#87 Are You Buying Back Time or Creating a Vacuum? How to Turn Space into Strategic Momentum

Trying to get ahead by freeing up your schedule? Francois Esterhuizen dives into why simply buying back time won’t drive progress, and how intentional choices turn rescued hours into real momentum and transformation.

You want to scale your business, to achieve growth and build momentum, yet you are constantly overworked, feeling productive, but finding yourself in the exact same position at the end of the week.

This happens because most of your energy is directed toward maintenance, not creation.

You are busy, but you might be mistaking activity for progress.

To shift your focus, you must first clarify how you are utilising your most valuable, finite resource: time. Imagine your time is a garden you are responsible for cultivating.

There are three distinct ways this time is used:

• Wasting: Time spent on activities that yield no emotional or strategic return. This is allowing the weeds of distraction and aimless activity to consume the soil.

• Spending: Time used on necessary operational tasks that maintain the status quo. This is the routine, necessary work of mowing the lawn and watering the surface.

• Investing: Time put into high-value, non-urgent activities that generate disproportionate future returns. This is planting the high-yield fruit trees that will feed your future.

If you are wasting or spending all of your time, it crowds out the capacity for investing.

When this balance is broken, you need to look at ways to intentionally buy back your time.

Buying back your time

The decision to buy back time is the first step toward reclaiming your internal locus of control. It is a strategic move to create the space required for high-leverage work. It involves three core tactics:

Eliminate: Get rid of wasted time and any activity that makes no material difference to your goals.

Automate: Put as many repetitive tasks as possible into automated processes, such as setting up recurring payments instead of having to manually process every transaction.

Delegate: Outsource or delegate tasks to someone else, especially low-value work that consumes a significant amount of your personal capacity for little strategic return.

From spinning your wheels to building a flywheel

The reason we get stuck in this cycle is often not a lack of discipline or skill, but a lack of clarity. If you do not have a defined purpose for the time you have reclaimed, you are merely perpetuating the busy cycle.

An empty garden bed does not stay empty — it is simply an open invitation for more weeds and low-value work to take root and flourish.

The time you bought back will be filled by another urgent, unplanned demand.

Give your time definition

Before you can effectively invest, you must have a clear blueprint for your ideal life. That blueprint allows you to define the single most important activity you can use that new time for.

Your answer must be specific, moving away from vague intentions:

• Not "work on the business," but "record the five core training modules for the new hire."

• Not "more marketing," but "write the three-email sequence for the new client onboarding."

This specificity turns freed-up time from a liability into a highly potent asset. You can use the value matrix below, derived from a clear end-goal, as your tool for creating that definition:

VALUE	EFFORT	ACTION
High	High	Maximise: These are quick wins that build momentum.
High	Low	Invest: These are the needle-moving projects you must protect time for.
Low	Low	Delegate/Automate: Primary source of time to buy back.
Low	High	Delegate/Eliminate: Energy drains that must be cut at all costs.

Your next move

Buying back your time is not about having an empty calendar; it's about having the space to invest in what truly matters.

It is the shift from being an operator in your life to being the architect of it. The process is continuous: you buy back time, invest it in a high-value activity that creates momentum, which in turn allows you to buy back even more time.

This is how you stop spinning your wheels and start building a flywheel.

So, what is the one task you can delegate or eliminate this week to buy back just 90 minutes of investment time?

Recognised as a trusted and sought-after clarity and leadership coach, Francois Esterhuizen works from Stellenbosch with South Africans worldwide. His work empowers individuals and leaders to transform emotional resistance into clarity, sustained momentum, and meaningful impact.