Your Time is Valuable – Keep it!

Quarter 3 of 2022 is all about Backoffice stuff – you know, the cogs of the wheel…the day-to-day grind…the stuff that keeps the business going.

Marketing & Outreach (the creation and tech part of it)

Processes & Procedures

Bookkeeping & Records management

A slew of Administrative Tasks & Activities

The list sometimes seems endless – and oftentimes is over 80% of our ‘to-do” list.

Unfortunately, these are NOT the income producing activities, yet they take so much of our time and energy. Harsh reality – you can’t grow a business if 80-90% of your time is on process and only 10% is on people and the income producing activities (sales and delivery of what you provide).

We know those things need to be done, but they are draining. We know we are probably not the best person to do the job, but we don’t know how to unload it, or streamline it, or make it less of a burden.

Maybe this quick read can help…read on (or skim if you don’t have the time).

Find what drains you

Take the week – as you go about your days – write down what you are doing, with a broad stroke, you don’t need to be too detailed. Categorize them like this:

1. Tasks that leave you exhausted or frustrated, activities you KNOW are not in your wheelhouse
2. Things you may not 100% enjoy but they have to be done by you
3. Activities that are why you started the business – these energize you, excite you

At the end of the week look at the list. What on that list can you delegate, offload, or streamline? Chances are they are in category #1.

If you are doing these tasks and activities, you are hurting yourself and your business in several ways:

• The results are probably below what you desire and are not as effective as they could be
• You feel run by your business instead of running your business
• You procrastinate and get behind
• It limits the hours you can spend doing income producing activities thereby limiting your revenue and profit
• You waste time, money and effort doing them

Realize that time is an unrenewable resource

We can’t create more time – a day is 24 hours…it is what it is. But we can use our time more wisely. We can streamline, we can delegate, we can offload, we can cease-and-desist.

We create a process for just about everything. We have a Copy Collection and email templates we use for those repeatable things (more on that at Ask the Expert in July and a future BLOG).

If you have been following us for very long you know we are BIG FANS of automations! Repeatable processes, follow-up reminders, communications, and more are all in an automation of some sort.

We outsource several things – graphics, videos production, scheduling speakers, etc. Even things in our personal lives to make more room for other stuff.

We stay uber-organized in our email, filing systems (both digitally and paper), and general office space. Saving us hours of time – not having to constantly look all over and waste time trying to find things.

Here is a BIG ONE to save you hundreds of hours – cease-and-desist! The average person spends 20 hours a week on ‘unproductive’ screen time – scrolling their favorite social media platform, watching entertaining TV/live streams, playing games on your phone. Many of those hours we ‘justify’ – but are we just fooling ourselves?

Think about it – even if you only spend 1 hour per day that is 7 hours PER WEEK you could have used for something more productive. Over the course of one year that is about 15 extra days of your life you just took back. What could you do with an extra 15 days?

Time may be unrenewable, but we can save time with the above (and other) solutions – and, good news, we can BUY back our time!

Take a look at the list in Category #1.  Next to each task/activity assign a dollar amount to each one. What is that task/activity worth on an hourly basis? Is it a $10 task, a $25 task, a $50 task? What would it take to pay someone else to do it?

Estimate how many hours of your time it would take to do the task/activity. What is your time worth?

Keep in mind, if you pay someone else to do it you (1) gain that time back to do more income producing activities and (2) they will probably do it better-faster than you with an improved result.

EXAMPLE: It would take me 5-6 hours to clean my home. I can pay someone $50/hour to clean it. I save the 5-6 hours and it takes me less than 1 hour of income producing activity to make the money to pay for the services.

OR

It may take you 10-15 hours a month to do your social media posts (create the graphic, write the copy, schedule the posts). You can hire a social media manager for $350-500 per month. Saving you 10-15 hours. How many hours do you have to do income producing activities in order to pay for that service? 1? 2? What it you produced all 10-15 hours? How much ABOVE what you paid them have you now made, or saved those hours to enjoy something else in your life?

Bottom Line

Figure out what is draining you, your time, and your energy.

Either implement processes, procedures, or automations OR outsource it.

Be ruthless about protecting your time – say no, calendar your week into chunks and blocks of similar activities to stay focused and on-task (see our BLOGs and videos on calendar blocking).

Buy back time by investing in the right people and resources to free up the hours you are spending on the cogs in your business instead of growing your business.

There are countless apps, automations, processes, procedures, and implementable strategies to help entrepreneurs and professionals save time. You just have to figure out what drains you, what you can let go of, what you can delegate to others, and where you can buy back a few hours.

ASK! That what NBG is all about – ask others in the community how/what they outsource, what their ‘best-practices’ are for saving time and creating processes and procedures. You may find that someone has a process for the exact thing you are trying to create and they will share it with you so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

Your business will grow because of it, and your enjoyment of both your business and your life will increase – I promise!