An Entrepreneur’s Weekend

A Typical Entrepreneur Weekend

Serial entrepreneurs are not really like other people.  We see things from different angles, we operate in different ways, and we have a different gears. We are passionate people, and once we’ve found an idea worth pursuing our work becomes our life. We look at time off as if it were a disease.

You will be hard pressed to find a serial entrepreneur who doesn’t currently, or at some point in their career, work until 3 am and get up at 730 am every day. Why? Because we try to maximize our time. Once the family goes to bed, we can really get things done.

For normal people weekends are a time to relax and unwind, visit with friends and family, or simply just veg out. Not if you’re an entrepreneur. For us, weekends are still full of work, but in another gear. There is a different energy and pace to the weekend so your mind works differently, which allows you to make progress in new areas.

As an entrepreneur you must be a master of time management. You must be able to spend time with your loved ones and get your work done without missing a beat. This is crucial to early-stage success. So how do you do this?

There is no clear-cut answer to this question, but here is a good rundown of how I use my weekends, which I consider to be a typical entrepreneur weekend . It’ll probably sound familiar to other entrepreneurs..

Friday

Generally speaking, most of the world is done with work and totally clocked out by 5 pm in your city. Friday night is and always will be a social time, so use it as such. I use the time on Friday in the following ways:

Friday 5-7 pm

• Turn off my phone
• Shut down my computer
• Spend quality time with my kids
• Reflect and rewind the week mentally
• Write down all the things I need to do over the weekend

Friday Night

Take a contact, and preferably their spouse, to dinner. Push work to the back burner and make sure the evening is socially driven. You must like the people you do business with, so make sure you get to know them well.

Come home, unwind and enjoy some quiet time with my wife. Once she goes to sleep I open the laptop and begin to plan actions for next week.

Saturday

Wake up early, exercise, read in peace and quiet, and then have breakfast with loved ones. Personally I belong to a group of CEO’s and other influencers from the Media, Entertainment and Technology sectors in LA and I attend meetings to learn about the latest trends while interacting with friends, colleagues and contacts for 3 hours every Saturday.

After the meeting on Saturday I always try and have a one-on-one meeting with someone new. This time is crucial for building relationships and growing your network. Those that will spend time one-on-one on a Saturday at 1:30pare your birds of a feather.

After this meeting, for me, it’s all about family time. My phone goes on vibrate and I take the family somewhere fun for a while and spend quality time together. However, I always bring a small notebook to capture ideas as they come, and they always do because my brain is totally relaxed and not distracted.

Once I put the kids to bed I get to spend time with my beautiful wife alone. Ahhhh peace and quiet. We watch a movie or sit and talk, but either way we have quiet time and appreciate it.

Once the entire family is in bed and sleeping my second half of the day begins. I use this time to work on SEO, social campaigns, contact organization, writing, or anything that requires a small to medium amount of brain power. I do thisuntil my eyes cannot stay open any longer.

Sunday

I always call Sunday Trep Day and for good reason. This is the day in which my brain is raging at full power with no distractions. I always begin Sunday with some exercise and reading to get me going. Then I spend time with my family and somewhere around mid-day I start really charging hard.

I start with wrapping up anything that I am behind on from last week. Old emails, new emails, internal communications, fundraising paperwork, etc. Once this is out of the way I start to get creative. I use a ton of voice-to-text to dump all of the thoughts I have going through my brain into a single document.

After this brain dump, I set about applying these ideas and making them actionable. I think and strategize in silence. I revisit the things putting off to see if they make sense and if I should move on them. I usually come out of this session with a few blog posts, a new twist on our messaging, tons of new prospecting ideas, and a bunch of useful ammo for the coming week.

Later in the night, after everyone is asleep, I begin writing emails and preparing for the day to come. I use the Boomerang app in Gmail – it is 100% a must use tool for entrepreneurs on the weekend. I can write emails to contacts and set a time for release, usually on Monday in the morning. This is important because it won’t piss anyone off if when their phone pings them during the middle of the night.