Let me preface this entry with the confession that I am guilty of this myself and can only say that I get a little better about it day by day.
Alright, the thing that truly wastes our time and money is when we are abundantly aware that we are allocating our time to tasks that do not generate income, do not create goodwill or are simply unnecessary. Note that I said “aware.” If you don’t know you don’t know. But a little business-introspection will help.
What I’ve always read, and often preached, was that as a business owners, we should determine what our hourly rate is and make sure we don’t spend time on tasks that are below our hourly rate.
I’m abandoning that philosophy in the hope of abundance. We’ve all heard the phrase, “You gave yourself another job, not a business!” Well, allocating an hourly rate to our time doesn’t do much to exonerate us from the job-trap.
So let’s take a fresh look at this approach and how it applies to our businesses.
First, what are the tasks that you do every day? Establish the baseline of where you stand.
Second, out of your daily tasks what are the most enjoyable, lucrative and effective in terms of getting clients to know, like and trust you and your business, both now and will be in the future?
How much of your time do you allocate to those tasks? What are you doing the rest of the time? Are those other tasks best handled by you or someone else? Do you enjoy those tasks? Are those tasks even necessary to the successful operation and success of your business?
All good questions (if I do say so myself) but I don’t have the answers for you. But I’ll share with you a tool that I use myself to assess my day-to-day time allocation. But first a quick story.
Years ago I experimented with becoming a personal trainer and the first thing I’d do with any new client was instruct them to write down exactly what they ate, when they ate it and how much of it they ate. That was their only assignment for the 1st week.
Without fail, almost every client would have one day completely missing from their “What I Ate This Week” journal.
I’d ask, “What happened to Wednesday?”
“Oh, well, you know, I really didn’t watch my diet that day and, well, you know . . . “
Yeah, I know!
And that’s exactly what we do as business owners. I’m talking about the days when we come in and sit on email all day or rearrange our desks. Possibly we do something more productive but it’s still not what we should be doing. Whether it’s paying the bills, scheduling appointments, etc. It’s all stuff that we either don’t do well, don’t enjoy doing and is usually not the best use of our time.
Yes, we need to play and be “unproductive” (in a work-sense) but let’s make sure it’s planned. Whether it’s hitting the golf course or deciding to take a 3-hour lunch with a friend, make sure it’s planned and make sure you actually make plans to do so (a blog for another day but play time is essential for any business owner).
So now as I’m writing this blog entry I’m thinking, “Is this the best use of MY time?” So I ran it through my Decision-Making & Implementation Flowchart and here’s what I came up with:
• There is a long term benefit (I’m an optimist who believes that 1000s of business owners will benefit)
• It increases my sanity (it keeps me focused)
• Improves the quality of my life (I love to teach and share)
• Does it make me money? Yeah, in a long-term, intangible way, absolutely.
• I thoroughly enjoy writing, and
• I do it best (sure, there are better writers but nobody else can inject MY personality)
Blogging is clearly something that I should be doing (along with a few others that I love and I’m good at). The rest should be either outsourced or eliminated.
Run your day’s task through the flowchart and let me know what you discover you should do (or do more of), what you should outsource and what you should eliminate?
