Ask most entrepreneurs what they would like more of and time will usually be somewhere near the top of the list. There never seems to be enough of it. There are customers who need answers, people who need direction, meetings that run over, opportunities that need evaluating and problems that rarely arrive at a convenient moment. When you are building or running a business, being busy can almost become part of your identity. You finish one task and another three appear. You clear your inbox and it fills up again. Before long, working longer hours starts to feel like the obvious solution.
I’m Micky Ahuja, an Australian entrepreneur and businessman, and I have learned to look at time differently as responsibilities grow. In the early stages of business, being constantly busy can feel like progress. You are answering calls, meeting people, solving problems and moving from one task to another. There is energy in that environment, and sometimes it is necessary. But as a business becomes more complex, the question changes. It is no longer simply, “How much can I get done today?” It becomes, “What deserves my attention today?” Those are two very different questions.
The 60 Minutes Most Entrepreneurs Never Protect
One of the strange things about entrepreneurship is that your day can be completely full while the important work remains untouched. You can spend hours answering emails, returning calls, sitting in meetings and dealing with operational issues and still reach the end of the day wondering what you actually moved forward. Everything you did may have been necessary, but necessary and important are not always the same thing.
I think this becomes more noticeable as a business grows. In the beginning, doing almost everything yourself can be unavoidable. You are close to the customers, the operations and the problems because there may simply be nobody else to handle them. But growth changes the job. More people become involved, decisions become more significant and your attention gets divided across more areas. If you continue treating every issue as something requiring your personal involvement, eventually your own attention becomes a bottleneck.
That is why I think entrepreneurs need to occasionally ask themselves a slightly uncomfortable question: Am I actually short of time, or am I allowing too many things to compete equally for my attention? There is a big difference. You cannot create another five hours in a day, but you can become more deliberate about what deserves the hours you already have.
Being Busy and Making Progress Are Not the Same Thing
There is a certain satisfaction that comes from being busy. A full diary looks productive. A long list of completed tasks feels productive. Even rushing between meetings can create the impression that things are moving quickly. But activity on its own tells you very little about whether a business is moving in the right direction. You can spend an entire day solving problems without ever asking why those problems keep appearing.
That distinction took me time to appreciate. Entrepreneurship obviously requires action. Ideas mean very little if nobody executes them. But action without enough thinking can create its own problems. You might work harder at an inefficient process, continue investing in something that is no longer producing results, or personally solve an issue that should have been fixed at a system level months ago. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is not another task. It is stopping long enough to understand which task matters.
As responsibilities grow, I believe this becomes part of leadership. Your value cannot always be measured by how many things you personally complete. There comes a point where you have to move from doing everything to identifying what matters most, giving capable people responsibility and protecting enough of your own time to think beyond today’s problems. That transition can feel uncomfortable, particularly for entrepreneurs who built their businesses by being involved in almost every detail, but it is difficult to build something scalable if every important decision continues to depend on one person.
So, What Is Different About 60 Minutes?
Imagine having one hour with no meetings, no calls, no emails, no social media and no notifications appearing on your screen. More importantly, imagine deciding before that hour begins that you are not going to use it catching up on routine work. You are going to use it to think about one thing that could genuinely improve the business.
What would you choose?
Maybe there is a decision you have been postponing because the daily workload keeps getting in the way. Perhaps one part of the business is underperforming and you have never really sat down to understand why. Maybe your team is repeatedly dealing with the same problem. Perhaps customers are telling you something that everyone is hearing but nobody is acting on. Or there may be a process your people spend hours completing manually even though technology could now do much of the work.
That is where 60 minutes can become interesting. You do not need to solve the entire company in an hour. You only need to give one important question your complete attention. In my experience, clarity often comes when you stop switching between ten different things. Sometimes an hour produces an answer. Other times it reveals that you have been asking the wrong question. Both outcomes can be valuable.
One Good Decision Can Save Far More Than an Hour
Entrepreneurs naturally think about return on investment when it comes to money, but I think we should apply the same thinking to time. If I spend an hour on something today, what could that hour save or create tomorrow? That is a very different way of measuring productivity.
Take a recurring operational problem. Every time it happens, somebody spends 20 minutes fixing it. If it happens several times a week across multiple employees, the business may quietly lose hundreds of hours over a year. You can continue solving each occurrence, or somebody can spend an hour understanding why it keeps happening. Perhaps responsibilities are unclear. Maybe the process has too many steps. It could be a training issue, a communication problem or something that should simply be automated. The hour spent fixing the cause can become far more valuable than all the individual hours spent treating the symptoms.
The same applies to people and decisions. One thoughtful conversation with a good employee could prevent a misunderstanding from becoming a bigger problem. One hour spent reviewing customer feedback could reveal why customers are leaving. One hour looking closely at a business opportunity might prevent months of effort going in the wrong direction. We tend to notice time when we spend it, but we rarely calculate the time a good decision saves us later.
Technology Is Saving Time, So Why Are We Still So Busy?
This is one of the contradictions I find interesting about modern business. We have access to technology that previous generations of entrepreneurs could barely have imagined. We can communicate instantly, automate administrative work, analyse information quickly and increasingly use artificial intelligence to assist with everything from research to routine processes. Yet plenty of business owners would probably tell you they feel busier, not less busy.
Part of the reason is that technology has made us more accessible. The same device that helps us work faster also delivers emails, messages, notifications, news and dozens of small demands for our attention. Being connected is useful, but being permanently available is not necessarily the same thing as being productive. If every five minutes of concentration is interrupted by something new, a ten-hour working day can contain surprisingly little uninterrupted thinking.
AI will make this question even more important. As technology becomes capable of handling more repetitive work, I don’t think the entrepreneur’s role simply disappears. The value shifts. Judgement, responsibility, relationships, understanding people, recognising opportunities and deciding where a business should go still require leadership. If technology gives us time back only for us to fill that time with more low-value activity, we haven’t gained very much. The opportunity is to use some of that saved time for work that genuinely requires human thought.
What Would Improve Your Business Over the Next 60 Days?
Here is a simple question I think is worth trying. Instead of asking what you need to finish in the next 60 minutes, ask: What could I do in the next 60 minutes that would make the next 60 days better?
The answer will be different for every entrepreneur. For one person, it might mean finally documenting a process that exists only in their head. For someone else, it could mean sitting down with a key employee and listening rather than talking. Another entrepreneur might need to examine costs, understand a customer problem, research a new technology or decide which opportunity they are going to stop pursuing. Sometimes you may simply need a blank page, a pen and enough quiet to work out what is actually bothering you about the direction of the business.
I don’t believe every hour has to be optimised, scheduled and measured. That can become another form of unnecessary pressure. Entrepreneurs are people, not productivity machines. The point is much simpler: some time deserves protection. If everything in your day is allowed to interrupt everything else, the work requiring your deepest attention will usually be the work that gets postponed.
The Real Value of 60 Minutes
An hour will not build a successful company. It won’t replace years of hard work, experience, good people, difficult decisions or the ability to adapt when things do not go according to plan. Entrepreneurship has never been that simple. But an hour can be enough to notice something you have been missing. It can be enough to challenge an assumption, make a decision, have an important conversation or recognise that a problem you keep solving should not exist in the first place.
That is what I think many Australian entrepreneurs don’t know about 60 minutes. We tend to think about time in terms of how much we can fit into it. Maybe the better question is what deserves to be kept out of it. Sixty uninterrupted minutes won’t necessarily make you work harder, and that isn’t the objective. Used well, they might help you decide where your hard work should go next.
For me, that is the real lesson. The most valuable 60 minutes may not be the hour in which you do the most. It may be the hour that makes everything you do afterwards more deliberate.
