In this post, we’ll be covering how to manage your time to achieve your goals in 2025.

There are plenty of tips and techniques on time management, but the ones we’ll cover now are specifically directed toward you achieving all your goals for next year.

➡️ If you want to learn the best way to set achievable goals for next year, you can also read: How to Set Achievable Goals.

Buy Back Your Time 🕓. The first way to improve how you manage your time is proposed by Dan Martell in his book. The explanation is pretty straightforward forward: if you have the resources to delegate work, you can start buying back your time.

What Martell proposes is that there is a pain-line we’ll all reach. It is different for each of us, but once we hit that pain line, we do one of three things: sell, sabotage, or stall.

• Sell means, as the name implies, that if you’re an entrepreneur, you probably end up selling your business.
• Sabotage
• Stall: you make a conscious decision not to grow; you don’t want to level up because of the effort it takes, and you’d rather stall or keep your business small, because growth is exhausting. 

When you hit your pain line, you need to buy back your time. Here are some things you can do after you hit your pain line, and even before, if you want to be able to predict your pain-line before you are standing in front of it.

1. Buy Back Loop

This technique consists of continually auditing your time or auditing 🗒️ your time after you hit your pain line. By auditing your time, you can identify low-value tasks you are doing and optimize by delegating to someone who: a) will be more interested than you in doing those tasks and b) is better than you at those tasks. 

• The buyback loop 🔁 starts with auditing, next transferring, and finally filling.
• Your first step is what we just did. Auditing your time.
• Next is finding who and how you can transfer those tasks. That is finding the easiest, simplest, and inexpensive way to delegate.
• Third, is filling your time. Now that you have some free time, you want to fill that with things that:
  • Move you towards your goals ✔️
  • Can help you grow your business 📈
  • You find joyful 👍🏻
  • That can generate more traction for your business 💻

2. Progress Tracking

Find how you can spend all or most of your time 🕓 doing what you love and enjoy ✨. If you do what you enjoy, you’re more productive and efficient. So, even after you’ve gone through the buy-back-loop 🔁, you should keep auditing your time to continue finding opportunities in how you currently manage your time.

You can do this every week, month, or six months🗓️. It really depends on how much change you need and how frequently you want to monitor that progress to ensure you’re on the right track.

• You can even use the ideal week technique to identify other tasks you want to delegate, we will cover more on this, on another post.

3. DRIP Matrix

Delegate, Replace, Invest, Production.

This matrix is made up of four quadrants. I’d recommend you start with Delegate and Production, which are usually the types of tasks easier to have more clarity on. Replace and Invest will require a little bit more thinking, so it’s probably easier if you start with the other two quadrants.  

• 🤝🏻 Delegate Tasks you want to stop doing today. These are those tasks you don’t like or enjoy; they don’t light you up and don’t help grow your business. 
• Replace 👩🏻‍💻 These are tasks that are harder to delegate because they do help you grow your business, but they don’t light you up.
• 🕓 Invest: You want to make time for these things. They light you up but don’t grow your business.
• Production 📦 You want to spend most of your time on these tasks. They are high-value tasks that both light you up and help you grow your business. 

4. Three Trade Levels 

The idea here is that everyone has access to 3️⃣ three trades they can make.

• Level 1: time for money 💸, e.g. working a full-time or part-time job.
• Level 2: money for time 🕓. E.g. being an entrepreneur or hiring someone to delegate tasks to.
• Level 3: money-for-money 📊: things such as investing or finding ways to make your money work for you.

5. F²: Four-Time Framework

Highlight > Laser > Reflect > Energize

More on how to organize your day and week. So, this technique will help you manage your calendar 🗓️ and therefore, improve your time management skills, productivity, and progress.

This is a four-step framework that starts with you understanding your most important task for the day and ends with reflecting on how you were able to complete such task, so that you can repeat that process.

i) Step One: is figuring out what you really want to achieve today. The one thing you definitely want to make time for, this is your daily highlight. This is the intention you set for the day, your priority.

• Once you are clear on what this task or activity is, you want to intentionally make time for this and use that time to focus 👀.
• ☑️ You achieve this by adding your item as the first thing on your day or by blocking the specific amount of time you need for this task.  

ii) Step Two: Laser 💥. Create barriers so that once you have blocked out this time, you can actually use it to focus and get your task done.

• So, its also about learning to manage your attention, which includes blocking out distractions and choice architecture.
• Don’t put your phone📲 right in front of you, because inevitably, you will get distracted!
• Make it harder to reach things that are distracting for you.

iii) Step Three: 🤸🏻‍♀️ Energize. Improve your mind and body so you have energy throughout the whole day. What this looks like for me:

• Coffee
• Breakfast
• Exercise
• Removing as many draining activities as possible
• Reducing interruptions as much as possible, for example, “very quick” (and I’d say unnecessary) meetings that end up making my calendar look like Tetris and leaving me with no focus time💆🏻‍♀️.

iv) Step Four: Reflect 💭. You want to create a process that is as scalable and replicable as possible. So, once you’ve done all of the previous steps

• 1️⃣ Step one was about choosing what you want to get done
• 2️⃣ Step two is about deciding to focus on your one task
• 3️⃣ Step three is about making your day sustainable and therefore productive 
• 4️⃣ Now this step is about figuring out, identifying, and understanding what has worked for you and what hasn’t. Maybe you went through all of the steps, but in the end, you weren’t able to complete your task of the day. You want to reflect and ask yourself: why wasn’t I able to complete the task? Or, let say you did complete the task and you were productive throughout the whole day: what did you do and how can you replicate that.
  • Once you have that, write it down! ✍🏻You don’t want to discover your recipe for productivity and then forget what it is. Take notes of what worked and what didn’t. Based on that, you can adjust and adapt. 
  • Since you can do this by day 🗓️, you have many trials to get it right and address aspects that are hindering your progress.

1. The 10-80-10 Rule

Basically, this is a rule for how much of your time you are investing on something.  

• The process goes like this: You work on the initial 10% with the team, and then they execute 80% of it. You finish off with the remaining 10% for integration and final touches. 
  • The initial 10% is for structure and skeleton 📄
  • The final 10% is for quality check ✔️
• So, you’re probably thinking 💭 one of two things: why haven’t I done this 🧐 or I wish I could do that. In my experience this is not possible with every team or project. Some people need much more guidance, follow-up, and working hand-in-hand, and so do some projects. But, if you can implement this rule on most of your projects, you have a winning plan.

2. DoD: Definition of Done

This can be a huge time saver 🕓 and can greatly reduce the back-and-forth. First, we need to start by clarifying that what you imagine ☁️ or envision in your head is not necessarily what your team sees 👀 or understands from your explanation. So, you want to communicate a clear definition of done. If it helps you should write it down ✍🏻. If it’s a larger or more important task, there are 3️⃣ three Fs to consider.

• Facts: this are the metrics that must be achieved. How are you going to measure if the task is done or not.
  • If you don’t have a quantitative metric, you can go for something more binary, for example, was the email sent or not.
  • Did you complete the purchase order or not.
  • Where you able to schedule a meeting or not.
  • Did you make the sale? And so on.
• Feelings: how people should feel if the task is really done. Can they check the task off their list?
• Functionality: why we need to do this. What does the competition of this task enable?
  • For e.g. once we get this done, then we can do XYZ.
  • Only when we get this done can X person complete Y. 
  • We can’t launch the product if we don’t finish Y.
  • We won’t develop the feature unless we have concrete feedback from users, which is why we need to collect feedback.
  • We can’t increase usage if we can’t measure church, which is why we need to implement a tool to do so…

I’ve had great results when I implement this. You don’t have to be tremendously specific on helping the other person understand what the 3 Fs are. In my experience, a general overview can go a long way in getting things done ✔️.

3. Q²: Quarterly Quests

Everyone shares what they are working on for this quarter and shares their DoD. My opinion is that not everything needs to be shared, unless you have 1,000 hours 🕓 in the day to do so. This is all about increasing productivity and progress, not hindering it 🫣.

So, for example, setting up a three-to-four-hour meeting just so that everyone can share what they are working on doesn’t really seem like a productive use of time (at least to me).

Instead, you can do this with a small team, your team leaders, or whichever way you consider it to be productive and not counterproductive. How to use the Q2 in a productive way? (in my personal opinion)

• Make meetings small (both in time and team members) and efficient ⏳ 
• Have an agenda 🗒️
• Set time limits, you don’t want someone to be speaking for 🕓 20 minutes straight, boring the rest of your team and then having someone else with only 3 minutes left.
• Frequency: quarterly meetings can give people room and space to work and focus on their tasks.
  • If you do this once a year, odds are five months 🗓️ later, everyone’s already forgotten about their quests and is busy with day-to-day tasks, urgent projects, deadlines, and so on.
  • If you increase the frequency, say bimonthly, you don’t give people enough time to show progress 📉.