Photo: Mitchell Hollander
MORE TIME FOR SUCCESS It may sound obvious, but in order to achieve anything in life, what we need first is time – be it for business goals or personal ones. Entrepreneur and Agilement co-founder Dr Andreas Kellner shows why self-organisation is the key to success and how to master it.
The story behind Berlin-based company Agilement is not your standard origin tale. It is perhaps more accurate to speak of ‘invention’ instead of ‘founding’ – and it begins with failure. Around 12 years ago, business partners Dr Andreas Kellner and Dr Benjamin Erhardt were running their first companies. Yet, at the end of a very exhausting year, they had to admit that they missed their goals, despite rigorous planning and hard work. What went wrong?
to writing emails and we had this new system to deal with. It dawned on us that it’s far more difficult to just get rid of the daily chores.” The two entrepreneurs went back to the drawing board. “We asked ourselves: how can we master task management and communication? How can we prioritise effectively? The basics, if you will. That was the foundation for our system and for Agilement.”
“We quickly realised that we had spent too much time with the daily chores,” Dr Kellner recalls. “Each day, emails alone took four to six hours.” They decided to get rid of internal emails, installed a pricey task management system and explained to their employees that from now on there would be no more emails.
Today, Agilement offers seminars and individual coaching sessions (online or in-person) for executives and teams who want to learn how to organise themselves perfectly. The ultimate challenge is creating a useful daily schedule – not only focused on work but on the entire day, which has gained more importance in the era of working from home.
“It worked,” Dr Kellner says, and laughs. “For about three days. Then everyone went back
“The meaningful organisation of daily life is just one aspect. It’s also about what we
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Issue 90 |
February 2022
use the freed-up time and energy for,” Dr Kellner points out. “It can be for business or personal matters. But the general rule is if you want to achieve something you have to evaluate where and how you can make time and find energy for it. Self-organisation is always the start.”
Viviane Bande, Agilement team. Photo: David Dollmann
