying time wasters and also identifying how badly it penalizes you in life.

If you want to learn how to work less, make more money and have more time in your life, I have the perfect resource for you. Click below to discover the very simple formula I use every day to reduce my workload to 1 hour a month (at the most).

It's easy, it's newbie-proof and it will give you the keys to a much happier and relaxing life

👉 https://martinebongue.com/workless

— Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/freedom-by-choice/support

I have been away from podcast for a long time. The last episode I recorded was like in June or something.

So now I'm back and I'm not going anywhere. I want to make sure that I record episodes every single day and that we hit those milestones that we already discussed together. The next milestone is going to be five hundred episodes and then afterwards it is going to be eight thousand episodes.

So I don't even know where to begin because right now it's March and I've been away since June, so a lot of things happened. And I think that throughout the next couple of episodes I'll tell you a little bit about what happened.

I have some interesting things that I want to discuss with you guys. And so for today's podcast, I want to talk about a subject that's impacting a lot of people, whether they realize it or not. And they're actually making the worst possible choices.

I'm talking about the value of your time. OK, so today we're going to talk about time management. How do you manage your time efficiently to be able to reach your goal?

Time management is crucial. You only have so many hours in the day and you need to be as efficient as possible and you need to be able to manage your time so that you can reach your goals.

A lot of people are always looking at time from a micro level. You're looking at this task here. I do this for an hour and then I'll do this and stuff. But you don't actually realize how quickly things can add up and how quickly it can get scary once you start thinking about it.

So what I want today is just for you to realize how quickly things can add up. We're going to take the example of time management over a year, OK, which is a reasonable period of time, because remember what I said people underestimate what they can achieve in a year and overestimate what they can achieve in a day.

You are going to see how this year is going to be used productively or unproductively from a time management standpoint, depending on what you do.

OK, so let's say, for example, that you're sleeping eight hours a day as we just establish. Right. So eight hours a day, that's a third of your time. So if you consider a whole year, that means that you're sleeping four months. That means you have eight months left to be able to achieve your goals.

And let's say that, for example, you have a nine to five job. So you have a regular job of basically eight hours a day devoted to this. The next thing you know, there's another four months gone.

OK, so now we already lost eight months. So you have four months left out of that year. And for now, you still haven't had any fun or anything. Right. It's just sleeping. Working.

Time management 101.

OK, now here is where it gets interesting. So now you have four months left in in that year. And if you want to be able to achieve your goals and you have a dream that you want to achieve, then you need to devote some time to this.

OK, so some people may not realize that, you know what? I spend my time in front of the TV and stuff. There are good things and bad things about television. But the only things I watch on television are animal documentaries or documentaries where I actually learn something. But I was talking to someone recently and they were telling me, oh yeah, well, I spend four hours a day watching TV.

At the end of the year, remember that we had four months left, another two months are gone. Those four hours that you're watching TV or doing something unproductive, that's actually not moving the needle towards your goal.

At this point, when you have two months left, you're like, dude, how the hell did that happen? You still haven't eaten anything and you still haven't taken time to relax. OK, so, yeah, just imagine, like these two months, if you wanted to actually achieve your dreams and all that kind of stuff, well, you will have to work those few months like full time.

But still, you need to eat. You need to relax, OK, you need some time off and stuff. Right. In that perspective, taking everything and putting it into the format of a year, this is when you actually realize that.

So if you really want this to happen, let's say you have a dream, you want to start your own business, you want to make money online, you want to fire your boss and you want to travel. You may be super motivated. But you might realize that if you do those things, especially those four hours that you watch TV, at the end of the year, you will suffer and only those two months are left for you.

This is not enough for you to you to be able to actually achieve that dream and that goal that you set for yourself. You know, because again, in that in those few months, you still need to eat, you still need to relax. Unless you want a nervous breakdown and you never sleep or anything, you know?

So this is how you need to see things. Think hard about your time management. Some sacrifices will have to be made. But once you’ve achieved your goal, it will all be worth it.

The Unconventional Time Rule That Saved My Weeks

You keep asking where the day went because you are managing minutes when you should be managing decisions. I lived that trap for years. I optimized my calendar down to the color, felt busy from dawn to midnight, and still could not point to a single thing that had grown. Busy is not the same as productive, and nobody warns you early enough.

The rule that changed everything was simple and a little brutal: protect the important before you touch the urgent. Most of what screams at you during the day is loud but low value, and if you answer it first there is nothing left for the work that actually matters. The strategists at Harvard Business Review have written for decades that high leverage work is rarely the loudest work, and blocking it first is the cheapest way to prove it to yourself.

My practice now is to schedule the one needle-moving task at the top of the day and let the noise wait. Research on focus from McKinsey keeps confirming that attention, not hours, is the scarce resource. I show my exact weekly setup on my growth playlist, and I dig into the mindset behind it inside my Diary of a Virtual CEO newsletter. Guard the important. The urgent will survive without you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the core principle of time management 101 for solo entrepreneurs?

Time management 101 starts with one rule. Identify the three highest leverage tasks for your business this quarter and schedule them first every morning, before email, meetings, or social media. Everything else fills the gaps that remain. Most solo operators reverse this order, which is why they spend ten hours busy and end the week without moving revenue.

How do you prioritize tasks effectively when running a solo business?

Run a Sunday review where you list every task you want to complete, then mark only three as essential for the week. Those three drive ninety percent of business growth. Everything else is optional or delegatable. Most operators try to keep twenty tasks alive, so nothing finishes. Cutting the weekly list to three creates focus and produces tangible results.

What are the most common time management mistakes that kill solopreneur productivity?

The three biggest time management mistakes are checking email before deep work, attending meetings without an agenda, and saying yes to opportunities outside your stated goals. Each one fragments your focus and steals hours from your highest leverage tasks. Eliminate all three for one month and most solo operators reclaim ten to fifteen hours weekly without working any harder.

Which time management tools and habits actually work in 2026?

Three habits beat every productivity app. Time block your calendar by activity type. Batch shallow work like email into two daily windows. Protect at least three hours of deep work daily on your most important project. If you need software, Google Calendar, Todoist, and Notion are enough. Time management is a discipline problem, not a tool problem.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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