Aryeh Bourkoff’s 5 Insights For Better Investing Your Time

As the CEO of an investment merchant bank, Aryeh Bourkoff is constantly managing partnerships, meetings, CEOs, and departments.

His time management skills empower him, and his company, to remain successful. Bourkoff revealed a few of his productivity insights in an interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And they’re crucial for any professional who feels stuck or unproductive.

Let’s explore what Bourkoff has to say about investing your time and how to make the most of your day.

1. Realize You’re a Bottleneck

As a busy professional, it’s difficult to step back and think clearly when you’re managing multiple tasks throughout the day.

But, according to Bourkoff, it’s important to realize that you’re a bottleneck (especially if you have various roles and responsibilities). You can’t be everywhere at once, but your attempt to do everything yourself is causing others to wait on you. Take a look at how you’re spending your time. Are people afraid — or unable — to move forward without your consent?

By dealing with this constraint head-on, you’ll free up time to focus on tasks that only you can complete.

2. Be Clear on Who to Prioritize

Everyone has a different opinion about what constitutes an “important meeting.”

Bourkoff recommends taking a deeper look into who is most important to meet with, and communicating this to your team. Some meetings are obvious to de-prioritize. But what if, for instance, you have to choose between partnership opportunities and a potential new hire? This is why you want to be clear about your priorities and what’s most important.

Remember, your time is limited. You have to make choices about how you want to invest it and with whom.

3. Create Irregular Office Hours

You won’t be able to move your schedule around to meet everyone.

Prioritization is one strategy. However, there may be seasons when you’re unusually swamped with opportunities and connection requests.

When this happens, Bourkoff offers a solution: Set irregular office hours. He tells a story of being swamped with meetings when he was starting his business. There were people he felt were crucial to his professional and personal growth, but was unable to find time for them.

To fit them in, he opened his availability from 10 pm — 2 am. By doing this, he was able to connect with people crucial to his success.

This may be unrealistic for some, and unsustainable for most. But it’s an interesting short-term strategy that you can benefit from.

4. Give Yourself Time To Transition

Investing your time doesn’t always mean being productive.

Giving yourself time to transition helps you be more productive when it counts. Before his 10 pm calls, Bourkoff enjoyed his evenings and viewed them as transition time-spending time with family, client dinners, or other priorities. And by stopping at 2 am, he gave himself time to reset before the next day.

This transition time is different for everyone.

You may not have late-night calls. But you can still give yourself the time you need for rejuvenation. This will ensure that you’re productive when you need to be and avoid mental fatigue.

5. Set a Ratio for Cost vs. Revenue Meetings

Bourkoff recommends setting a ratio for the types of meetings scheduled.

Look at the value of each one.

Investing in higher revenue meetings will ensure you’re making the most of your time (especially if your job is to generate sales). But your role and responsibilities will ultimately guide this ratio. Start strategically by determining your organizational and individual goals, then choose a ratio that aligns with them.

For instance, internal meetings will be prioritized if your goal is to build a team. But if your goal is to find new business, then external sales meetings will be prioritized.

Next Steps

Aryeh Bourkoff’s insights can help us better invest our time.

Take each suggestion and customize it to fit your own life situation. This will ensure that you’re making the most of your time and achieving your goals.

Want to learn how to better invest your time from other experts? Check out our article: How Entrepreneur Tim Ferriss Spends His Time.

Originally published at https://phase.undock.com.