Barnaby Lashbrooke, 40, started his first business when he was 17.
Born in Birmingham, England, he started a website hosting business that quickly grew to thousands of users and with them he had to invest more hours. “Sometimes I worked 24, 36 hours straight,” he says. This was also the case after hiring a small team.
Lashbrooke sold that company in 2006 and immediately launched his next and current company, Time etc., connecting freelance virtual assistants with companies and individuals who need their services.
In the early years of Running Time etc., Lashbrooke took his old work habits with him. He worked 100 hours or more every week and worked so much that he had trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
But the business didn’t grow, and Lashbrooke was burned out after a few years of his lifestyle. As he struggled through his days, he began to question the mantra he’d heard for a long time: “If you just work harder, it will happen,” he says. “I had to look at all of this and say, what if this is wrong?”
Lashbrooke decided to experiment. Instead of putting in more hours, he would significantly reduce his. Most of his employees, about 15 at the time, worked about 37 hours a week. He decided to limit his hours to just 35 hours a week. As his mental and emotional health improved, his company’s revenue grew from $1 million a year in 2011 to more than $12 million a year now.
Lashbrooke wrote a book about his success in 2019 called The Hard Work Myth. This enabled him to both reduce his working hours and significantly expand his business.
“I had to be very selective”
As he contemplated a new work life, Lashbrooke realized that “there was no urgency,” he says, unless he set a limit on the number of hours he could work. “I was able to work so much that I didn’t have to be picky about what I did.”
But when he limited the number of hours a week he worked, “I suddenly had to be very selective about where I spent my time,” he says. Now he needed to prioritize the things that really drove the company forward.
The shift was challenging, but one tactic he used to prioritize is called the Eisenhower Matrix, a four-quadrant graph in which each section represents a level of urgency. By filling it out, Lashbrooke was able to see which of the activities on his to-do list were actually key to solving problems for the company and which he could eliminate altogether.
“The hardest part for me was learning that there are things that I’ve been stuck on” that weren’t necessarily critical, he says.
“I had to get used to ticking them off.”
“I use Google Calendar as my to-do list”
Another helpful tactic was actively adding tasks to his calendar.
“I use Google Calendar as my to-do list,” he says, adding, “It helps you spend time on tasks, which I think is so important when you’re trying to handle a heavy workload.” A calendar can help you visualize those boundaries within your day, forcing you to only fill it with your most important projects.
Using a calendar “also allows you to schedule certain types of tasks in a way that you’re probably in the best shape to work on,” he says. For example, Lashbrooke likes to schedule meetings for the morning because that is when he is most energetic and enjoys interacting with people, and leaves time for creative activities in the afternoon.
Ultimately, “I think confidence is probably the hidden weapon in the whole productivity piece,” he says. It’s about getting a feel for how you handle the types of tasks you need to get done, when you’re best suited to do them, and how to organize your day to get them done optimally.
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