Amazing.com Co-Founder, Matt Clark, Reveals Essential Time Management Skills for Engaging in Meaningful Work that Impacts Long-Term Goals

Matt Clark, co-founder of Amazing.com, recently announced essential time management skills needed to engage in meaningful work that impacts long-term goals. When Matt began building his business, he realized early on that he needed to manage his time differently. Clark revealed that he went through numerous programs, read mountains of books and blog posts, and spent a fair amount of time researching what billionaires do to manage their time. Amazing.com co-founder shared, “When you’re working for a big company, someone else is telling you what to do with your time for the most part. They even give you a set of priorities. As soon as you start your own business, you have to decide what to do with your time. How effective you decide to spend your time directly impacts how your life will turn out.”

Clark continued, “The value of time management for anyone is incredibly important, but especially for people who own their own businesses. After all the time I’ve spent thinking about this, one of the few things that I’ve settled on is the idea of focus, especially in today’s age. Everyone talks about removing distractions, but I don’t think anyone actually does it. Even some of the most successful people I know are really terrible at focusing. It’s a strong competitive advantage to be able to focus. By focus I mean the mindset where you are willing to dedicate a chunk of time to something and that will be the only priority in your life for the amount of time you commit. Maybe that’s committing to something in business or maybe it’s something in your personal life. If you commit to focusing on something for a set period of time, you have to make sure you remove every distraction. These distractions usually include some type of electronic or anything else that could possibly get in your way. For example, if you work at a desk and you have to have your computer, you have to make sure you’ve turned off every notification on every device. You’re not going to do anything effective on the computer if you keep getting ping notifications from your email, Slack, Skype, or whatever else you have going on in your computer.”

Reflecting on Warren Buffet’s dedication to focus Clark shared, “He’s a guy that doesn’t even have a computer in his office. He has a phone, but a flip phone that’s 10 years old. His business partner, Charlie Munger, has said that Warren Buffet these days prides himself on basically having nothing on his calendar. Sometimes his calendar will be completely blank except for one thing like, “Tuesday, get a haircut.” That will literally be his entire calendar. For those of us that are far less successful than him, we feel the need to fill ourselves up with all kinds of distractions. Then we wonder why we’re not getting anywhere in life.”

Co-founder of Amazing.com went on to review, “One of the most important things is the ability to focus, remove distractions, and be honest with yourself about what is actually going to make a difference in the long term, and what’s not. Once you realize all of that, you can create a good strategy for doing meaningful work. My typical schedule is doing 50 minutes of work completely undistracted, followed by a 10-minute break. Some days, I have meetings or maybe personal things going on, and I might only get one of those blocks in a day. Try to shoot for a least a few. I think if you can do two or three of those kinds of blocks a day, you’re probably going to be more effective with your time than 99% of other people.”

Matt shared just how he makes sure his actions regarding time management reflect his long-term goals, stating, “When it comes to organizing my time, I look at the long-term goals I want to achieve in every area of my life. By long-term, I mean about 10 years from now. That gives me a general idea of what I need to accomplish in three years, and then a year. I have an idea of long-term, medium-term, and short-term things I want to do. Then each month I pull off my annual list and say, “Okay, this month to accomplish what I said I’m going to accomplish this year, which helps me get to my long-term goals, what do I need to do to keep chipping away at that?” Once I’m clear on that, I do that once a month to get a clear vision for the upcoming month. Each week I do the same thing, based on the monthly vision. I figure out what I need to do to chip away at my monthly objectives. Each day, I’m looking at that weekly list and making sure that I’m focusing on actually doing those things versus doing the things that just happen to be popping up.”

Concluding, Clark revealed “It’s inevitable that at some point things won’t go well and you’ll run into an issue. Focusing and persisting is the only way you’ll achieve anything. It’s the only reliable way you’ll achieve success. Some people get lucky, but who cares? You can’t bank on that happening. What you can bank on is focusing on the fundamental stuff, which is focusing, actually persisting, and working hard all the way to the end. If you look at people that have been incredibly successful, they are maniacal about their focus.” Clark added, “You’re going to make some hard decision. If you are trying to achieve big things in life, you don’t have three hours a day to watch TV or two hours to play around on Facebook. Do make some time to recharge, because that does help but you have to be willing to spend your time intentionally and understand the long-term impact of that.”

Matt Clark is an Amazing.com co-founder and an entrepreneur who has developed a passion for helping others succeed in life through business. Matt Clark and Amazing.com leverage the power of Amazon and give people the information and tools they need to start their own successful business, selling physical products. Their flagship course, Amazing Selling Machine, has helped thousands of individuals build and scale their own Amazon businesses. Clark double majored in Finance and Entrepreneurship, receiving his bachelor’s degrees from the University of Houston, C.T. Bauer College of Business.

About Amazing.com:
Amazing.com is an educational company that specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to build and scale an Amazon business. Although the company focuses on building a physical products business by leveraging Amazon’s platform, their main goal is to change people’s lives by helping them attain financial freedom. Reviews of Amazing.com can be found on their Facebook page.