Do you start your week at full speed—well-rested, bursting with fresh ideas, and armed with ambitious goals? That’s great! But… do those goals get sidelined just as quickly when your inbox starts overflowing, your team bombards you with questions, and urgent matters take over? Oops.
Time to take control and fuel your productivity fire! 🔥
Firefighting vs. igniting growth
As an entrepreneur or leader, you need to protect time for long-term strategy and growth. Ideally, at least 20% of your workweek should be dedicated to focus time—especially if you’re still deeply involved in daily operations.
What should you do with this time?
âś… Create an action plan for your business goals
âś… Build and develop your team
âś… Research & innovate new opportunities
âś… Work on process optimization
âś… Develop new creative projects
These future-focused tasks help you stay top of mind in your industry and keep your company ahead of the curve. After all, isn’t creating and improving the reason you became an entrepreneur in the first place?
Are you constantly firefighting, or are you making time to fuel the productivity fire in your business?
Start Small: the key to consistency
Dedicating 20% of your time to strategic work may sound overwhelming, but trust me—it’s not that hard. The key is simple: just do it—and schedule it like a non-negotiable meeting.
Start with a small time block:
đź•’ Begin with one weekly focus hour.
đź•’ Expand it to 90 minutes, then a half-day.
đź•’ Eventually, build up to a full strategic day per week.
Once it’s in your calendar, guard it. If you let one exception slip through, exceptions will quickly become the rule.
Find your focus formula
Every entrepreneur works differently. What works for one may not work for another.
🔹 Some thrive by starting their workday later, spending the first two hours on strategic planning.
🔹 Others prefer to block an entire day for deep work and long-term vision.
Experiment with different setups until you find what works best. Trial and error are part of the process—but once you lock in your focus time, stick to it.
Fiery Friday: my strategic deep-dive day
For me, Friday became my dedicated strategy day—which I called Fiery Friday.
🔥 I zoomed out to identify which processes needed improvement.
🔥 Then I zoomed in to optimize them:
✔️ Where can we work more efficiently?
✔️ Where do bottlenecks slow us down?
✔️ What processes need to be documented?
✔️ What templates, scripts, or checklists can save the team time?
✔️ Which services offer the highest ROI?
These deep-dive questions fueled my Friday focus sessions, allowing me to step away from daily operations and work on business optimization.
Why I flipped the 80/20 rule
I’m speaking in past tense because things evolved again. Eventually, I reversed my 80/20 focus rule to spend 80% of my time on new projects (like promoting my book, a real estate project in the forest, and keynote speeches) and only one day per week in the office.
This shift didn’t happen overnight—it was a gradual transition, made possible by building a team that operates independently.
Keep your goal in mind
What’s your ultimate professional goal?
- Do you want to expand your business to multiple locations, where managers report to you?
- Do you plan to exit your business through succession, an acquisition, or a sale?
- Or do you prefer to be the expert in your field, leading with 80% craftsmanship and 20% strategy?
Make your vision crystal clear—and design your schedule and role around the path that suits you best.
🎯 Start with small steps today, and you’ll create the business (and life) you truly want.
Want more practical tips for scaling without losing control?
📖 You’ll find practical insights, frameworks, and action steps in my book YOLOpreneur—a collection of strategies to help you delegate daily processes, reclaim your time, and scale sustainably.
