The 60 Minutes Most Australian Entrepreneurs Never Think About | Micky Ahuja

 

Time is probably one of the most common frustrations in business. Speak to almost any entrepreneur and you will hear some version of the same problem: there is too much to do and never quite enough time to do it. Customers need attention, employees need answers, meetings fill the calendar, emails keep arriving and unexpected problems have a habit of appearing on already busy days. It is easy to assume the solution is simply to work longer. But after spending years around business, I have come to believe that the bigger question isn't always how many hours we work. Sometimes it is what we do with the hours that matter.

I’m Micky Ahuja, and one thing entrepreneurship has taught me is that time behaves strangely in business. You can have a ten-hour day where you barely stop and still feel as though nothing important moved forward. On another day, one good conversation or one clear decision can solve something that has been consuming everyone's attention for weeks. That difference interests me because it challenges the traditional idea of productivity. We often measure a productive day by how much we completed, but perhaps we should also measure it by whether we spent enough time on the things that could make tomorrow easier.

What If You Had Just 60 Minutes?

Imagine you walked into work tomorrow and somebody gave you 60 completely uninterrupted minutes. No telephone calls. No emails. No meetings. No social media. Nobody asking you to make an immediate decision. There is only one condition: you cannot spend the hour catching up on routine work.

What would you do?

I think many entrepreneurs would initially struggle to answer that question. We become so accustomed to reacting that having uninterrupted time can almost feel unfamiliar. Our days are organised around what needs an immediate response, which means the important things that don't appear urgent can continually be pushed into tomorrow.

Perhaps you would use the hour to look properly at why a part of the business isn't growing. Maybe you would review what customers have been saying instead of simply checking sales numbers. You could think about whether your team has the right structure, whether you are holding onto responsibilities somebody else could manage, or whether a process everyone complains about actually needs to exist at all. None of these activities necessarily creates the appearance of being busy, but any one of them could influence what happens next.

Entrepreneurs Spend a Lot of Time Solving the Same Problems

One lesson I have learned is that solving a problem and removing a problem are very different things. Businesses become surprisingly good at repeatedly solving the same issue. Something goes wrong, somebody fixes it, everyone moves on, and then the same thing happens again two weeks later.

It might take only 15 minutes to fix each time, so nobody considers it particularly serious. But repeat that process across a year, across several employees and across several recurring problems, and suddenly a business is spending an enormous amount of time maintaining inefficiency. This is where a focused hour can have disproportionate value. Instead of fixing the problem again, you can ask why it keeps happening. Is the process unclear? Does somebody need better training? Is communication breaking down? Could software or AI automate part of the work? Is the business following an old procedure simply because nobody has challenged it?

An entrepreneur doesn't necessarily need to have all the answers. Sometimes the useful part is creating enough space to recognise that a different question needs to be asked.

The Difference Between Urgent and Important

Urgent work is very good at getting our attention. Your phone rings and you answer it. An email arrives marked urgent and you open it. Somebody walks into the room with a problem and whatever you were thinking about suddenly moves down the list.

Important work behaves differently. Reviewing where the business should be in twelve months rarely sends a notification. Developing somebody in your team doesn't normally arrive in your inbox marked urgent. Thinking carefully about a new opportunity won't automatically reserve space in your calendar. If entrepreneurs don't deliberately make room for these things, the everyday operation of the business will happily consume every available hour.

I don't think the answer is to ignore operational problems. They are part of running a company. The challenge is making sure they don't become the only thing a leader has time to think about.

Technology Hasn't Solved Our Time Problem

This becomes even more interesting when you consider how much technology we now have. Modern entrepreneurs can communicate instantly, automate tasks, access information from almost anywhere and use artificial intelligence to complete work that previously took considerably longer. In theory, we should have more free time than business owners had twenty years ago.

Yet many of us feel busier.

Technology has made work faster, but it has also made interruption effortless. The smartphone that allows you to run parts of your business from anywhere also means your business can reach you almost anywhere. Every tool that gives us information creates another place to check for information. Every communication platform makes it easier for somebody to request our attention.

This is why I think focus will become increasingly valuable. As AI and automation take care of more routine work, entrepreneurs will still need to make decisions that require judgement, experience and an understanding of people. Technology can help provide information, but somebody still needs to decide what deserves attention.

Try the 60-Minute Question

There is a question I think every entrepreneur can experiment with:

What could I do in the next 60 minutes that would improve the next 60 days of my business?

The answer might have nothing to do with completing more work. Perhaps you finally have a conversation you have been avoiding. Maybe you review a process that frustrates your employees. You could speak to an important customer without trying to sell them anything and simply listen. You might examine where your own time is disappearing or decide which project no longer deserves the resources being given to it.

For another entrepreneur, the best use of that hour might be learning. Business changes quickly, and AI is accelerating that change. Spending an hour understanding a new technology, customer behaviour or industry development can sometimes be more valuable than another hour clearing administrative work.

The point isn't that every entrepreneur should follow the same 60-minute routine. I don't believe business works like that. What matters is deliberately creating some space where your attention belongs to you rather than to whoever happens to demand it first.

An Hour Is Small, but a Decision Isn't

Sixty minutes obviously won't build a company. It won't replace hard work, capable people, experience or consistency. Building something worthwhile takes far longer than an hour, and there will always be periods when entrepreneurs simply have to put in the work.

But a good decision can begin in an hour. A bad process can be identified in an hour. An important conversation can happen in an hour. A new idea can be challenged in an hour. And sometimes an entrepreneur can realise that the thing consuming most of their time isn't actually the thing that deserves most of their attention.

Maybe that is what we misunderstand about time in business. We are constantly asking how much more we can fit into the day when sometimes the better question is what should we deliberately leave out?

The next time you find yourself saying there aren't enough hours in the day, don't immediately look for another hour.

Take one of the hours you already have and ask yourself whether you're giving it to the right thing.