How does a typical day go for you? Do you have a plan for how much you are going to achieve? I don’t just mean a loose list of tasks, but a real plan for what you are going to achieve and how you are going to achieve it.
If you don’t set your own daily agenda, then you could end up running to someone else’s agenda. That is a completely unproductive way to work. Often that means constant distractions, focusing on the wrong kind of tasks, and working far too many hours. Not to mention, you are far from maximising your earning potential.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. With a bit of organisation and a slight change in mindset, you can stop working below your pay level, learn the real cost of interruptions to your day, and how you can maximise your golden earning activities to finally bring in the revenue that you deserve.
Stop Working Below Your Pay Level
Often when you run your own business, it is easy to fall into the trap of working harder and not smarter. You end up putting in a massive amount of hours without much to show for it in the end.
This concept might be the wakeup call that you need. Have you thought about what your hourly rate is?
In the corporate word, there is a lot of emphasis on paying people what they are worth. You certainly wouldn’t accept an employee role that was below your pay grade. So why do we put up with it when it is our own business?
To calculate your pay rate you need to know two things, how many hours you work in a week, and your annual income. Alright, let’s calculate your actual hourly rate…
Annual Income ➗ 52 Weeks ➗ Hours worked = Your Hourly Rate
Example: $100,000 ➗ 52 Weeks ➗ 60 Hours = $32.05
But who wants to be working 60 hours a week every week? If you saved yourself some time, you could bring your pay rate up significantly.
Example: $100,000 ➗ 52 Weeks ➗ 40 Hours = $48.08
Imagine what your pay rate could look like if you then increased your revenue also. But how can you simply pluck more time out of thin air, or increase your revenue without working more? Read on and I will tell you.
Banish Time Bandits
Do you know what time bandits are? They are all the little things that suck a significant amount of time out of every day. The 10 minutes you lose from an unexpected phone call, then the 20 minutes you need to refocus back on what you were doing before the phone rang. That is a total of 30 minutes of your day that you just lost!
And it is not just the phone ringing that causes this lost time. It is the emails that arrive, the people that pop into your office for a chat, and the constant break in your train of thought. To truly make the most of your work hours, you need to banish those time bandits for good. Here is what you can do…
- Have set ‘office hours’ where you make phone calls, answer your emails, and meet with people
- Batch your tasks so that you make all your calls at once, set your meetings for the same day of the week, and clear your emails at a designated time of day
- Only answer the phone if you know who is calling – let your voicemail get everything else
- Take advantage of technology – Use an appointment scheduling app so that you plan your day on our terms, turn off pop-ups and notifications, have a SPAM filter, time your calls, set up rules to automatically direct emails to certain folders
- Work out when you are most productive and use that time wisely
By minimising your distractions and using your time wisely, you could quite easily save significant hours every week. There is one more thing that could save you plenty of time…
Identify Your Gold Time Activities
What are gold time activities you say?
There are 4 categories of tasks in your business…
- Important and Urgent – things like client problems that need to be dealt with immediately
- Important but Not Urgent – tasks that will grow your business like nurturing past customers, gathering testimonials, creating articles that educate your audience etc.
- Not Important and Urgent – these are all of your distractions like unexpected phone calls and emails
- Not Important and Not Urgent – your time wasters like watching TV commercials!
The gold time activities are the ones that fall into category number 2 – important but not urgent tasks. They are the activities that can have the biggest impact on your business success. But they are the tasks that often pushed to the side in favour of the other three categories.
I have a secret to let you in on. There is a simple and easy solution to get these tasks completed without using any of your time. The key is… to outsource.
To ensure that the tasks are done to the standard that you need, you can’t just outsource to anyone. You need to carefully select an expert. Someone that specialises in the tasks you need. Once you can confidently trust they will complete your golden time activities, you will be saving more time in every week.
And, by consistently completing your gold time activities, you also have the potential to increase your revenue. I can feel your hourly rate climbing already!
Your Plan Going Forward
To make the most of time management there are a few things that you need to do…
- Create a priority list of all the tasks you undertake, split them into the 4 categories that I spoke about above (you can download my FREE resource to help you do this here)
- Select some experts that align with your business that you can outsource the all important gold time tasks to
- Have a realistic plan for each day and stick to it
- Be conscious of how you are spending your time
- Be disciplined so that you don’t waste time on distractions
To achieve all of these things, you will need to commit to a long-term change in your business behaviour. You need to value your time and treat it as your most important currency.
You also need to embrace the art of outsourcing. It can be hard to let go of some of those tasks in your business. But outsourcing them to an expert guarantees they will get done and not be shelved when you get too busy.
If you are ready to get started on this process in your business, then download my free resource which will help you to identify the golden time tasks in your business and how you can save hours of time every week. Click here to download it.