If you have followed my journey from corporate CEO to full-time writer and speaker, you know I am a big advocate of using virtual assistants. I couldn’t survive without mine.

But I have noticed that many of my fellow entrepreneurs are reluctant to take the plunge. So often they don’t get the help they need because they think hiring a full-time, physical assistant is their only option.

In this podcast episode, I talk practical ways to restore margin in your life and, specifically, how to shave ten hours off your work week.

This is something I am personally having to re-apply to my own life. In this episode I share some of my current challenges.

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If I asked you your “magic number,” chances are you would look at me and wonder what I really meant. Magic number? Is that like a lucky number?

If, however, I asked for your hoped-for retirement age, I bet a number would quickly pop into your mind. Was it fifty-five, sixty, or sixty-five?

“I don’t have time to read.”

When I tell people about my blog, that’s one of the comments I usually hear in response. The implication—or at least the way my possibly oversensitive mind takes it—“You must not have any life to read that many books … loser.”

Of course, I exaggerate. But, really, it’s a tension a lot of people in our overworked and overstressed society deal with. They understand that reading is important—after all, their second grade teacher made that clear. But nobody has the time to read a Dr. Seuss book, much less To Kill A Mockingbird or (gasp!) Infinite Jest.

I have a hard time saying “no.” Perhaps you do, too. I think it is more common than we think, especially for those who are empathetic or nurturing. We just hate the thought of hurting someone else’s feelings.

I didn’t really notice this problem in myself, because for most of my career I have had an assistant who said “no” for me. If someone had a request, they had to get through her first.

A friend recently sent me a fascinating article on “batching.” After reading it, I became intrigued with the idea of dedicating blocks of time to similar tasks in order to decrease distraction and increase productivity. While there are variations of batching, the Pomodoro Technique seems to be well thought out and tested. There are also free tools and resources to get you started.

What Is Batching?

Batching is simply a form of time management that allows a person to maximize concentration and decrease distraction. As a result, it increases your productivity, creativity, and mental sharpness, while decreasing fatigue, procrastination, and stress. Batch processing is the grouping of similar tasks that require similar resources in order to streamline their completion.

One of the great stressors in life is that feeling that we’ve forgotten something important. Each day we are bombarded with so many demands on our time that we are simply unable to act on them all, forcing us to tread carefully through a time management mine field for most of the day.

Our inboxes contain requests for the trivial and the important, all watered down by endless junk mail that is specifically designed to grab our attention. Voicemails allow others to drop off assignments and due dates over which we have little or no control. Poorly led meetings eat up valuable time, and drop off the occasional action item as well.

One of the most helpful time management principles I have found is David Allen’s Two-Minute Rule. The basic concept is that you take immediate action on anything that can be done in two minutes or less. This is the key to becoming more productive.

To implement this, you should do these kinds of actions NOW. Why? Because it will take longer than two minutes to write the action down on your to-do list, organize it, get back up to speed later, and complete the task. Instead of going through that whole rigmarole, you just do it and move on to the next task. It is a huge productivity booster. And it will keep your to-do lists much shorter.

Several months ago, I spoke to a large group of military officers and contractors. My topic was “How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week.” In my speech, I provided seven tools for achieving greater productivity and restoring work-life balance.

You schedule time for large meetings, small meetings, conference calls, and phone appointments. If you are like many leaders, you often feel that your life consists of nothing BUT meetings. As a result, there is no time to complete the work you volunteer for, agree to, or are assigned in those same meetings.

What can you do? Simple: Schedule time for you.